Prisma Gorgon Bleed vs Damage build

[(PSN)LawnMowingMonkey]

So, I had this gorgon riven waiting until I finally got the prisma from Baro, I had already a planned build with +180% damage and corrosive procs, but after a lucky reroll I got 184% cc, and with point strike it's enough to make it to 124% cc, so I'm leaning towards a hunter munitions build (I may keep rerolling, but I'd still prioritize cc).

The build I have in mind has: serration, split chamber, point strike, vital sense, hunter munitions and the riven, and then I'd have to give up on vigilante armaments to get viral going on, and taking into account the amount of bullets this thing shoots, the set bonus is actually kinda appealing plus the multishot. I'm thinking of completely ignoring the viral and just slap armaments and something like shred, but I have never tried a bleed build without viral, so I'm not sure if it's gonna be that effective (I don't have argon scope to slap it in there atm). Would bladed rounds make more sense than shred?

Then again, I'm thinking of this build: serration, split chamber, point strike, vital sense, vigilante armaments, the riven, malignant force and high voltage. Would the elemental damage be enough to replace or make it better than the bleed build? The riven has 89% fire too, so overstripping armor won't be an issue.

I'm asking because I'm really low in forma and I'm sure there would be people here that have tried more bleed builds than me.

[Dreddeth]

Generally speaking, a Bleed build needs Viral to remain competitive with a straight damage or armor-stripping build once enemies get beefy. You might ultimately still kill the enemy, but without the health-halving effect of Viral a straight damage build will do it faster via hitting the enemy's exact weakness for massive damage, and the armor-stripping build will deal more and more damage as it tears off an enemy's bulk. They'd probably need less ammunition to do it as well, since without Viral you'd need to stack a lot more Bleed procs, which deal pretty much fixed damage per tick compared to how Corrosive and Radiation can deal bonus damage and/or reduce armor to hit even harder.

Plus, giving up an elemental combo on any build for niche utility mods is never worth the trade. You'd be sacrificing too much damage for too little return.

[Xzorn]

Prisma Gorgon doesn't have enough Slash triggers and Hunter's Munitions on it's own also doesn't produce enough bleed DPS for a pure physical build.

Most weapons capable of pure physical bleed builds are melee with 75%+ base Slash weight and 25% base status. There are three guns to my knowledge which can perform better as pure physical over Corrosive / Viral + Slash that being Dread, Nagantaka and sorta Panthera. Two of those need a Riven.

It's mostly tied to the mods we have to work with on guns and a lack of both Slash and Status weighted weapons. Even a weapon like Tigris with 90% Slash weight will eventually scale better as Corrosive cuz of the mods available. I fear for Weeping Wounds with melee 3.0 because it's a major reason Melee can get away with pure bleed builds but with just about every other weapon class you'll be better off with an elemental hybrid build unless that weapon just isn't able to deal with Armor like Corinth.

[hooperinius]

Imho if you have a riven that pushes over 100% critical then use critical mods, bladed rounds, 2xelementals tailored for whatever enemies you are shooting.

[DarthKadra]

So, assuming we're talking building against armor.

Viral + Hunter Munitions is definitely not the way to go. Viral damage is for the most part lost as direct damage and you would need a huge amount of bleed damage. Almost no slash procs occurring due the weapon being impact based and Hunter Munitions alone is not enough. 

In my experience testing various weapons often times it's better to go Corrosive+Slash than Viral+Slash against armor. So you might try this build 

9 hours ago, (PS4)LawnMowingMonkey said:

Then again, I'm thinking of this build: serration, split chamber, point strike, vital sense, vigilante armaments, the riven, malignant force and high voltage.

with Hunter Munitions instead of Vigilante Armaments. However, I feel it would be more of a style option, to have bleeds, I very much doubt it would outperform Vigilante Armaments by any significant margin, if at all.

Edited December 18, 2018 by DarthKadra

[(PSN)LawnMowingMonkey]

Thank you guys for the answers, and sorry for taking too long, work didn't want to let me focus on warframe these days.

I took the general advice, and went with the corrosive build with the two 60/60 mods and it performs quite nicely, tried the physical build with bladed rounds, but it doesn't scale well at all, it worked better in conjunction with armor stripping frames, but I wanted this one to be a general-use-weapon, so definitely sticking with elementals.