Quick damage comparison of automatic rifles vs a suit with 500/500 HP.

Duvolle Assault rifle 125/90

33.99 damage per shot
800 RPM
60 = 2039.4 Damage per clip

0.88 TTK Shields
1.22 TTK Armor
2.11 TTK

Kaalakiota Rail rifle 90/125

51.70
461.54
42 = 2171.4 DPC

1.40 TTKS
1.00 TTKA
Total time to kill 2.4

Ishukone Assault rail rifle 90/125

40
600
42 = 1680

1.38 TTKS
1.00 TTKA
Total time to kill 2.38

Six kin combat rifle 85 (95)/130 (125)

21
1200
68 = 1428 DPC

1.25 TTKS
0.95 TTA

Total time to kill 2.2

1.40 TTKS
0.91 TTKA
Total time to kill 2.31 (after fix)

Carthum assault scrambler 80/135

35.75
705.88
72 = 2574
51 (with OH) = 1823.5

1.49 TTKA
0.88 TTKS

Total time to kill 2.37

From what I can see is that the Duvolle has the best time to kill by a lot, while the rail rifle has the worst. This in theory is balanced.

Surprisingly the Assault scrambler should have a better time to kill than a rail rifle, although slight and the time to kill for shields on a scrambler rifle should be equal to that of a duvolle or very close. Another thing I found surprising is that the rail rifles both have an equal time to kill vs armor even though the Assault variant has a higher DPS figure. Lastly I find it very interesting that the AR and aSCR, the two most unused weapons, happen to be shield killers.

Aside from that my question is why does the Assault scrambler, and Assault rifle suck so much? And why are the rail rifle and combar rifles much better than both of these regardless of TTK?

I believe the reason we are having problems with some rifles, and some sidearms, regardless of DPS. Is that some weapons are able to apply their damage better than others it seems pretty straight forward reading it but if you give it a little deeper thought it wont be so obvious.

Regardless of how the weapons are buffed (AR and aSCR) they are still going to be terrible, unless massively buffed, due to their damage application being bad. For example the assault rail rifle and combat rifle have much better dispersion and hipfire than the AR, I bet if you switches the AR's hipfire and dispersion stats with the RR or CR it would become much better. The aSCR has a lot of side and a little bit of upward kick, at long ranges it misses very often and the kick is very unmanigable, and the damage profile makes it hard to use vs dual tanked shield suits.

Another problem is that most shield suit use some form of plating and due to the high HP of plates it creates a larger buffer, which severely slows down how shield weapons apply their damage, while the low shield HP of armor suits (even while dual tanked) means that after shields are gone armor weapons can apply their damage indefinitely; the way proficiency skills work further adds to this problem.


Conclusion (tl;dr):

I know believe that before buffing these two weapons via buffing ROF and damage etc, the damage application of all rifles should be looked at first i.e kick, hip fire accuracy, and dispersion. Hybrid tanking be resolved, and proficiency skills be reworked. After all this I highly believe all weapons should fall into place without having to touch their damage or rof.