[2023] Accatran MK2 Recon Lasgun

Hello! I work on the combat team, and can hopefully answer this, or at least shine some lights on it.

When we (as in the combat team) set up weapons we usually go by the models of them. Bigger or heavier looking ranged weapons tend to get tweaked towards the low RoF/high damage spectrum, while smaller and ligher looking ones go the other way.
That there’s been a pattern of blue-ish weapons being fast and light while orange-ish ones being slow and heavy (and the green-ish being a middle ground) is actually a pure coincidence from the balancing point of view.

For the damage (and fire rate and therefore total damage output), it will of course depend on how the stats are rolled, so I’m going to base this on all stats being set to 50%. And with that baseline the Mk VId will deal less damage per shot than the Mk II.
But when including other things like the firerate being about 50% faster, similar spread as the Mk II while aiming, and being more mobile in general, the Mk VId might very well be overshadowing the Mk II by too much.
In short, I’ll poke a designer on my team about this for potential tweakage of damage or other settings, as I’m just a lowly programmer.

All three Accatran Recon lasguns should be available for both the Sharpshooter and Psykinetic, so if you only have one of the marks available for either of those (when fully levelled up) I’d recommend you to log it as a separate bug.

I agree with that reasoning, and looking at the code there aren’t a lot of differences between the infantry autogun marks.
It might have been any number of reasons, such as the visual components being updated after the tweaks were in place, or an oversight, or deliberate design.

I could argue that autopistol (as our version is more of a 40k SMG than a pistol) fills the role of a nimble autoX type of weapon. But that would veer into a design and lore discussion, and while I’d love to do the latter I don’t feel that I can give a good enough design answer. And I don’t want to give the impression of promising anything or raise any false hopes/spread false information by saying it should be changed, as it’s ultimately up to the designers. I can say that I’ll give them a heads up about this though.

Lots of words for saying “I don’t know”. But I hope it’s somewhat useful anyway.

As the good Commissar says, the Mk VIIa recon lasgun will be the best at punching through unyielding, infested and carapace armour. It will also stagger those armour types more. The Mk II is similar, but a bit worse owing to the higher fire rate. Then the Mk VId has the “worst” (of the three) armour penetration capabilities, but a lot higher fire rate. But as mentioned above the high fire rate can make it outclass the Mk II in pure damage.
The lower armour penetration capabilities does mean that it will benefit more from brittleness applied to enemies and rending applied to the weapon than the other two marks. Leading to potentially even more outclassing.

I did look a bit closer into the actual tweak values at near/far range, and it looks like there is some discrepancies between the Mk II and Mk VId there. Again I won’t promise anything, but the designers knows about it at least.