Light pen weapons are near useless

[Dundo]

Title, they need far more damage or need to be converted to medium pen.
There is 0 use for light pen weapons as is.

[Axis of Lint]

Originally posted by Dakota:

DPS isn't real, enemies don't have infinite health, they have set health values. If an enemy has 100 health and you have a gun that does 50 damage and a gun that does 90 damage they're both taking the same amount of shots to kill the target. This issue pops up a lot with most of the light pen weapons in the game. A devastator head has 110 health for example, every AR kills them in two hits to the head, as does every SMG. A warrior has 150 health on its head, a liberator and a liberator penetrator kill it in 3 hits to the head, adjudicators and tenderizers kill it in 2 hits to the head, it's the same thing. Scavengers have 60 health so everything but the sickle kills it in 1 hit while the sickle is twice as bad as everything else against them. Hunters have 160, so similar deal as the warrior heads with the 3 shots or 2 shots taken.

You've literally just said that light and medium armour pen weapons are basically the same when it comes to killing chaff which is what I use them for.

Then you say that "let's ignore magazine size and RoF" which is precisely why I take light pen weapons because they generally favour those stats.

I mean, if you want to talk about an enemy where armour pen actually matters (for the most part) like a hive guard, I don't even use my primary most of the time unless it's a single, I'll just pull out my support weapon and kill it.

You know the only time a medium armour pen primary has mattered to me? When I drop in without a support weapon at the beginning of a map or after I've died.

[Tahla]

Originally posted by Axis of Lint:

Originally posted by Tahla:

Show me the unarmoed spot of a gunship or a rocket strider that shot it's rockets.

Light penetrating weapons fundamentally don't serve a different role that medium penetration weapons do especially in higher difficulties where medium enemies are more abundant.

Light pen weapons should have medium pen if you shoot head but with the usual damage penalty of meeting armor values and deflect on angles.

There seems to be a disconnect here somewhere. I take a light pen weapon to clear chaff and I use my support weapon and/or stratagems to kill heavier things. You can absolutely take a medium armour pen primary to also help clear heavier enemies, but then you're (usually) sacrificing something when clearing chaff.

As an example, I switched to using the purifier for clearing overseers when fighting the Illuminate (I usually run the sickle as a primary but the purifier can double tap the overseers and clear groups of voteless), but it comes with drawbacks, notably the fact that I can't fire it at close range without harming myself. The same could be said for using say, the JAR dominator over the base liberator - they're used for different things and the liberator has much better snap to sights and handling, but the JAR can obviously kill things the base liberator cannot.

There's nothing *wrong* with light pen weapons nor anything wrong with using them.

(As an addendum, there are a couple of medium pen weapons that, like you say, are fundamentally just light pen weapons but better, such as the liberator pen, which nowadays is basically just a better base liberator, or you could easily argue the halt is better than the base punisher as another example).

Yes there seems to be a disconnect because in higher difficulties, especially on some seeds, the chaff very often has a lot of medium enemies. Even enemies that have light armor like brood and alpha commanders die faster to any medium gun because they're not penalized for matching armor (-35% damage, and that's not even counting durable damage loss).

A lot of the weapons you name throughout the thread that you use are not purely light pen or medium pen either. I see a lot of plasma weapons used which while medium pen are much more importantly explosive, which shreds through durable parts and no light pen weapon can do that. The cookout has burning and will kill a lot of smaller bugs or zombies with just a glancing shot and you can hit multiple enemies with it, it also has a lot of stagger and keeps enemies off of you, which most light pen weapons can not do.

My suggestions is just that light pen weapons (especially assault rifles and SMGs) that don't provide some other benefit like stagger, stun or any sort of damage over time, need to be looked at. They chew through ammo and are just overall worse at dealing with the majority of enemies on higher difficulties, having them actually deal full damage to light armored enemies and provide a small benefit against medium enemies (reduced damage, can penetrate medium armor if shot head on, otherwise deflect) is not a big ask.

