evilauthor, on 11 August 2017 - 09:37 PM, said:
If you can actually use more than 2 or 3 tons of ammo per Gauss weapon in a single match, I'm not sure you need the crit padding because you're obviously a god tier player. Or you're pumping all your ammo into the terrain. In either case, you're doing alot more shooting than getting shot at.
Or are you saying that it's a good idea to use tonnage on gauss ammo you'll never use because said ammo is good crit padding?
For a dual gauss build you could split the ammo so that 6 slots would be 3 tons of ammo, which works out well enough on some mechs.
Heatsinks and ammo both have their pros and cons here. Against machine guns or crit seeking weapons that equally spread damage the gauss will blow up long before the ammo dies since each ammo slot is 10 HP and a gauss for IS is only 10 hp but 7 slots and its even worse for Clans with only 5 hp and 6 slots. If we look at hp per slot IS gauss has 1.4 hp per slot, Cgauss has 0.8 hp per slot, ammo has 10 hp per slot. So you'd be fine just using DHS instead, both faction's heatsinks have 2.5 hp per slot. It would mostly just be a waste of the ammo's tonnage, as the gauss will just go up and take the whole side with it far before even a heatsink dies.
Against 10+ frontloaded damage per shot weapons its a bit sketchier, as the hp of each item doesn't really matter at all since all of them get oneshotted anyway, so you're really just looking to fill up all the slots you can to reduce the chance of a gauss going up. No matter what you do the gauss will be the largest item in the section and the most likely thing to be crit, but filling the side up with multiple small items instead of a single large one means you could potentially get lucky for each item is in there, losing one ton of ammo, then another, then another before the gauss goes up, but the odds are stacked against you.
Doing the math, with an IS gauss rifle in a side torso with LFE and 3 tons of ammo, 10 slots are filled. Upon the first crit the gauss has a 30% chance to survive while an ammo box is destroyed, next you have a 22% chance for the gauss to survive and another ammo box is destroyed, next you have a 12.5% chance for the gauss to survive and the last ammo box dies anyway, then the next crit your gauss is taken out. You have a less than 1% chance to go through all of that. There's also a good chance that any one of those ammo crates destroyed could have been holding any remaining ammo, rendering your gauss useless anyway.
Due to ammo loss even if the gauss doesn't explode when padding with ammo its not recommended you do this if you have dual gauss, its only proper to do if you have a single gauss and are filling that component its in with its own ammo.
One other quirk to note is that with clan gauss being only 5 HP it can be oneshotted by an AC5 and so can their DHS, meanwhile their ammo takes 2 crits from an AC5 to destroy. This means if you're dealing with frontloaded damage in segments of 5 ammo is vastly superior to DHS in terms of potential crit negation, however you will always have a higher chance of the gauss being crit out than any other weapon, so it really depends on how lucky you get, you could hit jackpot and just have all the crits hit ammo boxes, you could get really lucky and just never have any shot even trigger a crit.
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