Moldur, on 17 September 2015 - 01:22 AM, said:
You are correct in the damage output and range. The way you write your original post seems to imply that lowering laser duration has literally zero positive effect, which I heartily disagree with. It should be easier for IS to give a full burn due to duration. More important to the game, it is easier for IS to give a full burn on a single component. This is advantageous when you and/or the target are in motion, or the target is attempting to roll armor.
To further understand this concept, lets take the ridiculous outlier, the locust 1E. It has a 1/2 the standard burn time for all lasers. Crazy.
Anyways, for lasers on the 1E, small lasers especially, the burn time is practically a single instance. It can be rolled, as opposed to a true instant damage pinpoint weapon, but it will be very hard to roll that damage since the burn time is insignificant. If it had a longer burn time, the window to roll, and the window for the shooter to fall off target would be larger.
This scenario can be propogated among all IS chassis to a degree, especially those with short burn time quirks. Yes, it will be markedly less extreme than the 1E, but understand that other mechs still have the same advantage, only to a lesser degree.
First off, the Locust 1E does not have a 50% duration reduction, it has 25% and only with Medium Lasers. Other lasers are 12.5%. The only Locust with a 50% burn-time reduction is the LCT-1V, and that's only for the ER Large...of which it can mount one.
That 25% does give the MedLas a burn of 0.675 seconds which is, frankly, still absurd. Who needs Pulse lasers? Small lasers are a total non-factor; they don't do enough damage (single strike or cyclical) to be worth fretting over and they are only losing six hundredths of a second off of their already-short burn. They are also extremely short-ranged, even on an LCT-1E.
With that out of the way, here is what I believe:
I believe that, when comparing a Clan laser to an Inner Sphere laser, that you are entitled to the same damage in the same amount of duration. That means, in 0.9 seconds, both an ER Medium and a standard Medium ought to be dealing 5 damage. Without quirks, that's not what is happening. Without quirks, the Clan laser does just a smidge under 5.5 points. If you drop the CERML to 1.25 second duration, it is doing a negligible amount greater than 5. Alternatively, if you reduce standard ML burn by 10% to 0.81 seconds, then the C-ERML laser will be doing 4.9 damage in the same duration it takes an ML to do 5.
The extra damage a Clan laser has at its disposal should be at cost of opportunity, since the laser has no weight or size penalty for its increased damage. You want to deal all 7? Then you must either choose to sacrifice those hit-points or wait for a more favorable time to get your staring in. Otherwise, you can pull off of the target in the same amount of time and still have done the same amount of damage; all it cost you is some extra heat build-up that wasn't applied toward damage.
By the same token, I feel that heat should be generated at the same rate for both sides. That is, per second of burn, both lasers of a given class should be increasing your heat by the same amount. To balance range, it would be more favorable to increase cycle time. Increased cycle time reduces utility in close quarters and provides gaps in incoming fire for shorter-ranged weapons to move in.
Basically, it ought to be Heat vs. Damage and Cool-down vs. Range. DPS per tick should remain constant across a type.
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