Burst

A lot of guns both in the Small Guns as well as Big Guns category have the ability to fire weapons in automatic mode. Some Energy Guns do also have this feature. When firing a salvo of bullets this way, players usually refer to this as a 'burst' or the act of doing so as 'bursting'.

Mechanics

A burst follows a cone of fire, that starts at the player's position and slowly gets bigger towards its maximum range. It is effectively an isosceles triangle (or something very close to it, given the Hexes this game uses as a plane.

Unlike Single Shot weapons, bursts have the ability to be fired without aiming at a person. They can be fired in the general direction of an enemy - even through smokes or past your sight range, given the weapon's maximum distance allows so. You can initiate this mode by holding Ctrl. As long as you hold the keybind, you will see a white silhouette of where your burst will fire towards. It will not adjust to hard-obstacles that can not be fired through however.

Bursts can however still be used in a similar manner like single-shot weapons, by clicking an enemy, causing you to take aim and then fire after a brief delay. This will not alter the property of the burst, and still cause some bullets to hit enemies around your target, as if you would have fired the weapon with Ctrl at the exact position your enemy stood on. There is an exception to this, which is Commando (Weapon Trait), which is a perk especially seen on Assault Rifles. This causes targeted bursts to behave differently then untargeted ones, and funnel all the bullets towards the target you chose.

Parameters

A burst has multiple parameters that dictate how effective it is at certain aspects. It is important to note, that most parameters depend on the firing mode of the weapon. Especially a lot of Machine Guns have 2 different burst firing modes, which differ in a lot of parameters like bulletcount, spread, one-hex, AP Cost, Firerate and even range.

Spread

The Spread parameter is important for the width of your firing cone. The more Spread a firing mode has, the bigger the firing cone. This can be beneficial if you want to hit or suppress a lot of targets, though it is unfavorable if you want to do more damage to less targets.

One-Hex

The One-Hex parameter is a value that dictates how many % of bullets would hit a target, if it would be standing directly next to you. Of course, a target's Armor Class as well as other hit-chance modifiers are not taken into account, so the value is usually less in practice.