My apologies to those who have answered this many times. I've been away for the game for a few months, and am coming back but am having trouble remember why 2 or 3 DHCs are better than 2 or 3 DCs.

I assume it has something to do with shared cooldowns, but also noticed that the DCs only have -10 to weapon power setting when firing, where as DHCs have -12. I assumed that less power drain is better, and with supposedly same DPS (and perhaps twice the procs), DCs would outperform DHCs. However, the DPS calculator suggests otherwise, to the tune of almost 10% higher DPS for a 3 DHC setup vs 3 DC.

Can someone help me out here?

Also, while I'm playing newb, if anyone has some advice for BO abilities and loadout for my Defiant tactical retrofit, I'm all ears.

Thanks everyone in advance, and again, my apologies for asking what I'm sure has been answered many times (and what I swear I once knew).

The reason that dual heavy cannons are better than dual cannons is that while they both have the same cooldown, the dual heavy cannons have less of an impact on your weapons power, as well as the fact they hit significantly heavier per volley.

I appreciate the response, Destraa. I'm still not sure I fully understand, though; I'm sorry to say I'm a bit of a numbers guy, and so may need to see the math to "get it".

Why do you say DHCs have less impact on weapon power? They're listed as draining 12 weapon power, whereas DCs train 10. I would think, based on this info, that DHCs have more impact on weapon power, not less.

Hitting more per volley is irrelevant if they hit less frequently; DHCs and DCs have the same DPS, so I'm not sure I see why hitting more per hit is helpful.

Forget all the math, it's pretty widely known that DHCs hit much harder than regular DCs... to the point that regular DCs are pretty much useless. It's all to do with the way DPS works in battle vs the way it is calculated when it appears on an item description.

I can definitely see the common wisdom (no one seems to suggest DCs), but I will struggle to forget the math. Perhaps some testing is in order.

They draw more power, but not for the same amount of time. DCHs end up doing more damage despite higher drain because of the specifics of how firing cycles overlap between multiple weapons. If you look at the very basics of the situation, they *should* be doing less, but there's a lot of oddities in the whole system that aren't modeled as well as, say, WoW's combat system, so it's hard to put in words exactly how things interact in all cases.

DHCs fire less frequently. Thus, even though they take more power per shot, there's enough time between shots for your power to full regenerate.

Supposedly, this shouldn't be an issue as weapons are supposed to refund the energy used after their firing cycle, but in practice, this appears to not always be the case.

Also, DHCs hit harder, but less frequently, so that means if you get an enemy's shields down, they might only be down for a few seconds before they turn away from you, hit Emergency Power to Shields, or something else, and you'll get more damage in with DHCs in that short time frame than with DCs.

DHCs-Burst. They're like quantums (only the same cooldown as DCs apparently.) They get more damage in before shields go up. Great all around.
DCs- constant. They shoot constantly. they nag at shields to get them down. they do less damage in each shot, but the same amount of DPS.

IMO, they should be like photon and quantum torpedos to be more equal.

Short version: The in-game DPS figures don't take into account how the energy drain system works in practice (and I'm not entirely sure that even the Cryptic devs understand this). The DHCs are much more energy efficient because they spend a larger percentage of time in cool down where they aren't draining power. Weapon power also doesn't seem to drain instantaneously, and DHCs have more of their damage front loaded which means they inflict closer to full damage (energy hasn't had time to drain out yet).

For more detailed information see my guide linked below. If you want to see how different weapons perform together, it's easier just to use my Starship Weapons Calculator, which is fairly accurate based on the tests I ran to verify its results.

Long Version: Guide- Weapon Power and Multiple Weapon Damage Scaling

Easy Version: Starship Weapons Calculator

Charts:
Weapon Damage Scaling 35 Weapon Power
Weapon Damage Scaling 50 Weapon Power
Weapon Damage Scaling 75 Weapon Power
Weapon Damage Scaling 100 Weapon Power
Weapon Damage Scaling 125 Weapon Power

Thanks, all. This has been incredibly helpful. I really appreciate the info - DHCs it is.