[Guide] T7-MCG mechanics and why it shouldn't be used

From: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...ZOSWNaanFqSUVxLWc&f=true&noheader=true&gid=68

The initial refire rate is 225 and it increases to 800 over 1 second.

Converting into rate per second: The initial refire rate is 3.75 and increases to 13.33

Using rudimentary knowledge from physics along with the assumption that the rate of change is constant (correct me if I'm wrong), this is analogous to the problem of the distance traveled with an initial velocity (v) and some constant acceleration (a) with a known termination time for the acceleration.

In equation form this is: integral from 0 to t of (v+at) dt which yields vt + (1/2)a(t^(2))

Thus the number of bullets fired after some time T is vT + (1/2)a(T^(2)) +1 : 1

To obtain the time required to take down the standard 1000 health (7 bullets) goon merely require solving (1) for t:

vT + (1/2)a(T^(2)) = 6 => vT+(1/2)a(T^(2))-6 = 0

Using the standard positive solution for the quadratic equation

(-v+ sqrt(v^(2)+12a))/a

Plugging in the values yields about: .708

That isn't a small TTK. That is a monstrous TTK in this game.

An MSW-R has a TTK of .48 seconds and most CQC weapons fall within .05 seconds of that. Heck, ALL LMGS have lower TTKs than that.

"What about the case when I have the highest effective health possible?"

You need 16 bullets to deal 2272 damage (resist shield + nanoweave).

For an NC6, it requires 1.32 seconds to break this number. For an Orion, merely 1.2 seconds...

So, how many rounds will you have pumped out by the 1.32 second mark? 17!

So you will beat an NC6 and anything with less DPS.

How many rounds will you have pumped out by the 1.2 second mark? 15... so you would lose to an Orion and everything with a greater or equal DPS, which is pretty much all CQC oriented weapons in the game.

Not to mention that the accuracy is awful and far worse than the other CQC weapons when fired from the hip. This weapon has no niche. You are better off using an MSW-R in EVERY situation, not to mention that the crippling spool up time makes it awful at range where you are forced to burst fire.



So, unless I made some mistakes above, dear developers, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE buff this weapon. It should at least match an MSW-R with the necessary shield/health requirements.

TLDR: Don't buy this weapon. It is worse in every situation to an MSW-R, even under the most favorable conditions: I showed above that, even with the most possible health you can achieve in the game, you will still have worse average DPS.

Needed to add after "worse average DPS", "at the time where your health will have expired", but of course no more edits left...

I need to also point out that headshots exacerbate the situation, i.e. if the opponent can get head shots, then you will die more quickly, yet still be converging to a higher DPS at the same rate.

If the acceleration isn't linear it doesn't matter anyway, since it reaches its maximum RoF at the 1 second mark which is the time before you will expire in health to most weapons (assuming maximum effective health).

I also didn't quantify the accuracy statement. It has worse accuracy than the MSW-R as well; the hip-fire accuracy is 2.75 vs. the 2.5 and it doesn't have the option to equip the advance laser sight.

The CoF bloom per shot is also equivalent to that of the MSW-R.

It also doesn't matter if the acceleration is linear, since it is integrable so Fubini's theorem can be used to rearrange the order of integration to achieve the same quantity.

I think you're underselling how remarkably accurate it can be at headshotting, although I admit that I only use it in towers where I can prespin the gun by shooting the spawn shield and then move through it to mow someone down.

The MCG has always been paradoxically better as a ranged weapon due to the surprisingly tight initial COF in ADS. This really makes no sense given the nature of the weapon, but there you go. Adding spin-up time basically ruined the one thing the gun was good at, snap-bursting headshot kills at 50m+.

No, it never has been.

The MSW-R has the same initial CoF ADS.

I am also now uncertain about the spool up time being 1 second or .50 seconds... if anybody could clarify that for me, it would be awesome, although I would have to change all of my calculations.

In fact, with a .50 second spool up it actually works....

I really hate how they hide this **** from you.

