4 minutes = 240s, 240s at X DPS = 240X total damage dealt.
5.5 minutes = 330s, 330s at 1.5X DPS = 495X total damage dealt.
There's something off about that if you need to deal a little over double the amount of damage to complete the encounter in your Scimitar, because PvE enemies aren't anywhere near clever enough to use that many recovery abilities.
The question was whether cannons are viable. Yes they are, unless you only look at DPS as your only way to measure effectiveness.
DHCs with rapid fire more often than not punch through one shield facing, hits hull quickly. A beam boat on the move has to sometimes take 2-3 shield facings down to get to the hull, wasting a lot of DPS on shields.
It's an odd situation, which explains why it doesn't seem to make sense. I repeated it time and time again, while trying to level 5 toons to lvl 60.
Maybe you'll have different results if you try it.
a bit of both would be nice. It just seems off that one weapon type is so dominant over another, especially since if i am to believe cryptic, the whole idea with cannons is to deal MASSIVE amounts of damage. What's the point of them if, even when you're flying around and making the best of your turnrate/strafe runs whilst dodging explosions, you end up behind the people orbiting at 10km just rolling the keys in response to what happens? I'm just a little confused as to how such a high-risk weapon can have such a lousy reward. [edit] Also: Why are cannon abilities one tier higher than beam abilities?[/edit]
Well there was a time where most ppl used cannons. Wasnt any better than now. Maybe even worse cause its a lot harder than bfaw. Main problem is not the weapon itself but how cannon abilities are designed compared to bfaw. And you need to have a fast turning ship used by a very good pilot while bfaw is much more forgiving.
I believe I've already said much earlier in the thread that cannons are viable.
Though if you're hitting enough multiple shield facings with a beamboat in Argala that you've effectively doubled enemy health, your beams aren't hitting hard enough. :P
autos are NOT more efficient. Humans can shift more intelligently -- most (not dragsters?) race cars are manual, and most "real" sport's cars as well. For a reason. Manuals cost less to make and maintain, perform better (with a skilled driver), use fuel better (slightly, again intelligent shifting, 10% or less savings typically), and are far more efficient or at worst equal to an automatic. The only advantages of an automatic are simpler to drive & allows cruise control.
It depends on what is considered "efficient", while todays automatics still weigh more and have more of a parasitic drain on driveline power (which has really improved , nearing within close percentages that manuals do, but just not there yet), automatics now shift faster than manuals do and there is less time losts due to a manuals slower clutch engagement between gears. The gaps in fuel economy is almost at a parity as well. Heck the Mazda 6 is slower and gets worse gas mileage with its manual.
No high end sports cars (Ferrari,Lamborghini, Bugatti, etc) use manuals anymore and while mid range cars do, the automatic version is actually faster because of the speed of the shifts (C7 Corvette 8 speed, Porsche 911, etc).
I love me T56 manual transmission, but its startingt to go the way of ignition points, manual chokes, and manual drum brakes.
autos are NOT more efficient. Humans can shift more intelligently -- most (not dragsters?) race cars are manual, and most "real" sport's cars as well. For a reason. Manuals cost less to make and maintain, perform better (with a skilled driver), use fuel better (slightly, again intelligent shifting, 10% or less savings typically), and are far more efficient or at worst equal to an automatic. The only advantages of an automatic are simpler to drive & allows cruise control.
And a mix of cannons, a DBB, and a torpedo will absolutely rip up early STF's like the Borg and still be 'good' in newer advanced content.
You can hit the 15 k ISA parses easy, if that's your measure. And as there's plenty of folks hitting 3 k like it's their job, I'd say 15 k is competitive.
If you want the absolute most damage, you really need to just start working over the 'how did we miss this in QA of the month'. You'd be surprised how much non weapon damage is floating around out there.
cannons are KING for killing a SINGLE target the fastest
Quoted for truth, cannon's have thier strengths its just that the current meta as well as the way most parsers work. Show beams as higher dps, because many factors including more moving targets. Cannons take careful manuavers to maximize there damage. While anyone can jump straight into a battle with FAW. You have to aim a well placed spread fire, to use it right thous more down time, shows up as more dps for beams. While spread shot does a huge burst but less sustained. So average dps appears higher. But in general cannons are better for focus firing.