I'll say it again, there fundamentally is no different use case for light and medium pen weapons, they're there to deal with chaff and in higher difficulties a lot of chaff has medium armor or some sort of mechanic to lower your damage (overseer armor that needs to be blown off, small weak spots or tanky parts on devastators, durable parts on bugs). Explosive weapons are in a league of their own on top of being medium pen since they ignore both of those mechanics.

[Axis of Lint]

Originally posted by Dakota:

Originally posted by Axis of Lint:

If this is where you argument comes from, I finally see the problem. I take a higher pen support weapon to complement my lower pen primary.

Hence why I talked so much about the fact that you can't choose your loadout in a vacuum.

If we're stuck taking a support weapon to make up for the primary weapon being bad at killing things, then we lack a support weapon for killing heavy enemies like bile titans and chargers and such.

If I'm considering meta on bugs, crossbow 100% for the utility in closing bug holes, 1-2 shotting any of the medium enemies, taking out whole patrols in a shot or two, being able to kill chargers with 3 shots to the back, being able to kill impalers with a few hits to the head, and then I can bring along a recoillless rifle to deal with BTs and kill chargers faster. Could also do the EAT+arc thrower combo if I wanted to focus on chaff clear since arc thrower can deal with entire bug breaches on its own taking out medium and light enemies without ever reloading and stun and kill chargers and only can't deal with BTs and impalers, strafing run can deal with the impalers quickly and EATs the BTs.

Again, you're NOT CONSIDERING THE WHOLE LOADOUT. I literally don't know how to be clearer about this.

I bring things like the strafing run to kill armoured stuff that I don't want to kill with my support. I bring the railcannon strike to kill heavily armoured things. I bring the HMG emplacement to destroy crowds of armoured things. I bring the anti-tank emplacement sometimes to kill heavily armoured things.

Everything. Has. It's. Own. Role.

[Dakota]

Originally posted by Axis of Lint:

Originally posted by Dakota:

Reinforced rocket striders, gunships, basic troopers that have an armor vest on, hive guards, bile spewers, stalkers, overseers, watchers, harvesters all go down much easier with medium pen. Devastators you wanna aim head for, but medium pen options like dominator can stagger with a chest shot too, just making things easier.

Gunships are a very poor example and personally I feel using primaries against them is a bad choice. A single well placed railgun shot will take out a gunship versus firing any kind of primary.

Trooper heads are still unarmoured and still the thing I hit with no issues so that's a moot point.

Bile Spewers and Hive guard I kill with either my support weapon, grenades or a stratagem (I run strafing run a lot for this reason).

Stalkers aren't medium armoured.

Overseers I run the purifier or MG43 because light pen is possible by largely not useful vs them
Watchers die just fine with the sickle I have no idea what you mean, they have no medium armour on them at all.
Harvesters, again I usually run the MG43 on Illuminate so this is a non-issue for me and I don't know why you'd run medium armour pen just to kill them tbh,

Considering the Illuminate only have four mobs at the moment they're very much an outlier since three of the four are armoured.

At this point you're conflating two variables together and your argument isn't sound. You can either argue about medium armour pen or you can argue about damage, but you can't argue that light pen is useless because of damage *and* armour pen, because they two things aren't linked, even if the JAR, eruptor and crossbow do significantly more damage per shot than light pen weapons because not all medium armour pen weapons do 200+ damage a shot.

Takes like a mag from an adjudicator or counter sniper, or like 2-3 shots from a crossbow to take out a gunship, they're not at all something a strategem weapon is required for, and generally the best strat weapon for bots is the RR, and you don't wanna have to waste shots from that on gunships anyway.

Having to aim for trooper heads is harder than body shots, so it's a bit slower.

Having to use up strafing runs on hive guards and spewers instead of being able to save them up for impalers, also using the very limited supply of grenades on them instead of having thermites saved for chargers, or running a support weapon for the purpose of dealing with them is a lot of stuff you gotta do instead of just shooting a crossbow bolt or two at them.

Stalkers have light armor on them in a lot of places, which while light pen can damage them, it does vastly reduced damage, making medium pen a far better choice to kill them.

Watchers have armor on some of their fins, light pen can kill them in the middle, but it's a 3x bigger target with medium pen that you can kill.

