[Theorycraft] Heavy attacks, Exodia Brave, and Armor stripping

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Heavy attacks are really good nowadays, in large part because some of them have guaranteed bleed procs. If you've tried heavy attacks with Exodia Brave, however, you might have noticed that kills inflicted by bleed do not proc Exodia Brave's energy regen.

The resulting theory is as follows: frames with armor stripping could potentially still take advantage of Exodia Brave with a powerful heavy attack build and regain 15 energy per second for 4 seconds. Frost, with his 250% power strength required to strip armor, notably benefits from offsetting Blind Rage's decreased power efficiency. Mag, who is sadly still forced to cast Crush twice and Polarize once at a minimum, also benefits similarly. Even Banshee, who normally doesn't have energy issues but also has the defense of a wet paper towel, can instead become quite survivable by running a full suite of purely defensive mods (including Umbral Vitality and Umbral Intensify to reach 100% armor stripping for Sonic Fracture) and still be effective purely by virtue of Silence having a high base duration and Sonar having a high base range and great augment. Vauban similarly will also have increased build flexibility. Survivability in general is improved by health and energy recovery from Life Strike and Exodia Brave, respectively.

Downsides to this idea:

• Pizzas exist
• In multiplayer other players will kill enemies and prevent you from regaining energy
• Zaws with Exodia Brave are a long-term investment for newer players
• Zenurik is a similar investment and more reliable so why not just use that
• Arcane Energize is better in pretty much every way
• Couldn't actually test this because my Exodia Brave is only rank 1

The literal only upside:

• A new build might be fun and different
• Too lazy to hunt Eidolons
• Scales with number of enemies better than Zenurik

Edited December 7, 2019 by continue