4 replies to this topic

[Heffay]

Instead of dividing up the damage over 10 equal bursts, have the first burst do 30% of the damage, and the remainder divided up among the remaining bursts.

This will give a nice little boost to pulse lasers without having to tweak their damage, heat, duration, etc. They'll be more interesting to use, have a nice distinction from traditional lasers, and you can add a variety of modules to support the actual initial burst (2% increase in front loaded damage, 2% more heat or something like that). The nice thing about that is it doesn't increase the damage of the laser, but makes it a bit more bursty without it becoming a pinpoint weapon with all the drawbacks those entail.

[Kaeb Odellas]

Give them 5 bursts, to correspond with the 5 WUBs in their sound effects

Edited by Kaeb Odellas, 05 February 2014 - 03:46 PM.

[Solis Obscuri]

Seems like a decent idea. A slight reduction to the overall duration would also produce a similar result. Maybe 0.6s -> 0.4s for LPL and MPL, 0.5s -> 0.3s for SPL (I'm not terribly really worried if a 90m 3-damage weapon goes hitscan).

[MustrumRidcully]

There is a principle that I like in design: KISS.
Why make some extra rule only for pulse lasers? Why can we not simply adjust it along the lines of all the statistics that the game already offers for tweaking, why add an extra rule?

You could lower the beam duration further. You could lower the heat generated. You could increase the damage. Why would these approaches not work to make pulse lasers better?

You don't need a special snowflake mechanic for every weapon.

Edited by MustrumRidcully, 06 February 2014 - 12:28 AM.

[Gryphorim]

My preference would be to make pulse lasers fire just the one "wub" with corresponding low damage and heat, but cycle rate faster, to match the "wub wub wub" we have now. Scale damage to be the same as a standard laser if fired at same point for 30 seconds or more (ie: same dps average) but at about 1.5 times the heat (maybe scaled so the longer you hold down the trigger, the more rapidly heat climbs?)


So yeah... Laser machine guns

Edited by Gryphorim, 06 February 2014 - 01:18 AM.