Dominator vs illuminate is nice since it one shots overseer heads and takes out harvester leg joins in 5 or so shots, but there's a lack of tank enemies there that would prompt us to bring a recoilless rifle so illuminate is currently the most wide open for bringing weapons without being much worse off than if you brought other options.

Light pen is generally useless because of both damage and armor pen, that's kinda the running theme. The only medium pen weapons that do less damage than light pen counter parts I can think of are the liberator penetrator and the adjudicator, and both of them still do enough damage that their shots to kill vs light armor enemies is equal to their equivalent light pen weapon, then they kill medium targets faster anyway. Every single other medium pen primary does much more damage per shot than any of the assault rifles do. I'd say out of the light pen weapons the diligence is the one that's really worth bringing to a lot of places since it at least has the damage thresholds to one shot a lot of the light pen targets and the precision to do so consistently without caring about recoil of follow up shots.

[Dakota]

Originally posted by Axis of Lint:

Originally posted by Dakota:

DPS isn't real, enemies don't have infinite health, they have set health values. If an enemy has 100 health and you have a gun that does 50 damage and a gun that does 90 damage they're both taking the same amount of shots to kill the target. This issue pops up a lot with most of the light pen weapons in the game. A devastator head has 110 health for example, every AR kills them in two hits to the head, as does every SMG. A warrior has 150 health on its head, a liberator and a liberator penetrator kill it in 3 hits to the head, adjudicators and tenderizers kill it in 2 hits to the head, it's the same thing. Scavengers have 60 health so everything but the sickle kills it in 1 hit while the sickle is twice as bad as everything else against them. Hunters have 160, so similar deal as the warrior heads with the 3 shots or 2 shots taken.

You've literally just said that light and medium armour pen weapons are basically the same when it comes to killing chaff which is what I use them for.

Then you say that "let's ignore magazine size and RoF" which is precisely why I take light pen weapons because they generally favour those stats.

I mean, if you want to talk about an enemy where armour pen actually matters (for the most part) like a hive guard, I don't even use my primary most of the time unless it's a single, I'll just pull out my support weapon and kill it.

You know the only time a medium armour pen primary has mattered to me? When I drop in without a support weapon at the beginning of a map or after I've died.

I brought up in my other post the reason I "ignored" the magzine size and rof is because generally they don't actually mean anything. Crossbow has 50 rpm and 5 shots in the mag and it's gonna clear out chaff way faster than every single AR in the game.

From the sound of it though, you aren't even really using your primary for much to begin with, or relying on it much at all since you're mostly using your strategem weapon, so honestly how would you even get a good feel of which ones are better or worse if you aren't pushing their limits any?

[Axis of Lint]

Originally posted by Tahla:

Originally posted by Axis of Lint:

There seems to be a disconnect here somewhere. I take a light pen weapon to clear chaff and I use my support weapon and/or stratagems to kill heavier things. You can absolutely take a medium armour pen primary to also help clear heavier enemies, but then you're (usually) sacrificing something when clearing chaff.

As an example, I switched to using the purifier for clearing overseers when fighting the Illuminate (I usually run the sickle as a primary but the purifier can double tap the overseers and clear groups of voteless), but it comes with drawbacks, notably the fact that I can't fire it at close range without harming myself. The same could be said for using say, the JAR dominator over the base liberator - they're used for different things and the liberator has much better snap to sights and handling, but the JAR can obviously kill things the base liberator cannot.

There's nothing *wrong* with light pen weapons nor anything wrong with using them.

(As an addendum, there are a couple of medium pen weapons that, like you say, are fundamentally just light pen weapons but better, such as the liberator pen, which nowadays is basically just a better base liberator, or you could easily argue the halt is better than the base punisher as another example).

Yes there seems to be a disconnect because in higher difficulties, especially on some seeds, the chaff very often has a lot of medium enemies. Even enemies that have light armor like brood and alpha commanders die faster to any medium gun because they're not penalized for matching armor (-35% damage, and that's not even counting durable damage loss).

