TR Weapons better beacause of Firerate????

[Konsten]

Hey, im playing NC and I noticed that most of the TR Weapons have a very much higher Firerate than the ones of NC and I was asking if that made the TR Weapons better, because they also have the same Damage stats as the NC weapons.

[Bruva Guren]

The answer is no, unless you like Assault rifles.

TR's high RoF and mag size also comes with inconsistent recoil, so even if you want to utilize say the t-9 Carv 750 RoF, you still need to let go of the trigger to reset recoil and CoF.

NC also suffers from harsh (not inconsistent) recoil, but all of their weapons are the hardest hitting in the game.

If we're talking purely about stats:
Currently there's no Carbine that can match the GD7F at close range or the Mercenary at Mid range.
No LMGs that can fire 200-167 dmg like the Gauss SAW, the fastest 167 LMG with the Anchor. (Side note dont use the Promise, its horrible!)
For SMGs, the Gladius and cyclone are literal carbines in a class that can go invisible.
Now for the ARs, there's just no beating the cycler TRV and the TAR. NC gets carnage-AR and GR-22, but they're both relative to the TR ARs, are harder to use.

But the weapons' stat alone isnt going to take you very far. It all solely relies on you how you utilize a weapon's strength. If you think TR is strong, then make a TR character and try it out.

[Chrøme]

NC weapons are the best

[Youngling Slayer]

NC has some very strong high rate of fire options like the GR22 and the GD7F

[Torchlight]

GD7F, GR22, AF-57 Piston, GD-10 Blitz, all good RPM and high damage.

For TR, RPM Is a number that doesn't really matter, damage and range is more important. the MSWR is a prime example.

[C4Delta]

what about the serpeant that one is pretty good aswell or the orion?

[Shortpower]

Originally posted by C4Delta:

what about the serpeant that one is pretty good aswell or the orion?

Serpent is functionally a GD7F, Orion is functionally a MSWR.
They're both good guns, yes.

[Black_Fox]

Higher RoF means more random horizontal sway in this game, with the TR typical weapons you need to manually burst fire a lot if you want to hit anything

[Shortpower]

Originally posted by Black_Fox:

Higher RoF means more random horizontal sway in this game, with the TR typical weapons you need to manually burst fire a lot if you want to hit anything

You burst fire to control CoF, not to control "horizontal recoil."

[Percello]

Generally, it goes like this:
NC weapons hit hardest per shot and best at closer range.
TR weapons fire the fastest, have the largest magazine sizes and are mid range.
VS weapons are mid overall and best mid-long range due to low bullet drop.

None of this actually matter, though, if you don't have decent accuracy.
If everyone had 100% accuracy all the time, then ranges would come into play.
There's a bunch of factors that come into play when it comes to weapon damage.

[Black_Fox]

Originally posted by Shortpower:

Originally posted by Black_Fox:

Higher RoF means more random horizontal sway in this game, with the TR typical weapons you need to manually burst fire a lot if you want to hit anything

You burst fire to control CoF, not to control "horizontal recoil."

Horizontal recoil in this game works in the way that the guns either swing to the left or right with a chance to change direction after each fired shot - first bullet goes straight so bursting increases accuracy by interrupting the sway. Higher RoF, faster direction changes on top of the CoF

[Shortpower]

Originally posted by Black_Fox:

Originally posted by Shortpower:

You burst fire to control CoF, not to control "horizontal recoil."

Horizontal recoil in this game works in the way that the guns either swing to the left or right with a chance to change direction after each fired shot - first bullet goes straight so bursting increases accuracy by interrupting the sway. Higher RoF, faster direction changes on top of the CoF

Bursting doesn't, it's not, I can't.

It's not sway, it's bounces. These are limited and controlled by a few stats on the gun - but basically no good players are bursting for horizontal recoil because it doesn't help.

Bloom, and only bloom, is why they're bursting. For recoil it's as simple as: does gun have a bias? If it does pull down + against horizontal bias (example, the TAR has a bias for bouncing right so you pull down left). If it doesn't - just ignore the horizontal recoil, doing your best to just keep the gun centered on enemy head with micro mouse adjustments.

The stat I think you either don't realize exists or fail to understand is horizontal recoil tolerance, and to a lesser extent recoil angle min/max.

Using TAR again because it's one of my favorites and easy enough to remember:
It can only bounce twice 0.3 degrees in either direction (tolerance 1) before it must bounce the other direction. It has a right bias (17/20) so it will likely bounce right more than left - meaning input wise as a player just keeping slight leftward pull on your mouse will help to counteract the recoil. That of course won't help at extended ranges, but in CQC it's pretty straight forward.

