Inspired by this thread, I've revisited the beam Pally for lvl 4 missions.

God it's awful.

Maybe it's just me, but I have yet to come across a situation where I would prefer beams over pulse.

Why?


1. Range. The main advantage that beams have over pulse is their ability to hit out to 160km. When do lvl 4 mission rats spawn anywhere near that far away? I've have yet to see it. Most rats spawn within the 30-70 km range and that's perfect for a pulse fit for a few reasons:

a. Tractor Beam range

b. With 2 Tracking Computers, Conflag does 1000 dps up to ~40km and scorch does like 800 out to ~100km.


2. Tracking is **** with beams. Anything closer than 20km is difficult to hit even with 2 TC's running with Gleam/INMF. Your DPS might look nice but your application of that dps is baaaad.


3. Downfalls of the traditional Beam fit.

a. If you fit a MJD to your beam pally, my question is why?!?!? On ships like the CNR where you sacrifice tank for gank the MJD is totally cool, but on a ship where you have more than enough tank and dps to run any lvl 4 up close, what practical use is there for a MJD? It slows down your mission time when you jump all over the place and god forbid you ever get a mission where the next gate is ~50km away.

b. So you've got beams and can shoot out to 160km. That's might be cool if you could target that far, but your default targeting range is just over 100km. This means that you need to fit at least one sebo to make use of those long beams, assuming you ever needed to shoot that far, which again, never happens.

c. Sniping = No tractors = No salvaging or looting = ~ 3-10 mil lost per mission (Roughly?) I've never done the math but whenever my hull is full of loot I give it to my hauler alt to run to amarr and sell it off. I'd estimate that this accounts for anywhere between 20-30 mil per 5 missions with the occasional mission dropping something nice (3 pseudoelectron containment fields or a 20 mil implant, for instance.) If you MJD and snipe, you're probably losing out on this income. If you're MJD-ing and sniping and then closing range to go back in and salvage after the fight is over, you're wasting valuable time. The trick is to salvage/loot while you fight within tractor range, and pulse fits excel at this.

d. This may sound like nitpicking, but the way I deal with those missions that have 5-10 frigs spawn all at once amongst a larger group of rats is to split my guns up into 2 groups of 2. Load the appropriate ammo for the range they're at, turn on the TC with either tracking or optimal scripts respectively, and pop them all in quick succession by activating one gun group (2 guns) per frig. This eliminates any overkill and most of the time I one-shot them. With the slower cycle time of beams, it takes longer to do this. Sometimes a few of the frigs close distance and I'm unable to hit them due to the ****** tracking of beams. Not a big deal cause I've got drones, but something I noticed nonetheless.


I'm sure the beam pally has it's niche in belt ratting or running sites or something else that I don't have any experience with, but I fail to see how it outperforms the pulse fit paladin for typical lvl 4 missioning.

The difference between pulses and beams becomes apparent when you have to shoot targets that aren't weak to EM while they're at range like Guristas. Scorch is mostly EM and will suck hard vs those, beams with MF still won't be amazing but at least it'll be better than Scorch.

That's just optimal. Falloff is 70km and with 2 tracking computers with range scripts running, optimal becomes 58 and falloff becomes 99.

Lol. I have all relevant gunnery skills to 5 except for large laser specialization, which currently sits at 4.

We are talking about T2 Tachs with Imperial Navy Multifreq loaded, right?