Is it That Big of a deal to give the 90 firing arc to dual cannons? on paper, it would seem that's the natural route: i.e. single cannons 180 arc, dual cannons 90, heavy dual cannons 45 degrees. With this change, you could also raise the embedded [CrtD] to +20 on the heavies. At this point, do many people use DCs?
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To be honest, I'm surprised you didn't ask them to make 360 degree Duals!
If your build lacks proc based damage then heavies are better.
That's what my turret ship is for...Anyway, if a range penalty is part of the package(maybe even increacing the RoF a little more too then), I'm fine with that. It's just not making them a bit different from the heavies using the excuse of proc popping doesn't work: that's been tested quit a few times with pretty Lame results(excluding the Embassy plasma consoles). My KDF toon has a full DC loadout on his Raptor carrier, but it feels more like a penalty compared to his BoP with all HDCs of the same types and procs. This would also be a counter to the turn bug, which will probably be a thing off and on from now on.
People have historically gone with DHCs over DCs for two reasons:
1) The useless DPS number given in the tooltip lies to folks and tells them DHCs deliver more deeps.. and they don't know they can't believe it;
2) Folks don't seem to realize the crit bonus on DHCs magically goes away when they pop scatter volley or rapid fire, just like accuracy overflow magically goes away on beams when FAW is activated.
They also seem to live in denial about this and claim they do it for the "spike damage", despite DCs packing more of a punch.
Honestly, seems to be they just enjoy the sound of those DHCs. Maybe it plays into some sort of epic-captainry or RPist immersion thing, who knows.
It's more they saw the DMG figure and not the DPS figure in brackets. The only cannons I use on my Feds are my Epic Quads anyway.
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Both the plasma and research station consoles come in Very handy for that. I have a H&C AP SC variant of my Regent. A bit like my turret ship.
Using turn consoles or wide arc cannons in PvE in order to avoid getting better at arc management or flight planning is a harsh crutch, since it only serves to encourage continued mediocrity.
Oh yea the Terran DHC rules them all, well almost all. It should be noted that for every energy type except AP we have wide arc DHCs with decent mods around. Depending how you play they can easily outdo even the Terran DHC.
On my 169k ISA pug run I did with cannons yesterday evening the parsed DPS order of my 4 frontal weapons was like usual:
Wide Arc DHC (Crit D x 3 | Pen) > Terran DHC >> DHC (Crit D x 4) = Elachi Crescent Heavy (but single) Cannon
So I did the run with my “heavy” cannon escort which shows in two extreme cases how much the arc of a weapon matters. A wide arc DHC outperforming even the Terran DHC and a single (heavy) cannon being on par with a regular DHC.
I also have a “light” cannon escort utilizing DCs and even the quad cannon (which parses roughly the same as a DC). While it is correct that you get more procs with those faster firing weapons I’m unsure at how much of a performance increase we look at here. With one wide arc DHC and the terran DHC one would like to carry anyway there are only 2-3 weapons left to decide over. There are also not many none-sci ships that have a lot of sci console slots where the embassy plasma explosion proc could lead to a noteworthy performance increase. On a sci scimi or pilot escort with 4-5 sci slots yea I take DCs over DHCs but on my bug ship with only 2 I don’t really bother.
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That's the gist of it, isn't it? DCs work with the per-shot domain a lot more effectively than DHCs, but since this is STO - where jack-of-all-trades builds are sub-par - if you can't or don't build specifically to utilize and magnify that potential to an absurd degree, you're probably much better off using the slots to magnify the effect of something else you've already got buffed to high heaven.
After all, there is a big difference between running 2 plasma exploders and running 5 of them, when you've dedicated a substantial portion of your build to amplify that proc.
I can neither verify nor falsify your position, sorry. My light cannon build on a fed sci pilot escort is much more emphasized on procs as in plasma explosions. They surely have greater percentage of the overall damage there as on my heavy cannon bug ship but the build is otherwise different and performs weaker as a result.
What I tried to deliver in my post was that with stuff like the terran and wide arc DHCs around any discussion between the potency of DHCs compared to DCs is reduced to verry few slots on a ship so should not have much of a difference in the overall performance. I also wanted to volunteer that single cannons could be underestimated by a lot of people as I found them to be on par with their dual cannon counterparts even on rather fast turning ships.
What was your highest ISA-DPS on a cannon build and would you mind sharing your build? I sadly don’t know many player who manage to use cannons well so I hope you don't mind my asking.
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Personally I agree with the idea of upping DC arcs to 90° and then re-balancing the damage around that to make them a good option for the slower turning cannon wielding cruisers, and for escorts they'd synergise a little better with torps.
Just so we have that "big gun" aesthetic I think the game is missing.
So to recap, make the DHCs fire much slower, but hit WAY harder, Infact harder than most weapons, make them energy hogs, make them able to be mounted fore and aft, and 200 degree turn radius. Turns them into Star Trek space battleship guns.
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Honestly, it is negligible, but in most cases.. yes.. DC outperform DHC. Thing is, we're talking percentage points here, it's not a huge victory. If you already have a full set of DHC all upgraded with the Mods you want then changing over to DC is probably not worth the cost for such a slight upgrade. It really all comes down to how many 'per shot proc' abilities you use in your build. The less of those you use, then the less difference there is between a DHC and a DC build.
Cannons have been in need of an upgrade from 45 to 90 degrees for quite some time. It's honestly silly that this has never been done. Cannons are still a bit too far behind the curve, upping their forward arc would definitely be helpful and is a change that should have been made quite a while ago.
Lol yes !!
As for the 45 degree arc not only does it make sense but it allows you to do things like efficiently run more turrets on the back. You keep something at a 46+ degree angle in front then after your rear weapons finish cycling you swing in to the front arc and get your front weapons firing cycle staggered allowing far more energy efficiency.
Cannons are fine. If you can not figure out how to use them then don't but don't try to fix something that works fine.