From time to time I see people mention lazors and how difficult it is to maintain the capacitor on Amarr ships, and while I agree to some extent, I suspect due to the multitude of crystal types that people only ever consider Multifrequency, Radio and Scorch.
I have run some numbers to try and illustrate how effective some of the other ammo types are. This data assumes all skills V for consistency, and was obtained from an Apocalypse (no cap bonus, no damage bonus) with Megapulse II; the workhorse of all laser turrets. I imagine the M and S crystal efficiencies follow a similar pattern so I didn’t feel the need to do an exhaustive analysis.
tl;dr if your capacitor is dangerously low, you don’t have to turn off your guns and wait for regen, swap out to some imperial navy Standard and keep on the pressure. It’s a 34% damage decrease but a 45% reduction in capacitor draw.
Also a lot of ships can be cap stable with Gamma, with a lot less investment in skills and cap modules. Normal and navy Radio/Microwave are horrible with the only useful scenario being for characters without access to tech 2 turrets.
pretty much you only need Multifreq, Standard and Radio (at least for PvE). carrying the other crystals doesnt usually do much because of the optimal and falloffs obtained from those three, unless you really want to keep shooting at optimal.
with those three you have what you need, high damage but low range and big cap consumption, normal range and average damage but cap efficient, long range with less damage and lesser cap consumption.
Amarr ships also sport at least 1-3 free mids depending on the hull, so unless you really need tackle and warp prevention there’s space for cap batteries or rechargers to compensate.
also lasers have almost instant ammo swap compared to other turrets, not carrying the other crystals is doing it wrong.
Blasphemy! If your using pulse lasers you must use scorch, praise be to scorch the one true crystal, and his holy sons conflagration and navy multifreq.
there used to be a joke about loading standard and going afk during pos bashes.
On my paladin I carry everything between MF and Standard as that will hit everything in normal mission ranges with tachs. And a lot of the time it’s not worth swapping as you get pretty decent falloff
Exactly. Beam lazors only need multi-frequency, standard, radio, aurora and gleam.
Well aurora and gleam are debatable and it is up to your wallet if you want to use it. Even in pvp most ranges are covered with the three crystals.
Bear in mind, switching ammo may be instant but if you cannot decide which crystal to use, you end up switching all the time, costing you time and damage.
