My view on the betelgeuse 54-A

I have just unlocked it and gotten around 50ish kills with it. Here is my thoughts.

Pros and Cons(Compare to the Orion)

Pros
-You dont have to reload. As long as you dont empty out the entire 40 rounds, you never have to enter the reload animation. This is actually quite useful as you can return to fights a lot quicker.
-Infinite Ammo. This might be useful in fights where you dont have easy access to engineers? For my playstyle, is not entirely all that useful.
Cons
-Small magazine capacity. You cannot clear rooms well with this gun. I had to change concussion grenade to AV as the Betelgeuse 54-A do not have enough mag capacity to effectively deal with maxes and to clear large amounts of enemies.
-You are forced to use the manual reload once you hit max heat.
-You have no access to rail attachments the Orion have.

The betelgeuse 54-A is an interesting weapon but I dont think as it stands currently, really fits into the HA. HA would not benefit from infinite ammo most of the times. As useful as you can quickly switch targets without having to reload with the betelgeuse, I feel I would pick a larger magazine capacity over it. Its not a horrible weapon, it just have a somewhat strange role as an LMG. Perhaps heat mechanic would be more useful on LA or medic?

I really don't like that you enter a reload animation when it overheats either. Just put a slightly longer delay in when it overheats, and then let it cool down again, none of this silly "Take out muh battery for 1 second, that'll cool it right away". And no, the heat mechanic isn't exactly useful on the carbine or the AR. At least with the orion you still have a fair amount of shots before it overheats, both the carbine and AR take a further hit to their magazine size, reducing the already low 30 rounds on a 143 damage weapon. There are some situation where the heat mechanic is useful, but I'd much rather have a solid 30 rounds over the situational usefulness.

Why do people keep citing "room clearing ability"? Your ability to kill everyone in a room is entirely dependant on how many of them have functioning brains.

Concussion grenade and adrenaline shield 5.

Yeah, at least the betelgeuse is still usable and have some good benefit?

The other guns I just dont see the point. You are probably better off using corvus for longer distances for AR and for CQC, I wouldnt rely on an underbarrel shotgun, better off running a serpent or vx6-7.

While I loved it before the August update (an Orion with 15 more rounds, foregrip (Stat was built in) and a compensator (ADS play style)), the changes really put this in a odd spot. With only 40 rounds and stock Orion stats its only real use over the Orion is when you play expecting to be away from the Engineers, and I really had to go out of my way to stay away from engineers to see how it worked. In a few situations where I had a second person push in on me while taking on someone else I had the weapon overheat on the bullets that killed the second target. This heat mechanic would work better on weapons ment for longer ranges (Shot then back into cover)but not on a weapon ment for suppression and close quarter combat with the possibility of multipe targets or a sudden unexpected hostile rushes in. If the heat limit is increased from 3.2 seconds to 4 seconds to overheat we would have a perfect 50 round mag like the Orion.

As for those saying the Pre-update Betelgeuse was an upgrade not a side grade worse Hip fire due to the compensator, and worse base CoF for both hip fire and ADS fire says your off the mark.

Also a little note the Betelgeuse still seems to have the slower equip time then it should. This is likely as that was built into the guns stats as its Foregrip stats were also built in.

Want something even more lame?

The Auraxian AR for TR is literally the base gun but with soft point. The end.
Nothing else, nothing special. They took away the special compensator and HVA and just slapped on stock SPA

I still think that the Darkstar is in the worst spot of the three, despite the recent buffs. As for the Betelgeuse, it seems to lack an identity along with the ammo, being neither good at close quarters or at range.

Darkstar is pretty much pointless at this time unless you hack. Not enough bullets and if there is more than 1 person you are dead. And the Betelgeuse is simply weird. The delay before it starts to cooldown is too long and its just worse in every way compared to before where it had 65 round mag size. Now its just a 35~bullet LMG with no other buffs given to it.

The main problem with this heat mechanic is it added another downside compared to what you had before. Yes, unlimited ammo isnt that great - I know there is a few places where it could be useful, but 9 out 10 times its just another downside with no upside given to the weapon otherwise. And this is because the average lfiespan in planetside isnt that long that ammo is a problem.

Pretty dissapointed and im gonna park my VS char until it gets looked at, which sadly in SOE terms prob means a years time.

Too bad most of times you'll have somebody wearing a anti-concussion implant and that ADRENALINE SHIELD was frakked up with the last patch and it's not working

Dunnow, I've been running around with Betelgeuse for the most part of the day and I kinda like it. It's definitely the weapon where the heat mechanic works better simply because YOU HAVE ENOUGH BULLETS to kill in 1vs1 fights before it overheats. You have to adapt your playstyle to the new weapon a bit but you can defenitely benefit from the "never have to reload again" feature. Ofc, you cant clear a room with it (but half a room? yea you can ).


Darkstar and Eclipse sadly are crappy weapons. I was playing with them and taking counts of the times I was happy to have them, and the times I felt I died or underperform BECAUSE of them. I got some +1 in the "good" column, but the +1 in the "bad" column are like x3 times.
They really need to fire more bullets before overheat. Or the heat needs to drop instantily when you are not firing.

Is there a delay before the cooldown kicks in?

Its not really "room clearing ability", but its the general idea. The strong point of LMGs are their bigger clip sizes, allowing the heavy to exploit his shield to the full, as he would have to reload, thus negating its effects.

http://www.twitch.tv/zethiann/c/5037189

Decent example of what the beetle handles like. It could have a tiny bit more clip size but its decent all right.

Having a cycler with spa is awesome. As far as the vanu heat guns, the devs seem to be using them to test out a new mechanic. I'm sure they're keeping an eye on their performance and will adjust them if necessary. In the meantime if you don't like em don't use em. You still have ALL your other guns to chose from. Just like I didn't use the Unity as it was a straight downgrade to me before the changes.

Yep, around 0.5 (maybe more) seconds before it starts to cool. Then you have to count the time it actually takes to cooldown. Right before overheat to zero heat, we are talking about probably a little more than 1 second.
If the weapon overheat, than the normal long-reload time of the weapon kick in.

Truth is, you can'r really burst-fire and expect to kill anything mid-long distance because you really dont' stop for 0.5 second when you usually burts-fire and if you start firing before the weapon has cooled down, you'll keep building up heat.
It's good for suppressing, not really for killing.

The burst firing might work better on a different gun, but Orion is really more CQC but still deadly up to mid range. It would probably work better on something like SVA-88 or LSW.

SOE breaking things? I am shocked. I suppose the underbarrel shotgun is completely unreliable?

I unlocked this last night and only got to use it for about 30mins so my experience with it is quite limited currently.

I did enjoy using the gun, and had no issues taking down enemies either in 1v1 or against multiples. As of yet, I have not overheated the gun enough to require a pause in fire, but that may depend on the types of battles I find myself in.

The only issue for me is that I am used to hitting the reload button fairly frequently out of habit, which triggers the reload animation and does absolutely nothing useful other than prevent you from firing. It would be nice to see reloading disabled.

I personally feel that the magazine size nerf is really necessary on the guns. The current weapons all have some of the lowest DPM in their class already, it doesn't need another 25-33 percent nerf in that reguard.

If they do decide to roll this out on more weapons, I hope they shoot to keep the same sustained DPS for our weapons.

Thanks for sharing!

As this is mostly about the "Heat" based ammo mechanic, what do you think about extending this to all Vanu small arms?
For Carbines an effective <30 clip capacity, around 20, would be even more of a problem than a roughly "40" size on this gun.

I would rather have existing guns as they are with normal magazines and quick reload instead of all getting switched to a new system, even if they buff/tweak it.