I think our definitions of the word "accurate" are very different. The Polaris has always struggled being the bigger brother of the Pulsar LSW. It's a lot more expensive, and it's horribly unpredictable at Medium and Long Ranges. It's attachments are a strange hodgepodge of a gun that can't really decide what it wants to do. Do you want to go with the Advanced Laser, or the 6x Scope? Versus it's cheaper alternatives, it doesn't tend to excel at close, medium or long range. Go with the Orion, Pulsar LSW or the Ursa. Hopefully the Polaris and Flare get revamped when they do the LMG Pass.
I stated my definition of accurate. It has the least overall recoil over time, making it easiest to put rounds on target, and it has very close to best-in-class CoF characteristics. I say overall recoil because as long as the randomness of horizontal recoil falls within a certain threshold of controllability, accuracy really then becomes a question of overall recoil, and vertical recoil enters into consideration. Marginal reductions in horizontal recoil don't really justify increases in vertical recoil of 33% or 50%, in my opinion. I guess horizontal recoil is your issue, since you're talking about predictability? I don't think it has anything close to extreme horizontal recoil. I also don't believe the jump from 0.1875, which you claim is very accurate on the Ursa, to 0.2 on the Polaris makes something horribly unpredictable. That's about a 6% increase in recoil per shot, and about a 20% overall increase in horizontal recoil over the course of a kill. In exchange, you have significantly less vertical recoil to deal with. If you're talking about the recoil angle, the arc is 3 degrees. It's a fairly small amount of variation. The Pulsar's only edge over the Polaris is a slightly higher RoF and faster reload. By every other measure, it is equal or worse. Larger moving hipfire CoF. Larger moving ADS CoF. Smaller magazine. Slower projectile. It also has significantly worse recoil characteristics because of a combination of higher RoF, higher first-shot multiplier, lack of a compensator, and a 10 degree recoil arc instead of 3. The last bit actually makes it far less predictable. And I'm not really sure why you don't like its accessories. You have two very good sets you can use which make it solid in one of two roles. You can make it a close-range hipfire weapon, using the adv. laser sight and soft-point ammo. It's CoF for hipfire is 2.5/3.25, which is very good (2.5/3 is the best any LMG offers, for the record). Of the VS LMG's, only the SVA-88 has better hipfire accuracy, and it has far more vertical recoil and no advanced laser sight. The Polaris actually ends up as the most accurate VS LMG for hipfire. Many people would argue accuracy is irrelevant for hipfire weapons, but it's true nonetheless. You can also build it for long-range engagements, which is where its strength lies, using the scope of your choice, a compensator, and a foregrip. You don't really need HVA here, so I don't miss the lack of it. I honestly don't even use HVA on any of my long-range weapons. HVA adds a noticeable amount of recoil, especially at the ranges where it is supposedly useful, and I find 625 is sufficient speed for almost any infantry engagement. The only weaknesses for the Polaris are lower TTK due to 652 RoF, slow reload time, and a 0.5 ADS move. Its niche is accuracy, and it fills that niche very well at any range. If that extra accuracy lets you hit with even one extra round that the Orion, Pulsar, or SVA-88 would have missed, then your TTK in that scenario is actually lower with it. So it's not really a bad trade-off once you hit the ranges where you begin to miss some of your rounds.
I haven't really used the polaris, but its stats aren't meaningfully better than the LSW (or any other vanu lmg) from the standpoint of long range combat. It has a lower first shot multiplier than the LSW but other than that its stats aren't particularly favorable (and seem to be straight inferior to the SVA-88 or the ursa in terms of long-range.) I'm not sure what you mean by recoil over time; it has the same recoil decrease and cof bloom as the LSW.
How does the Flare fare? I'm gonna pick up a longer range option than the Orion, and the Flare and Pulsar LSW are within certs reach (even the SVA-88, but it is twice the price of the Flare). The Flare has Soft Point ammo doesn't it? that would help it on the short-midranges. But the Pulsar LSW being a good all-rounder with budget cert options sounds good too.
Save your Flare money and wait to buy the Ursa. It's well worth it. -The Flare doesn't have a unique role of it's own. -The Ursa is as close as Vanu can get to the TMG-50.
But the dude asked for a decent CQC alternative for his Orion. The Polaris is terribly accurate indeed and if the Advanced Foregrip one can attach to it in the VR was available ingame it would be the only thing I would ever use, but for now it seems people generally agree that the Polaris comes in 5th, maybe 4th, when it comes to primarily CQC.
If you want something which is strong in mid ranges, and average in long ranges, then the Flare is decent weapon. In comparison to an Orion it falls a little short in CQC. I see soft point ammo as pointless for the Flare and makes it worse in CQC. With a weapon which already has a slow rate of fire, you do not want to cripple the weapon even more by reducing projectile speed to gain a few more dps on each bullet which already has high damage for an LMG.
