Weapon loadout question

[Dhansak]

Just trying to figure out weapons for my Juggernaut, using shadow-tigger's excellent spreadsheet to help out with dps values etc.

I have a 4 space slot I want to experiment with and was wandering if it just makes sense to have 4 size 1s instead of one size 4 weapon?

e.g. one heavy laser beam (size 4) has 116 dps at epic level. However a Burst Medium Laser (size 1) has a dps of 48 - so obviously out damages the heavy if there were 4 of them. Also the rapid medium laser is a contender too - less dps but less heat and energy used.

Is it a heat and energy cost thing that makes this impractical? can't check properly myself yet as I am a bit low on relics - I used most of them to upgrade the ships's infrastructure before looking at armament.

Thanks

[WeaverSong]

Heat and energy certainly stack quickly. Additionally, it takes more relics to upgrade a stack of smaller weapons, they will probably have smaller range, and they won't be able to get the 20% large weapon (size 4+) damage boost from The Perfect Predator. But yes, stacking smaller weapons generally gives more total dps than a large weapon of the same size.

[Moon-Shadow]

Warning.


Opponents have resistances, where a little damage does less than a lot of damage just a little less.

And DPS is not everything, if you go to missiles then those are the worst weapons because they have extremely bad DPS values.

Missiles are strong, but per missiles or burst.

And mines extremely slow, because the enemy has to come to the mine, and they do a lot more damage than any weapon, and homemade ones hardly need more ammunition than finished ones and can also do 1000+ damage in purple.

Mines and missiles are rather not done in towers, especially never in 360 degree towers, as they have no special use there, except that a gunner could work them out if he has the right skills.

There are some weapons with little DPS but very high damage, and you can build them yourself.

DPS is only important if you have gunner with poor accuracy, no beam weapons, and not the new module that removes ship movement from the shots, then DPS is important because otherwise too few shots reach the enemy.

Beam weapons and a Gunner with bad stats are more likely to hit than with individual weapons.

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Increase weapon size, preferably with additional cores and boosters.

Less the module in the lower group, which doubles the size, as this has disadvantages with many weapon combinations, such as unnecessarily much heat without doing much more damage, only in a few combinations does it make sense.

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And the karma advantage with 20% more damage for weapons of size 4+

That assumes that a weapon has at least 4, the good 20% more damage without costing more heat and energy.

Starting with the Karma advantage only brings you something if you always start with a shuttle, as you can then select several things that give -1 on ship size.

And I rarely use the karma advantage, only when I intend to end up using ships that have more than one size 4+, as only having a single weapon, which is 4, makes little sense.

[Dhansak]

Thanks guys - that has given a lot to think about - will not fall into the dps-only trap!

i will give a lot of consideration to what you have said - i didn't even know enemies had resistances... so much to learn lol.

Cheers :)

[Moon-Shadow]

Opponents with silver stars, and some with gold stars.

And Ravager bosses, they always have stars, they have even more resistance than the others with stars.

Then some ships have a ship bonus for resistance or damage points.

Absorb is shield, resistance is armor.

Absorb, for example 5 points, then it subtracts this 5 from each hit, if you have several weak weapons that do 10 damage, only half of the damage would be received, and high DPS are rather low single damage.

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Vulcans are sometimes super strong and sometimes very weak, so they ignore shields, cannot be absorbed, but if an opponent has resistance you do a lot less damage, unless the Vulcan that fire slowly then the individual damage is higher than with the fast firers.

Vulcan is better to build yourself, because you can take the one with a higher critical chance from the lower group, which reduces the damage minimally, but since the weapon has a very high critical chance and you take skills for critical chance and maybe even crew with critical chance , you can get a 60% to 90%+ chance, and 100% only with "Ziggy" because it has its own critical chance bonus.

[Dhansak]

Ah - I have seen the enemy with stars and realised they could be more difficult - but didn't know the underlying process.

I have been thinking of doing a vulcan build just to see what happens. At the moment I have lasers of many types plus 2 missile launchers. I must return to lower levels to see if can actually do something against a ravager boss - I've had to run so far!.

Thanks again!

[Spanky]

Against armor it doesn't matter if you do 100 damage in 1 shot every 5 seconds or 20 damage every 1 second. It is the same dps. Armor is percentage based.

The difference is if you are a good shot or not. Miss with that big slow shot you just lost all the damage dealt. Miss with 2 out of the 5 shots with the faster weapon and you only lost some of the potential damage. Really depends on how you like to play.

