Dang, were the Arc Emitters THAT good? I didn't get to mess with them much.
There were a couple of factors that, when combined, made them incredibly strong that I didn't pick up in testing.
First, Arc Emitters have a lot less wasted damage than PD lasers and Burst PD (wasted damage being any firing time directed at a missile that will still hit the ship) since their random targeting makes them less likely to focus the closest missile like other PD weapons do. Focusing the closest missile makes sense, but when there are multiple missiles in a salvo and PD can't kill individual missiles fast enough, they'll start uselessly shooting at the closest missile, despite the fact that they'll never kill it in time. This is why even a ton of PD lasers don't reliably intercept large salvos of missiles- they get swamped, keep uselessly shooting the closest thing, and the rest of the missiles hit. Arc Emitters bypassing this restriction was (and still is) intended, they'll always be the best option for nullifying at least
some of the incoming damage. Also, the instant arc means that they don't have to deal with beam velocity or turret rotation, which makes them more effective than they seem from stats alone.
Second, they fire in a very wide arc, which makes most ships able to achieve greater PD density than they're generally designed for. This, again, is intended; they were (supposed to be) individually less effective than Burst PD lasers, and only became competitive when using multiple emitters with overlapping arcs.
Those two things together made Arc Emitters a really good choice for normal PD, but they didn't seem to be too strong- in testing, if I swapped out all my PD for Arc Emitters, they intercepted similar numbers of missiles per salvo as Burst PDs did. My first error was there, since Burst PD is a mag-fed weapon and should be
more effective than Arc Emitters while it still has ammo; the numbers were just a bit too good. Secondly, they simply did too much EMP damage, since they could flame out most fighters in a single hit. What I missed was that it was relatively easy to achieve a critical mass of Arc Emitters- after a certain point, they'd just instantly zap anything that got into range, and they'd never get overwhelmed with targets at close range since they don't have to rotate.
The fix for this was to just gimp the *** out of their stats. The new long charging times (1.25 seconds, on the small and medium) are basically adding back in the time saved by having an instant-hit, non-rotating turret (unlike other PD weapons, they now have difficulty intercepting the
first shot in a salvo since they take so long to charge), and the slower firing speed means that they don't have better DPS than the plain PD laser. (Reducing DPS also reduces the benefits gained from being able to overlap firing arcs that normally wouldn't converge.) There are still a ton of advantages- it's a PD weapon that works in a hardpoint, can fire on targets outside of its rotation arc, and does unavoidable hard flux and EMP damage.
Hopefully this puts them in a more reasonable state. They're definitely still usable and good, but they're no longer the optimal choice for point defense.