I have returned to the game recently rolled a delta recruit (Rom-Fed-Tac). The last time I played all crafting was still located at Memory-Alpha, and the Breen was the last available missions....
I tried using DHC on my warbird I found that with rapid fire and an attack pattern and coming our of cloak i would pop most single targets real quick if i was in ~5km range. But it was VERY bursty. If i tried to park and stay forward facing in the warbird @5km against an STF level ship i would take a pounding and need to scramble to stay alive. I equiped DBB on it and found the fireing angle (and distance needed) to be quite a bit more forgiving.
Now on the other hand my "main" is a Fed eng who run in a T5u Excelsior FAW beam boat I have more hull and i dont need to stay as close. I think having more hull is the key to doing the "park and fire" thing.
I have a T5-U Galaxy-x in dock I have been slowly fitting with DHC (since it can use them) from the rep boxes and other random drops/craftables on cheap. Thinking that an eng with heals for days+curiser+DHC would make a great "park and fire" on large STF single targets (like the Crystiline Entity, Borg cubes, and Iconian Heralds. Just a theory on my part though.
That's not true. I think a lot of cruisers have to gracefully slide in sideways.:D
Escorts go straight.
NVM.
Whoops. I said 'straight':(
That depends on how the enemy group is positioned, it was more a comment about how little maneuvers you need to do with beams to use FAW decently. Difficulty curve with DHC are higher to maintain higher sustained as well as burst.
That depends on how the enemy group is positioned, it was more a comment about how little maneuvers you need to do with beams to use FAW decently. Difficulty curve with DHC are higher to maintain higher sustained as well as burst.
- Beams always had a cheesy way with them because they simply ignore your weapon cap. (Unless they changed this in the last year) I consider this an exploit as Cryptic simply denies the mechanic or refuses to elaborate on it, many have attempted to broach this subject to them without result.
- Overcap on weapon power with beams broadsiding will increase your damage considerably.
Same story as above.
- There is way less damage dropoff at higher distances, compared to cannons.
- Beams can use Z-Axis exploit where in (lets say) a 1v1 its easily exploitable and make the cannon (escort) a hell.
- Since they screwed over FaW last year, it has been nothing but stupid beam boats.
- Pretty sure beams have a higher innate accurate(Im not talking weapon mods here), not so interesting for PvE but for PvP its a different story.
I cannot confirm the last one, i just always felt it was the case. All the above are pretty much facts and tested by me, and others.
- Scatter volley etc has become a simple Role Playing ability, its so useless as it is. The arc isnt wide enough, damage isnt high enough. Rapid fire is pretty much only interesting for PvP where alot of single target damage is important (to get your kill and TRIBBLE over the rest of the team, like a domino effect)
As far as i know Cryptic hasnt done anything to resolve the matter, they dont care, as usual. As long as people pay.
- Beams always had a cheesy way with them because they simply ignore your weapon cap. (Unless they changed this in the last year) I consider this an exploit as Cryptic simply denies the mechanic or refuses to elaborate on it, many have attempted to broach this subject to them without result.
Cryptic and the devs already admitted that they dont even know how the pros do the stuff. How can they deny stuff they dont even know about?
- Overcap on weapon power with beams broadsiding will increase your damage considerably.
Same story as above.
No, it doesn't. Overcap retains the damage you have with a theoretic static 125 weapons power. It does the same for cannons except if your build and piloting isnt up for it, you definitely see your cannon DPS drop like a noob.
- Scatter volley etc has become a simple Role Playing ability, its so useless as it is. The arc isnt wide enough, damage isnt high enough. Rapid fire is pretty much only interesting for PvP where alot of single target damage is important (to get your kill and TRIBBLE over the rest of the team, like a domino effect)
Cheers!
Again, we go back to piloting. Bad Pilots = Bad cannons. If you cannot make cannons effective as beams, it only means your not meant to fly it effectively at PvE unless you improve yourself.
