In recent years, beam shaping has been recognized as an effective strategy for increasing the total productivity of the laser powder bed fusion process. The majority of the modified intensity distributions have wider beam profiles, allowing for increased hatch spacing, thereby directly affecting the build rate. However, most research on beam shaping productivity focusses on optimizing scan speed and hatch spacing, while ignoring the influence of layer thickness on the total productivity. This work discusses the effect of layer thickness variations on productivity increase in 316L stainless steel for both a Gaussian beam and a ring shaped beam. While for 30 µm layers, the ring beam has a larger process window and a higher build rate, for thicker layers, an equally powerful ring shaped beam is shown to not be more productive than the conventionally shaped Gaussian beam, owing to the flat bottomed melt pool requiring slower scan speed to reach the desired melt pool depth. However, when a slight amount of porosity is accepted, the ring beam showed a significantly higher increase in build rate, owning to the reduced amount of pore forming locations in the part. Thus, whether Gaussian or shaped beams are better suited for thicker powder layers is dependent on the desired applications and corresponding required material densities.