moneyBURNER, on 17 March 2013 - 05:15 PM, said:
The value of high-burst/low ROF vs low-burst/high ROF varies depending on the situation.
In a long range standoff, high-burst damage means everything, and heat can be a non-issue when there's lots of time to cool off safely.
In a massive short-range brawl resulting from a quick onrush, continuous low-burst damage can be a lot more efficient and effective in allocating damage to multiple enemies, where instead of wasting the full burst of a weapon to finish off one critically injured section and then waiting for the next shot, damage can be applied more 'granularly' to different sections/mechs.
Not to mention that a miss from a high-burst weapon with a slow cooldown can be catastrophic versus the ability to fire frequently in lower bursts.
The trick with high-burst/long-cooldown weapons is - you know how important they are, and adding another second to aim carefuly barely affects your theoertical DPS - but it significantly improves your actual damage. If you have to fire fast and often, you cannot afford to aim as much for each shot, as it cuts more into your DPS.
In a brawl, one or two powerful attacks can take out a single hit location, lowering your enemies damage output - and than it doesn't matter anymore that he'd out-DPS you eventually, because you just took out some of the armnament he could have out-DPSed you. If you don't manage to breach that "threshold", and aiming is of little concern, it might not make a difference...
But, say, you need 150 damage to kill your opponent.
If you take a single Gauss Rifle, that's 10 shots - which you can fire in 36 seconds.
With an AC/2, you need 75 shots - that's 37 seconds!
If you just use the raw DPS figure, you would say the Gauss would need 40 seconds and the AC/2 37.5 seconds. But that ignores that you can shoot at 0 seconds, you don't have to wait a cooldown cycle before you fire your first shot. If you'd need 1,500 damage, that would be 396 seconds for the Gauss and 374.5 seconds for the AC/2, so the DPS advantage wll eventually win out. But the "front-loaded" damage can be very important in more realistic scenarios.
Edited by MustrumRidcully, 17 March 2013 - 11:45 PM.