Renthrak, on 11 May 2013 - 01:41 PM, said:
I voted YES, but I don't think the AC/5 is as useless as people seem to think it is.
I actually ran the numbers for ballistic weapons, comparing damage per ton of ammo (shot damage X number of shots in a ton), damage per ton of the weapon itself including heat sinks required to dissipate all the heat produced within the recycle rate of the weapon, and numerous other factors to determine the overall 'efficiency' of the weapon. The results were rather surprising.
The top two most efficient ballistic weapons are the Gauss Rifle (no surprise here), and the AC/5 (???????). It turns out that based on the tonnage and ammo required to use ballistics, the AC/5 is only second to the Gauss Rifle because the GR produces so little heat.
This doesn't seem to make sense based on the mediocre stats of the AC/5 itself, but basically, carrying an AC/10 or /20 costs more weight(weapon+ammo+HS) than the comparable increase in damage. One of the biggest things holding the AC/5 back in actual gameplay is the current prevalence of massive Alpha Strikes as the primary means of offense.
For reference, the AC/2 has higher flat damage output, but requires so many heatsinks that it ends up heavier than the AC/5 to achieve that level of performance.
I did such calculations a long time ago, too.
I ultimately found this way a bit too... naive. Or not practically as relevant as I hoped.
A big factor is that we have a high heat capacity in MW:O. That means even with just 10 standard heat sinks (and you can't have less), you can fire for a while before you overheat. In practice, you don't need to compensate all the heat weapons produce, only have enough heat cap and enough dissipation that it lasts for a typical engagement. For a sniper, such an an engagement can last only 5 seconds or so, before it is back into cover. For a brawler, it might better be measured in damage - the fight lasts as long as it takes to kill the enemy or be killed by him.
Then, there is another factor. If we're really only talking about engagements lasting 5 to 30 seconds, DPS becomes can become very imprecise. In 5 seconds, a Gauss Rifle delivers by DPS 18.75 damage, and an AC/2 deals 20. In truth, however, the Gauss Rifle deals 30 damage, and the AC/2 22 damage.
Of course, the problem is, once you get this detailed, you notice the numbers of one weapon don't scale up linearly.
A single AC/2 might be able to fire for 40 seconds uninterrupted with just 10 standard heat sinks. But that doesn't mean 2 AC/2 would just need 20 standard sinks to last 40 seconds. With 20 heat sinks, two AC/2s could fire "only" for 25 seconds. And 4 AC/2 with 40 heat sinks would last only 17.5 seconds.
So, what I eventually went for as analysis was:
Set a target damage value to be reached, with a target engagement time, and set how often this would need to be done (to get a feel for how much ammo you'd need). Then, calculate how many instances of a particular weapon you need to get that damage goal in the alloted time, calculate how many heat sinks it would require to not overheat and how much ammo it consumes per engagement and multiply by engagement numbrs, and then compare the total damage this build would do to the total weight that build would need.
I did treat the first 10 engine heat sinks as free and all that jazz, too, to get a few reasonable values.
These are two charts I came up with, the first for every short engagement times (4-12 seconds) with high burst damage:
and a second one for somewhat longer engagement times with less burst damage.
A Google Document containing the spread sheet can be found here:
https://docs.google....cXc&usp=sharing
(The original is an excel document, which is also what I used to generate the charts.)
I find the charts illustrating the current meta quite well - PPCs rock for short-term damage, but quickly drop off if the engagement starts to last any time.
With high burst situations, the AC/5 can do relatively okay compared to the UAC/5, but it's quickly outperformed.
Edited by MustrumRidcully, 12 May 2013 - 01:38 AM.