How to auto kill SP grineer?

[MaxTunnerX]

This question has been bugging me for a long time. How am I supposed to auto kill (without activating something extra) SP grineer? I can auto kill SP infested by using literally anything, SP corpus by using toxin, but for grineer I still need terrify or some other armor strip, which is annoying AF. So what elements do I use on my weapons to auto kill them?

Mostly Im using viral slash on my weapons, I switch to toxin when fighting corpus. Some people say corrosive is supposed to work against armor, but my tests didnt show any difference for the better. Other people say viral slash heat works, and that seemed to work, although it could have just been my imagination. So again, how do I mod my guns so I dont have to bother with any abilities?

[Tiltskillet]

3 minutes ago, MaxTunnerX said:

As for the corrosive, when does it start failing? At endurance runs or already at sedna?

I don't remember.  I have used a Corrosive build, but haven't used anything but Viral HM against armor on it for a long time.   The latter was way, way more effective without strip.

A quick test in the Sim, and it looks like HM is about 3x better than Corrosive against L140 SP CHGs without any outside buffs.  That's...a big difference.

[BroDutt]

There's a reson why it's easier to strip armor after Veillbreaker update. Just double/multiple cast ability that reduce enemy armor or use armor striping weapon like vastilok or Unairu armor strip. 

Focussing on one weapon with viral heat isn't advised. But some kuva, tenet, incarnon weapon can mitigate this because they had better stats/evolution.

There's a reason why using secondary as primer and melee as an extra finisher (melee had better damage but you need to get close) exist.

[(NSW)Greybones]

1 hour ago, (XBOX)Mastermitchel89 said:

Alright we'll give corpus overshield that resists toxic damage and increase their damage reduction

And the infested? We'll just have deimos variant spawn commonly you know the blast tanky ones

Who's my little masochist Who is it

Oh yes. DE could really undo all the buildcrafting, component grinding, cheese tactics that players want to employ specifically to turn the game off. They don’t though, instead they leave alone the efforts of players who specifically sought out ways to break the game instead of trying to make a game-breaking build break the game in the hands of a newbie player and not break the game in the hands of a non-newbie.

Which would be weird; a build performing one way for one player and a different way for a different player despite everything being the exact same?

SP players aren’t concerned with “Too much or too little”, it’s all Maximum Strength with no care for that balance point, so it’s kind of silly to try and force a balance point onto players when they very much are trying to avoid it and make it especially clear that they’re doing so

[(XBOX)Mastermitchel89]

1 hour ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

Oh yes. DE could really undo all the buildcrafting, component grinding, cheese tactics that players want to employ specifically to turn the game off. They don’t though, instead they leave alone the efforts of players who specifically sought out ways to break the game instead of trying to make a game-breaking build break the game in the hands of a newbie player and not break the game in the hands of a non-newbie.

Which would be weird; a build performing one way for one player and a different way for a different player despite everything being the exact same?

SP players aren’t concerned with “Too much or too little”, it’s all Maximum Strength with no care for that balance point, so it’s kind of silly to try and force a balance point onto players when they very much are trying to avoid it and make it especially clear that they’re doing so

so grineer and armor are the only things allowed to be over the top but the other factions can be a waste of ram speed because 'the playerbase is used to it' specifically the max miners and min maxers vs everyone else who wants to just finish the steel path starchart with their favourite under powered weapons and warframes. But because one player can break the game the unfair/unrewarding mode change is suddenly easy and fine for everyone else

1 hour ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

Oh yes. DE could really undo all the buildcrafting, component grinding, cheese tactics that players want to employ specifically to turn the game off.

If this isn't an issue

1 hour ago, (NSW)Greybones said:

SP players aren’t concerned with “Too much or too little”, it’s all Maximum Strength with no care for that balance point,

then buff the enemies to their strengths and weaknesses, since it doesn't matter

[nslay]

Glaive Prime can kill SP Grineer very easily since it has a guaranteed Slash proc on Heavy Attach (manual detonation after throwing it). And it's very efficient at SP Grineer because it's an AOE weapon that has no fall off and procs Slash on everyone hit by the explosion.

Cerata is similar to Glaive Prime, only with Toxin. If you prime enemies with a Corrosive/Viral/Heat weapon like Phage or Catabolyst (very efficient beam weapons), you can easily kill large groups of SP Grineer with Cerata's guaranteed Toxin procs. And Cerata will work on Corpus and Corrupted and Infested too... while Glaive Prime won't work so well on SP Corpus and can struggle with SP Corrupted if there's a Guardian Eximus around.

EDIT: If you didn't know, the reason why Slash works on SP Grineer and other armored enemies is because Slash ignores armor. So you put some powerful Slash procs on a heavily armored SP Grineer and it will die within a second from the Slash damage-over-time tics.