- Beams always had a cheesy way with them because they simply ignore your weapon cap. (Unless they changed this in the last year) I consider this an exploit as Cryptic simply denies the mechanic or refuses to elaborate on it, many have attempted to broach this subject to them without result.
- Overcap on weapon power with beams broadsiding will increase your damage considerably.
Same story as above.
- There is way less damage dropoff at higher distances, compared to cannons.
- Beams can use Z-Axis exploit where in (lets say) a 1v1 its easily exploitable and make the cannon (escort) a hell.
- Since they screwed over FaW last year, it has been nothing but stupid beam boats.
- Pretty sure beams have a higher innate accurate(Im not talking weapon mods here), not so interesting for PvE but for PvP its a different story.
I cannot confirm the last one, i just always felt it was the case. All the above are pretty much facts and tested by me, and others.
- Scatter volley etc has become a simple Role Playing ability, its so useless as it is. The arc isnt wide enough, damage isnt high enough. Rapid fire is pretty much only interesting for PvP where alot of single target damage is important (to get your kill and TRIBBLE over the rest of the team, like a domino effect)
As far as i know Cryptic hasnt done anything to resolve the matter, they dont care, as usual. As long as people pay.
Cheers!
1. This is an incredibly poorly phrased description of overcapping. I heard a developer talking about this the other day, they weren't sure we 100% understood what was going on, but they did make a mention that there was some mechanic that gave a similar effect to what we thought was going on, with no mention of that mechanic being a bug.
2. Overcapping, as we understand it, is a product of the active firing time of a weapon. Cannons have shorter firing cycles, and get less benefit.
3. Sure thing.
4. What? No. The firing arc isn't just in front of you, it's all around you, based on a point at the front or rear of your ship. This means that only turrets and Arrays can fire directly above you, while DBB's, torps, DC's, and DHC's can't. This is a literal game mechanic.
5. FAW isn't the problem, actually FAW is a very heavily nerfed CSV.
6. No.
7. CSV is a much better ability than FAW. It just only works on weapons that are worse in PvE.
SCM - Crystal C. (S) - [00:12] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 8.63M(713.16K) - Fed Sci
if that was true then ship agility stats would need reworked since being able to 180 in 1 second completly negates the limited arc.
True, with modifications a ship can do a 180 rather quickly.
If that's the goal of said modification.
Unfortunately, no modifications can increase the firing arc of a DHC.
NO to ARC RIP KDF and PvP 2014-07-17 Season 9.5 - Death by Dev
are cannons viable? hitting the random button on all your skills and items is viable in this stupid game.
cannons can take out high value targets faster, and have higher DPS vs single targets as long as you stay close, and your target will generally get to experience quite a few less regen tics wile you kill them with cannons vs spamming FAW shots in all directions to 2+ targets.
none of this shows up positively in parsers though, cannons have very peeks and valleys damage dealing between cannon skill up time, they removed NWS were CSV was king, and cryptic's pve game design revolves around throwing armies of pathetic npcs who are only there to die, not fight back, and generally don't bunch up on thier own, so canons have trouble excelling against all that. the best way to use cannons in pve though, it to coordinated the use of GW and CSV on like a sci heavy escort, so you can properly use CSV's immense damage potential.
another thing that massively holds back cannon builds is turrets, they are god awful weapons. i remember adding together the base dps of 4 singles + 4 turrets and it was quite a bit less then 8 beam arrays. swap in 4 DHCs and the base DPS is barely more then 8 arrays. if i were to still play, i probably would never bother running cannons builds unless the ship had 5 fore weapons.
Comments
The question was whether cannons are viable. Yes they are, unless you only look at DPS as your only way to measure effectiveness.
DHCs with rapid fire more often than not punch through one shield facing, hits hull quickly. A beam boat on the move has to sometimes take 2-3 shield facings down to get to the hull, wasting a lot of DPS on shields.
It's an odd situation, which explains why it doesn't seem to make sense. I repeated it time and time again, while trying to level 5 toons to lvl 60.
Maybe you'll have different results if you try it.
