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[Igncom1]

@Igncom1 Were you referring to the auto pulse laser, or the pulse laser?

Ahh yeah. Though the medium sized one was just called the laser or something like that. Would be a bit silly to put a mid size weapon on the same level as a large. Generally anyway.

[Goumindong]

Mid size is pulse laser. Large is autopulse

[intrinsic_parity]

Auto pulse laser is quite a bit better against shields than plasma with a .75 efficiency vs 1.1. Its main problem is that it has bad sustained dps because it runs out of charges and poor armor penetration. You blow all your charges breaking the shield and have nothing left to finish. I think it does get a lot better with skills that add damage.

[Thaago]

Agreed, autopulse is much better vs shields because of the efficiency. If you have the slots to overcome its low sustained DPS and get up to your flux limit, its very good against lighter armored ships - quad paragon and quint radiant autopulse variants are pretty good and absolutely murder against non-bricks. I wouldn't use it on an Apogee though as its slot limited.

[Goumindong]

I actually prefer

2x autopulse, 2, HIL, 4x Graviton on the paragon. The turreted autopulse tends to spray and waste when theyre on the side. The graviton and HIL can combine well to smash small ships and then you only need to dump flux on things that need their shields broken with the APs

[TaLaR]

What's the point of 2 HILs? It doesn't add much shield pressure and one is enough for any armor once you get past shield. Being able to fire 2 different targets is pure drawback for inefficient soft flux beam too, just more flux wasted (under AI control).

[Goumindong]

What's the point of 2 HILs? It doesn't add much shield pressure and one is enough for any armor once you get past shield. Being able to fire 2 different targets is pure drawback for inefficient soft flux beam too, just more flux wasted (under AI control).

One for each side. The HIL and gravs on each side go on the same fire control group and they will track targets together. This lets your AI kill multiple smaller ships at the same time.

2 Autopulse is plenty of shield pressure anyway (16500 to 24750 dmg each burst +600 DPS after that) so you can always use more efficient armor damage. For when you do punch through.

[TaLaR]

Need to try it out. I usually group Gravitons separately to enable flux management. Gravitons should fire pretty much always, while HILs only fire on fluxed out targets / when ship has too much unused flux.

[Goumindong]

That is also reasonable. Not sure if the AI will tend to focus well with the HILs on separate groups. Worth a shot though

[Igncom1]

I went for 4 autopulse, 2 gravaton and 2 heavy needler for my anti-remnant paragons.

They lack for fast anti-armour, but honestly I feel like you don't need to worry about that as much as being able to counter the shields. The AI can and will armour tank with a radiant BB to get kills, but with a full red player officer (on AI), you can still 1v1 them and win.

It's in my opinion that you don't really need much of any anti-armour, but you do still need something to deal with it.

I has a horrifying battle the other-day where eight enforcers, armed with one HVD and four duel machine-guns surrounded about three conquests and only managed to drive one of them away before being killed by CR.

[Thaago]

Ooof yeah. To get kills in a reasonable amount of time, enough anti-armor to crack and then enough good DPS anti-hull is needed. HVDs have a lot of strength, but DPS isn't one of them!

As trite as it sounds, the correct balance of Kinetics vs HE (or for energy high efficiency hard flux vs high shot size/HE) is determined by the balance of the enemy's defenses. The much maligned default Eagle with 3 heavy mortars and 3 gravitons is excellent against low tech ships, and will kill the hull of an overwhelmed ship quickly and efficiently. It just doesn't have the hard flux to duel well shielded ships alone.

[bobucles]

There are other benefits to having high damage weapons as well. Ever see a ship do a disrespect vent in your face? The AI will think twice about it if you have a sizable HE such as a reaper or hellbore handy. Officer talents also take KE defenses to the next level, offering a straight up 50% KE reduction on top of stacking all the other potent armor boosting talents. Those larger officer boosted ships simply can't be killed with KEs, even gauss will have a bad day against it.

It's one of the reasons that the Storm needler can be a double edged sword. It's a beast at cracking shields for sure, but armor and hull damage are virtually non existent. The AI tends to get trigger happy with it, and will deal more self harm against a hull than damage against the enemy.

[Tackywheat1]

\the AI can flicker shields like a pro, blocking explosive stuff and absorbing kinetic at will.

The AI only does this when it is on very high flux (and thus a torpedo/missile barrage will easily overload and kill a ship)

it's good enough to take on absolutely absurd ships like the Nova from seeker or BB from DME with 0 hull damage if you can corral the catlike AI to not split your ships and get defeated in detail.

I have never had enough firepower to outflux a NOVA (although there were 5 of them..), even with plasma paragons

I see folks often forgetting the biggest advantage HIL has over plasma: it's a constant beam.  Once plasma fires its orbs, it has to reload.  As long as the firing ship has flux to spare the beam NEVER drops.  Against plasma, you can flicker shields and manage flux.  Against a HIL or two, you drop those shields for a second and you're seeing explosions on your ship...at a higher typical range too, since advanced optics provide a range boost for which plasma is ineligible. 

Except Plasma Cannon reloads insanely fast (thus any hard flux dissipation from shield flickering will be negligible) and will clear any fighter cloud very fast with a few sprays (since each projectile will pierce through multiple fighters)

Question: what is the impact stat used in the weapon data spreadsheet?

[Goumindong]

I believe its physical weapon push. Only the graviton beam has it i think.

This could be terribly wrong though. Describe the pattern in the data (which weapons have what values) and i might be of more use

[TaLaR]

Graviton has some interesting effects, as far as I understand it dampens target acceleration - being focused by Gravitons affects Eagle under Maneuvering Jets quite badly. Some mod mobility systems that generate a lot of acceleration in short time window are affected even more.
This effect stacks with multiple beams: one is more or less ignorable, but 3-4 are bad news for player-piloted ship with mobility focused play (AI doesn't use mobility with much finesse, so effect on them is much less pronounced).