As I continue to work on all the new stats of the items, I want to give more specifics of what exactly is changing and why, not in terms of specific items, but in terms of how the new stats are being generated.

Here I'm going to talk about the new Damage per Energy's (DPE's) of the weapons. Currently, DPE's are pretty much fixed based on the weapon type with very little variation. Currently, pulse guns are about .66 DPE, mags are .5 DPE, and lasers are .33 DPE.

DPE will now vary with the weapon type, tech level, damage type, size class, and Free Market+, so there will be a huge range of DPE. Note that weapons are balanced so that as DPE goes up, DPS goes down, and vice-versa, so that you can get a high DPS weapon to do burst damage or a high DPE weapon to do more sustained damage over time.

The base DPE by weapon type is becoming closer than before, with lasers at .4 DPE, mags at .5, and pulse guns at 0.6. This give pulse guns only 50% more DPE than lasers, rather than double is they are currently.

DPE is also going up by 0.01 per tech level, so the base DPE at tech 20 will be .6, .7, and .8 respectively. This means that a higher weapon will have both a better DPS and a better DPE than a lower tech weapon, all things equal.

Damage type and size class will affect DPE according to the following tables: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key= ... UbVAqx3yGg

Free Market (+) weapons get an additional DPE bonus of 5%.

The new, more dynamic range of DPE's will give players more meaningful options in designing their setups. In addition, some of the new stats have DPE's that are significantly higher than anything that existed before. This plus the new much more powerful energies will eliminate the automatic need for every ship to have multiple electric augmenters. For example, the new Nano Ploughboy has a DPE of 2.28 and Siege Catapult has a new DPE of 1.58.

How does this affect thoraxes and their awesome damage per elec stats?

Have you taken the chance of hitting into account Jeff?

Lasers always hit

Mags and pulses can be dodged (depending on the size, speed and agility of your ship and the tracking and speed of the weapon).

Mmm, maybe I'm looking at this wrong, but I would have expected to see larger weapons have better energy efficiency. What it looks like is that the more compact an item the better it will work, no?

Also shouldn't that be surgical and not surgery?

- DW

To me it makes sense that a bigger weapon uses more energy and a smaller weapon uses less energy. A bigger weapon will be doing more damage instead.

I have not done thoraxes or torpedoes yet.

Yes, I take into account the chance to hit. Lasers, mags, and pulse guns have different base powers that are modified by the other things, and those values are 25, 24, and 45 respectively. Pulse guns have a lot more power than the others, since they are so much harder to hit with.

On a related note, I've been making both lasers and pulse guns easier to hit with. Most lasers are getting a sizable increase to their firing arcs and all pulse guns are getting a very small amount of tracking, like mag's, but they don't accelerate. It still takes skillz to hit with the pulse guns, but it's slightly easier, and tracking augs are now very nice when you're using a pulse gun because they will increase the number of hits you'll score.

Thanx jeff! your ma hero!

Alby augs and speed demons with panther paws, this could be terrifying =)

screw SDs, think MFing Merc Diss's that converge on a small target instead of the wall of miss that currently happens... SBGs that get 4 hits on an SD rather than the 1-2.

Jeff- Are the ship modifiers taking into account small ship size isn't going to be as useful now?

Thanks for the updates Jeff!

Er, what do you mean pulse guns have a .66 DPE right now? At the higher techs, it is around 0.25. Bule Abadi Blaster, Venusian Pulse, Mercurian pulse, ect.

Anyway, my SD can't power his rhino cannon even with a -10% elec mod on it, hopefully this will make it easier.

Oh yea, I fully expect that a bigger weapon would use more energy per shot and get more damage from it However what I’m saying is that I’d also expect that energy to be used more efficiently too. That is to say a better Damage Per Energy ratio than small items.

Looking at the sheet and doing some simple math on 3 samples;

Size ~ Base Damage ~ Damage Multiplier ~ DPE
Nano ~ 100 * 1.15 = 115
Normal ~ 100 * 1 = 100
Gargantuan ~ 100 * 0.84 = 84

And if we are to include the Power modifier from the other sheet, i.e. the size;

Size ~ Base Damage ~ Damage Multiplier ~ DPE ~ Power ~ DPE’PS
Nano ~ 100 * 1.15 = 115 * 1.3 = 149.5
Normal ~ 100 * 1 = 100 * 1 = 100
Gargantuan ~ 100 * 0.84 = 84 * 0.6 = 50.4

As I’m sure we can see there seems to be a huge discrepancy between the smallest weapon and the largest. With the Nano being nearly 3 times more Energy Efficient than the Gargantuan. But then again, maybe I’m looking at it all wrong, if so tell me what I’m doing wrong

- DW

Death Warrant, I don't really understand your numbers there, but the size class does not affect the base damage, it affect the base power, which for the purposes of this discussion can be thought of as DPS * DPE.

The way the numbers are generated is first, and item is given a tech level, acquire difficulty, size class, and weight class which determine the total power and the DPE (DPE is totally independent of the total power). Then the DPS is calculated by taking the total power and dividing by the DPE (plus a few other things like any aug bonuses.) So the differences in DPE's should be what you except from the table.

You will, however, see a magnified difference in the DPS's between a large and a small item, since the small item has both less total power and more DPE, thus taking even more away from the DPS.

Jeff, are you going to be changing the low-RoF pulses (Bule blasters, bule abidi blaster, venu pulse, merc pulse, may be some others) to make them actually useable? As I said above, 0.25 DPE on them, they are awful. You miss a lot of the time due to their pulse firing, and it truely destroyes your electric bank. When I used my izer as a gunner, I could power two venusian jackhammers for quite a bit longer than ONE venusian pulse.

Ah, thank you for clarifying. I had a feeling I was looking at it all arseways

- DW

Ahh, so the "multiplier" is actually a, um, divisifier or something. The lower the number the better, meaning that larger weps WILL be more DPE efficient than smaller weps?

Also, I'm just curious about why mining damage gets such a low base DPE mod. In the old scheme of things, they were about the same as lasers. The second lowest DPE mod goes to Rad weps, which also used to be about the same as lasers. Two of our classes devote a whole subskill to these damage types. Was it decided that those two classes needed "tamed down" a bit, or was there some other reason?

Edit: Actually, now that I think about it, why does damage type have anything to do with DPE? I can understand the argument about certain types of weps having a better chance to hit, but that has more to do with projectile type than damage type. After all, there are thoraxes that do laser damage, mag weps that do surgical, mining, energy, or radiation damage, and "instant hit" beam weps for all of the damage types other than energy and physical afaik. I'm sure you're not going to scrap your whole rebalance based on this nube's questions. I'm just curious.