Well there was a time where most ppl used cannons. Wasnt any better than now. Maybe even worse cause its a lot harder than bfaw. Main problem is not the weapon itself but how cannon abilities are designed compared to bfaw. And you need to have a fast turning ship used by a very good pilot while bfaw is much more forgiving.
Though if you're hitting enough multiple shield facings with a beamboat in Argala that you've effectively doubled enemy health, your beams aren't hitting hard enough. :P
It depends on what is considered "efficient", while todays automatics still weigh more and have more of a parasitic drain on driveline power (which has really improved , nearing within close percentages that manuals do, but just not there yet), automatics now shift faster than manuals do and there is less time losts due to a manuals slower clutch engagement between gears. The gaps in fuel economy is almost at a parity as well. Heck the Mazda 6 is slower and gets worse gas mileage with its manual.
No high end sports cars (Ferrari,Lamborghini, Bugatti, etc) use manuals anymore and while mid range cars do, the automatic version is actually faster because of the speed of the shifts (C7 Corvette 8 speed, Porsche 911, etc).
I love me T56 manual transmission, but its startingt to go the way of ignition points, manual chokes, and manual drum brakes.
No no no no no. NO.
Here.
And a mix of cannons, a DBB, and a torpedo will absolutely rip up early STF's like the Borg and still be 'good' in newer advanced content.
You can hit the 15 k ISA parses easy, if that's your measure. And as there's plenty of folks hitting 3 k like it's their job, I'd say 15 k is competitive.
If you want the absolute most damage, you really need to just start working over the 'how did we miss this in QA of the month'. You'd be surprised how much non weapon damage is floating around out there.
Quoted for truth, cannon's have thier strengths its just that the current meta as well as the way most parsers work. Show beams as higher dps, because many factors including more moving targets. Cannons take careful manuavers to maximize there damage. While anyone can jump straight into a battle with FAW. You have to aim a well placed spread fire, to use it right thous more down time, shows up as more dps for beams. While spread shot does a huge burst but less sustained. So average dps appears higher. But in general cannons are better for focus firing.
That's not true. I think a lot of cruisers have to gracefully slide in sideways.:D
Escorts go straight.
NVM.
Whoops. I said 'straight':(
I tried using DHC on my warbird I found that with rapid fire and an attack pattern and coming our of cloak i would pop most single targets real quick if i was in ~5km range. But it was VERY bursty. If i tried to park and stay forward facing in the warbird @5km against an STF level ship i would take a pounding and need to scramble to stay alive. I equiped DBB on it and found the fireing angle (and distance needed) to be quite a bit more forgiving.
Now on the other hand my "main" is a Fed eng who run in a T5u Excelsior FAW beam boat I have more hull and i dont need to stay as close. I think having more hull is the key to doing the "park and fire" thing.
I have a T5-U Galaxy-x in dock I have been slowly fitting with DHC (since it can use them) from the rep boxes and other random drops/craftables on cheap. Thinking that an eng with heals for days+curiser+DHC would make a great "park and fire" on large STF single targets (like the Crystiline Entity, Borg cubes, and Iconian Heralds. Just a theory on my part though.
That depends on how the enemy group is positioned, it was more a comment about how little maneuvers you need to do with beams to use FAW decently. Difficulty curve with DHC are higher to maintain higher sustained as well as burst.
This cannon thing sounds hard.
That has always been the reality of cannons and all other weapons, the ease of use of beams trumps all of it rather than the viability.
I feel like I should say something here...
.......
Nah.... Enjoy the show, all |=)
/popcorn
Want some?
Fleet Defiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support | Fleet Manticore Kinetic Strike Ship | Tactical Command Kinetic Siege Refit | Fleet Defiant Quantum Phase Escort | Fleet Valiant Kinetic Heavy Fire Support
Turning the Galaxy-X into a Torpedo Dreadnought & torpedo tutorial, with written torpedo guide.
"A good weapon and a great strategy will win you many battles." - Marshall
I knew using Kinetics would be playing the game on hard mode, but what I didn't realize was how bad the deck is stacked against Kinetics.
No. Not really.
