Dude, I have a Ph.D. in experimental physics. I’m very familiar with how to design an experiment to isolate individual variables. It’s a skill I teach my students in their introductory lab classes.
What you’ve done in your assumptions is not at all the same thing. You’ve made one major incorrect underlying assumption (the way grenades are triggered) that invalidates the entire experiment.
To put it in mathematical terms, you’ve essentially decided to arbitrarily declare that pi=4, and therefore assert that a circle inscribed inside a square would have the same perimeter as the square. Despite the fact that one could easily look at the diagram and determine that statement is false.
The grenade mechanics limit you to a fixed number of grenades per minute, somewhere in the vicinity of 7-9 under normal conditions. Your hypothesis that you could get double the grenades with hellfire is just flat-out false. There is a thread in this forum containing a large, detailed, and *extremely *well-documented set of tests confirming these mechanics.
In other words, there is actual well-designed experimental evidence demonstrating that your model is wrong. The first step in any scientific endeavor is reviewing the available literature on the topic, which you clearly haven’t done. So please don’t try to lecture me on how science works.
If you don’t want to trust a simulator, this is one case where it’s possible to do some simple napkin math to compare the Hellfire to any other rifle. Let’s choose to compare it to a regular old Assault Rifle (or a KSR if you prefer, which also has no steady-state DPS benefit). If the Hellfire loses here, it loses to any other rifle that has a special ability.
You get the same number of grenades with both rifles. So all we need to compare are the two effects. With a regular assault rifle, you get the damage of an Incendiary Grenade.
With the Hellfire, you get the damage of the Hellfire proc, but you also don’t have to spend a GCD casting the grenade, so there’s an extra benefit. However, IG is energy neutral, so we can’t assume that we gain any energy from this - the number of power abilities will remain the same. So the real benefit is that we’re able to cast more Placed Shots.
Thus, the real comparison is (damage of IG) vs. (damage of Hellfire proc + damage of Placed Shot).
As you noted, crit and other effects are all basically irrelevant here, so let’s abstract them away and just compare base damage. Here are the CP coefficients for each ability (in other words, this is normalized damage; someone with 1 combat power would do this much damage, someone with 1000 combat power would do 1000x this damage). Assumptions are full museum and appropriate agents (though even ignoring both of those effects gives the same result):
Incendiary Grenade (cooked, w/o Slow Burn): 10.05
Incendiary Grenade (cooked, w/ Slow Burn): 12.33
Placed Shot: 3.33
Hellfire Assault Launcher: 4.29
So even adding in a placed shot, Hellfire will do 7.62 x CP damage per grenade, whereas IG will do at least 10.05 x CP damage, and more if you’re taking the appropriate passive.
Hence, Hellfire would be worse than a normal, no-frills assault rifle. All of the extraordinary weapons give an additional damage increase over a no-frills rifle, so they would also beat Hellfire in main-hand damage output.