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[Megas]

One thing that has really bugged me lately is light needlers.  I vented my grievance against them at least twice recently.  They are not a bad weapon.  Actually they are good when examining it on its own.  However, light needler seems overshadowed by railgun.  Every loadout I tried where the only difference between loadouts is using light needlers instead of railgun, the railguns do at least as good a job as light needlers.  (Often better because I have better flux stats.)  Is there any reason to use Light Needlers aside from "I have no railguns available, but I have some light needlers at hand to do the same job right now at higher cost until I find railguns to replace them"?  Light Needlers have some burst damage, but sometimes, steady suppression is at least is good, maybe even better if you simply want the AI to keep shields up instead of flickering them.  Not to mention perfect accuracy makes railgun good for IPDAI use if the ship has the flux stats to support that application.

The biggest problem with light needlers is the OP cost.  9 OP instead of Railgun's 7 OP (or Arbalest's 8 OP).  On the ships where I would consider Light Needlers instead of Railguns, the added OP cost is significant, and I often sacrifice something to fit them in while I would not need to with Railguns.  With the other tweaks to weapons lately, maybe Railgun is a bit too good in the 0.9.x era.  With the highest kinetic DPS in its class, good efficiency, and perfect accuracy, Railgun is very hard to beat.  I occasionally use Railguns over Arbalest on medium mounts (usually for accuracy reasons), but I have not replaced Arbalest with Light Needler because of the extra OP cost for mostly similar stats.

Is Railgun supposed to be the small class of Hypervelocity Driver or Gauss Cannon?  Those weapons have slow fire rate, terrible flux efficiency (low DPS but same flux use as autocannons), but long range, high damage per shot, and perfect accuracy.  By contrast, Railgun is simply a superior light autocannon with better damage, better range, maybe faster turning, and perfect accuracy.

Maybe both Railgun and Light Needler could be tweaked further.

Maybe Railgun can get 800 range, what Light Needler used to have, but the DPS is lowered to about 100 (slow down the fire rate), increase flux use per shot.  If turning Railgun into mini-HVD is too drastic a change, then just lower DPS to 150 to match Arbalest; flux efficiency worsens from 0.9 to 1.0.

Meanwhile, maybe lower Light Needler's OP cost from 9 to 8.  With that change, it may end being a variant Arbalest if its cost is at 8 OP, but that does not matter with small slots that cannot use Arbalest.

[lethargie]

Light needler might be a bit expensive at 9 op but they do bring some definitive advantage compared to railgun.

1) They do immediate damage in a big burst. Railgun have a very noticable delay before the first shot. Needler therefore go well with faster ship that can burst/back/vent, or just burst really. For example I find them way better then railgun at the front of medusa and sunder, who enjoy the quick dump of kinetic just before letting loose with less efficient energy weapons.

2) they do duration burst, making it harder to flicker the shield during HE weapon shooting.

Railgun is the standart best small kinetic, but i find myself considering the light needler once in a while. If it was 1-2 op less I would definitly use them a lot more.

[Thaago]

I think all we need is the light needler to be 7 op. I think its tradeoff of per shot damage for burst alpha striking has some use cases (phase and teleporting ships especially), but in general it is a worse weapon than the railgun at 9 OP.

[TaLaR]

Needler's burst is disadvantage most of the time. Kinetic suppression needs to be steady, otherwise you just ask to be armor-tanked (which works extremely well against low per shot damage of Needler).
The fact that AI doesn't armor-tank it almost every time (when not mixed with something anti-armor), really isn't indication of Needlers being good - rather AI playing intentionally suboptimal.

[Goumindong]

Light needler might need its OP droped a bit but youre confusing how the weapon is optimally used.

The main thing is that the light needler is a burst weapon. Its not really there to win a flux efficiency war but to exclaim boldy “i have a larger capacitor than you and that is all that matters right now”.

