I've just shot a vid exploring this question a bit more. It'll be ready in half an hour when I'll edit this post and insert it in there. Some interesting findings from an interesting question.Originally Posted by CategoryTheory Go to original post
I'm really looking forward to seeing this! But if you could make it a new post in this thread, rather than editing this one, that would be helpful since it will then automatically come to my attention when the forum shows me the list of threads with new posts.Originally Posted by RichardOshea Go to original post
Nice work with that video, Richard. As it turns out, it seems to be important to test with actual shooting, rather than relying on whether the enemy is lit to determine whether or not they're pulsed.
At 5:47 in your video you're still using the AR with Strained and the LLP (you'd not changed yet since you used it in the test before that), and though you wave your reticle near the red enemy as you pass through the gate, we don't see him light up. But slightly later, at 5:51, you turn around and he's now clearly displaying a glowing outline. So pulse does display in the expected way, at least at closer ranges.
But at 10:36 you check the range and move from 52 m to 49 m. At 10:54 you then pass your reticle over the enemies but they don't light up to indicate that they're pulsed. Your subsequent two shots are 151.293 and 151.090 damage (both non-criticial), though, which is considerably higher than the original 124k or so that the AR did, which is apparently from the Spotter talent, indicating that they are actually pulsed, even though they're not showing it visually. (The expected damage base on your previous hits at 75 m would be 124k * 1.15 = 143k; I'm guessing that this is a bit higher because the lower knee of your AR's range graph is past 50 m, though that does strike me as rather long range for an AR.)
I think I'm going to have to cons up a rifle with either very short or very long range (to avoid having to deal with the drop-off) and do some testing with shots to confirm that unlit enemies are still pulsed.
I think that one of the more interesting realities of the video is the difficulty of creating long engagement ranges due to the environment. Obviously we have the mathematical realities of talents, mods and weapons statistics but we also have the realities of environmental clutter, obstructions to line of sight, fog of war, weather and enemy AI reactions. So a major limiting factor of LLP is line of sight whereas with the scanner pulse we have an 110m omnidirectional scan capable of penetrating all of the above limitations to LLP. Spotter's damage multiplier remains the same regardless of the source of the pulse so it comes down to the environment you're in, skill included, as to the ultimate effectiveness of how we utilise either the scanner or the link.Originally Posted by CategoryTheory Go to original post
Well, as well as the particular area you were in, another part of your difficulty was that you were looking to create 75 m ranges. For most of that later section where you were trying to get line of sight, you had LOS at 60-65 m or so, which is still out of LLP range, but lost it when you tried to move to 75 m.Originally Posted by RichardOshea Go to original post
Especially when attacking open-world targets, I'm at ranges greater than 50 m very frequently.
Well, it is if you're trying to use it just to pulse at long range (which you can't do anyway), but my purpose is to shoot the enemy. For that, LOS is no issue at all for the LLP when used with Spotter since if you can't get LOS you can't shoot the target anyway.So a major limiting factor of LLP is line of sight....
Right: 0 when you have no LOS to shoot the enemy....Spotter's damage multiplier remains the same regardless of the source of the pulse...
(This is for weapon builds, of course. For skill builds focused on direct damage Spotter will still be great without LOS for any devices that do have it, or can move to have it. But it's not going to do nearly as well as replacing your Scanner with a second damage-dealing skill. You might be playing with someone else using a pulse, of course, but now this is getting really situational.)
By the way, feel free to trim my text when you quote me, or even just leave it out. There's no benefit to immediately duplicating a longish post as the very first thing after that post.
That's my point about LoS; that it isn't just an issue of range but one of environmental conditions the game creates also. So there are many things that can interfere with LL pulsing a target which are completely negated by the sanner pulse. But there are still benefits to running one over the other which are determined by more than simple math.Originally Posted by CategoryTheory Go to original post
Seriously, trim the quotes, please. It gets hard to read a conversation when 75% of what you post is just a second copy of a large amount of text immediately after that text.
I don't see the point. If you're using LLP to support Spotter in a weapons build, under what conditions do you care if your pulse is working when you have no LOS and thus can't shoot the enemy?Originally Posted by RichardOshea Go to original post
Pulsing the enemy via the Scanner can be useful for detection of unknown enemies, but LLP isn't useful for this since it pulses only when you pass your reticle over an enemy, and that will mark the enemy with a triangle anyway. (Or more properly, it's only very minimally useful, in situations where it's useful to see the enemy's body position, rather than just location.)
I could try and verbally describe the issue I'm discussing but the video already demonstrates it neatly. The math of the game is only a part of the problem an agent might face, and the world itself is another. LoS and AoA are extremely important aspects to initiating an engagement and if that engagement also needs to proc Spotter then environmental limitations become a factor for its use whereas those environmental conditions are offset entirely by the scanner pulse. As the vid states the benefits of one over the other are down to the build and how the agent chooses to roll the streets. Mathematically optimal solutions aren't always the best in practice.Originally Posted by CategoryTheory Go to original post
You have the wrong end of the stick here. When using Spotter, pulsing the target is not the end goal. The goal is to hit a pulsed target with a bullet. That cannot be done without LOS (at least, not for any weapon that can mount the Linked Laser Pointer), so if you can achieve the aim of shooting and hitting the target, you automatically have the LOS you need for the Linked Laser Pointer to work.Originally Posted by RichardOshea Go to original post
I am not sure what use you find for pulsed targets you're not shooting that could not be achieved just as well without Spotter, but regardless, that's not the topic I intended for this thread.