4Game

If you know… you probably don't need an explanation.
If you don't… well I will do my best.

Shock Cannons are a human tech unlock that take exorbitant ampunts of engineering materials to unlock. For all the effort you will put into getting your grubby stick grabbers on them you will probably be graced with two things:

1. Some of the highest dps hard points in the game.
2. A desire for the Shock Cannons to get some tweaks…

Now before you light me up let me explain my thoughts.

The Shock Cannons are fun to use, they fit between the full Cannons, and multicannons as functionality is concerned. But they have some psuedo engineering by default that imo hurts the functionality of the guns.

The hardpoints in question are semi auto, and feed from a constantly reloading magazine. You can fire faster than the magazine replenishes and thus need a full reload that breaks up firing salvos. Not necessarily a bad thing but it isn't necessary to have these guns have the autoloader engineering in the first place (personally I would prefer a high cap mod)

The Shock Cannons also seem to suffer from an ammo pool that is fairly small. I understand that there is some balancing concerns with damage output, but the guns already put out an obscene amount of heat for a kinetic weapon. If you fully load out a ship with nothing but shock cannons and head to a has rez you will be out of ammo before you have killed your 5th Anaconda…. I am not a new player to Elite, and by no means do I not understand how to synthesize ammo… but it is effort and mats I WOULDN'T have to spend using alternate weapon loadouts. A multicannon has an ammo pool and damage output that makes it far better for run of the mill bounty hunting.

I honestly don't mind the shock cannons having some rapid fire… spread… but it does seem to be a bit excessive on the fixed mounts. (If you play fps games I am accustomed to dmr type gameplay)

I am not a pvp player so if you want (or have) input on Shock Cannons please discuss below.

Tldr: shock cannons could use some love IMO they are a sweet piece to put on your ship and I hope in the future Frontier will grace us with a rework. (And potentially the ability to tweak it ourselves)