User blog:Undead.exe/Harbinger Firerate and DPS

Introduction

So apparently, anyone who's ever owned the RABS-II Harbinger will tell you that the 1.43 firerate shown in the store and stats pages doesn't actually reflect its true firerate when you actually charge it up and let it fire. If you've actually seen a Harbinger user though, you'll also notice that no-one ever fires it in an absolutely constant stream -- they'll fire four bursts, and then pause for a split second before letting out their next volley of four. This makes things just a bit confusing with trying to work out its "effective" firerate.

So, I decided to buy one (temporarily) and run a few tests to try and pinpoint an average DPS number for this thing when its being used at full steam...

Oddities

A couple of weird things about this weapon's firing mechanism:

• Holding down the right stick causes two bars to fill up (one underneath the Harbinger in the weapon changer, and one circular bar that's actually your crosshairs). Releasing the right stick while the bar is more than 3/4 full will cause the Harbinger to fire 4 shots

• You can actually charge the Harbinger faster than you can fire it -- and attempting to fire a second volley while the first one's going will actually interrupt and cancel the first one, so you need to be listening to the firing sounds moreso than looking at the charge bar(s).

• As hinted in the intro, there will always be a pause between volleys -- this can't be avoided, and trying to release the right stick too fast to cut down on the lag will actually cut off your 4th shot from your first volley. You're actually safer lagging a little between volleys rather than rushing and losing a shot.
• The power of each shot actually increases depending on how long you charge the Harbinger for, which creates further issues with calculating an actual DPS figure.

Testing

First off, you need to catch a stable rhythm for the Harbinger's shots and/or volleys. The way I interpreted it personally gave me the following:

1 2 3 4 - - 1 2 3 4 - - 1 2 3 4 - - . . .

To put it another way: for every four shots I fired, there were two resting beats before my next volley of four came out. The underlined numbers are where I've interpreted the on-beats.

The next thing you need to do once you've grasped the rhythm is to replicate it on a metronome. An online site like this one probably works best, since you can manually type the rhythm or tap it out to get a number.

Tapping on only the on-beats, I wound up with 72 bpm, which meant one beat was played for every 3 shots/rests. Tripling it gave me 216 bpm, which is the speed of the Harbinger during its volleys when expressed in minutes. Dividing 216 by 60 gave me 3.6 shots per second.

However, 3.6 shots per second is before I've accounted for the resting period. Multiplying that figure by 2/3, I ended up with an average of 2.4 shots per second.

Summarised Estimates

(Note: refer here for the tests used to obtain the estimated damage increase when the Harbinger is fully charged)

At its fastest during the volleys:

• Firerate: 3.6

• DPS at Lv 8: 6174 (using figure given in Customize screen)

• • Estimated DPS after applying estimated full-charge multiplier: 11113

Average when consistently firing 4 volleys back-to-back:

• Firerate: 2.4

• DPS at Lv 8: 4116 (using figure given in Customize screen)

• • Estimated DPS after applying estimated full-charge multiplier: 7409