Pulse Beam Rifle vs Assault Rifle (In terms of overall DPS)

circleofpsi

So, quick question

I'm looking for to see what is the best overall for a DPS out of Pulse Beam Rifle vs Assault Rifle, I kown it's more then likely gonna be AR then PBR but since the build I'm going for will likely not be useing Furious, I'm curious what's going to be stronger.

Let me know

flowcyto

They both will have pretty similar overall base dmg (assuming you can fully channel PBR usually, since its dmg ramps up for its maintain). Though I believe AR may still have a slight edge (even w/o Furious and its special adv), you can do fine w/ either (and since they are different dmg types, you'd also want different debuffs for them- likely Chest Beam's Burn Through for PBR and the AP debuff and/or Frail Armor for AR).

circleofpsi

flowcyto wrote: »

They both will have pretty similar overall base dmg (assuming you can fully channel PBR usually, since its dmg ramps up for its maintain). Though I believe AR may still have a slight edge (even w/o Furious and its special adv), you can do fine w/ either (and since they are different dmg types, you'd also want different debuffs for them- likely Chest Beam's Burn Through for PBR and the AP debuff and/or Frail Armor for AR).

I see thanks then

I was toying around with the pair and while both builds are viable, its a bit unorthodox to try centre a build with the only use of Assault Rifle and not add powers like Shotgun/w AP Debuff or Frail Armor from Holdout shot

thisiscraftaaa

Pulse Beam Rifle, at least to my knowledge, will do slightly lower damage than Assault Rifle overall (assuming you're using Targeting Computer for both,) and ever since Kaiserin nerfed defpen sharing to make dedicated debuff support builds (that almost nobody was using to begin with) worse, you'll have an easier time with defense debuffs for AR than PBR, both applying your own (in that there's better options for Piercing than Particle) and that other people are more likely to be applying pure Piercing debuffs (pure 18%x1/8%x3 defense debuffs being the only ones that can be shared with other players) than pure Particle debuffs. This is also assuming just baseline R3 Assault Rifle against R3 Pulse Beam Rifle since R2+Uncompromising AR will do even better and R2+FIE PBR will do even worse, and R3 AR with an appropriate PVD will do even better (Qularr Toxic Rifle is even better for generic maintain-spam DPS just on its own, and toxic defense debuffs are INCREDIBLY common, while Frost Ice Rifle is actually better for a Shatter build (full maintain into Ice Blast full charge into Shatter, ideally with Avenger Mastery.)

PBR's primary advantage is really that, due to how it's designed, it can pull off such silly-high crit chance rates with such low energy cost that you can get away with a casual, easy Dex-prime Ego-stacked TC, and likely get more out of it than the usual Ego-prime Ego-stacked (which is better in most situations, and on most ranged DPS.) Of course, int-prime int-stacked is on the table, but it always is, and if you're going for that you should do it solely for the defpen, not for the energy costs. In short, PBR is easier to use but won't have as much DPS as AR, which makes it a shoe-in for leveling builds where the primary concern is having much less energy and much higher power costs than you would at maximum level, and also very hardy where fluctuating energy is a concern, like when dealing with Kaiserin's favorite "mobs with maintains that blockbreak you each tick while draining 80% of your energy each tick and doing 3k DPS if you don't have energy," or when dealing with a Support and Hybrid AoPM fighting for supremacy, which can aggressively screw over more sensitive builds (like PA builds) with bad luck on timing. Another advantage is, simply, the fact that PBR is a fully-mobile power, in the same way Qularr Toxic Rifle and Frosty Ice Rifle are fully-mobile, or 2GM and Pulp Fiction Ray Gun are fully-mobile. Assault Rifle slows you down to half-speed while maintaining, and many stronger ranged attacks, like Soul Beam or Force Cascade, entirely self-root you while using, let alone the various Elemental mainline attacks. (PA is another oddity in being fully mobile despite being, currently, The Best™ for ranged damage, but that's not really relevant here so I'll leave it at that.)

Inversely, PBR's biggest weakness is how backloaded it is. And backloaded in the true sense, not in the "it rupturesssss" sense that the... folks upstairs seem so fixated on as of late. Rather, it's backloaded aggressively in the same way Hurricane or Epidemic are backloaded: your ticks towards the end of each maintain are doing twice as much damage as those towards the start, which means that if you're having to stop attacking frequently, you'll be doing significantly less damage than you would on full maintains, which already wouldn't be as much as Assault Rifle with the same ranks in the same situation (albeit not by a devastatingly wide margin.) Backloaded damage is extremely anti-tap, and in this way, certain fights (like Teleiosaurus as a prime example) will utterly neuter your already slightly-subpar damage due to the constant need to block. Being mobile with 100' range does at least allow you to avoid some uncomfortable situations that stronger self-rooting ranged attacks would put you in, but in situations where you need to block and block often? Your output will suffer drastically. What makes this even more significant is that PBR backloads critical chance and critical severity as well. Namely, each tick has, what, 5% higher chance and severity than the last? To the point where the last few ticks are almost guaranteed to crit with 150%+ severity as long as you're properly built. And that alone helps bring PBR up to being almost as strong as Assault Rifle of the same rank, not even R2+Uncompromising. So it's more safe to say that your starting ticks are closer to 1/3rd the strength of your ending ticks. Not only does this mean having to stop to block or do anything else destroys your damage, but that PBR suffers when trying to pick off single targets at moderate to low health. And since it's a single-target power, it can't be prefired unlike a PBAoE like Epidemic or Hurricane (or Storm Calling/Storm Summoner) to do maximum damage in an optimal situation.

I do personally love PBR, I really do. It's just built around the idea of never needing to stop attacking, which isn't realistic in our current CO, and it hasn't been blessed by the same power creep that powers from our devs' favorite sets have. Fortunately, it's still usable, it just happens to be usable in the same way you could, say make a Vengeance-spam DPS instead of a Force Cascade/Typhoon or even Gigabolt DPS. In that you technically can, it's going to perform at, like, 2/3rds the strength normally, and having to stop to block further butchers it.

circleofpsi

thisiscraftaaa wrote: »

I do personally love PBR, I really do. It's just built around the idea of never needing to stop attacking, which isn't realistic in our current CO, and it hasn't been blessed by the same power creep that powers from our devs' favorite sets have. Fortunately, it's still usable, it just happens to be usable in the same way you could, say make a Vengeance-spam DPS instead of a Force Cascade/Typhoon or even Gigabolt DPS. In that you technically can, it's going to perform at, like, 2/3rds the strength normally, and having to stop to block further butchers it.

(Don't worry I did read all of it, just snipping the qoute ^^)

Thanks for the information here, very useful, so either way they both work great for what they bring to the table just in overall sheer numbers AP is always gonna be better (makes no sense, cuz fucking laser beams!) but with the content I play most of the Numbers won't really matter for a Casual like myself, but I always love learning about them.


So thanks for this o7