It was pointed out on another thread that lasers are considered totally useless by some players because of higher average resists to lasers compared to other damage types.

I decided to try to quantify things a bit to analyze the situation. Of course it won't be perfect, but here's some ways of looking at it.

First I averaged the resists of all damage types over all ships in the game, and got the following:

Laser: 41%
Energy: 32%
Heat: 32%
Physical: 19%
Radiation: 40%
Surgical: 29%
Mining: 39%

(This puts lasers at doing about 25% less damage than the average of other damage types.)

Then I looked at the average of the resists for all ships tech 16 and higher, and got the following:

Laser: 55%
Energy: 47%
Heat: 46%
Physical: 37%
Radiation: 53%
Surgical: 42%
Mining: 49%

(This puts lasers at doing about 17% less damage than the average of other damage types.)

Then I looked at the top 10 non-super low level AI ships by number of kills in the last week, and got the following:

Name / Kills / Laser Resist / Avg other resists

Uber Reaver / 14663 / 40% / 45%
Rosemary / 3360 / 30% / 28%
Green Meanie / 2648 / 75% / 69%
Icepick / 2174 / 60% / 55%
Forgone / 2071 / 60% / 52%
Basilus / 2027 / 40% / 27%
Rosemaries / 1572 / 30% / 28%
Badalien2 (Jujuso'qi) / 1478 / 100% / -2.5%
Inferno / 1402 / 0% / 33%
Uber Chrome / 1336 / 50% / 47%

First of all, damn, people must like camping Uber Reavers. Non-weighted averages are laser: 49%, others: 38%. Weighed averages are laser: 45%, others: 42%. So laser here is doing 18% or 5% less damage in the real world.

In the balance sheet, damage of weapons is scaled by the "usefulness" of each damage type. The current usefulnesses that are used to generate the stats are:

Energy: 1
Heat: 1.25
Laser: 1
Mining: 1.5
Physical: 1.1
Radiation: 2
Surgery: 1.5

The average of non-laser damage types is 1.4. That means that on average, laser weapons do 40% more DPS/DPE than other types. If you multiply 1.4 by any of the above resistance factors, you get numbers greater than 1.0, which means that on average, lasers should be doing *more* damage than any other damage types.

But there is a further factor in here, which is that beam weapons do less damage than pulse, mag, or torpedo type weapons, since they are considered to be easier to hit with. The base power of laser is 25, while the base power of mag cannon is 24 and pulse gun is 45.

If you compare the DPS of a laser beam weapon to the DPS of a non-laser type pulse type weapon, then you will see a huge difference, but that's because I'm assuming some percent of the pulses will miss, while nearly all of the lasers will hit.

For example, if you compare the tier 1 Hephaestus lasers that you get, the laser and energy ones do 290 DPS, while the surgical does 214, mining does 257, radiation 181, and heat 206. Laser is doing more than any other type, though tied with energy.

I guess all in all, ignoring the base power of beam weapons versus pulse weapons, laser seems to be inferior to energy and physical damage given average resists, but superior to all other damage types.

If there's an imbalance here, I would say it's in assuming that pulses are 45/25 = 1.8x harder to hit with than lasers-beams. Are people really missing with nearly half of their pulse shots? At low level, I think the answer is probably much closer to yes than in the end game. I developed this ratio a long time ago by playing low level characters and spying on low level newbies. Perhaps we should globally buff all beam weapons with the end game in mind, and then lasers will not be as "useless" as some people perceive them to be.

Don't forget that most AI have some sort of Laser or Energy diffuser, which then adds on to the resistance.

From my personal stance, I prefer Energy over Laser, at least for the Venusian type weapons. VJacks offer better DPS and EPS that VRays, so why not use VJacks then? Sure, one may miss with a few pulses, but usually 80-90% of my shots connect, and it's much more worthwhile than having to chip away at enemies with 100% accuracy.

In the meanwhile, I shall swap to VRays and see if there's any noticable difference.

Yeah, a large part of it is the skill factor; with beam weapons, people might be able to hit 100% of the time, but that means their DPS is static. If they fail at something, there's really not much chance that they can get it the next time, while with pulses or jackhammers, they can blame their loss on those two seconds that they accidentally missed, so they lost 40k damage or so.

On the other hand, SD's ONLY use beam weapons, because their high speed makes anything else impossible to hit with; the accuracy of pulses drops to probably less than 10% with a high level SD, especially if you consider that they cant be firing all the time compared to a beam weapon.

Part of the problem isn't the weapons themselves, its the enemies that we have to fight; if you were fighting something like, say, a zebra, its really easy to hit with any weapon; on the other hand, something like a condor might be fought with laser weapons, except for the fact that condors have higher laser resistances!


There, at its core, is the problem; people wont use lasers unless their enemies cant be effectively killed without them, and there are VERY few enemies like that. On top of that, if the beams are eth, having to select each target separately as a zerker is incredibly tedious.

So it's not just the damage, its the ease of use and the necessity of using them, both of which are fairly nonexistent.

An SD can hit a large target like Bana Queen or Emperor with 3-shots at near 200 speed consistently. If the game automatically nerfs lasers in comparison based on the assumption that 3-shots will miss a lot, that's not necessarily warranted.

The reason know one uses laser. is its not 100% connect rate. first you have to be in range second you have to face your target. unless the weapon is 100% tracking. Thats why other weapons are alot better. Rop's, MTD's, MTR's, there all 100% tracking and 2 of them are 4d. so its 100% hit rate for them.