[Sköll]

I'll summarize the 4 factions for you:
NC: Slow firerate but hits like a tank. Good in most engagements as most ranges

VS: Literal baby easy mode. Their guns are accurate, with midline damage and decent firerate. Their recoil is also much lower than everyone else's with less bullet drop

TR: Hardmode. Your bullets do less damage, and your firerate is directly tied to your framerate. If you have poor hardware you will suffer on TR. Their guns are also much more unwieldy for what is essentially not much to show for it, and you will often struggle to hit anything. I know the obvious response is "just burst lol" but even small bursts out of TR weapons are difficult to hit, not even mentioning the poor bullet spread and low damage output they have to begin with.

NSO: Vanu but gray

Source: 2,300 hours over 12 years and having played all 4 factions respectively.

And I can already hear the vanu chuds coping I dare call their faction overpowered.

[Shortpower]

Originally posted by Shrimply A Krill Issue:

I'll summarize the 4 factions for you:
NC: Slow firerate but hits like a tank. Good in most engagements as most ranges

VS: Literal baby easy mode. Their guns are accurate, with midline damage and decent firerate. Their recoil is also much lower than everyone else's with less bullet drop

TR: Hardmode. Your bullets do less damage, and your firerate is directly tied to your framerate. If you have poor hardware you will suffer on TR. Their guns are also much more unwieldy for what is essentially not much to show for it, and you will often struggle to hit anything. I know the obvious response is "just burst lol" but even small bursts out of TR weapons are difficult to hit, not even mentioning the poor bullet spread and low damage output they have to begin with.

NSO: Vanu but gray

Source: 2,300 hours over 12 years and having played all 4 factions respectively.

And I can already hear the vanu chuds coping I dare call their faction overpowered.

Since people keep having objectively wrong takes and good players don't tend to browse the steam forums:
First, sorry for this massive text block, felt the need to address some copium with weapon stats and fully explain to the best of my ability why certain weapons are meta. (general rule of thumb is higher RPM weapons within their categories are meta, immediately killing the TR "high RPM weapons are bad" victim complex, though 125 does uniquely struggle.)

Links at bottom providing evidence etc.

Actively going to avoid mentioning vehicles, they're a bit more complicated than infantry weapons to consider the balance of - also they aren't exactly relevant to winning objectives.

The "FPS screws you over so hard" thing is mostly cope, under 60 FPS the increase of TTK by 0.05 seconds is much less important than the massive inherent disadvantages of being below 60 FPS in a shooter, and smoothing about 90% fixes the issue so long as you can maintain a flat 60 FPS at all times.
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TR - 143 damage primary, 125 damage unique. 125 is a rough damage model, but is incredibly dominant in CQC with excellent body and headshot TTKs, but is the most impacted by the FPS/RPM relation (the smoothing setting and 60 FPS just about nukes the issue though). TR 143's tend to be at the head of the pack for 143 behavior either with larger magazines or better RPM - except in carbines where they have the worst carbine arsenal of any faction (including NSO) simply by lieu of not having a GD7F equivalent (albeit not significantly worse, as the Lynx is only a bit worse).

Best AR arsenal: especially post ASP (secondary battle rifles offset the 200 damage ARs upsides enough to silence the debate). TAR is similar to GR22/HV45 while also having a larger magazine letting Medic truly behave as a "Medium Assault." Cycler TRV has GD7F tiers of damage output & TORQ-9 is a funny 125 damage instant kill machine.

Worst Carbine arsenal: Not necessarily "bad" but lacking a true equivalent to the GD7F or a Light Assault gimmick like the Horizon/Newton leaves the arsenal boring and unimpressive. Lynx and Kindred are both excellent, with Kindred having some of the best TTK in the game while also teaching good habits.
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Doing VS after TR because it's similarly 143 focused like TR - 143 damage primary. The arsenal tends to be slightly worse clones of NC/TR weapons (GD7F > Serpent, MSW-R > Orion, TAR > GR22 > HV45, Anchor > Maw). No bullet drop on many guns gives them a nice edge in very specific circumstances. It's widely considered the most boring infantry primary weapon faction since NC/TR have identical competitive weapons + other fun competitive/near competitive guns.

Best battle rifles: The Obelisk is the one gun that can properly make use of no bullet drop and doesn't require ammo allowing Infils to skulk around at medium range with this Doku rifle without too much concern.

Heavy Weapon: Not the best, but the Lasher does provide a unique door suppression weapon that has better up-time than the Thumper.

