Best elemental for each Kuva weapon v2.0 (post elemental rework)

[Raskol]

I made guide about that a while ago when the liches first came out. It was before elemental rework so its quite outdated now. Ppl ask me questions or quote that thread in other posts so i guess i can make an updated version (since the old thread is archived).

My intention was to pick the best elemental base for each weapon accoridng to its type (either high rof AR or slow hard-hitter), its IPS values and having some build variety if needed.

Now some explanation

Im aware im old fart using corrosive+heat since the new meta is viral+heat but...
Having heat as base elemental on a weapon gives you choice and lets you build both combos. Other than that while viral+heat performs pretty well vs all factions, corr+heat beats if just a bit vs armored targets and its still the toughest enemy type in game (even after armor nerf)

Other than that i belive its all pretty self explanatory - toxin and heat if a weapon can proc enough status to make use of it, radiation if its supposed to 1shot thing

As always, if you got any questions im happy to answer 😄

Link to the old thread, most is rather outdate but might find some useful info there as well:

 

 

Edited April 14, 2020 by Raskol

[Savire510]

why low heat on stubas

[ChaoticEdge]

No, this seems your attention seem alright but it doesn't mean it is reason to do so because elemental is pretty powerful enough to me because "Status chance is insane" like Kuva Kohm someone had long time ago a 170% chance status which this person was doing all the rainbow color doing this all over the area which by all means it doesn't give us reason to boost it even way too greatly to be.

[SneakyErvin]

I dont understand the rad choices at all. Are you just building them for the innate rad damage and leaving it at that or are you building them for further increased rad damage?

If you are building them for higher rad you are wasting options on them by going innate rad over heat or electric since the end result with heat, electric or rad is the exact same, since 60% of either gives you the exact same base damage value that scales the exact same with further mods invested towards rad damage. Those two also keep options open for viral+heat or viral+electric or corrosive+heat or pure corrosive etc.

[zehne]

I too don't understand.  You posted a list and there is nothing to explain it or give credence.

Like you can say rad for seer, but it has corr.  Corr + viral is a VERY powerful combination.  The only thing that makes viral not the best is enemy armor.  But on the seer you can have both corr and viral.

Idc if you disagree, the point is that there is reasoning behind my choice which then allows for other users to hold a meaningful discussion.

[Raskol]

26 minutes ago, Savire510 said:

why low heat on stubas

 

8 minutes ago, SneakyErvin said:

I dont understand the rad choices at all. Are you just building them for the innate rad damage and leaving it at that or are you building them for further increased rad damage?

If you are building them for higher rad you are wasting options on them by going innate rad over heat or electric since the end result with heat, electric or rad is the exact same, since 60% of either gives you the exact same base damage value that scales the exact same with further mods invested towards rad damage. Those two also keep options open for viral+heat or viral+electric or corrosive+heat or pure corrosive etc.

Im sorry guys, i hit enter too fast 😛

@Savire510 Low/medium - Its all about the procs, you dont want heat to proc too often. Even with minimal roll itll proc on enemy at least once which is all you need 

@SneakyErvin Updatet as well - Corr+rad for bonus dmg vs both alloy and ferrite armor so you dont have to shoot twice, also saving mod slots 

@zehne ^

Edited April 14, 2020 by Raskol

[Teljaxx]

Man, who needs optimal? I got impact on my Stubbas. Because they don't shoot bullets, they shoot tiny fists, and I want to punch everyone as hard as possible. I also went with redundancy on my Nukor. Because double the radical, double your friends! And just lighting everyone on fire isn't a good way to make friends...

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

Rad gives you flexibility in that it won't mix with your other elements. Who knows how elemental damage will be reworked in the future? Corrosive was once the Golden child of damage until the status change. It used to be able to handle both Ferrite and Alloy by the strength of it's proc. It even outdamaged Rad. Now that's capped at 80 percent strip, it's still the best answer to Ferrite due to its innate bonus, but is worse than Viral against Alloy. Remember, all armor class modifiers double dip. Against a Sortie level Bombard, Rad does 6x more damage than neutral, so that tiny amount does do work.

[(PSN)Sentiel]

I use Primed Cryo Rounds and Primed Heated Charge, so I want my weapons to have the innate element that supports the other elements on my weapon in order to have them balanced, so for primaries it's Heat and for secondaries it's Cold or Toxin.