Now lets go back to laser. assuming the wiki is correct on the stats with them emp drone controller. Let me add thats the only full tracking ethereal laser with real dps for laser. I am going to compare it to a KMW which is the same tech and is mining damage.

here is the difference. program used was my item viewer i made to compare items in game.



as you can see the emp controller is only a bit better. and for that to be the only laser weapon you can use that is full tracking and etheral. Why do you think know one uses laser damage? because there so many things that are better. Look at lins, reason why i use that on my sniper is it doesn't matter if a few miss the ai drop so fast that i don't need 100% hit rate. even on a MF i used lins and MTR's. if you take a look at all other laser weapons there all underpowered apart from the MT's. But all other full tracking lasers are ungodly size apart from the PD's but there dps is fail. when doing mf reavers you need something thats fully tracking as a secondary weapon and something that pwns the crap out of them as a primary weapon.

so after look at that. its quite easy to see why people dont use lasers. however i would probs use 5 emp controllers if i had 5 hehe. but seeing as there rare. its just as easy for me to through a lins and some other tracking weapon. Also for sniper all you need is lins and PSS that goes though mf reavers pretty fast.

so either make more lasers ethereal and fully tracking (or even just full tracking you don't have enough small sized full tracking lasers). until then i highly doubt people will use laser's when there is so many weapons that beat laser weapons.

Oh almost forgot to mention that most ai had laser and energy dif's. so even if the laser does awesome damage its still not going to kill as good as a surg weapon with the same dps because of the difs.

anyway those are most of the reason i don't use laser damage and is the same reason a lot of other people don't use laser damage

I dont believe that was the reason at all, lasers are quite useful in pve, they seem rather balanced for that purpose.

The issue that makes them useless is that if you start trying to use them vrs players, they will simply equip some laser diffuser if they werent already using them, so you may as well not even have brought lasers.


In pvp SD sure, but in pve SD i dare say far more is done with non-beams than with, excomm and 2shot see more action than any beam. Even thoraxes can be used with great effectiveness on SD.

One of the big reasons is DPE. Energy weapons are, in general, far more efficient than laser weapons. The only laser weapon I know of that's used regularly is the Mad Thorax, since it's not actually a laser and gets good DPE combined with DPS.

I don't know of any Laser weapon that can compete with Excomm on DPS, DPE, and size. I think the balance sheets put too much weight on the "autohit" aspect of lasers, considering how easy it is to hit with projectiles if you have good range and tracking, or if you get in close.

It would be great to see more laser damage weapons like MT that are not beams; perhaps a laser torpedo?

Foremost, I'd prefer true lasers to be useful. I use Merc Disses often in PvAI and I hardly ever miss, I'm pretty sure at least 90% of my shots hit against smaller targets. If I miss a larger target then it's because I just couldn't care enough to aim.

It would be a different story in PvP where faster, smaller targets like Speed Demons require laser-type weapons to hit - except for the fact that I can instead use RoP's or Jijis which increase their visibility and seem to do more damage since most Speed Demon ships have much higher laser resists than heat resists.

thats what i was trying to point out. Lasers are not useful atm. the ones that are full tracking are huge. and the only one thats full tracking and ethereal is the emp drone controller and its range is only 180.

then you come back to the fact of how easy it is to get laser and energy difs. to top it off most ai have them. It just doesn't make laser a first choice of weapon. if you want to hit fast moving targets you use full tracking or full tracking and ethereal. I would never see myself using lasers. there just not good compared to other weapons in game.

Don't even talk about nerfing other weapons, its already hard enough to do oly as it is. either leave it as is or beef laser weapons. make more of them full tracking but don't add a huge size to them.

Their low range and low shield combined with very high level make them amazing to camp for leveling. That they have good drops on things such as Dement Frags and pure credits is good also.



What you're forgetting in all of this is diffusers. In PvP if I use a laser weapon my opponent will certainly have Volitiles (spelled wrong in-game btw) ready to equip... thus the efficiency and power of laser damage is dropped by a huge 2/3! This completely wrecks their actual stats.


Also: here are the resists to Laser damage on popular ships, as well as the damage type's ranking in highest-to-lowest resist on on the ship...




Notice that laser consistently has high resists, and consistently is at the top of the list of most-resisted damage types on these ships. Why use a damage type that is guaranteed to be both resisted and diffused in PvP - unable to exploit weaknesses of any target - whilst a beam-based weapon of another damage type can exploit weaknesses in at least some of these targets?

Beams are also generally unnecessary versus MOBs since they fly in predictable patterns and can (usually) be easily hit with the more-powerful pulse-based weapons in the game.



Based on all of this, the following should be done to make lasers more useful:

• Re-balance "Volitile" diffusers: more difficult to acquire (IE. not from any AI base), larger size, higher failure rate, weaker stats are all things that should be assessed
• Add useful Laser-weak ships: if there are ships that are useful for PvP and PvE that have minor-to-significant laser weaknesses, then lasers will be more useful as well in order to take out such ships
• Fix AI lasers: if these are done then you'll need to re-balance a few AI (EG. Christmas Spirits) that have seemingly overpowered damage in order to deal with diffusers
• Make lasers THE beam weapon: "beam" should have a higher power multiplier for laser damage than other damage types on the balance sheets

There is nothing wrong with laser weapons as they are now. I am still waiting for a laser dps missile

Yea! Beef Mad Thorax so people rant its OP!

its already oped lol . right now mad thorax is the only balanced laser damage weapon imo.

Diffusers are a related, but different problem. I think it was a bad design to make them reduce damage by a percent. That means that low level diffusers scale up with your enemies damage. They should probably be changed to soak-only, which would allow volatile diffusers to be quite powerful when you're using tech 4 stuff, but basically worthless when you're using tech 20 stuff, as they should be.