Its really good on bigger ships because they can exploit its burst, projectile velocity, and accuracy to remove frigates and shielded fighters from the game. It still good on smaller ships if they can exploit a burst damage situation. Probably the best lights to put on a standard medusa as an example. Expensive but immediately removes the enemies shields while you threaten with a big energy punch. Available immediately after you phase in and starts preparing for the next salvo immediately as you phase out.

Its really good on the pirate shrike. And decent on the brawler.

It is surprisingly reallly good on the Aurora (11,000 capacity with a mobility system! Ill trade 3000 cap for 6000 of yours any day!)

Edit: so here you are circling a dominator. Maaan its gonna be so dead when you get behind it. Its gonna be a sitting Blllaaaaaaaat and youre fluxed out.

Which is to say its really good as rear guard on big ships that need something to keep frogates away. Railguns can be tanked as the enemy closes and fires torpedos/does damage. They can also be avoided easisr. Needlers cannot. As soon as youre in range youre either out of range or youre out our your flux engagement window.

[Goumindong]

Needler's burst is disadvantage most of the time. Kinetic suppression needs to be steady, otherwise you just ask to be armor-tanked (which works extremely well against low per shot damage of Needler).
The fact that AI doesn't armor-tank it almost every time (when not mixed with something anti-armor), really isn't indication of Needlers being good - rather AI playing intentionally suboptimal.

If they armor tank you should have explosive or energy on the way. Armor tanking needlers is just as bad an idea as armor tanking railguns. If the shooting ship cannot threaten with HE or energy theyre both useless

[Dexy]

The burst damage makes a big difference. Two needlers will remove most of the shields of a frigate in a second, whereas two railguns take several seconds to do so.

[SCC]

I feel similar to Megas on this matter. While needlers might have a burst and screw with AI more, it doesn't really matter most of the time. Unless I'm fighting frigates or can stack needlers a lot, sustained pressure and beter efficiency against armour gets me further. I'm not completely certain about rarity, but it feels that railguns are more common, too. Part of that might be that AI never actually flickers the shield for me, which doesn't seem like behaviour anyone else faces, and I have no idea what's the reason.
Aurora can't mount needlers.

[Goumindong]

Huh, for some reasoni though the front were universals and not synergy.

[TaLaR]

Needler's burst is disadvantage most of the time. Kinetic suppression needs to be steady, otherwise you just ask to be armor-tanked (which works extremely well against low per shot damage of Needler).
The fact that AI doesn't armor-tank it almost every time (when not mixed with something anti-armor), really isn't indication of Needlers being good - rather AI playing intentionally suboptimal.

If they armor tank you should have explosive or energy on the way. Armor tanking needlers is just as bad an idea as armor tanking railguns. If the shooting ship cannot threaten with HE or energy theyre both useless

Railguns are easy to steadily mix with HE, so that there are simply no windows of opportunity for armor tanking.
On the other hands even when mixed with HE, Needlers produce very uneven mix. Precise enough flicker timing allows to avoid most of Needler burst while taking limited/no HE damage. AI may not be that good at it, but again that's AI problem and not Needlers being good.

Of course, when your counter to armor-tanking is reaction fire with fast projectiles of Heavy Blasters instead of mixing in slow HE projectiles, both Needlers and Railguns work (but Railguns are better due to being OP cheaper and producing more kinetic damage per slot).

[Megas]

Light Needler does not have enough burst to matter against bigger ships, at least not merely one or two light needlers.  It might have enough against frigates, but how often do they matter when most later game fights are against capital and cruiser spam who have no problem shield tanking a burst or two from light needlers?

I have considered Light Needlers a few times for less flux load, similar to two Heavy Needlers vs. three Heavy Autocannons, but Railgun is efficient too, not as much as Light Needler, but still better than average, and 7 OP per weapon instead of 9 makes a big difference when 4 to 8 OP is the difference between fitting everything I want or not.