[(NSW)Greybones]

3 minutes ago, (XBOX)Mastermitchel89 said:

so grineer and armor are the only things allowed to be over the top but the other factions can be a waste of ram speed because 'the playerbase is used to it' specifically the max miners and min maxers vs everyone else who wants to just finish the steel path starchart with their favourite under powered weapons and warframes. But because one player can break the game the unfair/unrewarding mode change is suddenly easy and fine for everyone else

If this isn't an issue

then buff the enemies to their strengths and weaknesses, since it doesn't matter

…What? You… do know that the armour in the rest of the game without the crazy SP modifiers is in a fine place, right? And that direct damage is more of an option instead of everything requiring viral/slash? And that enemies have their different roles and the different factions are different already?

It’s the modifiers that push it over the top and is why Archon Hunts don’t get those same modifiers; Steel Path was from the very start meant to be unbalanced for the sake of players who didn’t want balanced gameplay in the first place, they just wanted enemies what lasted longer and hit harder to try their best gamebreaking builds against.

The Grineer in SP are punching bags that you hit as hard as possible because they can take it, the other factions are whatever because who cares about roles and enemy differentiation and any sort of gameplay nuance when you’re specifically building to blown it all away anyways

You… don’t go to Steel Path for build and loadout and gameplay variety, you go to Steel Path to hit things hard. If you want balance and build variety you play around in the rest of the game designed for balance and build variety, which SP aint and never will be.

SP was introduced for min-maxers. If you’re not a min-maxer, it’s a good thing the game mode isn’t the only way to play and earn things, isn’t it?

[(NSW)Greybones]

20 minutes ago, (XBOX)Mastermitchel89 said:

so grineer and armor are the only things allowed to be over the top but the other factions can be a waste of ram speed because 'the playerbase is used to it' specifically the max miners and min maxers vs everyone else who wants to just finish the steel path starchart with their favourite under powered weapons and warframes. But because one player can break the game the unfair/unrewarding mode change is suddenly easy and fine for everyone else

If this isn't an issue

then buff the enemies to their strengths and weaknesses, since it doesn't matter

Oh god, did someone convince you that the game starts at Steel Path?

[MaxTunnerX]

Thanks for all the tips so far. Just in case youre wondering what I use normally, its kuva tonkor 50% toxin. Most often used on wukong so its double tonkor. Ive got crit chance on it, cold for viral, hunter munitions, galvanized multishot thing, primary merciless, crit damage, all the good stuff. Earth level SP grineer die in one shot as usual but the further I go on the star chart, the more shots I need (which isnt rly the case with corpus and infested). Archon missions with grineer are downright annoying. I dont even dare to launch them without terrify + I sometimes switch to felarx for those. But yeah, so far it seems there is nothing I can do to keep using the tonkor and not have armor strip on me as most of the strategies you suggested mean changing weapons to single targets or even melee.

 

EDIT: Just found out Ive been using a pure damage riven for some reason. Ima try to roll it for something better. Also feel free to suggest non rivens that could help me in that slot.

EDIT2: Just rolled a 100%+ crit chance riven. Its definitely better now, but not as much as Id expect. The numbers are entertaining as they have different colors now and the grineer are more likely to just die over time, but Im still not getting the auto/insta kills. Its actually a mix of boredom and nervousness now. Either watching enemies if they really die eventually or ignoring them and hoping they do. Feels like Im better off with the armor strip rofl, sigh.

[Tiltskillet]

10 hours ago, MaxTunnerX said:

Thanks for all the tips so far. Just in case youre wondering what I use normally, its kuva tonkor 50% toxin. Most often used on wukong so its double tonkor. Ive got crit chance on it, cold for viral, hunter munitions, galvanized multishot thing, primary merciless, crit damage, all the good stuff. Earth level SP grineer die in one shot as usual but the further I go on the star chart, the more shots I need (which isnt rly the case with corpus and infested). Archon missions with grineer are downright annoying. I dont even dare to launch them without terrify + I sometimes switch to felarx for those. But yeah, so far it seems there is nothing I can do to keep using the tonkor and not have armor strip on me as most of the strategies you suggested mean changing weapons to single targets or even melee.

Are you using a Grineer Bane?  It will dramatically increase the power of the weapon, especially the bleeds.  Also maxed Primed Magazine Warp will give it two shots, another a big boost in dps.

10 hours ago, MaxTunnerX said:

Just rolled a 100%+ crit chance riven. Its definitely better now, but not as much as Id expect. The numbers are entertaining as they have different colors now and the grineer are more likely to just die over time, but Im still not getting the auto/insta kills. Its actually a mix of boredom and nervousness now. Either watching enemies if they really die eventually or ignoring them and hoping they do. Feels like Im better off with the armor strip rofl, sigh.

Well insta-kills and HM are at cross-purposes.  If you are insta-killing enemies, you don't need HM.  If you do need HM, by definition you're not insta-killing.  You can see how far you can push a Corrosive build with buffs but eventually it will peeter out against armor, and you're back to HM and relying on bleeds to kill targets after a few moments.   Or changing things up with armor strip, priming, etc., all the things that you're trying to avoid doing.

For rivens you'd be looking for Crit Damage, Crit Chance primarily.  Damage, Multi, or Reload are decent.

