More speficically, the firerate is increased by 50% (this is viewable in the excel sheet).
Actually, heat per shot is slightly increased with overdrive:
As far as overdrive is concerned in its entirety, I previously tried to work out a way to replace the overheat penalty with a cooldown system that would make sense. But eventually I got burned out on all the balance stuff, so I ditched it.
This table is old, and some of the weapon values are outdated, but it should give you a good enough idea of how that’d work.
This system works off of the weapon’s base overheat time, and total reactor power (yay, giving an actual to reason have a maxed out reactor). Essentially, we take the overheat time in seconds, take the reactor power and interpret it as milliseconds, and then apply a few modifiers. The formulas here are as follows:
Overdrive duration: (overheat / a) + (power / 1000 / b)
Overdrive recharge: (overheat / c) + (power / 1000 / d)
The variables for this table in particular are set to:
a = 2.5
b = 1.5
c = 1.25
d = 1
For Moron, the duration is also divided by 2, and the recharge is divided by 1.5 (this would be combined with the 33% overdrive for Moron that I’ve been rambling on about since forever).
So we have the formulas, and we can tweak the values to try and figure out what would be most optimal. Another important thing to consider would be how exactly the cooldown would work.
I don’t think a solely time based cooldown would cut it. I think the player should be forced to use the weapon normally to recharge, so I figured that we can make it so that the recharge only triggers when damage is dealt to an enemy.
What I propose, is that whenever an enemy is hit, the game takes the weapon’s current base firing interval and allows the cooldown timer to advance for about 1.2x that. So for example, if Vulcan has an interval of 0.100, a hit would trigger the recharge for 0.120s. Of course, this only works when firing normally and doesn’t stack (the timer just resets with every hit). That way we’re essentially forcing the player to damage enemies normally instead of just waiting out the cooldown.
This also helps with the problem of giving overdrive to the Corn Shotgun, as you would no longer be able to use overdrive indefinitely while overheated. Boron would also be balanced a bit more, since you couldn’t use overdrive to heat it up faster.
Another thing to consider is when can overdrive be engaged, as well as when can the recharge be engaged. If we want to impose a very harsh limit on its usage, we can make it so that the recharge only activates once overdrive runs out completely, and overdrive goes back online only after it’s fully recharged. We’d have to experiment with different degrees of such restrictions, as well as the actual formulas to have it well-balanced.