How it stands at this moment
- Beams always had a cheesy way with them because they simply ignore your weapon cap. (Unless they changed this in the last year) I consider this an exploit as Cryptic simply denies the mechanic or refuses to elaborate on it, many have attempted to broach this subject to them without result.
- Overcap on weapon power with beams broadsiding will increase your damage considerably.
Same story as above.
- There is way less damage dropoff at higher distances, compared to cannons.
- Beams can use Z-Axis exploit where in (lets say) a 1v1 its easily exploitable and make the cannon (escort) a hell.
- Since they screwed over FaW last year, it has been nothing but stupid beam boats.
- Pretty sure beams have a higher innate accurate(Im not talking weapon mods here), not so interesting for PvE but for PvP its a different story.
I cannot confirm the last one, i just always felt it was the case. All the above are pretty much facts and tested by me, and others.
- Scatter volley etc has become a simple Role Playing ability, its so useless as it is. The arc isnt wide enough, damage isnt high enough. Rapid fire is pretty much only interesting for PvP where alot of single target damage is important (to get your kill and TRIBBLE over the rest of the team, like a domino effect)
As far as i know Cryptic hasnt done anything to resolve the matter, they dont care, as usual. As long as people pay.
Cheers!
Cryptic and the devs already admitted that they dont even know how the pros do the stuff. How can they deny stuff they dont even know about?
No, it doesn't. Overcap retains the damage you have with a theoretic static 125 weapons power. It does the same for cannons except if your build and piloting isnt up for it, you definitely see your cannon DPS drop like a noob.
Heck, even the best beams aint even broadsiding.
It does only if your piloting skills aren't meant for cannons. This can be eliminated with piloting.
Harder to pilot. But the mechanics is almost same especially if you can eliminate the disadvantage with piloting.
Again, we go back to piloting. Bad Pilots = Bad cannons. If you cannot make cannons effective as beams, it only means your not meant to fly it effectively at PvE unless you improve yourself.
1. This is an incredibly poorly phrased description of overcapping. I heard a developer talking about this the other day, they weren't sure we 100% understood what was going on, but they did make a mention that there was some mechanic that gave a similar effect to what we thought was going on, with no mention of that mechanic being a bug.
2. Overcapping, as we understand it, is a product of the active firing time of a weapon. Cannons have shorter firing cycles, and get less benefit.
3. Sure thing.
4. What? No. The firing arc isn't just in front of you, it's all around you, based on a point at the front or rear of your ship. This means that only turrets and Arrays can fire directly above you, while DBB's, torps, DC's, and DHC's can't. This is a literal game mechanic.
5. FAW isn't the problem, actually FAW is a very heavily nerfed CSV.
6. No.
7. CSV is a much better ability than FAW. It just only works on weapons that are worse in PvE.
SCM - Hive (S) - [02:31] DMG(DPS) - @jarvisandalfred: 30.62M(204.66K) - Fed Sci
Tacs are overrated.
Game's best wiki
Build questions? Look here!
True, with modifications a ship can do a 180 rather quickly.
If that's the goal of said modification.
Unfortunately, no modifications can increase the firing arc of a DHC.
RIP KDF and PvP 2014-07-17 Season 9.5 - Death by Dev
cannons can take out high value targets faster, and have higher DPS vs single targets as long as you stay close, and your target will generally get to experience quite a few less regen tics wile you kill them with cannons vs spamming FAW shots in all directions to 2+ targets.
none of this shows up positively in parsers though, cannons have very peeks and valleys damage dealing between cannon skill up time, they removed NWS were CSV was king, and cryptic's pve game design revolves around throwing armies of pathetic npcs who are only there to die, not fight back, and generally don't bunch up on thier own, so canons have trouble excelling against all that. the best way to use cannons in pve though, it to coordinated the use of GW and CSV on like a sci heavy escort, so you can properly use CSV's immense damage potential.
another thing that massively holds back cannon builds is turrets, they are god awful weapons. i remember adding together the base dps of 4 singles + 4 turrets and it was quite a bit less then 8 beam arrays. swap in 4 DHCs and the base DPS is barely more then 8 arrays. if i were to still play, i probably would never bother running cannons builds unless the ship had 5 fore weapons.