The MCG was better than the MSW-R before then. If you had actually ever used it, you'd know this. It was capable of putting 6-8 rounds on a pinprick at any range due to its recoil characteristics (or relative lack thereof). Look at the pre-GU11 stats and you'll see what changed: It was given significant horizontal recoil, a high FSRM (was initially 1x), had better hip accuracy, higher minimum damage, and the spin-up shots didn't "waste" COF.

The MSW-R/CARV are better at ranged bursting now, because the MCG's ROF is too low to kill someone before they can react. But that wasn't always the case. The "buff" basically made the gun worse at the only thing it had over its competitors. It was actually possible to snipe effectively with it before GU11.

I've been using it since you could bypass the spin. Not that it matters. The only things that matter are the current parameters of the weapon.

It seems like I don't reach maximum RoF until well after 10 bullets, so it seems like the situation might even be worse than shown.

If they decreased the spool up time slightly it would remedy the problem.

I think if nothing else the COF should not start blooming until after it reaches maximum ROF. It's absurd that you get to "waste" your effective COF, especially when it isn't very good on the move to begin with. Theoretically a Laser Sight could help with this when hipfiring, but it seems better generally to ADS whenever possible with it so that doesn't help there. Maybe if it had an ALS instead?

It still wouldn't make it any better a weapon, because by the time you reach the maximum RoF you are dead with anything less than nanoweave and resist. If you wanted to relegate it to range it would still be outdone by weapons you could burst with, like the TMG.

Burst and spin up are not compatible concepts.

I also used the wrong value for acceleration. It should have been 9.583 (I used 13.33)... which makes things even worse. Oh well, no more edits left for that gigantic post.

My point stands and is even more cogent than before, because I was being more than generous by using a greater acceleration.

At 1.3 seconds it's actually only at 13 rounds fired or so..

That is somewhat assuming perfect conditions though. All weapons miss, although honestly it's hard to argue the CARV/MSW-R will miss less than the MCG (and average accuracy stats bear this out).

However, you are overlooking something: You assume that you have to spin up for each kill. The one and possibly only place where the MCG does have a significant advantage is when you are going to engage multiple targets and can kill one before anyone is able to notice and exploit your spin-up time (i.e. an ambush). After the first kill, all subsequent kills can be made without spinning up. This is admittedly a niche use; the one time I found it actually valuable was hiding behind a box in an Amp Station building near the horizontals. Four VS ran past me, I spun up and killed one as he was turning, and then at max ROF I hit Resist Shield and promptly annihilated the other three. But that only worked because they didn't notice me, and the MCG is a rather poor ambush weapon compared to something like a pump-action or SMG that does frontloaded burst damage.

Still, it's something the MSW-R couldn't do... although probably the CARV still could've.

You're a heavy. Sneaking up on people is possible, but soon as you kill somebody with that annoying *** vulcan gun noise, the entire room sees you on the map and is aware of your presence.

You could take out an army of people with a pistol and your knife if you ambush them.

A CARV could do what you described quite easily, like you said, or even a Rhino, or even a CARV-S...

Not necessarily. You can only live so long under fire. Assume the first kill is effectively free and most everyone else only notices your presence when they hear the fully spun-up sound. At that point you will potentially be killing the other targets faster than with the CARV (although depending on how well you can aim and stagger bursts in ADS, the CARV may hold an edge even so), and definitely faster than the Rhino and CARV-S (which have a significant RPM disadvantage next to a spun-up MCG), and eons faster than pistol + knife, especially if your pistol is unsilenced (and as a HA, why wouldn't it be?).

However that's an extremely narrow point to hold an advantage and it fails if you're caught before the spin-up finishes. But in theory it is a niche that is not entirely trampled on by other TR LMGs. The problem is that it doesn't have much of a niche in general, whereas the other HA options do: the Jackhammer is one of the most reliable CQC options available to NC HA and the best all-rounder shotgun, and the Lasher has a wholly unique indirect-fire and suppression niche that no other HA weapon can match at all. It'd be nice if the MCG had similar utility, but it's hard to imagine what that could be. TR doesn't need better CQC options when they have the MSW-R and the CARV, and making a chaingun a potent ranged weapon (as it once was) is highly counterintuitive.