Absorb on shields isn't as straight forward, but it is still based on dps. It will absorb a flat amount of damage every second.

So if the enemy has 20 absorb every second, then the faster weapon from above won't do any damage, but the slower weapon will still do 80 if you hit (assuming no armor).

Based on my observations it seems like armor reduction is calculated before shield absorb kicks in.

So using the weapons above and an enemy with with 50% armor and 10 shield absorb:

The slower weapon would do 100*50% - 10 absorb per second = 40 damage every 5 seconds assuming you hit. That absorb only gets to act once.

The faster weapon would do 20*50% - 10 absorb per second = 0 damage every 1 seconds..whether you hit or not since the absorb can take up to 10 per second.

Now that isn't a completely fair comparison, because it is likely the slower weapon would have taken up more space. lets say the slow weapon takes up 5 space and the faster weapon takes up 2.5 space each...so you can have 2 of them.

Now the faster weapons in total would do 2*20*50% - 10 absorb per second = 10 damage every second.

If you can hit with 5 shots then in total it is 50 damage in the 5 seconds it would take to hit once with the slower weapon. So in this case the faster weapons end up doing a bit more damage in total 50 vs 40.

Beams have an apparent lower DPS, but they are much easier to consistently hit targets with and more than make up for the lower dps with a greater on target rate. Personally if I decide to use beams I almost always make them into point defense versions which goes a long way to manage the heat and energy cost.

Actually, the shorter range doesn't bother me personally too much and if I am crafting a weapon and it allows it to be point defense I will do so. Besides range, you can get a better weapon for the same amount of room by adding more components, and if you are going for a really big weapon you can even add some of the range back in.

TLDR: Everything is viable, try different things to see which works best for you.

[Dhansak]

Hey thanks for that Spanky!

That level of detail really gives me the "meat and potatoes" to work with. At the moment I am using all lasers of various types (burst and beam) - including some PDC. Interesting that you make your weapons pdc if possible. I have yet to craft any weapons so will have to look into that as well.

Thanks again - much appreciated

[Moon-Shadow]

Important.


PD weapons have half the range, but this range is higher for self-made weapons than for PD weapons that already exist.

If you want to use boosters in your own Weapons, you need the skill from technology that halves the booster size.

Unfortunately, boosters in beam weapons are twice as big so you need the skill.

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"Juggernaut" on the ship I only made the rear 360 degree towers into self-made PD beams, with booster for range to the front.

And otherwise I had plasma on the side towers, and the one in front with the tower also had plasma.

But now, since there is "Ziggy", I would build a flak cannon for the 4 place tower, that is, cannon with explosive and time, and tower on manual control for controlled explosions.

[lalelunatic]

best "performance" in combat for the least effort (auto gunners) comes from gear space actually... not from weapon space alone... *cough* nodolo´s *cough*...

quick summary:

best ships, cruiser = hades, dread = cerberus.. why? multibarrel guns ,fire arcs AND 2 engineer slots.

best guns = crafted green beam lasers... why? instant dmg on the target with decent gunners, no spray fire loses you dps, highest dmg from green cores (important).

best gunners = energy damage unless you find something that gives your lasers 75+% crit AND 300% crit dmg combined... which you wont. the flat increase from energy will for 99% of the time be worth more.


how to do:

lvl up 2 engies with specialist max dmg resist, skill armour talent, get terran or venghi heavy armour (ardonian in case you cant get em), skill social down to max for first officer upgrade and gunner upgrades (woth more than anything else later on).

this gives you 2 legi engis with 12% dmg resist each, 1 first officer with dmg resist 13% avrg.
= 37% + ardonian 42% = 79% that alone makes you nearly immortal later on, but slow =P. if you get better ones you can go terran armour, which negates the "slowpoke" thing.


why defense stuff? i asked for weapons!! well simple, a dead ship doesnt do any dmg at all... but now that you got god mode enabled...


craft green - beam - overcharge - NO HEAVY USE NORMAL CORES, with as many cores as you can fit. fill rest up with crit enhancers if possible.

upgrade to purple via artifacts, put them in multibarrel guns with energy gunners, look at stuff melting... well IF... and thats important....

you get enough nodolo combat mods... (no they dont just drop, some stations in the correct lvl range sell them in packs if your lucky, so good hunting those).

but those things take huge amounts of space you moron... yeah they do... but remember we achieved near immortality... now lets nodge it up to full by using...


improved repair stuff... AND.... by throwing everything out the airlock that is even remotely resembling shield stuff... yes you heard right... ALL SHIELD STUFF OUT THE ARILOCK...

use the free space for all stuff neccesary and fill EVERYTHING possible up with nodolos. and i mean even the heatsinks, as nodolos, finetuned, should suffice for your needs, as the turret size in the ships limits that anyway.

congratulations, you now own a endgame ship that is technically immortal, and melts lvl 60 hunter fleets.

