What I like about cave maps is that it feels like mechs have a serious purpose now. At least the AC one. They need to fix the weapons on the OG one. Before now mechs always felt like they were mostly a meme and weren't worth the opportunity cost of bringing more reds or greens. But they're pretty nice for pushing into a heavy nest so that you can hellbomb the BT hole.

Can someone please post the datamined damage numbers for the speargun? I'm curious if they have any useful breakpoints.

Can someone give me the quick rundown about the plasma accelerator sniper rifle? I'm trying to ween myself off of the Eruptor and I've seen people tell me that the accelerator is "good now" after the buffs. But I'm just not feeling it. At least against the bots. It feels like it either doesn't have enough ammo or enough damage. If I still need to snipe a devastor head to drop them in one burst, then why not use a different DMR without the charge up gimmic and better ammo economy to snipe the head? If I miss the first shot in the burst it just staggers them.

Is it just bad on bots? Is it better on squids? I don't really feel like playing squids right now. The breakpoint calculator makes it look like it wrecks oversaars on paper, but my ammo concerns have me worried about fleshmob spam. Am I overlooking something useful about it, or is it just like a bunch of weapons where they'd be a lot more practical if Alexus would give them a much bigger pool of spare magazines?

>>535154692
I've mostly been running a lot of the same shit on each faction. Especially since I'm still warp pack maxing.
>Medium unflinching armor
It has decent mobility, enough armor to avoid dying to a number of sucker punch hits, and the scout pings help locate POIs for scavenging supplies.
>Eruptor
Point, click, delete something. The main reasons that it's hard to put down is just that it provides an abundance of explosives for closing bug holes, and is effective vs fleshmobs.
>Talon
Ol'reliable for when it isn't advisable to use the eruptor. Also helps with things like quickly deleting shriekers and watchers.
>Pyrotech grenades
The best jack of all trades grenade in the game. You can press it into an anti-tank or area denial role as needed.

stratagems:
Bugs
>Quasar/EAT
>warp pack
>Eagle Strafing/500kg
>tesla tower

bots
>Quasar
>warp pack
>eagle strafing
>rocket sentry

squids
>Grenade Launcher
>warp pack
>MG sentry
>gatling/laser sentry (would take MG twice if I could). Or 500kg if I want to be lazy and flatten UFOs with it.

>>532455251
At the very best, it is a textbook "monkey's paw" sentry.
Pro
>infinite ammo sentry
con
>the only situations where it doesn't immediately overheat and die are ones where enemy presence is so light that a regular sentry wouldn't have run out of ammo.

Lasers have poor damage output. There are only two ways to use them well:
>leverage their precise hitscan nature to target weakpoints
>leverage their ignition capabilities to light multiple targets on fire at range
The laser sentry does neither. It attacks center of mass against one target at a time until it dies. It will be the retarded black sheep of the sentries until AH does one of the following.
>maxes its targeting more intelligent to either aim for weakpoints or spread fire dots around (LMAO not happening)
>massively improves the base damage output
>massively reduce the cooldown so that you can at least cope with the knowledge that your shitty sentry is disposable and can be spammed.

>>532456134
Yes. I can't be arsed to remember the schedule. It will be back eventually.

>>532331779
This is why:
>early on the scorcher was our first explosive primary weapon
>so that we couldn't close every bug hole on the map with one scorcher magazine, they decided to give the plasma rifle poor demo force
>this reasoning continued to hold with the plasma punisher, purifier, and loyalist
>this is probably fair for these primary and secondary weapons
>fast forward the placebo group warbond
>Alexus crawled out of the basement and decided that the Epoch should also have fuckall demo force because plasma
>never-mind that the laser primary/secondary weapons have fuckall demo force, but the larger laser cannon, quasar cannon, and orbital laser have improved demo force to represent that they are more powerful weapons.