Corrosive or Viral on Incarnon weapons

[Crispy_Calamari]

Im kinda new to endurance runs and looked up a few builds. Most of them are viral/slash (as I expected) but some others are also interesting to me, especially the incarnon weapons.

So regarding the Incarnon weapons with the 2000% damage buff: what would be wiser to use for endurance runs?

I know that corrosive damage falls off due to the armor scaling in the higher levels. The Kengineer made a cool video about that topic.

When going for a slash / Hunter Munitions build, viral is the better choice but here is where people start doing things that I dont understand.

In endurance runs (especially in grineer disruption) people run corrosive or corrosive heat/cold on their Felarx or Laetum. If they wouldnt reduce the enemy armor, I can understand that they´d wanna do as much raw damage as possible and just murder the enemy that way.

But to my surprise they instead whip out the epitaph, prime the demolyst, strip their armor (ash´s shuriken most of the time) and then shoot them with their corrosive felarx/laetum.

I dont understand why.

Viral should be much better no? If people go as far as priming the target AND stripping their armor, then why not use viral for maximum overkill? Corrosive isnt even a good element to use against a non-armored unit, whereas viral should give players a nice damage boost due to cloned flesh being weak to viral.

And i didnt see this just in the videos on the internet. During my own endurance runs I see plenty of people doing the same...

When I ask my fellow tenno in the squad chat, they just say -> "it does more damage."

Does it though?

Same with melee weapons. They dont put viral on them (which i understand if you have a primer) but instead of going full slash, they go for corrosive....

Am I missing something?

My only guess is that during the first hour or so, where enemies are not really super tough yet, people dont wanna go through the hassle of armor stripping and priming every enemy and because of that just slap on corrosive to help them deal enough damage at the beginning, whilst at the later stages of the mission, the dmg you deal to a primed and naked enemy is so big, it doesnt matter that its corrosive rather than viral. Is that it?

And also: Primed base Damage mod even though they alrdy have a dmg arcane....why?

Any fellow endurance loving smart people here, who can enlighten me?

 

[taiiat]

the reason can situationally be due to Elemental availability. there are times where maximum paper Damage is all you need if you're stacking things in a particular way, and so whatever Primed Elementals must be present and that means whatever Damage Types those can make.

[Crispy_Calamari]

10 minutes ago, taiiat said:

the reason can situationally be due to Elemental availability. there are times where maximum paper Damage is all you need if you're stacking things in a particular way, and so whatever Primed Elementals must be present and that means whatever Damage Types those can make.

ok, but even so. in case of shotguns, viral is still an option. And in case of pistols, there´s only primed heated charge. so why not go for viral heat?

[Pakaku]

My guess is that Corrosive is an extra proc that can count towards CO-type builds, and if the enemy gains part of their armour back, the Corrosive will give you its benefits while you also deal more overall damage just from them having less armour (this is also why you want to strip Eidolon armour to as low as possible without hitting 0%)

[taiiat]

7 hours ago, Crispy_Calamari said:

ok, but even so. in case of shotguns, viral is still an option. And in case of pistols, there´s only primed heated charge. so why not go for viral heat?

the main scenario i think of is when you're trying to get the highest values possible so that additional effects that scale off of your total modded paper Stats will have the largest values to work with. in such a case, you wouldn't care about what Damage Types you're putting on.
would you do that for Demolysts? unlikely.... but just saying it.

[Cryoxiis]

So speaking specifically for the Felarx (not sure about the other incarnons) GunCO is multiplicative to modded damage not additive and that includes the 2000% damage perk. So building for as much raw damage as possible means its scales far greater than the 75% damage boost from modding viral because shotguns have access to 2 primed elemental mods + Blaze so corrosive/cold is a monster. As you mentioned players are still fully armour stripping so that its only the health they need to eat through despite not receiving any elemental damage boost against cloned flesh. Yes that also means the weapon can still be used to kill mobs but I don't think that's a key factor behind the intent.

Regarding primed base damage mods, they really should be running a Bane/Expel/Smite mod as that's again multiplicative to modded damage and not additive. If for whatever reason there's a leftover slot even with bane then sure throw on the primed damage mod. The likely reason though is because players can't be bothered to switch out bane mods so the primed damage mod is good enough.

[Tiltskillet]

17 minutes ago, Cryoxiis said:

So speaking specifically for the Felarx (not sure about the other incarnons) GunCO is multiplicative to modded damage not additive and that includes the 2000% damage perk.

Do you know if Devastating Attrition is fixed?  It wasn't working for clients before Duviri dropped.