Soft Point Ammo is often maligned unfairly IMO. It lowers projectile speed, but the amount it does is not very great and in CQC to Medium ranges it's unnoticeable; the speed it slows down to is still much higher than the SMG projectile speed, almost double and they don't suffer in CQC. With a low fire-rate, the extra bullet needed to kill is more time added to kill, so in some ways it's more useful for low ROF weapons. The Ursa (mentioned earlier) seems like the best ranged option, but I am more looking for an all-rounder / medium distance.
Thats just a blantant lie. I tried both aswell, and the difference is minimal, stop trying to justify your 1k certs down the drain. There is no difference, and I even prefer the flare more, seeing it has the higher rof making it a bit more usefull than the ursa at cqc and medium. But again, the rof is still minimal. And you say if you look at the stats only, what do you think this game is based upon, what people like you think or how they really react according to their stats? Period.
Recoil over time isn't relevant, though, since the weapons aren't dealing damage over time, they're doing it in discrete steps. If one bullet has the same deviation from the last, it doesn't matter how close or far apart in time those bullets come, unless it starts coming so far apart that the gap gets significantly over the ~150ms threshold of human reaction times, so that it can be manually compensated. That's down there at shotgun level ROF. Also, remember that horizontal recoil is effectively the radius of the circle of your shot grouping (okay, it's one radius of an ellipse with vertical recoil being the other, but for the sake of simplicity...). Because pie are squared, a 6.6% increase in radius is a 13.6% increase in the area your shot pattern covers. A little horizontal recoil goes a very long way; it's pretty much the primary stat for an automatic weapon's effectiveness at range since it's usually the largest component of total COF. That's the major reason why the CARV is so bad at range and the Gauss SAW is so good at it; they're at opposite sides of the horizontal recoil variance. Vertical recoil is a lot less significant since it has either no variability (for 'straight up' weapons) or at least relatively little variability (angled recoil weapons) and so it can be manually compensated regardless of ROF. You can just do the same thing for all shots at all time without first needing to gauge the degree (or direction!) of randomness. Your targets are also vertically oriented, so that axis is more tolerant of error.
What's the lie exactly? That the Ursa does better at range and is comparable in CQC? 'Trying' them is a little different than buying them both, certing them out and then using them to kill hundreds of people. I currently have more kills with the Flare than I do with the Ursa, I've just found that the Ursa handles itself a lot better than the Flare does out past 40m. It's cute that the Flare has a 3-shot burst, and maybe if you (were the only person) to like burst Carbines then maybe that would make sense, but otherwise it just doesn't have anything that makes it stand out in CQC, at Medium or Long range that the Ursa (or Pulsar LSW) can't do and do better, except maybe Soft Point ammo. I had more certs than I know what to do with, and that was before the refund debacle, so I'm not trying to 'justify' any certs 'down the drain'. The Ursa was an excellent purchase and I'm so happy to have finally found a Vanu LMG that was on par with the TMG-50. It seems like you're happy with the Flare.. so congrats on that I guess, but I think you'd be happier with the Ursa for anything past 40m, and happier with anything but the Flare under 40m. Again, I hope they fix the Flare and the Polaris when they do the LMG pass. The Ursa is in the same league as the SAW and TMG-50. I know it's a stretch trying to include the SAW in any group, but they all fare pretty well at Medium to Long range, and if it's a fair fight vs the SAW, then the Ursa always wins for me. .
the ursa is a straight upgrade from the flare from the standpoint of long range combat; this isn't even arguable, all the relevant stats are right in the spreadsheet. Whether a fairly marginal upgrade is worth the 750 cert difference is up to you. Neither the flare or the ursa are really in the same class as the SAW or the tmg-50 though; the horizontal spread on the vanu guns is a bit obnoxious, and the damage falloff really hurts them.
2OP: Try Lasher with laser sight, its certainly differs from other lmg's. For CQC use hipfire and strafe\jump left\right or run in small circles. Gets the added bonus of eliminating the need to pull out the rocket launcher to kill enemy Maxes, also good in laggy battles, due to splash.
It still has the worst horizontal recoil of any 167 damage weapon (except the Flare... ) but yeah, at least it won't be getting double-whammied anymore.
I think the SVA88 jumps around like a bunny. I have unlocked most weapons inclusing the LSW which is awesome. I recently switched to the Ursa and with the attachments it is amazing. I know it's slow but it just moves vertically with no real sway and it stays on target at medium ranges much easier for me. Test it out in the VR with HVA, Compensator and Foregrip.
I think for me it's the recoil angle min/max. That is why I prefer the Pulsar and even more so the Ursa.
This actually means that the 143 damage weapons will gain the most for ranged combat. Even less reason to consider the Flare/Ursa at all now.
Actually no. People use the Flare and Ursa because they like hitting for 167. And just because bullet damage doesn't degrade, doesn't mean that that's somehow going to miraculously turn Vanu LMGs into long range monsters. They're still going to have the same problem hitting their targets at medium and long range that they do now, and the ranges where you start to see damage dropoff are so far out there that people will still be sticking with the Ursa to actually get those bullets on target.