It doesn't have to be a CQC option per se, but a sustained damage option with a specific setup .... well.. resist shield and nanoweave, because there is no other setup in this game with its insanely low TTK.

As I showed in my original post, not even .4 seconds after going beyond 800 RPM (WITH THE ACCELERATION FROM 225 to 800!) will you match the default LMGs in sustained damage. At which point your CoF is so insanely large, that unless you're less than 10 meters away you have a snowballs chance in hell of hitting them.

If they made it so that you are the alpha HA with resist and nanoweave vs. a non-CQC weapon, then it would make a lot of sense, but that simply isn't the case. You're always better off using a different weapon, since you can't achieve an average DPS comparable to that of any of the LMG options until you're past the TTK it would have taken the opponent to kill you, your friend, your friends dog and the brady bunch.

The spin up time isn't worth the RPM. The RPM is 50 above the Carv which also has 100 rounds.

Can the T9 equip extended mags bringing it up to 200? That's the way the minigun should be used, you need to rock those 200 rounds so you can just put down a non stop wall of lead.

Did you not read the gigantic wall of stuff I posted? Most things will kill you will before you get to your 16th round, assuming you have the best spec possible for survivability.

Like Kyouki said, the massive spin up time is NOT worth the marginal 50 RPM that you achieve a second later when you're already full of bullet holes.

This weapon was not made for this game in this form. In PS1 this made sense. In PS2 where the TTK is but a fraction, it makes almost none.

There are almost 0 situations where you need 200 rounds. 100 rounds is OTT in this game alone imo.

Yeah chaingun are complete garbage. Give up using it after getting auraxium, which was real pain in the *** compared to T9 and MSWR. Dont get it why this gun must have a spin up time. I mean we already have guns beyond 800 rpm, and no one call them OP. And we have the Jackhammer which pretty much kills you instantly at 10-15 meters, and Lasher which act like normal LMG with bonus splash damage. Why the hell mcg must be so bad at any distance, i have no idea.

Actually when you compared Gauss saw and T9 Carv killing potential. You think that extra 50 rounds would be fair addition. Yeah SAW have long reload time, sure. But you can kill SO MANY guys before it, and most important, your time to empty your mag is 4 sec longer, than CARV.

I think what you guys are missing is that the chaingun is not a CQC weapon.... it's a suppression weapon. you can definately kill people better with just about anything else, hell I switch to the pistol if it even looks like I'm gunna be in CQC. but at 30-150 metres the MCG can keep whole squads pinned.

so you can have your other LMGs and whatnot do their own jobs and you can use the MCG for what it's meant to be used for. same reason I dont snipe people with my SMG.

Yeah right. Suppression my ***. I bet you dont even try it out for yourself. First of all there is no such thing in this game. Second - if you try to scare of more than one guy, you get yourself killed in a few seconds. That amount of tracers+such a wide spread of bullets = you hit nothing, everyone saw your position. If you try to burst this weapon, you start to get hits but the firerate is so low, what my T9 CARV laughs in the MCG face, while being more effective in any way. Hell, even a TMG50, or A PISTOL would be much effective, than this abomination.
If you need to pin some one down, you use HE round, nades, UBGL, pods, fury. Not bullets, or just A LOT of bullets, but in that case you can use any weapon you want,and a MCG still be the worst choice possible.
It would be nice to use this weapon, but im sorry you cant. When i pick a gun, i want it to be effective. I'm not going to love weapon if it just makes you look cool, and sound all bad ***. Nope.

https://players.planetside2.com/#!/5428013610412012241/weapons

on the contrary, within an hour of unlocking my MCG it ended up as my second best weapon, note my accuracy with MCG and CARV, I use them to suppress the enemy, and anyone dumb enough to run out into the bullet rain gets shredded. also I run with a squad most of the time, so while i'm suppressing my squad is flanking and killing the enemy.

explosives are for killing people with, not scaring them. when I HE you only know it because of the death stat screen. but when I MCG, you hear it, feel it and even in some cases taste it >