A better understanding of Fire Rate?

Borderlands 2 BL2 General Discussion
#1

This might have been addressed already, and if so I apologize and look forward to the thread link. However, everything I find online in regards to Fire Rate doesn’t seem to match up. I’ve seen two different ways of looking at it–

Fire Rate: Number of seconds the gun can be fired continuously before reloading.
Obviously this one is wrong, because if that were true, we’d want a low fire rate rather than a high one (i.e. A gun with a Fire Rate of 2.5 would fire all rounds in 2.5sec).

Fire Rate: Number of bullets fired per second.
This makes more sense, but doesn’t seem to play out that way. For example, a gun with a Fire Rate of 7.0 and a clip of 55 bullets would take 7.86sec ( 55 / 7.0) to fire all 55 bullets before reloading. However, when I hold the trigger and count it out, sometimes it goes faster than the math suggests, sometimes it goes slower than the math suggests based on the gun type; so the pure math can’t be all to account for (obviously badazz points and skill tree perks taken into consideration–pretend that 7.0 already considers all of that).

I’ve also read that I should ignore the definition and should simply multiply Damage and Fire Rate (e.g. DMG of 100, FR of 7.0, DPS = 700/sec); but to understand over how many seconds, you still need to take the clip size into consideration (700DPS * 7.86sec = 5502 Total DMG per Clip).

I guess I’m wondering how, if at all, fire rate really matters since when considering it I get a Total DMG of 5502, but if I simply just multiply Clip (55) * DMG (100) I get 5500. Whichever way you calculate it, you get the same damage; really the question is how fast do you want to do that damage?

Thanks,
Kong :bldancing:

#2

um…well you shoud go find the person that told you the first one, and tell them not to make statements about the gameplay of games they have never played…

The second one is right. However, your fire rate is also tied to your frame rate: no more than one shot per frame, and you can only fire durring a frame, so theoreticaly, if your framerated is de-synced with your fire rate it will cause it to fluctuate a bit, but if you’re getting few enough frames to actually notice, you’re either using a really high fire rate gun, or the fire rate bit it the least of your issues.

The bit about DPS calculations is pretty much how those work, the’re kinda useful as long as you recongnise that they in no way represent the damage you’re actually putting out, except on a relitive basis compared to other DPS caclculations

1 Like
#3

In the context of this game, fire rate is the number of bullets fired per second. Simple as that.

Exception: some guns are semi-Auto: they fire as fast as you pull the trigger. In that case, the fire rate acts as a ceiling (on most of those guns, you wouldn’t be able to reach it anyway…not without cybernetic fingers)

Because of how the Unreal engine is made, fire rate is tied to frame rate. All possible fire rates are fractions of your frame rate, the excess is rounded down.

For example, if you play at 30FPS, you could have a fire rate of 30 (30/1), 15 (30/2), 10 (30/3), 7.5 (30/4)… And so on. If you manage to get a fire rate of 20 in that context, the game will round it down to 15.

#4

Also want to point out that there are certain things that will modify the fire rate you get with a given weapon on a given character. These are mainly specific perks from the character’s skill tree, but can also be from relics and class mods. For example, Gaige’s The Better Half will boost fire rate (assuming you haven’t hit your platforms frame-rate llimit as per @Wingsday and @Chuck80) half-way through emptying it.