I have been loving the mod so far but I can’t seem to really justify the use of the Impulse Cannon as a weapon. I think this is primarily due to the inability to add modifiers to it, which makes the Thaumium Gauntlet almost always superior DPS-wise. This also applies to the void gauntlet, with the included warping and bonuses not nearly providing incentive to even craft or use it.

I usually run a Thaumium Caster’s Gauntlet with the following modifiers and focus:

Advanced power 5 Vitium bolt focus
Experience Modifier with Power augment
Impetus Modifier
Elemental Vitium Modifier with a cast speed Augment

All numbers were tested against Botania’s Guardian of Gaia Tier 2.

I can deal 16 damage to the guardian with my Flux focus per shot and you can fire a Bolt shot every second or so.

The impetus Cannon has no modifiers and three firing modes: Ray, Burst, and Railgun. I will be ignoring the ray modifier since it is inferior to the other two. A notable advantage is that the Cannon has infinite range and near instant speed, which is a situational positive but a positive trait regardless.

Burst first does around 5 or so damage per shot which bring this to around 15 per burst assuming all the shots hit. The cooldown is around 2 seconds or so between each burst. This is assuming you hit every shot though.

Railgun hits for 25 damage assuming you hit and can penetrate multiple mobs. The cooldown on this is around 5 seconds.

Rough damage calculation over the course of 20 seconds gives us the following:

Gauntlet focus: 16 damage x 20 times in 20 seconds = 320 damage total
Burst Fire: 15 damage x 10 times in 20 seconds = 150 damage total
Railgun: 25 damage x 4 times in 20 seconds = 100 damage total.

I am not sure how a specialized offensive tool such as the Impulse Cannon is outperformed by a generalist tool. I haven’t run the numbers but I’m pretty sure that the vanilla gauntlet is better damage wise with the right focuses. And this is not using the cloud focuses which melt pretty much everything.

I supposed you could make the argument that it is meant to be an auxiliary weapon rather than a weapon you always use (I tend to swap between gauntlet and railgun when using both). But I still feel like the Impulse Cannon is more of an a awesome yet impractical offensive despite being described as our ‘magnum opus’ in the lore entry.

Some suggestions to improve this would be to lower the cooldown of the Railgun shot and/or buff the burst shot damage. Being able to add modifiers such as an impetus cell for extra charge or gauntlet modifiers would expand its damage potential a bit more. You would need another slot to make up for the fact that you need to have a lens on it though.

Alternatively, if you were to make the lens a focus rather than an augment you could free up a third slot and I’d imagine that it would not be difficult to make it so that you can swap lenses on the fly with the hot key to change focuses. This could be made into a focus pouch upgrade if you wanted to.

Some lens suggestions off the top of my head are:

A semi-automatic shot that is between burst and railgun in damage and fire speed.

A charged shot that increase in Power when holding down the fire key (much like a bow)

A short range shotgun burst.

Otherwise, this is an excellent mod and if I didn’t know better I’d think it was made by Azanor himself. Keep up the good work!

I personally stand behind either allowing the further augmentation of the Impulse Cannon (say, having specialized modifiers that you can construct from the basic gauntlet ones), or having more powerful lenses for the Cannon.

If I were to have a say, I would fold the idea for a charged shot into the Railgun lens, with a basic uncharged shot doing roughly 20 damage, and after charging for about a second, doing up to 40-50 damage, at the cost of increased impetus usage over an uncharged shot. With the charge time mechanic, you could reasonably shorten the cooldown time of the Railgun lens, or even tie it to the charge of the last shot (greater charge = longer cooldown).

With the pure beam mode, I think the main issue isn't how much damage it deals, but how fast it deals it. I'd be perfectly fine with the pure beam's 6 damage if it was dealt faster than it currently is.

I also stand by the idea of a shotgun lens.

Maybe the beam (with no lens) can bounce off walls once or twice.
Also, a "charge up" mode could be useful, similar to bows.

So I can say that the Impulse Cannon is 100% getting buffs. For all of them impetus cost is getting decreased and range increased. Here's what I'm thinking over for the existing firing modes:

• Beam mode will take some impetus to start up and then take extremely little to maintain the beam (like maybe 1 per 10 seconds or so)
• Beam mode will bypass the damage cooldown on things it hits
• Railgun mode will have its cooldown reduced to maybe 3.5 - 4 seconds instead of 5
• Burst mode will have its cooldown reduced slightly and I'll double check to make sure all 3 shots do damage consistently

As for new things:

• Shotgun lens is probably getting added at some point
• Beam/projectile bouncing will probably be its own upgrade if it gets added

As for charging, it will probably not be added because it was going to be a mechanic for a new construct (entity) that will pretty much be a super cannon that can break blocks. Breaking a single warded block with a max charge shot with it is being considered - but I really want more feedback on that before doing it. A lot of people seem to want an endgame method of removing wards at all, but for all I know the silent majority may be happy with how things are.

