KurakilBurstarKurakil I'm mainly wondering so I don't bother putting on any experimentals that essentially do nothing in pve.
Well, in case my point wasn't perfectly clear, my recommendation is to not bother with offensive heat effects for PVE. It is a waste. You want damage pure and simple. Pop them and move on. I will just add that my go to strat for NPC popping is nailing the powerplant. A fixed Beam weapon will allow you to do this all day if you want (the higher the class the better the penetration which does help a lot). Add secondary weaponry that compliments this and you're g2g.
That reminds me, why are beam lasers better for modules even though they only have base piercing values (not Focused engineering)? Is it simply because they output the damage much faster over a shorter timespan?
Basically yes. The Beam laser ticks like >3x/second whereas Burst Lasers having a higher pen fire much slower (I'd guess 3x in a half second burst but with the CD it puts it way behind). It feels like the pen value is only a threshold check, ie: is your pen greater than the armour value for the hit? If yes then it does a roll for possible damage unmodified by any overage, and the number is low enough that beams are easily good enough.
The god of module sniping though are super pen railguns but they have ammo which is why I only use them for PVP.