This means I subscribe to the popular Viral+Heat, however, I do it because I main Volt and his Shock Trooper can turn Heat into Radiation, giving me Viral+Rad, which is excellent for beefy enemies. Unfortunately, if I would use Corrosive+Heat, Shock Trooper wouldn't create Radiation, it would instead buff Corrosive.

The only exceptions are Nukor and Ogris, which are Magnetic for broader status pool that can be inflicted to increase Condition Overload damage.

Edited April 14, 2020 by (PS4)Sentiel

[Rhalick0]

Tl;dr : cant go wwrong with heat.

[Galuf]

Meh. Kuva weapons allow you to cheat out an elemental mod and are almost exclusively crit based(nukor is crit damage based, ogris is meme based), usually a non budget build will involve a riven, a single elemental mod and a faction mod for minmaxing. Fire is often the poor man choice if you don't plan for a gas build.

 

Edited April 14, 2020 by Galuf

[FurianStorm]

I go with Radiation as well.
Why? It's the only element that needs 2 mods to create. (if you want that)
I don't build on extra radiation. I just built what I want need at the time usualy cor or viral)
That way I have at least 2 elements on my kuva weapon. Cor/viral combined with radiation.
Is it meta? propably not.
Is it super smart to do? Propably not.
But I don't care I like it and to me that's what counts.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

1 hour ago, FurianStorm said:

I go with Radiation as well.
Why? It's the only element that needs 2 mods to create. (if you want that)
I don't build on extra radiation. I just built what I want need at the time usualy cor or viral)
That way I have at least 2 elements on my kuva weapon. Cor/viral combined with radiation.
Is it meta? propably not.
Is it super smart to do? Propably not.
But I don't care I like it and to me that's what counts.

It actually is a smart thing to do. 

Case Study: 6000 Armor

6000 armor is roughly what Sortie 3 level Heavy Gunners and Bombards sport. It's a nice, easy number to work with.

Damage Reduction = Net Armor / (300+Net Armor)

~6000 armor is ~95% Damage Reduction.

10 Corrosive procs strips this armor by 80%, to ~1200, which is 80% Damage Reduction.

From 5% of your damage going through, to 20% is a 4x multiplier, which is slightly under the 4.25x multiplier Viral would give you.

However Corrosive has a +75% armor-class modifier against Ferrite. Armor-class modifiers double dip, boosting damage and mitigating armor by the same %.

Viral by contrast has a +75% health-class modifier against Cloned Flesh, which is a simple 1.75x multiplier.

Against a Heavy Gunner with Ferrite:

80% armor strip and 75% innate Ferrite mitigation, Corrosive will face an effective armor value of 5%, which is 300, which is 50% Damage Reduction. 

From 5% damage going through to 50%, plus the 1.75x multplier is a 17.5x Multplier.

10 Viral procs with a 4.25x and 1.75x against Cloned Flesh is a 7.4x Multiplier.

Winner: Corrosive

Against a Bombard with Alloy:

Corrosive is only neutral to Alloy, so by stripping 80% armor, it's only a 4x Multiplier.

Winner: Viral

Added Heat proc:

A heat proc reduces armor by another 50%. ~6000 armor becomes ~3000. ~95% Damage Reduction becomes ~91% Damage Reduction. 9/5=1.8

A heat proc will give Viral an additional 1.8x mulplier, so against either of the Heavy Grineer units, Viral damage has a 13.32x Multiplier.

Heat's armor stripping is only additive with Corrosive's stripping and mitigation so:

A Heavy Gunner against Corrosive will have effectively, 2.5% armor (150), 33.3% DR. 66.6% damage goes through. 5% to 66.6% is a 13.32x. With that 1.75x, it's 23.31x Multiplier Against 6000 initial Ferrite.

Against a Bombard which Corrosive has no bonus, 10% armor remains (600), 66.6% DR. 5% to 33% is just a paltry 6.6x Multplier.

Case for Radiation bonus on Kuva Weapons:

Even at 60% Radiation, Radiation will be of lower proc priority than your chosen element and will get all the benefits of that main elements proc to synergize with it's bonus against Alloy. 

At 10 Corrosive procs, Corrosive gets a 17.5x multiplier against Ferrite, but a paltry 4x against Alloy, but that small Radiation bonus will get that sweet 17.5x multiplier against Alloy from the Corrosive procs. If you had 120% Corrosive (2 60% Elementals) vs 60% Radiation, 2 times as much Corrosive as Radiation, 4x2=8 < 17.5.

Your 60% Radiation bonus will do 2.1x as much damage as the 120% Corrosive portion of your weapon against a Bombard. Half the value, but double the effective damage. 4.2x the Value.