As for adding compat with other gauntlets, the only ones I know of in maintained addons are Periphery's, but the reason I didn't add support for those from my side is that from a lore perspective they don't use Vis and such. So a lot of the augments wouldn't really make sense, and I wouldn't even know what to do with Vis cost augments.

Hah I even made sure to mention Periphery gauntlets in the Thaumonicon as "the cost of not using vis to power the gauntlets, I suppose" as to why someone couldn't augment them.

I mean, what I suspect is happening in those gauntlets is that their energy systems are being converted to vis internally. Unfortunately, the Periphery developer might have decided too generous of a power conversion. 50 mana for 1 vis is pretty bonkers, and back when Timeless Ivy was a thing it was 380 mana for one point of damage. Had I been compiling the mod I probably would have nerfed that gauntlet to something like 400 mana for 1 vis. I can't even speak for the other gauntlet types as I don't run Blood Magic or any other compatible magic mods.

By the way, I've been informed that while runic shielding is great, Protection 4 is far more critical for survival as it does indeed reduce incoming damage from sources that bypass armor.

So I can say that the Impulse Cannon is 100% getting buffs. For all of them impetus cost is getting decreased and range increased. Here's what I'm thinking over for the existing firing modes:

• Beam mode will take some impetus to start up and then take extremely little to maintain the beam (like maybe 1 per 10 seconds or so)
• Beam mode will bypass the damage cooldown on things it hits
• Railgun mode will have its cooldown reduced to maybe 3.5 - 4 seconds instead of 5
• Burst mode will have its cooldown reduced slightly and I'll double check to make sure all 3 shots do damage consistently

As for new things:

• Shotgun lens is probably getting added at some point
• Beam/projectile bouncing will probably be its own upgrade if it gets added

As for charging, it will probably not be added because it was going to be a mechanic for a new construct (entity) that will pretty much be a super cannon that can break blocks. Breaking a single warded block with a max charge shot with it is being considered - but I really want more feedback on that before doing it. A lot of people seem to want an endgame method of removing wards at all, but for all I know the silent majority may be happy with how things are.

As for adding compat with other gauntlets, the only ones I know of in maintained addons are Periphery's, but the reason I didn't add support for those from my side is that from a lore perspective they don't use Vis and such. So a lot of the augments wouldn't really make sense, and I wouldn't even know what to do with Vis cost augments.

Yay╰(▔∀▔)╯

Glad to hear that the Impulse Cannon's getting buffed. Woot ^~^

Maybe a bit TOO buff. The base beam, without the damage cooldown, is showing a 62DPS on the test dummy mod I have installed- and it is only taking 3 out of the 4 damage from the beam! I cut it in half and it feels like a good "get off me or die" option rather than a "your soul is evaporated" option.

First off, at some point I did buff the Impulse Cannon shot damage for all firing types. Depending on when you first installed the 2.0 version of the mod, especially if you got it when it was a beta, those values might not be accurate in your current config. If you want to reset it quickly, the ingame config GUI should allow you to reset it to default with a button. The new values are:

• Beam: 6 dmg
• Burst: 8 * 3 dmg
• Railgun: 30 dmg

How do those values sound? To be honest, I'm thinking of ways to improve the pure beam mode, because it seems like it gets outclassed by a combination of other lenses and cloud foci. I might buff the damage again and add the ability for it to bounce off of surfaces or something, I have to think about it.

More firing modes / lenses was brought up before and I do want to add some more, I just have to try to balance them all to be at least comparable.

For the gauntlets, I'm actually surprised you find the thaumium one to be better than the void gauntlet - normally people go for the void one. I find that a lot of casting will just eat up all the Vis in the area, and the void gauntlet taking it from a 3x3 chunk area helps a lot with that. I could maybe see nerfing the cast speed bonus the thaumium gauntlet gets.

Lastly, I know that right now augments are really, really powerful, and make gauntlets maybe a bit more OP than I was intending. The challenge is making augments universally useful for different focus types (including those that aren't the usual meta of flux bolt and clouds), while at the same time not breaking the game. Currently, the frenzy augment sticks out as being really powerful, that one I think I'm going to nerf a bit. If I remember correctly, it currently has a max 2.33x modifier or something crazy like that, which I think I'm going to tone down to 1.75x at most.

