"Good" is a bit complicated given his kit, fun however, and effective, that I can provide you with:
Have you ever wondered, how much health and armour is enough?
Have you ever wondered, can I even make (effective) use of Archon mods?
Have you ever wondered; can I truly, be breaking bad?
Probably, you have not, but fret not, for I am here to help you understand why these questions make sense for Lavos.
Throwing a build at ye would be far too simplistic so lets break this down step by step.
First:
Lavos is a cast-heavy frame with a very comfortable ability kit and stats + a passive that make him pretty tanky.
Unlike all other frames, he has no energy ( Hildryn does too in the form of shields for whoever dares say 🤓☝️), but cooldowns which his 3rd ability and 1st with the augment reduce. The logical gameplay with him is to spread some statuses on an area with his Vial Rush - we'll refer to it as ² to simplify during the explanations - cast his ⁴ to wipe out an area of enemies, and then his ³ to reduce all the active cooldowns.
Rinse & repeat.
Disgracefully this is slow, and weak, why?
Because it requires of quite the setup to be effective, while other frames can do more for significantly less, i.e: Gyre, Saryn.
Second:
Knowing what the frame does and how he has to be played, we need to then look at the stats & abilities + how do these work more profoundly.
We know ⁴ is meant to be our DPS ability, and it covers a nice area ignoring walls or covers, which is fantastic, though it fails a bit when it comes to covering vertically. We know our shields are very average at 370 and that our first ability heals us for a % of our total health, so going for an armour + hp build is the obvious, moreover when our passive provides us status immunity.
Our ³ is the one in charge of reducing how long we have to wait for the rest of our abilities to be ready, helps procs statuses, and converts orbs and ammo pickups into universal variants which benefit all of us, this is a core part of Lavos' gameplay loop.
Our ² is a massively powerful AoE CC that will slow down enemies and help spread statuses too, each vial detonation carries cold that will affect enemies over time, and whatever status have we blended in for its duration.
Analysing this information, we now have to look at our enemies, these have varying defences, and the higher we go, the worst these get, making it so Lavos struggles to DPS-cast at high levels due to his lack of innate defence strip. Now, I'm a purist, no shame on admitting it, so I do not like to slap a helminth ability to "fix" the issues of a frame and call it a day but instead to try and work around them with the tools we've been given, therefore for this explanation I will exclude helminth abilities and solely focus on the base frame.
Now that we know this, it's time to think:
We have no energy, therefore we skip mods such as flow, energy nexus and so on.
Our passive also increases status duration the higher our ability duration is, so we can choose two things here: Archon Continuity, or Primed Continuity.
Why not Narrow Minded? Well...
Catalyze, Transmutation Probe & Vial Rush massively benefit from having higher range.
Higher range on ⁴ means more enemies we can afflict, more range on ² means more area we can control, and more range on ³ means more enemies we can hit, reducing our casting time on the rest of abilities, plus more statuses we can inflict and drops we can convert. So, no brainer we at minimum need to slot in Reach, not Archon Reach since we won't gain any benefit from it, and, personally, Overextended, since strength which we will talk now is not too important on Lavos, and almost skippable entirely.
Negative strength, while not terrible, is not favourable, so we will need to remedy that 60% loss by adding in a least Molt Augmented, after that, if you've put an Aura Forma on Lavos (recommended on any frame), add Growing Power for a constant +25% since this guy is always proccing something.
Now, time to focus on our survivability, we can't do science if we are dead.
We need to increase our max health, so we have three options: Vitality, Umbral Vitality, or the better pick, Archon Vitality.
With Archon Vitality the heat procs from our ⁴ will duplicate which pretty much means having multiplicative 100% strength for it. We will come back to this point a bit later.
But lets push it further, add in Arcane Blessing for yet another 1200 health, making us sit at 2680 health points.
As for our armour, again options; Umbral Fiber, Fiber, or, Health Conversion.
If you do not plan on running more umbral mods, then Fiber is the better choice, but, what if you ran also Health Conversion? This would yield you 2700 armour for a damage reduction of 90%, perfectly round number, almost, intentional it would seem...
To double down on this then, equip Adaptation for yet another 90% damage reduction on top of that 90%.
We have then, two slots left on the build to fill, the exilus, which I personally would leave as is, but if you're feeling dedicated, I do recommend Power Drift for a bit more ability strength and a little knockback prevention for when you aren't status immune.
So, last mod slot, this is mostly a personal choice, you can put whatever here and it wouldn't be wrong.
I will give you two recommendations, Umbral Intensify, for overall more strength and an extra pinch of armour, or, a lesser known and used mod, Precision Intensify.
This last one, is why I said we will come back to this point.
With Precision Intensify, once you have all stacked up, your ⁴ will have 230% strength per cast, "doubled" by Archon Vitality, so virtually 460% strength.
But it'll matter not if you have a lot of strength if the enemies aren't primed with more elements, defence stripped, or close to the area, therefore it's time to get into min-maxxing with Archon Shards.
Remember how I mentioned initially about using Archon Continuity?
Well, if you add in two Emerald Shards for higher Corrosive stacks, you can let a toxic Vial Rush passively armour strip enemies very quickly on an AoE* while also slowing them down. This will give them 3 different status effects further contributing to elevating Catalyze's damage, but we can go further than this.
With another two Emerald Shards we can increase our ability damage on enemies affected by corrosion by another 20-30%, or up to 45% if you decide to add a third Tauforged one, but realistically these are still a bit tedious to get, not even I have that many personally.