A lot of the weapons you name throughout the thread that you use are not purely light pen or medium pen either. I see a lot of plasma weapons used which while medium pen are much more importantly explosive, which shreds through durable parts and no light pen weapon can do that. The cookout has burning and will kill a lot of smaller bugs or zombies with just a glancing shot and you can hit multiple enemies with it, it also has a lot of stagger and keeps enemies off of you, which most light pen weapons can not do.

My suggestions is just that light pen weapons (especially assault rifles and SMGs) that don't provide some other benefit like stagger, stun or any sort of damage over time, need to be looked at. They chew through ammo and are just overall worse at dealing with the majority of enemies on higher difficulties, having them actually deal full damage to light armored enemies and provide a small benefit against medium enemies (reduced damage, can penetrate medium armor if shot head on, otherwise deflect) is not a big ask.

I'll say it again, there fundamentally is no different use case for light and medium pen weapons, they're there to deal with chaff and in higher difficulties a lot of chaff has medium armor or some sort of mechanic to lower your damage (overseer armor that needs to be blown off, small weak spots or tanky parts on devastators, durable parts on bugs). Explosive weapons are in a league of their own on top of being medium pen since they ignore both of those mechanics.

You're absolutely right in that there are generally more armoured enemies late game, especially with automatons for instance, but that also comes with the caveat that there are more enemies in general and taking medium armour pen weapons that again, generally, have lower magazine sizes can be a hinderance, despite how much it might help killing the more armoured enemies. There aren't a lot of things that you can't kill with a light weapon that are significantly improved by bringing a medium pen weapon. Even when I was running the purifier vs Illuminate, yes you can kill groups of voteless with it and it's great vs overseers, but honestly I can use an MG to do that just fine without having to worry if one gets close or anything and it also tears through overseers and rips through the harvester leg, so I just stopped bringing it and went back to the sickle so I can clear hordes of voteless without wasting ammunition.

I'm usually the supply pack person out of our four and I can tell you that they do not complain about me bringing it because they burn through their ammo a lot, whereas running the sickle I can supply them with ammo and be fine myself.

[Axis of Lint]

Originally posted by Dakota:

Originally posted by Axis of Lint:

From the sound of it though, you aren't even really using your primary for much to begin with, or relying on it much at all since you're mostly using your strategem weapon, so honestly how would you even get a good feel of which ones are better or worse if you aren't pushing their limits any?

Uh, considering I'm usually firing 2000+ rounds a mission running a sickle and railgun, I'm pretty sure I'm using my primary a bit.

[Dakota]

Originally posted by Tahla:

Originally posted by Axis of Lint:

There seems to be a disconnect here somewhere. I take a light pen weapon to clear chaff and I use my support weapon and/or stratagems to kill heavier things. You can absolutely take a medium armour pen primary to also help clear heavier enemies, but then you're (usually) sacrificing something when clearing chaff.

As an example, I switched to using the purifier for clearing overseers when fighting the Illuminate (I usually run the sickle as a primary but the purifier can double tap the overseers and clear groups of voteless), but it comes with drawbacks, notably the fact that I can't fire it at close range without harming myself. The same could be said for using say, the JAR dominator over the base liberator - they're used for different things and the liberator has much better snap to sights and handling, but the JAR can obviously kill things the base liberator cannot.

There's nothing *wrong* with light pen weapons nor anything wrong with using them.

(As an addendum, there are a couple of medium pen weapons that, like you say, are fundamentally just light pen weapons but better, such as the liberator pen, which nowadays is basically just a better base liberator, or you could easily argue the halt is better than the base punisher as another example).

Yes there seems to be a disconnect because in higher difficulties, especially on some seeds, the chaff very often has a lot of medium enemies. Even enemies that have light armor like brood and alpha commanders die faster to any medium gun because they're not penalized for matching armor (-35% damage, and that's not even counting durable damage loss).

A lot of the weapons you name throughout the thread that you use are not purely light pen or medium pen either. I see a lot of plasma weapons used which while medium pen are much more importantly explosive, which shreds through durable parts and no light pen weapon can do that. The cookout has burning and will kill a lot of smaller bugs or zombies with just a glancing shot and you can hit multiple enemies with it, it also has a lot of stagger and keeps enemies off of you, which most light pen weapons can not do.

