The Tac Laser is dead. Long live the Tac Laser. There was a time when it was a very normal beam that didn't do anything particularly well, and that was ok because beams in general didn't do anything particularly well. But now every beam does
something and the bog-standard Tac Laser feels like a relic of bygone years. Even in its heyday, no one
wanted to put a Tac Laser in a Small Energy slot, you just kind of settled for it. The flux wasn't enough to make a difference on shields and when it did hit armor/hull, it was only a minor annoyance unless you could mass 4+ on a target. The old wisdom is that beams like the Tac Laser are "pressure weapons": they forced the enemy to raise shields or risk death by a thousand paper cuts. They are long-range, perfectly accurate, and cheap in OP and flux cost. Low-risk, low-reward. In a word:
boring. Other Beams in the game have a similar problem but all are more specialized than the Tac Laser. The Graviton deals Kinetic damage, can deflect missiles, and now causes shields to take more damage. The Ion Beam is a pure support beam dealing shut-down EMP damage and can pierce shields at high flux levels. The HIL deals HE damage and crushes armor. The IR Autolance can shred unshielded fighters, deal very good burst hull damage, and doesn't even bother wasting flux on shields. The Phase Lance is short-ranged but deals good hull damage and the Tachyon Lance is a long-range nuke. Then you have the point-defense beams: the PD Laser, LRPD, and Burst Lasers. The LRPD is the primary offender here because it has 80% of the range and 67% of the damage for 50% of the flux cost. It tracks better, as well. Its only downside is it costs 1 more OP. The one thing the Tac Laser has going for it is that in a PD role, it passes through missiles but that is faint praise.
In short, the Tac Laser has been passed by in the meta. It just doesn't offer anything above and beyond what other beams can do and they're not competitive even in the pretty milquetoast Small Energy slot. To put it another way, how many of you use Tac Lasers on Centurion or Hammerhead Hybrid slots? How many Tac Lasers go on your Scarabs or Medusa's? Do you put Tac Lasers on Furies or Auroras? When is having just a single Tac Laser worth firing at range to keep an enemy's shields up (and worth giving up your own 0-flux boost)?
What
is the best use-case for a Tac Laser? A long-range Eagle Build? Contributing to an all-or-none, Disco Ball Paragon build? You used to be able to use Tac Lasers in an IPDAI + Advanced Turret Gyros combination on larger ships but IPDAI now takes an S-mod. Even then, it wasn't that great.
So what to do with them? Since every other beam does
something now, I don't see why the Tac Laser shouldn't either. (As an aside, I kind of hate that the IR Autolance exists because that style of beam mechanic would have been very good for the Tac Laser. Something a bit more opportunistic, a little stronger against hull, but still generally useful.) Without changing the actual mechanic of the beam, though, how do you incentivize shooting one of these at an enemy? How do you bump up the supportive fire role it has?
Suggestion 1: Ramping DamageMy first immediate thought was to ramp up the damage on armor/hull the longer the beam stays on target. If you played Starcraft 2, you know about the Protoss Void Ray. It doesn't deal a lot of damage at first, but if it can stay on one target long enough, it has three stages of damage that get increasingly more devastating. I'm not saying do anything to that extreme for the Tac Laser but what if it doubled its damage against armor/hull (but not shields!) over a few seconds of firing on one target?
For example, a Tac Laser does 75 DPS (though only half that for the armor calculation), but as soon as it contacts armor or hull, it increases 5% per tick up to a full 100%. IIRC, beam damage occurs ~10x a second, so it would take 2 seconds to get to full damage. Since all it takes is a shield flicker or stray fighter to get in the way of the beam, it has the potential to reset fairly often, but getting the full damage shouldn't take too long, either.
Suggestion 2: Angry FlashlightsI'm also a fan of Warhammer 40k and Imperial Guard Lasguns are sometimes called "angry flashlights." They are notoriously underpowered at the individual level but when you get 10,000 Guardsmen all firing at the same thing?
If you can get multiple Tac Lasers pointed in the same general vicinity on a ship's armor (like within 10 su), they amplify all damage to that armor cell by a small percentage (3%). This effect is multiplied
by 5 for other Tac Lasers. So, in the case of an Eagle with 3 Tac Lasers in the small slots, they add 9% to all weapons hitting that armor cell but add 45% for the Tac Lasers themselves (~109 DPS each). The upper limit is 5 instances (so +15%/75% for the Tac Lasers). The amplifying effect has no effect on shields.
Suggestion 3: "Pulse" LaserI experimented with making the Tac Laser "pulse", but do more damage (this would cause confusion with the Pulse Laser, I know). The Tac Laser stays at 75 DPS/60 Flux but has a .3 second duration with a .15 second chargedown. The actual beam DPS is 213 (Burst Laser is 350, for reference) and I improved its beam speed to 6500 (about twice as fast but not instant). Interestingly, it's terrible once you add range upgrades because the beam spends most of its time traveling and deals diminished damage. Seeing these things strobe everywhere might cause issues to our epileptic friends, though! It's very effective against unshielded frigates and fighters. My impression playtesting this is that it's too strong and perhaps too busy, visually, but it is working "within the framework" without any extra gimmicks. It does step on the toes of the IR Autolance to some degree.
OverallI'm not convinced any of the above are great and I'd love to hear other ideas. Maybe the Tac Laser should stay as a ho-hum pressure weapon because if it ain't broke, don't fix it but I do know I rarely use them currently. I'd like to have a reason to.