Phenmor and Laetum weren't having the same bug when I tested.  (They aren't multiplicative with GunCO either, which is probably not a coincidence.)

[Cryoxiis]

14 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

Do you know if Devastating Attrition is fixed?  It wasn't working for clients before Duviri dropped.

Phenmor and Laetum weren't having the same bug when I tested.  (They aren't multiplicative with GunCO either, which is probably not a coincidence.)

I personally have not tested it - looking at Aznvasion's GunCO spreadsheet he still lists it as multiplicative so I'd say it's still working that way. He also lists Phenmor and Laetum as additive so I see your logic that it's inconsistent - the argument I see for why it's not a bug (perhaps I'm too optimistic) is because the Felarx is quite restricted in exerting its power due to its mag size & ammo pool in comparison to the other two so it's somewhat 'contained'. Therefore whilst theoretically much stronger per proc, players have to work to 'draw out' all of that power from the Felarx with priming setups. It's a similar logic to the genesis incarnon weapons - players are rewarded with the work they put into achieving big damage numbers vs non-stop, out of the gate, room nukes with no work needed to achieve that which was pre-nerf Kuva Bramma/Zarr.

[Tiltskillet]

39 minutes ago, Cryoxiis said:

I personally have not tested it - looking at Aznvasion's GunCO spreadsheet he still lists it as multiplicative so I'd say it's still working that way.

Oh, I mean Devastating Attrition wasn't applying its 21x damage for clients.  Basically off topic.

[Cryoxiis]

35 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

Oh, I mean Devastating Attrition wasn't applying its 21x damage for clients.  Basically off topic.

Oh right, yeah no clue sorry

[Crispy_Calamari]

22 hours ago, Cryoxiis said:

So speaking specifically for the Felarx (not sure about the other incarnons) GunCO is multiplicative to modded damage not additive and that includes the 2000% damage perk. So building for as much raw damage as possible means its scales far greater than the 75% damage boost from modding viral because shotguns have access to 2 primed elemental mods + Blaze so corrosive/cold is a monster. As you mentioned players are still fully armour stripping so that its only the health they need to eat through despite not receiving any elemental damage boost against cloned flesh. Yes that also means the weapon can still be used to kill mobs but I don't think that's a key factor behind the intent.

Regarding primed base damage mods, they really should be running a Bane/Expel/Smite mod as that's again multiplicative to modded damage and not additive. If for whatever reason there's a leftover slot even with bane then sure throw on the primed damage mod. The likely reason though is because players can't be bothered to switch out bane mods so the primed damage mod is good enough.

hm ok but then there´s one more thing I dont understand.

You but also taiiat made the same argument regarding the primed elemental mods. But I dont understand to be honest haha.

You have access to Primed Chilling Grasp and Primed Charged Shell. Those are the only primed elemental mods right? (for shotguns). So yes, you can make corrosive+cold using both of those primed mods and a 90 toxin mod. But you can make viral+electric too, once again using both primed mods and a 90 toxin mod.

So the "total damage" (not considering what damage TYPE it is) is the same, no? (Assuming all the other mods in the build are the same) because youre using all the same mods and youre simply rearranging them. And in my eyes, one of those combinations has the advantage when it comes to killing unarmored enemies.

If the base damage is the same (which I think it is, right?) and it all gets multiplied by GunCO the same.....then why choose the one that not only doesnt give you a 75% dmg boost (due to the elemental weakness of the cloned flesh) but also doesnt even have the better status proc?

For simplicity lets say the felarx deals 100 dmg

(and lets say thats the value you get after ALL the dmg calculations including the multiplicative gunco, arcanes, what have you. everything that matters before you shoot the enemy. The only thing thats missing is the elemental weakness of the poor soul that youre about to murder.)

and you were aiming your gun at an unarmored enemy

Why on earth would you ever choose the elemental combo that does no bonus damage, over the one that does get a slight boost?

Reading what you guys said, I get the impression that Corrosive+Cold somehow deals more "raw damage" than viral+electricity, even though both elements use the exact same mods, just in a different order.

Once again, if the enemy was armored or the goal is to slow it down with cold procs, then I completely understand your argument. But against an unarmored enemy.....? I dont follow.

For clarification: I dont mean that the viral build is a status build and the corrosive+cold one is not. Both builds are EXACTLY the same:

The only difference is that one of them has the elements in a different order.

Raw damage, status chance, multishot everything is the same. Its really just Corrosive+Cold or Viral+Electricity.

