(09-03-2012, 06:10 AM)s1lencer Wrote: Why not? It's literally the same thing without the bullet spread.
They are slightly similar, but not quite. First of all the bullet spread you mentioned. Then, by default, the UZI shoots bullets every 0.125 milliseconds (each bullet dealing 14 damage). A beam would deal damage constantly and come into action nearly each server frame, dealing something around 0.01 damage each tick. If someone would set the UZI firing rate to 0.25 or so, the difference would be very noticeable.
Other than that, the beam of a phaser gun would have different properties than bullets, and many ideas can come here. For example, if you don't aim directly at a player, the beam might still arch toward them if you're looking close enough. A beam could also arch to nearby players off the player being directly hit, dealing a smaller amount of damage to them too. Also, a special feature this gun could have is that it could be used to heal / generate armor for team mates instead of damaging them, as well as to repair turrets and vehicles. A phaser gun might also overheat and react differently based on that (perhaps similar to the Nex charge). Some of those ideas might be bad, but we would likely have a beam do things differently than a bullet stream.
It's the same reason why all games in the UT series have the Pulse Gun and Minigun as two separate weapons... they aren't quite the same thing and have very different uses. I played UT for longer than Xonotic / Nexuiz, but they never felt too similar to me. Neither in Xon when the Electro had a phaser attack (the feature was soon removed unfortunately).