My suggestions is just that light pen weapons (especially assault rifles and SMGs) that don't provide some other benefit like stagger, stun or any sort of damage over time, need to be looked at. They chew through ammo and are just overall worse at dealing with the majority of enemies on higher difficulties, having them actually deal full damage to light armored enemies and provide a small benefit against medium enemies (reduced damage, can penetrate medium armor if shot head on, otherwise deflect) is not a big ask.

I'll say it again, there fundamentally is no different use case for light and medium pen weapons, they're there to deal with chaff and in higher difficulties a lot of chaff has medium armor or some sort of mechanic to lower your damage (overseer armor that needs to be blown off, small weak spots or tanky parts on devastators, durable parts on bugs). Explosive weapons are in a league of their own on top of being medium pen since they ignore both of those mechanics.

I like your suggestions there. Something to allow light weapons to not just be a supply drain burning through mag after mag while we're trying to burn through the endless medium enemy hordes would be nice to see. Also yeah, it's kinda wacky how insanely above the rest explosive weapons tend to be. When I have 50 hive guards on my screen fighting dif 10 bugs, the value I'm getting out of an explosive weapon is orders of magnitudes higher than anything else.

[Axis of Lint]

Originally posted by Dakota:

Having to aim for trooper heads is harder than body shots, so it's a bit slower.

Originally posted by Dakota:

Dominator vs illuminate is nice since it one shots overseer heads

So it's harder to hit trooper heads, but not elevated overseer heads? I dunno man

[Dakota]

Originally posted by Axis of Lint:

Originally posted by Dakota:

If we're stuck taking a support weapon to make up for the primary weapon being bad at killing things, then we lack a support weapon for killing heavy enemies like bile titans and chargers and such.

If I'm considering meta on bugs, crossbow 100% for the utility in closing bug holes, 1-2 shotting any of the medium enemies, taking out whole patrols in a shot or two, being able to kill chargers with 3 shots to the back, being able to kill impalers with a few hits to the head, and then I can bring along a recoillless rifle to deal with BTs and kill chargers faster. Could also do the EAT+arc thrower combo if I wanted to focus on chaff clear since arc thrower can deal with entire bug breaches on its own taking out medium and light enemies without ever reloading and stun and kill chargers and only can't deal with BTs and impalers, strafing run can deal with the impalers quickly and EATs the BTs.

Again, you're NOT CONSIDERING THE WHOLE LOADOUT. I literally don't know how to be clearer about this.

I bring things like the strafing run to kill armoured stuff that I don't want to kill with my support. I bring the railcannon strike to kill heavily armoured things. I bring the HMG emplacement to destroy crowds of armoured things. I bring the anti-tank emplacement sometimes to kill heavily armoured things.

Everything. Has. It's. Own. Role.

I'm considering the whole loadout a lot actually. I'm getting the most utility out of each thing in my loadout so I can fill all the roles I need. Rail cannon is useless on high diff since you're not getting anywhere killing one bile titan every 3 minutes when the RR kills one every 3 seconds. I know I have to fight off at times groups of multiple BTs, multiple chargers, and multiple impalers, while still having to clear out a horde of medium enemies and some occasional light enemies. I don't end up using HMG emplacement much since it's not mobile so it's gonna get run down and overwhelmed by the heavy enemies around and given its cooldown it's not really up enough, and I could have just plopped down a gatling sentry then stood by with my RR to be able to handle chaff, mediums, and heavies all at once if I did have to stand in a spot for a period of time.

Everything of course has its roles, the issue is that a lot of things have the same role, and when a lot of things have the same role, there's one thing that's best in slot. If you have 5 assault rifles, all of them have the same role, they spray bullets at the enemy to kill it, one of the 5 does this best overall.

[Axis of Lint]

Originally posted by Dakota:

Originally posted by Axis of Lint:

If this is where you argument comes from, I finally see the problem. I take a higher pen support weapon to complement my lower pen primary.

Hence why I talked so much about the fact that you can't choose your loadout in a vacuum.

