Just wanted to post this (educational)

So I just want to make this post for the new guys on the lot (and some of the older ones, I only finally decided to start practising this at like 600 hours).

Using ammo upgrades is great, but it's sometimes not the most efficient option. A lot of the time it pits ammo mods against damage mods, and ammo mods will always give your weapon more damage per refill. Even if this is true, sometimes that's not the most effective use of your upgrade modules.

A good metric is that you want your weapon to be able to efficiently kill grunts. A basic grunt has 90 hp, a slasher has 148 and a guard has 270. Taking an example, the Driller's Colette Wave Cooker with Mega Power Supply OC.

The CWC with MPS deals a base of 7 damage pre tick. This equates to 13 ammo cost to kill a grunt (with 1 overkill damage), a slasher will cost 22 ammo (6 overkill), and a guard takes 39 ammo (3 overkill). Taking out one of each will cost 74 ammo and waste about 1.5 of that on overkill damage, which is not bad compared to some weapons.

Then we change that t1 mod from B to A (ammo to damage). This modifies base damage to be 9, from 7, and this makes a HUGE difference in terms of efficiency. It now takes an even 10 ticks in the wave to kill a grunt, 17 ticks for a slasher (5 overkill) and an even 30 for a guard, for a total of 57 charge to take down one of each, and overkill costing about 0.5 ammo.

If we compare the two for a step more, MPS has a base ammo of 400, goes up to 500 with T1B. Then it becomes fairly simple to compare the two in terms of ammo economy:

  • 74 ammo - 7 damage per tick, 500 ammo cap - is worth 14.8% of your total max ammo, and again that's 1.42 ammo wasted which is 0.286% of total ammo gone to waste from taking out one of each basic glyphid class.
  • 57 ammo - 9 damage per tick, 400 ammo cap - is worth only 14.25% of your total ammo, and that's 0.55 ammo waste or 0.138% of total ammo wasted.

There are a number of weapons that are like this, with the ammo upgrade not necessarily being worth it, so just good to keep this in mind when deciding.