What is bettle for infantry weaponry, hitscan-like lasers that are comparatively weak, or powerful-yet-slow plasma bolts (for example, a plasma pistol would fire the equivalent of a 4000 Joules round, plus heat)?

6925509
In my opinion, it'd probably work well to use the lasers to blind, or at the very least disorient whatever enemy they're used on, and use that as a way to buy some time for the more powerful plasma bolts.

6925509

Sorry, had to be done...

6925509
An army wouldn't just use only one type of weapon. You could consider the lasers the standard infantry weapon while plasma would be for a more specialize infantry. For a good example of this, look at warhammer 40k armies.

6925530
Or Helldivers, and thanks!

I'd say it depends on the quality and price of making them. For example, in XCOM: Enemy Unknown (& Within), the aliens and Humans' highest tier of weapons is plasma-based, but in XCOM 2, they're replaced with beam rifles that are of a similar, if not more powerful, caliber.

Some laser guns are just light while others are hyper-concentrated plasma, like how in one of the Halo Novels, First Strike, it turns out that the Covenant's ship-to-ship plasma weapons, which fire similarly to their Wraith tanks, are actually horribly underutilized and don't have the correct calibrations, leading to the lumping plasma we've seen them use. Cortana realigns the inner mechanisms to maximize their effects and gets massive laser cannons capable of tearing through ships several times larger than the one they hijacked.