I feel like I am either misunderstanding something about elemental weaknesses or im just plain dumb

[Crispy_Calamari]

On 2023-06-26 at 11:52 PM, taiiat said:

the main scenario i think of is when you're trying to get the highest values possible so that additional effects that scale off of your total modded paper Stats will have the largest values to work with. in such a case, you wouldn't care about what Damage Types you're putting on.
would you do that for Demolysts? unlikely.... but just saying it.

If the raw damage value is what people are after and the damage types that the raw damage value consists of does not matter, then I understand this as "as long as the number is the same, it doesnt matter if its corrosive or radiation or cold or heat or whatever".

I agree with this. But what I dont agree with is how that leads to corrosive+cold > viral+electricity.

Because at the end of the day: damage types do matter. And against unarmored enemies, viral+electricity is better than corrosive+cold, right?

The corrosive+cold damage TYPES have literally no bonus against just pure cloned flesh health.

Whereas Viral does.

If the target is armored, THEN I completely get it. Because then not only is the corrosive+cold damage TYPE useful, the status effect is useful too.

But the people all strip the enemy armor anyway. So they are (in my eyes) literally removing the only part about the enemy health that their damage type is good for.

So why not mod for the damage type that the enemy is susceptible to AFTER removing the armor because thats what they do anyway, right?

To me this is the same as modding a weapon for magnetic damage but before you shoot the corpus unit, you remove all the shields with something (idk Styanax ability or mag or whatever). Why??

[taiiat]

3 minutes ago, Crispy_Calamari said:

So why not mod for the damage type that the enemy is susceptible to AFTER removing the armor because thats what they do anyway, right?

could just be laziness at that point - if you remove Barriers and Shields/Armor from everything, then it's pretty easy to Kill things with any Damage as long as it's relatively high, well into multiple Hours of Endurance.

it's hard for us to propose exactly why who you saw doing __ is doing __, just theorize why one maybe could or why one might not care.

[Crispy_Calamari]

10 minutes ago, taiiat said:

could just be laziness at that point

Oh okay. Its not often that I see someone in the squad who is not running a viral/slash setup so on the rare occasion that I do, without exception they always run with corrosive cold, whilst also always bringing armor stripping capabilities. Its been happening so often, that I started to believe that there was an actual reason for why people do that.

Considering that people usually (not always) have their builds well thought out when trying to go to level cap and also taking into consideration that guns that cannot deal slash due to bad IPS spread or low crit chance really rely on the correct element being used, I expected people to pay close attention to what damage types are most beneficial to their loadout.

[Cryoxiis]

3 hours ago, Crispy_Calamari said:

hm ok but then there´s one more thing I dont understand.

You but also taiiat made the same argument regarding the primed elemental mods. But I dont understand to be honest haha.

You have access to Primed Chilling Grasp and Primed Charged Shell. Those are the only primed elemental mods right? (for shotguns). So yes, you can make corrosive+cold using both of those primed mods and a 90 toxin mod. But you can make viral+electric too, once again using both primed mods and a 90 toxin mod.

So the "total damage" (not considering what damage TYPE it is) is the same, no? (Assuming all the other mods in the build are the same) because youre using all the same mods and youre simply rearranging them. And in my eyes, one of those combinations has the advantage when it comes to killing unarmored enemies.

If the base damage is the same (which I think it is, right?) and it all gets multiplied by GunCO the same.....then why choose the one that not only doesnt give you a 75% dmg boost (due to the elemental weakness of the cloned flesh) but also doesnt even have the better status proc?

For simplicity lets say the felarx deals 100 dmg

(and lets say thats the value you get after ALL the dmg calculations including the multiplicative gunco, arcanes, what have you. everything that matters before you shoot the enemy. The only thing thats missing is the elemental weakness of the poor soul that youre about to murder.)

and you were aiming your gun at an unarmored enemy

Why on earth would you ever choose the elemental combo that does no bonus damage, over the one that does get a slight boost?

Reading what you guys said, I get the impression that Corrosive+Cold somehow deals more "raw damage" than viral+electricity, even though both elements use the exact same mods, just in a different order.

Once again, if the enemy was armored or the goal is to slow it down with cold procs, then I completely understand your argument. But against an unarmored enemy.....? I dont follow.

For clarification: I dont mean that the viral build is a status build and the corrosive+cold one is not. Both builds are EXACTLY the same:

The only difference is that one of them has the elements in a different order.

Raw damage, status chance, multishot everything is the same. Its really just Corrosive+Cold or Viral+Electricity.

I feel like I am either misunderstanding something about elemental weaknesses or im just plain dumb

So I'll admit I overlooked you can do viral + elec with both primed mods still. So in that case yes you're absolutely right and not missing anything at all.

Why aren't people doing this? Great question - there's no sensible reason why they shouldn't be.