If we're stuck taking a support weapon to make up for the primary weapon being bad at killing things, then we lack a support weapon for killing heavy enemies like bile titans and chargers and such.

If I'm considering meta on bugs, crossbow 100% for the utility in closing bug holes, 1-2 shotting any of the medium enemies, taking out whole patrols in a shot or two, being able to kill chargers with 3 shots to the back, being able to kill impalers with a few hits to the head, and then I can bring along a recoillless rifle to deal with BTs and kill chargers faster. Could also do the EAT+arc thrower combo if I wanted to focus on chaff clear since arc thrower can deal with entire bug breaches on its own taking out medium and light enemies without ever reloading and stun and kill chargers and only can't deal with BTs and impalers, strafing run can deal with the impalers quickly and EATs the BTs.

Yeah, I think the crossbow is broken and a bad example, but I take your point, it's just not the way I play Helldivers. I take the sickle for general purpose killing, something like the railgun or EATs for killing medium to heavy stuff and something like the railcannon+HMG emplacement for anything else. I'll switch between impacts and thermites depending on enemy and loadout, I'll usually take the grenade pistol as a general all-rounder.

I started taking the purifier vs Illuminate because of it's usefullness at killing the overseers and groups of voteless. I also tried the plasma punisher which has a great stagger to it, but the problem I ran into was too many times when I would get run up by the voteless and my primary became a liability. Now, you can tell me that's poor gameplay and that's absolutely fine but that doesn't change the fact that it just became easier to run the sickle + MG43. I use the sickle to deal with voteless and the MG to kill everything else.

There are obviously going to be personal preferences for different weapons but you primary argument is that light armour pen weapons are useless and they are not. If I can use one (and so can two other people in my team of four) on difficulty ten and beat the mission then how can they be useless?

[Dakota]

Originally posted by Axis of Lint:

Originally posted by Dakota:

Having to aim for trooper heads is harder than body shots, so it's a bit slower.

Originally posted by Dakota:

Dominator vs illuminate is nice since it one shots overseer heads

So it's harder to hit trooper heads, but not elevated overseer heads? I dunno man

Bringing up "gotchas" instead of thinking a bit isn't much of a way to argue. Obviously hitting an overseer head is harder than hitting its body, the point of difference here is that if we look at a trooper, the medium pen weapons all except the adjudicator the lib pen one shot the body, and those two in particular two shot the body, so the difference in question is that the medium pen weapons get a large advantage while the light pen weapons just are worse off as all they can do is headshot, which all the medium pen weapons also do and do even better due to the higher accuracy values on many of them.

In the consideration of overseer heads, they are armored such that the light pen weapons cannot do a headshot while the medium pen weapons can, then ontop of that their body armor is ablative so light pen can kill it after they go through it, but medium pen cuts through it to kill them even faster so medium pen both has the advantage in body shots and can headshot where the light pen cannot.

So troopers and overseers are essentially the exact same deal where they're both a unit where the medium pen option kills them better wherever you shoot while the light pen option is left with less places it can shoot to kill and still doesn't kill them any faster.

[Get Donked On]

Originally posted by Dakota:

Originally posted by Tahla:

Yes there seems to be a disconnect because in higher difficulties, especially on some seeds, the chaff very often has a lot of medium enemies. Even enemies that have light armor like brood and alpha commanders die faster to any medium gun because they're not penalized for matching armor (-35% damage, and that's not even counting durable damage loss).

A lot of the weapons you name throughout the thread that you use are not purely light pen or medium pen either. I see a lot of plasma weapons used which while medium pen are much more importantly explosive, which shreds through durable parts and no light pen weapon can do that. The cookout has burning and will kill a lot of smaller bugs or zombies with just a glancing shot and you can hit multiple enemies with it, it also has a lot of stagger and keeps enemies off of you, which most light pen weapons can not do.

My suggestions is just that light pen weapons (especially assault rifles and SMGs) that don't provide some other benefit like stagger, stun or any sort of damage over time, need to be looked at. They chew through ammo and are just overall worse at dealing with the majority of enemies on higher difficulties, having them actually deal full damage to light armored enemies and provide a small benefit against medium enemies (reduced damage, can penetrate medium armor if shot head on, otherwise deflect) is not a big ask.