As for rarity, that goes away after player finds or raids all of the blueprints.  However, needler blueprints are found at Sindria or Culann, where patrols are crawling.  Railgun can be drive-by raided from Hegemony in Valhalla, where the planet is near a jump point and patrols are often distracted.

P.S.  Personally, I like to see Light Needler get its 800 range back and all other stats left unchanged.  Old Light Needler was a good weapon that was not broken, but in 0.9.x, it has become an inferior Railgun clone even with the recent boost to flux efficiency.  It feels weird that Heavy Needler is now the only needler with 800 range, when before 0.9a, both Light and Heavy Needlers had matching range and most other stats, while Storm Needler had different stats.

[xenoargh]

Well, here's what I see, when I plug these two into Rebal's current iteration for weapon balance.  You can compare the current Rebal versions with the Vanilla ones here, if you're interested in reviewing the current methodology.

So, comparing the two Vanilla weapons, the current Light Needler is substantially worse in almost all ways. 

Why?  Two things: accuracy and Armor penetration; but mainly it's accuracy, because one exacerbates the other.  The Light Needler's accuracy at 700 is actually fairly poor, missing the target 20% of the time, on average, vs. the Railgun's more-than-perfect accuracy (101%).  It's actually a little worse than that, because I don't fully calculate the random stat when it stacks per shot; by the time the Light Needler's 6th shot is out, it's already hitting less than 100%, and it goes downhill fast; the last shots are less than 50%.  Nobody really notices this much in-game, where it's a flurry of shots, but trust me, that matters, against small targets.

And that's a lot of what people are complaining about, in terms of practical effects, too. 

The Light Needler is, if we ignore the accuracy problems, a more Flux-efficient shield-crusher; it fires 15 shots for 750X2 = 1500 Hard Flux per burst, with a relatively-decent Flux efficiency of 0.8 for raw DPS.  So, vs. large stuff that can't dodge, it'd be great for Flux-locking. 

However, the Railgun will actually hit the same places over and over again, whereas the Light Needler's going to spatter the target with its needles.  And when the Railgun hits, it's doing twice the damage vs. Armor (granted, that's a paltry 50, even before Armor calcs start whittling it down, but still, it's not a total joke). 

So, against Armor, the Light Needler will be considerably worse.  Against Hull exposed in only a narrow hole, it'll be worse.  Against something stripped of Armor, it'll be better, but only a bit. 

This is why it feels "weak" now; without the huge range advantage it enjoyed, making it the best-for-cost kiting gun, it's not great.

Anyhow, that's basically what's going on here; it's pretty cool to see what I've been saying be so accurately reflected in player comments.


So... fixes that stay in-theme?  The last set in the sheet reflects my call there.  Light Needler gets more DPS and is obviously more efficient per shot... but stays spray-and-pray and is still lousy at killing Armor.  The Railgun is slightly less efficient, but ever-so-slightly positive.  Both weapons get their big shot-speed differentials set to 1.0, but the Railgun could trade a little less efficiency for really fast shots easily enough, to make it the super-accurate steady-hitter it's supposed to be.

[Goumindong]

Is the target ship moving in that evaluation?

And frankly... dont care about armor pen

[xenoargh]

The only real allowance for ship motion is in the shot-speed stuff, because there's no way to know the acceleration value of the target, whether it has magical Systems that get it out of the way, etc. 

That said... generally speaking, if a weapon's having trouble hitting a roughly Frigate-sized thing at its maximum range, it's probably having real-world problems putting out stated DPS.  I'm quite confident that my numbers are fairly representative of Reality at this point; the current stuff's been tested quite a lot, in a variety of scenarios.  Anyhow, try out the stat-lines yourself and let me know if it makes the Light Needler wildly OP; I really doubt it will.

[intrinsic_parity]

It seems like it makes more sense to say the weapon has a shorter effective range, not that it is actually worse at shooting things/doing damage. That seems like a bad analysis of the effect of inaccuracy since the range can be controlled by the pilot to improve the effectiveness of the weapon.