Cannon vs Blast Cannon

I see most top players in the 'season' section of the games menu using Blast Cannons over Cannons. Is there a reason why as the way I see it the Cannon deal more damage in conjunction with the shorter reload time. Any ideas ?

 

Yeah, I tried running a cannon on my speeder because of the high DPS, but global cooldown on yellow items just kills it.

Global cooldown is about 2.5 seconds. So your actions look something like this...

0.0 seconds: fire cannon 1,
2.5 seconds: fire cannon 2,
5.0 seconds: fire Tesla Bolt,
7.5 seconds: use Nitro,
10. seconds: (maybe fire cannon again).

You can see that as soon as you use any item that isn’t a cannon, your DPS takes a nosedive. If you’re only getting ‘roughly’ 2 shots in 10 seconds anyway, then you might as well take something with a longer cooldown and a bigger kick.

 

I ran double cannons on my Def, and I could fire those constantly, it is the closest we will get to machine gun.

 

dual cannons only work on defenders, and only under 2000 infamy. with a third burst weapon, defender will out damage any other ship since it got more hp. but few things i need to point out, any ship with 3 or less weapon slots, dual cannons will do much more damage then dual sniper, blast and ec with max perks and talent. if anyone saying dual sniper, blast and ec do more damage then dual cannons, they must have failed math class.

 

I agree... you should only need 1 short-cooldown weapon. On my 5-slot shooter I can always tell when Canon is not equipped because I have to constantly deal with a firing gap. Canon fixes that gap.

 

cannons do less damage per shot. and if you have a bunch of Defensive points stacked on shields they do almost nothing. Defensive points mitigate that much damage per shot, so it's negated entirely(if a gun does 20 dmg per shot and you have 15 defense, the gun will only do 5dmg). simple cannons recharge quickly and do far less damage per shot, so shields mitigate far more of their damage than they can a blast can. Blast can does more damage per shot but less frequently. Against a ship with a lot of defensive points and shields, you want the blast cannon, not the regular cannon.

 

My tier IV sniper crit is 25% and crit damage it does is about 1k. My tier III blast cannon does 800+ in one shot. So rather than waiting for lucky crit to happen, I prefer blast cannon. Ec takes long reload time and cannon is simply not strong enough at same level. And almost every players' instinct will tell them to run away if huge chunk of hp is taken from their ship on one shot. And it can shoot even when small wave is in the way. When combined with flare gun or when enemy is burning it does nice extra damage too. After mastering this weapon mechanics, it can hit nitro speeder too but you gotta lead your shot long way.

 

An L1 common canon does 64 damage, so your example is not realistic outside of illustrating what defense points are for. My rare defense perk is only 7, which is negligible in the context of single 400 damage Canon shot. Load up 3 of those perks and your Canon shot is still doing 379 out of 400. Two quick-reload shots (the time it takes for a single shot from any other canon) is 758 damage, more than most sniper shots at the same evolution. In principle I agree BC/EX is preferred for the single shot damage, but unless it's close range I find the standard Canon to be 2x as accurate.

On the other hand what you say about defense points is more applicable to a Defender which has much more built in defense, but that's only 20% of the ships out there.

I agree, BC is my primary canon... and I hit speeders with it nearly every game when they come up on me, which makes them run, then half the time I can hit them with my EX canon as they try to get away... then from mid range I can regularly pick them off with a standard canon, which is much harder with BC/EX or even Sniper. That being said I've killed plenty of nitro speeders with BC/EX too. Today I killed all 3 speeders in a match. Sniper is actually a little tougher with Speeders when they are flying over waves, which is why the standard Canon is a fantastic speeder killer.

 

Standard Cannon is far more reliable in mid- and long- range... If you don't use sniper or railgun, you can exploit the std cannon short cooldown on mid range, while you keep the projectiles of BC and ExC for close range.

Wouldn't recommend Standard for speeders for the reasons that other players have exposed. But other ships can make use of it, since it's always useful to have an available weapon to fire and a secure shot.

 

You mean sniper cannon? As far as I know standard cannon doesn't have long range.

 

I do mean Std Cannon. With help of the waves you can land a shot at long range, and at mid-long range its speed makes it almost as good as sniper cannon (EDIT: except for crit chance, obviously).

 

Sniper range is long range. Std cannon, blast cannon and ec are mid-range. And carronade range is short range. Or that's what I thought it was.

 

I'd argue standard canon is medium-long range at 26.3. The only non-infinite items that shoot farther are Sniper, LRM, and Missile Launcher. I use range perks on my standard canon which brings it near 30, a big help.