Gat ammo: Heavy vs Everything else

[DJ Logicalia]

From what I can gather, Heavy ammo used to be all the rage in gatlings, but has fallen out of favor recently. Firstly, why and secondly, how does it stack up against greased and other ammo types that are typically used in the gat?

[Alistair MacBain]

Some patches ago gatling (and mortars) had much more range. ~600 compared to the current 450 the spread the gatling had was way to big to hit consistently on that range.
That lead to everyone just using heavy clip in gats to get the full range of the gun.
With the decreased range you dont hardly need heavy clip anymore as you will most likely hit most of your shots at the ranges the gat can start to shoot. That lead to people preferring greased rounds due to the higher rate of fire and bigger clipsize.
Heavy is still a viable option especially if you intend to snipe out guns with the gat or if youre flying gainst junkers with their low profile.
But its not a must have anymore.

[Omniraptor]

This is the part where I once again ask for gatling spread to be increased so multiple ammo types become viable again (heavy long range greased close). It would buff gunners and make them more common because gatlings are also very common.

Right now I wouldn't consider putting anything other than buff engineer on gatling, with increased spread I would think twice.

[sparklerfish]

Heavy clip for precision at the farthest extent of its range, or accuracy with hitting specific components.

Greased for highest DPS for quick armor stripping.

[Indreams]

I've seen people use burst rounds on a gat. Is that for sniping? (I'm assuming bigger AoE equates to more chance to hit a component). Or just for larger clip?

[sparklerfish]

I've seen people use burst rounds on a gat. Is that for sniping? (I'm assuming bigger AoE equates to more chance to hit a component). Or just for larger clip?

Bigger AoE?  Uh, gatling has 0 AoE.  0 x anything = 0.  I guess they're either using it for the bigger clip or are mistaken about what burst rounds do.

[Indreams]

Dunno, I saw a post about burst rounds increasing flame AoE, so I was hypothesizing if it did the same to gatling and carronade.

I'm a novice gunner and the only ammunitions I'm familiar with is heatsink, lesmok, greased, and heavy.

[sparklerfish]

Ah yeah, the flamer thing used to throw me off as well.  Flamethrower is a peculiar instance because it's a particle weapon (and the only particle weapon in the game).  Flamer doesn't have AoE per se, but the way it's coded, burst rounds make the particles bigger so they hit a larger area.  Gatling is raycast and burst does nothing in it.

[ramjamslam]

Originally heavy clip didn't come with a clip size reduction so there really was no downside to choosing heavy.

Gatling clip size was 60 and light flak was 4 with no arming time.  So gatling gunginers required a lot more skill to be accurate and flak gungineers had to hold every shot to make those 4 count.  The metamidion is quite different today.

[Sammy B. T.]

Back in mah day if you wanted to brawl you brought gatling with heavy clip and you brought light flak with heavy clip. But as others have said Gat had a much longer range back then as well as no ammo reduction. Some captains brought greased in those days but those were for the aggressive, especially wippersnappers using that weirdo light mortar.

Heavy still definitely has a place. Heavy lets you hit at the entire range of the gatling whereas greased already reduces range and does nothing for the gat jitter. Combine that with precision lesmok mortar you can gain a sweet spot of extra range on your other meta foes. I've seen many a tug of pyra won by the fact that one side had those extra 50 some meters of effective range.

Also situations where you have double gat (mobulas, some forms of junker and spires) heavy is fantastic as the imperative for the higher dps from greased isn't as important.