Then people do miss in endgame and you were wrong. You can't just say every situation in which beams are useful don't count.

No, thats probably the only situation thats the exception.
And there are always exceptions.

Prom's obviously talking about PvAI. And it's true that the vast majority of pulse-type weapons connect with the target in that case. Jeff's definitely mistaken here.

Laser weps are usually pretty cheap and easy to get. There aren't very many of them that you can't buy in an AI base or get as easy drops. The reason they seem useless is because they're all either "tier 1" type weapons for their tech level, or else they get slight bonuses from being bought in Gargan, which makes them too big to use. Two notable exceptions are Mercurian Emissions and Mad Thoraxes which are rare / expensive. It's no coincidence that those are the two types of lasers that everyone says are ok.

Jeff, don't knock yourself out trying to rebalance this. All you need is a few rare and/or expensive mid-tech lasers. Maybe just add them to ruins or something so you don't have to go through a ton of work designing BPs and balancing all that stuff. Newbies are just going to get shot to hell by AIs anyway if you increase laser power, and then you'll be back to rebalancing again.

Oh yeah, and Laser Head Missiles please!

Mad Thorax will be 700 Dph and 875 dps then, quite broken. Nerf MTs to 357 damage per hit so after laser beef it will be at the same dps as it is now.

This makes the most sense to me. People actually use Merc emissions from time to time, and the titan laser+ is also not terrible, despite being pretty huge. If there were a few more laser weapons in their range of DPS it would probably be okay.

I made several rare and expensive tech 21 lasers, but people were saying on the "tech 21" thread that they are useless because they are lasers.

Well people just got used to that lasers are shit and it will be hard to change this appearance, no class uses lasers and volies ruin dps.

Well part of that is because of the stigma about lasers, and part of it is because their DPS is somewhat inferior in exchange for higher range. Zeus bolt for example; do we really need 700 range on it?

EDIT: Okay, i think i have it pretty much completely; on uber runs or DG'ing, the AI is simple enough that any type of weapon is effective for killing almost any AI. In that case, damage type becomes more of an issue, because things tend to be weak to mining, heat, and surgical. Nonetheless, people will tend to use pulse type weapons for higher DPS and DPE.

In pvp, all that matters is DPS and, to some extent, range. Fights are usually short enough that DPE doesn't matter hardly at all, so instead people use weapons that do the maximum DPS, and because of vollies(which are pretty much necessary for most high level content), laser DPS has to be over 2x that of another damage type, or have some sort of really good bonus in order to be an effective weapon.

The thing is, you can't really fix this problem, because so much content is already balanced around volitile diffusers. You'd have to rebalance almost all content above level 300 or so if you wanted to fix it.


I personally think that the zeus bolt should be changed from a laser to a high speed laser damage type projectile, similar to the sterile cannon. If it were a smallish size, it would actually get used in situations where MT's aren't an option. Also, possibly give them a cool mod like +1 weapon slot per weapon equipped, so you could use a set in addition to whatever normal gear you have.

So, to summarize what I'm getting out of this thread:

1) Laser-type damage is probably a little bit underpowered, but not significantly so. It should probably be beefed by 5% - 10%

2) While fairly balanced for low levels, at high levels, beam-type weapons are underpowered compared to pulse-type weapons, because high level players miss a lot. Adding 0.5 or about 2% per tech level extra power to beam type weapons will bring them up from 55% as good as pulses at tech 0 to 78% as good as pulses at tech 20, for a 40% total beef at tech 20.

3) Diffusers are probably the biggest problem of all and are completely OP at high levels. My current favorite solution to the diffusers issue is to give each one a max damage that can be soaked per shot, say for example a volatile laser diffuser could soak a max of 250 damage per shot, which is basically infinite for a tech 4 player who is supposed to be using it, but an actual cap for a tech 20 player.

While I think all three points are worth doing, the problem is that all three will probably make the game harder for players who have built themselves around not using lasers and AI's using lasers a lot. So maybe we should just do one or two of them for now and save the 3rd for sometime down the road.

does that mean ur gonna nerf compressed damp + off a % too? cos thats gonna upset people whove spent a fortune on the damn things

I think in theory all diffusers should eventually get a maximum absorption amount based on their tech level.

I thought u understood grammar

I'm quite sure few people already mentioned that high lvl players DO NOT miss a lot.