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Cannons are too energy-efficient (fire forever at max power)
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Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
I noticed already in Beta that having 4 front mounted cannons can be rapid fired infinitely without energy dropping at all. Try that with Beams... urks.
TL;DR version: Why do more than 2 beams suck so incredibly much energy. They are already the lowest dps weapons and I wonder how the later cruisers will be able to sustain their 4/4 gun slots if more than 4 beams already manage to suck weapon power down to zero in zero time. One wonders why not at least the huge cruisers are able to support their beam arrays with enough jouce.
TL;DR version: Why do more than 2 beams suck so incredibly much energy. They are already the lowest dps weapons and I wonder how the later cruisers will be able to sustain their 4/4 gun slots if more than 4 beams already manage to suck weapon power down to zero in zero time. One wonders why not at least the huge cruisers are able to support their beam arrays with enough jouce.
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Yes they can cause heavy sustained damage, however if the enemy uses stuff like evasive maneuvers there's a good chance they'll get out of the arc, meaning no damage.
Only certain amounts can be used, that means were heavily limited, unlike beams that can fit as many as they want for a huge burst damage move at the expense of their overall dps.
They can only be placed on cannons, the most fragile of the federation ships, so yes escorts with cannons can potentially do awesome damage, but against anything maneuverable or anything that can hit hard back that doesn't always happen.
One thing I am seeing as a regular tactic is people going from full impulse to 10k and,starting fighting immediatly... people just dont realise the massive drain on all systems, meaning weapons can stop firing ages before they do with a full lot of energy. A few seconds of full impulse can reduce all energy levels to 5
Off on a slight tangent I know, but makes a hell of a difference when using high enery weapons.
the reason they dont drain as much as banks and arrays is because you can only fire one at a time.
Yep, this whine (cannons do to much damage, dont drain power) keeps coming up. But the fact is that only *1* cannon is ever firing at a time (there is a slight overlap in the firing cycles). When you fire a cannon, every other cannon on the ship goes into 1 second cooldown. Dual cannons have a 2 second cooldown so you can only use two on a ship, heavy cannons have a 3 second cooldown so you can stick on 3.
The BO rapid fire I've never reallly gotten a handle on how exactly it works (other than being the "open a can of hurt" skill) with regard to multiple cannons firing.
This is also why escort captains need autofire, we HAVE to issue the fire command every second.
If there was no power drain on beams, cannons and conversly escorts would be pretty darn pointless.
The reason cannons suffer very little from power drain is beacause they are for escorts.
Escorts do one thing, and one thing only, BLOW STUFF UP
If they had the same power drain as beams they would be utterly usless because an escort only has a very short window of opertunity to deal his damage and then he has to either come about for another pass or run like buggery.
With a beam boat you couldnt care less where the target was, up, down, left, right, makes no differnce because you can always hit them.
With cannons you only have a very narrow 45 degree arc.
Anyways, you get the point I hope, because that was FAR too much typing
theoretically if you were to gob all your cannons at the same time you would experience the same drain as firing multiple beams.
Very true, and that is another reason we have that global in place to stop us from firing all cannons at the same time.
Not to mention that Rapid Fire would be INSANE if you could fire all cannons at once :eek:
I will start a new thread regarding the issue named BEAMS.
Rapid fire lowers the amount of energy used per volley for cannons. each shot does reduced damage.
I stopped reading here because you've made it completely apparent that you don't know what you're talking about.
If you're mounting 4 cannons, you're overlapping and wasting your global cooldown / cannon cooldown.
Fit no more than two, or three heavies.
Fat chance of that, any escort can turn on a dime, and since cannons don't have falloff from what I can tell they can shoot at 10km where tracking the opponent is easy even if you don't move at all.
Cannons have plenty of other penalties which other weapons dont have... small arc, global cooldown, less damage at range...
Carry on, just a side bit of humor.
in beta(and beginning of openbeta) you had no CD on cannons...
escorts may be the most mobile of the federation ships but their far from being able to keep up with proper evasive maneuvers (not just the skill but actually enemys flying in a way to hinder the ship)
Also cannons have the MOST damage fall off of any weapon... shooting cannons at 10km will drop your damage by a factor of about 100 (my damage went from 800 to 8)
And tank, while they didn't have the global cooldown at the start, the way they were programmed still prevented both being fired, firing one while another was firing replaced the first with the second rather than adding it up.
1. Limit arc weapon
2. They have global cooldowns, so essentially limited fire weapon.
3. Large damage falloff beyond 5k.
They're already a pain to play with, unless you have macros and ergonomic keybinds in place.
you can fir all you bean weapon on your ship all at once, wait for the 1sec cooldown and then fire all of them again.
that is 8 beam weapon is that is what's your fancy.
it would make beam too op, the current system of...
cannon= 1 sec 1 shot for a long long time.
beam = fire all 8 beam and wait a few seconds. seem quite balanced.