PlanetScience EP01 - Mythbusting The Baron + Flechette

Hey all,

I'm a long time lurker on the PS2 subreddit, and an avid player of Planetside (look me up, EmperorDorf on Connery), but decided to make a new reddit account as I am ready to start making a series of posts busting a lot of myths and meta talk that gets thrown around out here.

To start with, I've decided to tackle the meta surrounding the Baron G5. For those that haven't been around since the Arsenal update, the Baron G5 has become a lot more common due to the introduction of flechette ammo. With the Baron's longer range damage model mixed with the range-enhancing capability of flechette ammo, the combination seems like a no-brainer at first glance. Some are even saying the Baron should be nerfed..

On the surface the numbers seem to point to flechette being a buff across-the-board, but simple math always assumes 100% accuracy, and it's hard to quantify the randomness brought about by things like horizontal recoil, cone of fire bloom, and the distance to your target, among other things.

So I had a lot of time on my hands recently and decided to write a simulator to be able to answer these questions. I'll make a more detailed post about the inner workings of the simulator at a later date, but the short and skinny of it is, it takes into account almost all of the factors affecting weapon viability: Distance to target, recoil, cone of fire, stance, aim, target health, fire modes, attachments, first-shot recoil, reload speeds, chamber times, refire times, etc. etc. etc.

I spent about 60 hours coding this simulator for every little thing that had a number attached to it. Being a self-proclaimed excel wizard, 60 hours is a lot (and yes, it's all in excel, and not a single janky macro was used ;)).

Anyways, enough assurances. Let's get down to business - Is Baron+Flechette OP?

The short answer is no...like...hellllll no. Not at all. But don't believe me.. let's dig into the details.

So first off, I ran two simulations, one running Flechette, and the other not. Both simulations were firing from the hip of a Baron G5, and both were equipped with MPL. The distance to target was varied, from 1m out to 50m, and 100 kills were simulated for each distance. In total, 2600 kills were simulated at various ranges, and roughly 23,000 simulated shots were fired. Average TTK was calculated for each distance/loadout combination.

Here are the results

While hipfiring, the time to kill while using MPL and Flechette is reduced at range, just as you'd expect. Flechette is just straight better when hipfiring at a target that's 25-50m away.

But in just saying that... who the hell hipfires at targets 25-50m away? With a shotgun?? Like, yeah, your TTK went down by 20%, but your TTK to start with is just massive. 2.5 seconds to kill at 30 meters? An Emissary is better than that...

Ok lets run another test, but this time, let's look at ADS, since that's kinda this gun's 'specialty' right? And let's add a smart choke since MPL does nothing while ADSing. And just for fun, lets run slugs as well to see how that compares. And then lets put on a hipfire simulation alongside it, just to have some comparison to the simulation we just ran.

5200 kills and 46,800 bullets later..

Alright so Hipfire + MPL is clearly better at ranges less than 25m, and between 25 and 30 meters, it looks to be a tie between pretty much everything. [Edit: Everything but slugs is more or less tied out to a distance of 30m.] Everything out to 50m and beyond is dominated by slugs. Flechette doesn't even produce a noticeable difference over regular pellets. Surprised? Me too.

Ok but maybe we're just not aiming properly. This simulation was done aiming at the center of mass (body). Maybe we should aim at the head:

Another 5200 kills and 46,800 bullets later..

Damn man. Is Flechette useless?

Yeah man, Flechette is useless.

Unless you're hipfiring at targets 25-50 meters away.... Then it's good.

Yeah...

Myth: Busted

So where did this myth come from? Why were so many people claiming the combo was OP? This myth obviously didn't just come from nowhere. Maybe Flechette is good on other shotguns?

That and a lot more will be revealed in PlanetScience EP02, Shotgun Boogaloo.

Edit: This was my initial 2nd graph. but as LunaLucia pointed out, TTK at point blank ranges should've been equal between hipfire and ADSing. I looked into this, and a setting was changed on the ADS run which allowed the crosshair to recenter on target after each shot, whereas the hipfire test was firing shots as soon as possible. The simulation was re-run with the proper setting (shots as soon as possible), but the conclusion remains the same.