Honorable mention: Betelgeuse, a competitive CQC LMG that half fills the role of the EM6 & Butcher while also being, well a competitive CQC LMG. It's really only used for farming on live (similar to EM6/Butcher) after various nerfs (mag size most recently got decked to be more similar to TAR, making it harder to 1vX and more reliant on chaining 1v1s) and power creep (Butcher/Scavenger implant). Still a great gun, and uniquely difficult to balance.
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NC, transparency here, my primary outfit is on NC and most of my closer friends are NC mains - 167 damage primary, 200 damage unique, 143 damage secondary. On paper NC is the "hard hitting slow firing faction" which is true with their 200 damage (generalist guns that are incredibly dominant at long range while still being potent in CQC) and 167 (headshot TTKs are some of the best in the game at max damage bracket). They additionally though get excellent 143 damage guns with high RPM like the GR-22 Assault Rifle (Similar to HV45/TAR) and GD7F (the single best carbine in the game, similar to the VS Serpent). The only category NC actually lacks a competitive high ROF lower damage gun is LMGs as the Promise is an easier to use but much lower DPS weapon.
NC considered the best faction by most good players for a few reasons:

This is outside the scope of the general infantry equipment post, but a big part of the reason everyone uses NC for outfit wars - The NC MAX is overpowered. Between wonderfully potent shotguns that can 2 shot bodyshot (1 hit kill) & a shield that acts as a second constantly recharging health pool (mostly this) it's incredibly hard to compete with for point holding - and will only lose 1v1 to AV MAXs or the NSO Defector using Ablative.

Best SMG arsenal by a mile: the Cyclone in particular is the most overtuned automatic weapon atm, while Blitz and Gladius are both excellent. While TR/VS SMGs are just fine, and NSO are bad.

Best LMG arsenal: Anchor/GD-22S (bost GD buff) are both excellent CQC LMGs with good head clicking potential. Gauss SAW is an incredibly versatile LMG with fairly competitive body shots to kill in CQC and excellent headshot TTK every relevant range. Promise, while not exactly a good gun, is good for noobs that refuse to learn how to handle guns in this game as it is an incredibly well behaved platform. The EM6 offers a similar damage per mag to the Butcher while being much easier to obtain.

Second best AR arsenal: (won't usually mention, but it is worth mentioning here) - much for the same reason as the Gauss SAW the Reaper DMR and Vanquisher are both good. Once you have ASP secondary battle rifle this advantage matters less.

Best Heavy Weapon for objective based play: Gives heavies a secondary shotgun with ASP.
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NSO - 143 damage primary, 150 damage unique. Transparency here too, this is my primary faction that I have the vast majority of my playtime in. Arguably the worst faction in the game, mostly due to lacking a proper MBT/ESF, but also due to completely lacking a competitive Assault Rifle. Pistols for this faction have inherently increased bullet sizes with no additional downside. Vast majority of weapons have built in soft point and can still equip soft point making NSO oddly competitive for a single 5m window (15m-20m). Many weapons overpay in RPM for this *2 soft point advantage but a few like the CB-X75 (800 ROF, 143 damage @20m, 0.75x ADS move speed) does not, it properly balances the advantage to actually feel fairly close in power to the GD7F (845 ROF, 143 damage @15m, 0.5x ADS move speed).

Shotguns: Arguably the best shotgun faction due to the SG-100 being capable of 1 shots with barrel stuffing (still worse than the NS Baron), the HSG being mag fed + semi-automatic is a unique and occasionally useful twist on pump action shotguns, and the directive shotgun provides unique utility.

Assault Rifles: This is the single weapon category from any faction in the game that is actually just BAD. Every other faction maintains at least 1 competitive RPM usable weapon per weapon type. Stinkers like the AR-100 (667 ROF @ 143 damage - as compared to other faction's competitive 800 ROF @ 143 damage ARs) is more similar to the underwater rifles than other ARs. AR-101 (632 ROF @ 150 damage, 167 damage tends to have 600 ROF just to give an idea how low this DPS is) further drops RPM to bump to 150 damage, which basically just 143 damage but with better range. The best non-directive AR is the AR-N203 which is functionally just a worse Vanquisher, not unusably bad, but still rough.

Now for my own victim complex rant - Then there's the NSO directive Assault Rifle, the Maxwell, which requires paying money or using the previously listed bad ARs + the Yumi to unlock. I am uniquely qualified to speak on the weapon as I'm currently the person who has used it the most (not claiming to be great with it, just that I've used it most). The Maxwell finally got a buff to be usable at least (732 ROF, 143 damage @20m) compared to at least near competitive AR's like the T1 Cycler (750 ROF, 143 damage @15m), unfortunately having significantly worse ADS COF and hip COF than the T1 Cycler, worse horizontal recoil (both bounce twice, with no bias, Maxwell has 0.26 degree bounce & Cycler 0.225), and smaller mag size (30 vs 40, albeit with better reload speed). If they just gave the Maxwell 0.75x ADS speed it'd be near competitive which is frankly good enough.