If you have any further thoughts/suggestions about any of this, let me know.

I typically use my caster gauntlet offensively with the occasional rift or illumination cast once in a while, along with my Primal Cutter/Crusher with some Astral Sorcery enchants if I need to mine and do other things. I've never actually run out of vis before so I considered the benefit of the void gauntlet to not be worth the warp. Dual wielding a gauntlet and a pickaxe/sword feels so nice especially once you get used to switching to a offense focus when you see a mob nearby.

I actually prefer the Terra blast focus over cloud and flux bolt personally. It hits harder on almost everything in the game except for the Gaia guardian.

As for those values on the cannon (I just installed the mod this month), I just shot a few normal mobs and it seems that the burst hits for 8 on the first shot but the numbers after are too hard to read for me to verify. It looks like it is sort of working as intended but it's not very consistent though since sometimes a full burst would kill a creeper at full health and other times it'll stay alive with ~4 hp or so. It might be an aim problem or a connection problem though.

I do still feel like the railgun cooldown is a bit too long though even with the above damage values (I think my values were due to some kind of defense modifier on my test subject. The Gaia Guardian T2 is the final 'boss' of the Botania mod so I would imagine something like that exists for it). Even shaving a second off of it would really help the gun feel a lot better. As it stands now, if you miss you basically can't use the gun for a bit of time and it's pretty much overkill on a lot of mobs if you do hit them with it (the only non-boss mob that doesn't get oneshot by it is endermen but they usually are immune to projectiles anyway). A middle ground between burst and railgun in terms of damage would be nice.

Ultimately, I think what it boils down to is the design ideas behind the Impulse Cannon. What purpose was it designed for specifically? Or in a larger sense, what kind of niche does it fulfill in a player's toolkit?

Is it meant to be an alternative to the gauntlets that trades vis cost for utility? If so then my only complaint is the railgun cooldown time and even then it could be a decent compromise due to the enemy piercing and infinite range it has. A way to change lens on the fly would be nice as well but that's just a minor thing in the grand scheme of design.

I see the Impulse cannon as a casting tool specialized solely for combat instead of the swiss-army knife that the Casting Gauntlet is. In this scenario, the Cannon really needs a bit more damage or, at least, some form of scaling that makes it so that it is not invalidated immediately off the bat by the gauntlet. Either that or you nerf the gauntlet hard, but frankly I barely made it out of the spire during my first blind run with the gauntlet as it is without dying horribly.

I'd prefer that you not nerf the augments too hard but I have no clue what the bonuses are for them so i can't really say for sure if that's the right call or not. If you do nerf them, then offsetting the nerf with versatility instead (perhaps by letting players swap the cast time/vis cost/power crystal in each of the augments) would be a good compromise.

For your information, I want to say that this addon has its own config file, where you can change any damage from added weapons or augmantations

I'm forced to agree that there are crazier tools in other mods (but the one I'm thinking of is, well, Thaumic Additions, and its laser wand is insane with 5 ignore armor ignore magic resistance damage that will stack if it pierces the target, crosses back, and hits it again and next to no cooldown and barely ANY alienis usage) but I would like to point out that stock wise, it still outclasses IE's railgun. Unless you want to shoot graphite electrodes, and depending on the modpack those might not be trivial to create. That railgun is still only single target only and has projectile dropoff that you have to account for when shooting long ranges.

I'm not sure where you get your conclusion that it has infinite range- I am unable to shoot targets over 25 blocks away with the burst fire attachment, or over 59 blocks away with the railgun attachment. I tested on my own compiled version of Test Dummy.

But the idea to drop a full second from the cooldown on the railgun attachment? Yes please. That would bring it right back up. If the base ray gun used less impetus than the burst option, preferably none (requiring only to have impetus in the thing to use it in this mode) it would be a decent enough "get off me" option.

If you're having trouble surviving, try more runic shielding. It isn't capped at 3 and in fact has no theoretical cap, you're only limited by how much essentia you can gather and stability you can get out of your infusion altar.

Doing a bit more thinking on the impulse cannon's base beam mode. So pulsing it currently is the only way to get a good amount of usage out of it, but the noise of pulsing it is atrocious. It doesn't feel weighty or exciting, just really annoying. Fixing that would make it feel a lot more powerful right off the bat, without even touching the number balance.

Also here's an idea: make the activation of the weapon be the trigger that uses impetus, not leaving the death beam on. That would encourage people to continuously fire the thing for best impetus usage, as opposed to pulsing it, because holding down the trigger right now costs so much more that it makes the mode worthless.