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[Felicitatem Parco]

I performed a careful Life-Combat test to determine whether or not the fast Fire Pilot Tree Skill was causing a Heat Scaling Penalty when using quad AC/2.

• I was using a JagerMech with 4 AC/2s, 15 DHS (10 engine, 5 external) and full Mastery+Module Slot Unlock. All AC/2s were on firing group 1.
  
• Map was Canyon Network
  
• My electronic metronome was set at 110 beats/min, which equals a firing rate of 1 shot/0.55 seconds (10% slower than the native RoF... and no, I don't have any macros, call me old-fashioned for using a metronome.)
  
• Live combat was chosen because Skills are not active in the Testing Area (the Cool Run skill also gets in the way of things if you try to compare live->test data)

I pointed my guns at a wall when fully cooled and held the trigger until I overheated. This took about 26 volleys on average after 3 tests. This is the time it takes to overheat when you have Fast Fire skill active, which means the actual firing rate was slightly faster than 1/0.5 seconds (actual firing rate is 1 / 0.475 sec with F.F. skill active)




=> If quad AC/2 was subject to a Heat Scale Penalty, then those 26 shots should have shut me down very prematurely.


I then pointed my guns at the wall and fired at a RoF of 1/0.55 seconds. This was chosen deliberately to prevent me from getting too close to the threshold value of 0.5 seconds (which could have muddied my data if there was, indeed a penalty), while still being close enough to the firing rates under investigation for a clean comparison.

=> On average, I shut down after 30 volleys when shooting at 1 shot every 0.55
seconds

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Looking at the small difference in the number of volleys it takes to shut you down (about 13%) between the two firing rates (which differ by about 13%), It seems to me that there is no massive/significant Heat Penalties being applied to the use of AC/2 when fired while the fast Fire skill is active.

Addendum - Although it took fewer shots to shutdown when firing at the faster rate, I believe this is simply explained by the fact that firing faster overwhelms your heatsinks faster and the 4 heat/volley lends slop to determining the exact amount of shots needed to overheat. Shooting at a slower rate of fire allows your system to eject more heat. So 6 heat was removed from my Mech during the time differential, AND you have to include the inherent sloppiness of defining when your Mech overheats (because ending on volley #X means you could have needed all 4 heat to shut down, or maybe you only needed 1 more heat)... this means that if there was a Heat Penalty, then it added less than 10 heat during the entire 26 volleys, which would equate to a Heat Penalty of less than 10% of the base heat generated. That means the "Heat Scaling factor" would be tiny, and this is in contrast with what's in the XML table, and the itemstats.xml table is where every body is claiming to get this Heat Penalty from.

We've already established that the Gauss Rifle generates 1 heat in-game right now, and it looks like the AC/2 is not currently subject to Heat Scaling either.

Edited by Prosperity Park, 18 July 2013 - 02:03 PM.