Pistols: You may have noticed, if you somehow read this far into this massive block of text, that I didn't once mention pistols. This is because faction pistols are just that much worse than the ubiquitous NS revolvers & Pilot. This stops being true with NSO, the Harbinger is the only faction specific pistol that is arguably better than the Commissioner, Underboss, and Pilot. Increased bullet size (2.5x larger than normal bullets), large & fast reloading magazine, fast swap time, and similar TTK to Underboss (both 2 shot headshot, Harbinger 232 ROF vs Underboss 220 ROF) make it an overpowered sidearm and an easy pick for NSO mains to religiously give their secondary slot to.

Scout Rifles: Right so, it isn't exactly "the best" but it's a competitive selection with BY FAR the most unique options. The BAR-A75 is my favorite, but the Feyman is cool too with its underbarrel havoc launcher.

Sniper Rifles, worst: most other SR categories use carbon copies for the important things (semi auto & CQC bolts), NSO does not. Mako for example is worse than other CQC bolts, and Semis lack ballistic computer.

SMGs, the worst faction: Mostly hampered by the ridiculously tiny magazine the PMG-200 has (as its the closest to a traditional competitive weapon. These SMGs range from looking away in terror (PMG-100 is 900 ROF @ essentially 100 damage, compare to 125 guns at similar ROF) to looking suspiciously at it, unsure if it will help you kill the enemy or gimmick you to death (PMG-3XB is a 3 shot burst SMG that does 150 damage)

Honorable Mentions:
Galilei (Directive LMG) is a unique twist on CQC LMGs with excellent stats to compete with Orion/MSW-R & potential for an 80 round magazine.

Newton (Directive Carbine) is a solid competitor to the Horizon as THE Light Assault gimmick gun and an absolute blast to use.

Links:
Rate of Fire - FPS tie explained
https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/vg4hke/rpm_vs_fps_experiment_results/
NSO Pistol bullet size explained
https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/17yft33/planetscience_ep16_is_that_a_howitzer_in_your/
Useful tool for comparing weapons
https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/18hs6js/emperordorfs_ps2_weapon_surgeon_v10_public_release/
The go to "whats competitive" document for new players, easily the most useful thing here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13OHIk1d4L7yM69pIEp5w9b28wiMSCtCBHJofmnffov8/edit?gid=0#gid=0

[Bruva Guren]

Originally posted by Shortpower:

Originally posted by Shrimply A Krill Issue:

NSO - 143 damage primary, 150 damage unique. Transparency here too, this is my primary faction that I have the vast majority of my playtime in. Arguably the worst faction

Certified NSO moment

[Custodian Strike Force]

Originally posted by Konsten:

Hey, im playing NC and I noticed that most of the TR Weapons have a very much higher Firerate than the ones of NC and I was asking if that made the TR Weapons better, because they also have the same Damage stats as the NC weapons.

The most effective weapons across all ranges are found in the NC weapon arsenal. The player favors high damage with notable recoil that can be managed with the right attachment. It is also available to the NC if the player prefers a high fire rate.

You may be familiar with NC weapons such as the Phoenix Launcher, which is a TV guided missile that can occasionally be used as alternative sniper rifle to eliminate armored vehicles or infantry at a running distance of 280 meters.

An skilled NC heavy wielding a Gauss Saw is a menace on the battlefield. I've occasionally played as NSO, although I primarily main NC. I've come across these kinds of NC headhunters heavy using Gauss Saw, capable of eliminating you in a split second.

Here are a few examples of weapons that deal raw damage and have a high rate of fire (with manageable recoil or minimal recoil).

LMG
Raw Damage: NC6 Gauss SAW
High Fire rate: MGR-L1 Promise

Carbines
Raw Damage: AC-X11
High Fire Rate: GD-7F

Assault Rifle
Raw Damage: Reaper DMR
High Fire Rate: GR-22

SMG
Raw Damage: MGR-S1 Gladius
High Fire Rate: Blitz GD-10

Sidearms
Raw Damage: LA8 Rebel
High Fire Rate: LA3 Desperado

Semi auto Scout Rifle:
Raw Damage: MGR-M1 Bishop
High Fire Rate: Warden

AF-18 Stalker is a fully-automatic scout rifle

Sniper Rifle:
Raw Damage: AF-8 RailJack and SAS-R (close-quarters option)
High Fire Rate: Gauss SPR and Impetus (close-quarters option)

Heavy Weapon: NC05 Jackhammer - sustain a high damage output and project it out to longer ranges than expected from a shotgun and also features an alternate 3-round burst firemode, allowing it to quickly dump three shells down range for incredible burst damage that can potential kill infantry with a single burst.