Talk:GEKKO XX/@comment-26476084-20150615123834

I see the detailed discussion and calculations below about the damage the Gekko does. This is part of the problem, no one really knows! A variable not even mentioned below is distance. The weapon description mentions that.

There are only two ways to know how much damage it's doing: a. as a target observing your hp when being hit b. as the shooter observing the targets health bar when you are hitting him

This is unsatisfactory, obviously.

As the target, I try to gauge distance and the level of the Gekkos (by color) and the number of them being fired at me. Obviously, four red ones at closer range will make my HP tumble fairly quickly. One green one from 800m doesn't do much, it can be ignored. The area/variables in between are wide! I can't learn much.

As the shooter (I have 4 x level 9 Gekkos), I've learned it's best to use the entire 5 second burst on one target. The temptation to keep letting it do the little one second bursts is big, but it's better to let it go for a full recharge. I think the cumulative heat, and thus damage, builds up during a longer five second burst. In the five second burst, the target health bar goes down fastest in the final two seconds. The higher heat level accelerates the damage.

Like I said below, this needs to be used as a support weapon. Five seconds of sustained fire from 2 x Punisher-T's, for example, will wreck my Patton. Whereas my five seconds of sustained 4 x Gekko's will not do the same to an enemy mech.

One random piece of data from a game I just played. A Boa was in the open about 500m from me. He was set up for close range (Thunder and Orkan) so no threat to me. One sustained 5 second burst removed perhaps 33% of his HP. I do not know what level he was, though, so I am not sure about the points. The second sustained burst took the next third but then some other blue team players started firing on him and he was destroyed. This happens as lot as a Gekko user - you rip up a lot of enemy HP but because other weapons can do more damage in a shorter period of time and have longer firing periods between reloads, "your" kills get finished off by someone else.

My most expensive mech in terms of gold is this Patton with four Gekkos and, sadly, it's the one I use the least.