With the change in status having 10 caps and now that over 100% status gives you a chance to get extra status procs, along with our multi-shot, we reach the 10 cap in seconds anyways.

Right from the get go, status or not, having both Corrosive and Radiation on a single weapon is powerful as it lets you normalize the ttk on a horde of Grineer.

Edited April 14, 2020 by DealerOfAbsolutes
Error

[NyronGTR]

How about radiation seer? It has innate corrosive AoE and with bonus radiation it could have modded-in viral+heat on top.

[UltraMex]

For Corpus i just go for Magnetic on impact weapons since they are squishy without shield, add electric mod and faction damage for fun

[zehne]

6 hours ago, DealerOfAbsolutes said:

Right from the get go, status or not, having both Corrosive and Radiation on a single weapon is powerful as it lets you normalize the ttk on a horde of Grineer.

And so my Corr+Viral+Rad Kuva Seer pretty much covers all bases except for against shields...  But shields are just sponges, not armor coated sponges.

Realistically I only picked Rad on the seer because of it's utility against ancient healers.

[(PSN)Hooligonzo]

In most cases, there's no reason to get anything other than Radiation or Magnetism.  Combined elements are ideal.

There are a few situations where the Impact Kuva weapons have a strong argument in their favor, but even then Magnetism will do better against shields.

Every other element can be hit on with a single mod.

[DealerOfAbsolutes]

The argument for getting a single element is to save a slot that would have otherwise gone to a elemental mod when building for your desired elemental combo. That extra slot could be something like Argon Scope.

[Midas]

I would do ele on the seer because of its aoe hits.

[(XBOX)BULLS 0N PAR4DE]

nice post

[George_PPS]

On 2020-04-14 at 9:10 AM, Raskol said:

I made guide about that a while ago when the liches first came out. It was before elemental rework so its quite outdated now. Ppl ask me questions or quote that thread in other posts so i guess i can make an updated version (since the old thread is archived).

My intention was to pick the best elemental base for each weapon accoridng to its type (either high rof AR or slow hard-hitter), its IPS values and having some build variety if needed.

Now some explanation

Im aware im old fart using corrosive+heat since the new meta is viral+heat but...
Having heat as base elemental on a weapon gives you choice and lets you build both combos. Other than that while viral+heat performs pretty well vs all factions, corr+heat beats if just a bit vs armored targets and its still the toughest enemy type in game (even after armor nerf)

Other than that i belive its all pretty self explanatory - toxin and heat if a weapon can proc enough status to make use of it, radiation if its supposed to 1shot thing

As always, if you got any questions im happy to answer 😄

Link to the old thread, most is rather outdate but might find some useful info there as well:

 

 

Great reference. I loathed Kuva Lich and these weapons but am now working on getting them all to complete the collection for the time being of stay-at-home period. 

[kwlingo]

On 2020-04-14 at 11:10 AM, Raskol said:

Other than that while viral+heat performs pretty well vs all factions, corr+heat beats if just a bit vs armored targets and its still the toughest enemy type in game (even after armor nerf)

There you go. The simple solution. Viral + Heat going into any content works well versus bringing corrosive to enemies that don't have much armor wont do much benefit. 🙂 Also I prefer electric proc over heat. Heat needs time for ticks to scale and enemies don't stay alive long enough for heat to scale up. While electric does a 3 meter AOE and can trigger more electric ticks of damage similar to the old gas proc.

[Raskol]

On 2020-04-20 at 8:37 AM, kwlingo said:

There you go. The simple solution. Viral + Heat going into any content works well versus bringing corrosive to enemies that don't have much armor wont do much benefit. 🙂 Also I prefer electric proc over heat. Heat needs time for ticks to scale and enemies don't stay alive long enough for heat to scale up. While electric does a 3 meter AOE and can trigger more electric ticks of damage similar to the old gas proc.

Heat is mainly for -50% armor during the effect, dot is welcome addition but could not be there. Overall heat+viral is great synergy but if electric suits you better then be my guest - all depends on personal pref and situation

[Clanik]

Is viral+heat better or viral+Primed Bane of Grineer, so you take toxin instead of heat but don't get the heat procs anymore 

[(XBOX)Hyperion Rexx]

For the nukor, I would recommend magnetic IF you're using it as a status spreader for condition overload.  You can then have magnetic, radiation, viral and heat all at same time with almost 200% status chance.   Which is nice.