No, Laser Rifles are pretty much always better than plasmas. Heavy Plasma is OK, but the others are useless in comparison with Lasers, simply because they are reasonably powerful and have infinite ammo, so you don't waste any TUs on reloads.
Laser Pistols are good for those 'Crack Snipers' who have Heavy Plasmas (the only time I use them) when they need to get a shot off and run. Laser weapons are reliable and completely free to maintain, and sell for a lot more money proportionaly than plasma weapons, and there is not need to stockpile resources such as Alien Alloys to make them.
A Laser pistol sells for 2.5x the money you make it for, Laser Rifles sell for a similar kind of profit.
A Heavy Plasma sells for about 30k more than you make it for and needs Alien Alloys to make it, and if needed, Elerium for the clips. This makes the whole process very annoying, as you need to work out how much Elerium / Alloys to get to use etc.
Also, for a Heavy Plasma to be worthwhile your soldiers need to be quite adept at shooting. You can give a Laser weapon to anyone and they won't waste ammo and on the off-chance that they hit they will still do serious damage.
Also, Plasma weapons never get bonuses against any enemy, only penalties. Lasers are the opposite. A Sectopod (pretty much the most dangerous thing in the game) will get absolutely hammered by a Heavy Laser, whilst it can shrug off Heavy Plasma hits.
Base Defence missions are easy enough if you prepare a good team there. You only have 80 items at your disposal, so what I recommend is about 20 soldiers (you'll thank me if you get attacked by a battleship in your main base) with Laser Rifles (20 items, no need for clips), a med-kit each (another 20) a proximity grenade (20 again) and High Explosive (again 20). So each of those soldiers has very good killpower + enough health packs to remain safe.
On the other hand, try this with Heavy Plasma. 20 Heavy Plasma (20 items) a clip minimum each (another 20) and a med-kit (20). Now you have to have a toss-up between Proximity Grenades, additional clips or High Explosive (I think that stun weapons are not a great idea in base defense). If you choose Proximity Grenades you probably won't have all the killpower you need on the larger creatures. If you choose High Explosive you can't have 'minefields' and if you have 2 clips per soldier you won't have any explosive power.
If you choose to ditch the med-kits, then as soon as anyone gets wounded, they are gonna be useless for a very long time. If you want to cancel this out with armour, then fair enough, but you are still going to be vulnerable to those Heavy Plasma shots.
By the way before you all attack me and go 'What about blaster launchers j00 n00b?!!11!!' or whatever think about this - Power Armour is Laser-Proof, so if a soldier goes berserk or gets MCed, you should be OK. Power Armour is not really Heavy Plasma proof on the sides/rear, which is where you will probably be getting shot from. Absolutely nothing is Blaster Launcher proof and due to their enormous blast radius, no-one is safe. Hence, Laser Rifles are the way to go.
P.S. Sorry about the enormous post.
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