Comparison of Tier 2, 3, and 4 chips

Since I don't upgrade pilots anymore after Pix changed the cost structure for doing so, I've been building my stash of Au.  I decided to spend some of my stash trying the chip Powerball.  I essentially won the Powerball and got hold of a tier 4 suppressor chip, a tier 3 lockdown chip, and a tier 3 freeze chip for around 12.5k gold.  I will not be playing the game (Powerball) anymore and I'd advise anyone contemplating trying to do what I did to be very careful as you could easily spend >25k Au and still not get what I did.

WIth that said, I thought I'd create a thread talking about how the power of these chips varies by tier.  

Here are the stats on each of the chips: 















As you can see, the tier 4 chip has a 2.0% cumulative effect per shot, the tier 3 chips each have a 1.3% effect, and a tier 2 chip has a 0.7% effect.  So based upon this, the relative speed at which a chip does its thing should be 2.85 : 1.85 : 1.00 for tiers 4, 3, and 2.  In other words a tier 4 suppression chip should suppress a target about 2.85 times as fast as a tier 2 chip.

To try this out, I tested each of the above chips in customs matches against my son's account.  I would drop a Ravana on his account, and then I would drop either a Blitz or a Leech in mine equipped with one or more Scourges or Sparks, and I'd shoot th Ravana at different distances and timed how long it took for an effect to happen from one of the chips.  I chose the Scourge/Spark combo because even though we don't see "particles" when we shoot, Pix must count damage that way, and all the particles should hit regardless of distance.   

Here is the raw data from the experiment:








You'll note that I ran different level weapons in the test.  I confirmed that weapon level is irrelevant by shooting different level Scourges at the Ravana and seeing no difference in the time required to suppress the target:




So looking back at the data, a few things stand out:

a) For the taser family (including Calamity which I didn't show), the time for lockdown, suppression, and freezing has nothing to do with distance; a target can be 595 m away or 50 m away and it will still take the chip the same time to do its thing.
b) Based upon the tier 3 freeze and lockdown chips, it appears the time to achieve the desired effect is the same irrespective of what that effect is; it took the same time to lockdown the Ravana as it did to freeze it.
c) For a given chip, the Spark, Scourge, and Calamity (data not shown for latter) all take the same amount of time to achieve the effect
d) The level of a weapon doesn't matter in the time it takes to achieve the effect, only the tier of the chip matters (exception to this would be using freeze missiles in combination with a freeze chip where the level of the missiles does affect time until target is frozen)
e) The power ratio really is about 2.62 : 1.72 : 1.00 between tiers 4, 3, and 2.  Some of the discrepancy is probably due to the chip descriptions only showing one decimal place.  This means a tier 4 chip will freeze/suppress/lockdown a bot 2.62 times faster than a tier 2 chip while a tier 3 chip will do the same 1.72 times as fast as a tier 2 chip.
f) A result of e) above is that stacking two tier 2 chips on a drone will not be as effective as a single tier 4 chip but the stacked chips will be better than a tier 3 chip.  However, two tier 2 chips are vastly cheaper than making a tier 4 chip.  

I'll have separate posts covering how other weapons perform with the chips.