Simply put, beams tend to have lower DPE and a low max cieling for damage that is scaled significantly with size. One of my favorite weapons in the game which I use for just about everything is the MT. It has fantastic damage, fantastic DPE and good range for a thorax. However it takes skill to use, I am in agreements with whoever said it earlier that the balance sheets make the auto hit of lasers to big a deal. At end game folks very rarely miss with any weapon they are using.

All in all laser weapons are just not rewarding when you can use beams of other more useful damage types. We have many choices like RoP, Jiji, Sweeny and the Mzungu Mining line which have awesome damage types are good stats.

Lasers should just be taken out with all current laser weapons changed to different damage types.

One: It forces people to use different damage types to deal with different AI, instead of bashing through with more DPS.
Two: It increases the difficulty of a certain AI people seem so fond of camping.
Three: It would drastically increase the content for the other damage types.

As I said in the first point, the base power of lasers is 25, mag 24, and pulse 45. While I think this is balanced pretty well for low level, I think lasers should perhaps gain more power/tech so that they can start to catch up with pulse guns in the end game. Perhaps I should give them an additional 0.5 power / tech level, so that by tech 20, laser will be 35 to the pulses 45.

Note: this will probably beef AI more than players for now, since AI use lasers a lot more, but would probably make for a better balance.

im all for stronger lasers

Make some nice t20 jumping lasors and futhernace lazors, I wanna see AoE weaps.

There are a bunch of tech 21 splash and chain lasers.

I heard about some T21 lasers doing more damage on the target hit from a jump, is that true?

I'd like to see lasers become more useful, but I don't agree that beefing them across the board will make for better balance. As you say, AI tend to use lasers a lot more than players, often to very good effect. For example, level 1.4k Rosemaries would be a joke to SD's if they didn't multifire fairly long-range lasers. The same is true for the Bigger Green line of AI.

I would submit that these AI use their lasers so effectively because they don't need to power them for minutes at a time, unlike players on an uber run. Accordingly, it would be more logical for the beef to focus primarily on efficiency rather than damage. If anything, they should have lower EPS than things like RoP, Jiji, Sweeney, and the Mzungu Mining line, since their damage type is disadvantageous.

The base DPE for weapon types are:

laser 0.4 + 0.01*tech
mag 0.5 + 0.01*tech
pulse 0.6 + 0.01*tech

DPS of each weapon is basically total power / DPE. I think the gradient of DPS's and DPE's among these types is a pretty good one, at the moment. Not sure I want to increase the DPE of lasers from where they are. It makes sense to me that they would have slightly lower DPE, since it's harder to form a beam of energy than a package of energy, and also, since it's easier to hit with lasers, you could consider the actual DPE to be potentially higher than with pulses. Note that the higher the tech level, the closer the DPE's are to each other as a ratio as they all scale linearly upwards.

If I increase the DPS of lasers, I would keep the DPE's on them where they are and also increase the firing costs. But DPE is also modified by size class, so if the DPS is higher, then you could find "small", "micro", or "nano" lasers which do less DPS but higher DPE. The higher the base DPS, the more attractive the reduced DPS but higher DPE smaller lasers could be.

Beam hit chance vs Bullets -- Target&range aspect:

With increasing range bullets become superior towards laser weapons.
1st: at same tracking the bullets adjust overtime and therefore you have a basically a brother window vs slow ships.
2nd: you dont have to face the target.

Conclusion:
On long range target (non pvp) you prefer non beam weapons for better DPE,
on close range and slow targets you are indifferent (Pantha SD surrounding target with emp ray or MercMag),
only in pvp situations, closerange, you prefer beam weapons, but not necesssarely sticktly. Never the elss you would bever use a laser type of Beam weapon. The crappy laser resi was made i bet when there were barely beam weapons in the other weapon types. there were no cap ship mining laser, t20 surgical laser, in the good old days... i think ;D

Anyways, it be more usefull to strictly focus on the weapons/damagetype attributes of weapons, etc.. physical good dpe, energy good dps etc. rather then taking ships average resi into consideration, and in fact use the resi of ships to increase variability of target options for different damage types otherwise following will repeat again: "the adjustment of radiation resitance"
We once had radation damage type be low wich was balanced due to the fact that there was no radiation resi ingame, Radiation expert was introduced to a PvAi class and as a result , luckyly this worked without increasing playerships radiation resi ina verage since thats a PvP issue and as mentioned before FC is PvAI mostly. Thats btw also good reason why emp ray works so nicely, average DPS/DPE compared to toehr beam weapons, but resi wise on the PvP side of the game.

following suggestion to make laser tpye weapons usefull:

make their beam continues with doing dmg on a 0,2 sec(whatever works best) per tick no matter on the rof etc. It would look cool and would be the only damage type with constant beam, potential to use endless rof boost on it (if you have the elec) and for the tracing component youd get a totally new feeling and it would look cool !

PS fanaji laser suck atm, 0,15 sec recoild.. i doubt i can shoot that even without any rof boost within rof cap.

You're wrong. If we could consistently hit with pulses in PvP, we wouldn't see MF Jiji's and SDs with Razors. However, these non-laser beam weapons are simply better due to the combination of size, ethereal, tracking, and player ships being highly resistant to laser (even before volitiles).


Pulses tend to not miss in PvE due to the lack of highly-mobile threats and ease of abusing AI to let them run straight into pulses. If there were some AI with beam weapons that circled their targets, beams would increase in usefulness versus MOBs. Make them weak to laser and lasers become useful versus them.

Think clops with better shields and a laser weakness.

Obviously not in SD PvP, you pick the one situation don't you, theres always exceptions to rules.

You should see what a sniper can do with pulses