PPS: to save more gear space, get nodolo warp, throw out huge batteries, 1 large ardon is enough to warp nearly max, no sensors, use d.o. drive to save space, venghi heavy reactors, no cloak, tractor or other shenanigans.

cheers. =P

[Spanky]

I'm glad I'm not the only one that goes for a crazy optimized build. This is almost exactly what I do when I want to easily dominate the universe!

[Moon-Shadow]

So far there is only one way to achieve such protection.

Very monotonous when it is only possible with armor and not with shields.

And always only beams, and nothing else.

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Can someone explain to me what the * cough * is about.

In German it is translated as "Hust", and it uses the word "Hust" in German, but why what does it stand for. ?

For me the word is superfluous so far.

[lalelunatic]

well as long as the dev doesnt reduce shield stuff gear space used, its the most effective method. =)
regarding beams... you CAN absolutely use whatever you want, its just that beams should have by far the most "efficient" dmg, as they have a 90%+ hit rate compared to 40% ish (and lower sometimes) of other "projectile" based weaponry.

the *cough* thing... yeah... never seen a collage sitcom show huh? ok quick german explanation.

nur für dich =P. das *hust* text *hust*, ist die geschriebene form von meist in komödien benutzten dialogen, in welchen sich 2 schauspieler einen verbalen schlagabtausch liefern, kurz oder lang und einer von beiden einen sarkastischen schlag gegen den anderen ausführt. in deutsch wäre das in etwa wie folgt:

typ 1: "ey... warte mal, wir können da nicht reingehen! bist du irre, das is sau gefährlich, wir solten..."
typ 2 unterbricht typ 1 mit unverständlichem "husten": ""hust, hust" weichei "hust, hust""
typ 1 kuckt dumm...
typ 2: "oh, sorry... ich meinte... WEICHEI!!"

in etwa so sollte das verständlich sein, hoffe ich =). falls nicht... ich benutz das meist um sozusagen "das offensichtliche offensichtlich zu machen", im oberen fall wäre das die tatsache dass nodolo mods bekannterweise supergute items sind, etc. pp. =P

ok, back to english mode.

cheers =P

[Moon-Shadow]

That protection has the disadvantage for shields too, there is Vulcan, so you still need a certain amount of armor in the end.

Fending off Volcan with shields would have to be changed in the system how these weapons work, something like when you have absorption inside that less damage comes through, but that it doesn't get worse against NPCs than it is now sometimes is.

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"Collage Sitcom"

There is no such thing in Germany, because we don't have a "collage", there are similar schools but they are completely different, and the way people interact is different.

And there are no entertainment videos of that, because these schools don't offer Comedy Potential.

And similar things where something like that could be used, it is not used.

So so far I've only seen it on the internet, mostly in Star Valor Steam Threads.

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German.

Ah jemand der Deutsch kann , übersieht man , ich sehe mir selten mal an aus welchen Land jemand kommt.

Meistens wenn jemand seltsames Englisch hat , wo der Translator nicht schaft , um zu sehen auf was passiert es , wie welche aus Ländern kommen wo neben Englisch noch mehre Sprachen gibt.

[Dhansak]

Moon-Shadow
Thanks for the tip re the skill to help with booster size - I now have that! I will look at hand crafted PDs - I have regular ones at the back of my Jugg but have to rotate the rear to hit incoming missiles. Hopefully hand crafted ones will help with the additional range.

What is a "Ziggy"?

lalelunatic
Thanks for the detailed breakdown of how to build something wonderful :)
I have yet to come across a nodolo anything - stick with a build including shields until then? Is this type of build for dreadnoughts (i.e. 2 engineers) or would it work on the Jug?


Meanwhile this had made me pay more attention to my crew skills - hmm - more work to be done there!

By the way - does a (say) gunner's skill only apply to the turret s/he is on or does it apply for the whole ship?


Thanks again all for the high-quality info :)

[WeaverSong]

A gunner's skill will only apply on the turret they are assigned to, unless they are in a copilot spot, in which case they don't aim anything, but apply their bonus to all guns.

Ziggy is a special crew, obtained by completing the first step in the ZiggyD questline.