I'll say it again, there fundamentally is no different use case for light and medium pen weapons, they're there to deal with chaff and in higher difficulties a lot of chaff has medium armor or some sort of mechanic to lower your damage (overseer armor that needs to be blown off, small weak spots or tanky parts on devastators, durable parts on bugs). Explosive weapons are in a league of their own on top of being medium pen since they ignore both of those mechanics.

I like your suggestions there. Something to allow light weapons to not just be a supply drain burning through mag after mag while we're trying to burn through the endless medium enemy hordes would be nice to see. Also yeah, it's kinda wacky how insanely above the rest explosive weapons tend to be. When I have 50 hive guards on my screen fighting dif 10 bugs, the value I'm getting out of an explosive weapon is orders of magnitudes higher than anything else.

it is pretty nutty going from the standard liberator barely killing 1 alpha commander in a mag to the crosbow that insta deletes entire patrols and 2-3 taps alphas.
light pen ARs bar maybe the sickle are near useless for bugs and even then you are basically praying you dont get a bile spewer mission.
For bots all i can say is why bother with any AR when you can bring either of the marksman rifles if your aim is even semi-good enough to have the ARs even perform semi-acceptably. beserkers are a non issue as long as you know how to switch first and third person firing modes well.

For squids id maybe consider ars but even there their kinda awfull ammo eco makes em not great for clearing hordes (wich honestly is better done by your secondary anyways imo)
whilst their ttk on overseers is pretty bad and usually results in most dudes is see using them spending half a mag to a full mag just to kill 1 overseer.
sure you can run the siege ready passive but that applies to every medium pen primary as well and i find gets you more value on those weapons still as 10 crosbow bolts is usually more kills than 3 liberator mags can usually dream of getting unless you wanna tap fire it single shot style like a worse Marksman rifle.

[Axis of Lint]

Originally posted by Dakota:

Rail cannon is useless on high diff since you're not getting anywhere killing one bile titan every 3 minutes when the RR kills one every 3 seconds.

That's the single most hilarious thing I've heard you say so far.

[Tahla]

Originally posted by Axis of Lint:

You're absolutely right in that there are generally more armoured enemies late game, especially with automatons for instance, but that also comes with the caveat that there are more enemies in general and taking medium armour pen weapons that again, generally, have lower magazine sizes can be a hinderance, despite how much it might help killing the more armoured enemies. There aren't a lot of things that you can't kill with a light weapon that are significantly improved by bringing a medium pen weapon. Even when I was running the purifier vs Illuminate, yes you can kill groups of voteless with it and it's great vs overseers, but honestly I can use an MG to do that just fine without having to worry if one gets close or anything and it also tears through overseers and rips through the harvester leg, so I just stopped bringing it and went back to the sickle so I can clear hordes of voteless without wasting ammunition.

I'm usually the supply pack person out of our four and I can tell you that they do not complain about me bringing it because they burn through their ammo a lot, whereas running the sickle I can supply them with ammo and be fine myself.

Your circumstances are not the circumstances of the majority of players though, since you seem to exclusively play with a fixed group of people that seem to know what they're doing and can effectively share resources and roles. This is not the experience of the majority of players where you basically have to build to do everything yourself because they won't care about you.

And there's no arguing the fact that weapons with additional effects like explosive damage or stagger are rarely in the light pen category, some even have both like the crossbow or the purifier. Theoretical infinite ammo on the sickle is nice, coupled with a giant 100 shot heat capacity, but this is not the case for most other light pen weapons. Yes light pen weapons usually have a higher rate of fire and thus theoretical faster TTK, but that also means you'll waste a lot more ammo on enemies with long death animations that are blocking your shots where explosive weapons just hit everything in an area or spreading around your shots for burning and stagger will kill multiple enemies more efficiently and keep your alive longer.

Most light pen weapons unfortunately do not offer enough benefits for their drawbacks. Especially ARs and SMGs are single target, usually don't stagger, don't have any AoE effect and are on average worse at dealing with medium enemies if they can do so at all (gunships and rocket striders in particular).