*Feel free to quote me on this, for I use it on Citrine too and Prismatic gems does proc it at an uneven rate, an enemy may have 5-7 toxin procs but only 2 corrosive, may be a bug.
Last shard you may pick then.
As recommendation, make it also an Emerald Shard, but pick heal on enemy being affected by toxin status, as Vial Rush with this much range will create massive puddles of toxic & cold waste that will constantly harm many enemies that are within their range, giving you an unexpectedly high healing rate.
One last thing to solve then: pulling enemies close to you, close to danger.
Sadly, without a helminth ability, Lavos won't be able to do this himself, the aforementioned build is packed to the tops with mods and there's nothing the frame can do without sacrificing one of his abilities, which if you do, I highly recommend be his ¹, for as I've explained with the emerald shards, the healing part is well covered already!
Stills, I said I was a purist and I do believe we could do with some extra help spreading even more statuses, so instead of a helminth ability, pick a companion like Nautilus, or a Para Moa with a Tether Mine installed.
Both of these are robotic companions and thus can equip either Verglas or Helstrum which are the best companion weapons for priming enemies with elements, so add in viral + radiation and you'll have at least 4 elements covered by the Helstrum fire all the time.
A point in favour of the Para Moa is that the mine forcefully knocks down enemies and inflicts the ragdoll effect, which favours abilities that deal electric damage for this status has special properties on ragdolled enemies, while a point in favour of Nautilus is that it can group up enemies that have Overguard still.
Both Cordon and Whiplash Mine have 15s of cooldown, so installing Manifold Bond on both will yield similar results, making it totally up to player preference to play one or another. Nautilus will be more consistent as it sticks to the player constantly, while the Moa can be sturdier thanks to Link mods.
The pets of course will help upkeep a constant flow of health orbs both for Health Conversion and for you to convert into universal ones with the probe.
Aaand, that's it, I hope this helps you understand how to mod frames in the future (odd you don't being MR28?), and also brings anyone who comes check this post a refreshing and cool Lavos build straight out of my arsenal. There's an alternate version on config B that has Mecha mods instead of Health Conversion and uses a Predasite instead to re-spread all statuses (quite ridiculous), but this is more than enough text for now, feel free to ask for other frames.
Nope to both questions. The orb also grants energy, but doesn't count as an energy pickup, and likewise, same happens for the yellow shards.
The health orb will get boosted, but the energy amount you receive is equivalent to the pre-buff.
And that's the thing, even if it cannot pull in enemies with Overguard, as you've mentioned you can still put a bubble on them whilst they innocently pull their allies in, and then use Polarize to let the shards do the job for you, even if using a projectile with infinite punch through is the best option still to instagib.
It depends on how will you build Mag and want to play with her.
You can go for max range with duration to create containment fields that will tear apart anything that gets inside of them, which you can force with Pull too, or use Fracturing Crush to full armour strip and let the weapon do the job, after all Mag doesn't really need much strength, with FC you need just 135% to full strip.
An ideal Mag build would be as following - and one of the ones I use too; Aura & Exilus; Growing Power & Power Drift. Mods; Primed Flow, Transient Fortitude, Primed Continuity, Overextended, Stretch, Augur Reach, Fracturing Crush, Counter Pulse. Arcanes; Molt Efficiency & Arcane Energize.
Result; 135% PS; 265% PR; 100% PE; 128% PD, with 531 energy.
You'd have the jamming & quick shield refresh of Polarize, the full armour removal of Crush, very large bubbles, and good duration.
Another option would be running 200% strength or close, by changing Molt Efficiency for Molt Augment & Counter Pulse for Magnetized Discharge, which would disarm enemies 98% of the time when you manually detonate a bubble in a 80m area, which if am not mistaken ignores lines of sight.
Basically it's a matter of preference, if you prefer to use the top best most op weapon for X thing or you prefer a more chill ability loop gameplay.
Though, it's much better to disarm enemies forever than jamming their weapon for a few seconds, but at the same time this requires you to cast Magnetize twice on a magnetized target. ( ﾉ ﾟｰﾟ)ﾉ
Nope. On Railjack you can get the "endurance" boosters two ways;
1) By playing missions continuously, skirmish or any non-endless type.
2) By playing endless missions past 5 min.
However, Holokeys are an end-of-mission reward and therefore are not affected by said boosters, just like relics of ship parts.
You get one instance once the mission is over and that's it.
It depends on what shotgun you use mostly.
If you want just sheer pure damage per shot, then go Deadhead + Point Blank + Savvy on something like the Kuva Hek / Felarx, but if the shotgun doesn't cut it when it comes to base damage or killing by default, like the Tigris Prime or Exergis, more multishot and reload speed is better for consistency, paired with punch-through.
If you're already offloading viral to your Panzer, then there's no need to run it on your weapon, unless you go for an armour strip direct health damage build, in which case once more you'd want full focus on damage per shot with the first option.
Corrosive, on the other hand paired with heat is actually a good option to have for a Vendetta setup, as long as the heat bias is higher, which is possible with Incendiary coat + Blaze, which would also grant a bit more extra base damage to make up for the lack of merciless.
Stills, in the case of these shotguns, what you'd loose of base damage, which isn't a problem considering they have very high by default, you'd make up for more multishot and reload speed, up to a whole second on the Tigris, so... it is veeery situational, and DPSecond oriented instead of DPShot oriented.
I think for Exergis and Tigris, Shotgun Vendetta is better, but other ones are clearly better off with Merciless / deadhead.
(PSN)Pablogamer585's post in Peak Alchemist was marked as the answer