[MaxTunnerX]

32 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

Are you using a Grineer Bane?  It will dramatically increase the power of the weapon, especially the bleeds.  Also maxed Primed Magazine Warp will give it two shots, another a big boost in dps.

Well insta-kills and HM are at cross-purposes.  If you are insta-killing enemies, you don't need HM.  If you do need HM, by definition you're not insta-killing.  You can see how far you can push a Corrosive build with buffs but eventually it will peeter out against armor, and you're back to HM and relying on bleeds to kill targets after a few moments.   Or changing things up with armor strip, priming, etc., all the things that you're trying to avoid doing.

For rivens you'd be looking for Crit Damage, Crit Chance primarily.  Damage, Multi, or Reload are decent.

Im not using that mod right now, but if you say it works Ill try it out for sure. Also ty for the magazine warp info, didnt know any mod could give tonkor more than 1 ammo, although Im still trying to kill with 1 so I dont really need the 2 and I also use energized munitions when I really have to deal some damage. it will be handy in general tho so thats nice to know. As for the corrosive, when does it start failing? At endurance runs or already at sedna?

Anyway, heres my mod config so everyone better understands:

Galvanized chamber, 106% crit chance riven, vital sense, primed cryo rounds, hunter munitions, primed firestorm, critical delay, hammer shot, ammo drum, primary merciless,

I tried replacing firestorm with bane of grineer, didnt really see any difference (50% damage, the second last rank).

[(XBOX)Mastermitchel89]

4 hours ago, Pulsar63 said:

Isn't that the opposite of what Steel Path is supposed to be?!?

Sounds like "I want to do the hardest part of WF, but I want doing it the easy way"... it doesn't make much sense to me. SP is for higher challenge.

If you want easy life, why not doing the regular WF? :-)

Alright we'll give corpus overshield that resists toxic damage and increase their damage reduction

And the infested? We'll just have deimos variant spawn commonly you know the blast tanky ones

Who's my little masochist Who is it

[MaxTunnerX]

2 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

I don't remember.  I have used a Corrosive build, but haven't used anything but Viral HM against armor on it for a long time.   The latter was way, way more effective without strip.

A quick test in the Sim, and it looks like HM is about 3x better than Corrosive against L140 SP CHGs without any outside buffs.  That's...a big difference.

Yeah and I hate it so much. In my mind, corrosive should be anti armor. It should work like armor strip or something. But it doesnt.

[(XBOX)Mastermitchel89]

On 2023-08-24 at 1:25 PM, (NSW)Greybones said:

Oh god, did someone convince you that the game starts at Steel Path?

No they said the game starts at operator

The unbalanced part is the physical damage

Impact is most effective on corpus and neutral to infested

Slash is most effective on infested and maybe neutral to grineer

Puncture is most effective on grineer but neutral to infested

The the status procs come in

Impact proc is effective on grineer because they survive the damage and sub par on corpus

Puncture proc is effective on grineer not because the damage debuff but because crit chance straight up by 25, and similar to corpus

Slash proc wipes grineers multiplied health to ash semi useless to corpus and the infested are dead before procs are needed even on steel path

Without elemental mods corpus would come out on top

On 2023-08-24 at 1:18 PM, (NSW)Greybones said:

It’s the modifiers that push it over the top and is why Archon Hunts don’t get those same modifiers; Steel Path was from the very start meant to be unbalanced for the sake of players who didn’t want balanced gameplay in the first place, they just wanted enemies what lasted longer and hit harder to try their best gamebreaking builds against.

The Grineer in SP are punching bags that you hit as hard as possible because they can take it, the other factions are whatever because who cares about roles and enemy differentiation and any sort of gameplay nuance when you’re specifically building to blown it all away anyways

the real issue is even with elemental mods both lvl 100 and steel path lvl 100 do the same or similar damage leaving the player to not endure the mission ie without healing not a max lvl shield gating "run", leaving the player around 2-12 seconds to live long enough to deal damage through either armor strip or slash ie 2 options before brute forcing damage output and yet

On 2023-08-24 at 1:18 PM, (NSW)Greybones said:

It’s the modifiers that push it over the top and is why Archon Hunts don’t get those same modifiers; Steel Path was from the very start meant to be unbalanced for the sake of players who didn’t want balanced gameplay in the first place, they just wanted enemies what lasted longer and hit harder to try their best gamebreaking builds against.

You insist on corpus, infested to be paper mashe when they are supposed to last longer

On 2023-08-24 at 1:18 PM, (NSW)Greybones said:

You… don’t go to Steel Path for build and loadout and gameplay variety, you go to Steel Path to hit things hard. If you want balance and build variety you play around in the rest of the game designed for balance and build variety, which SP aint and never will be.

SP was introduced for min-maxers. If you’re not a min-maxer, it’s a good thing the game mode isn’t the only way to play and earn things, isn’t it?

At this point i don't care, because steel path acts as an actual mastery rank test and not everyone is playing steel path to show off or min max and if its supposed to be unbalanced fine give enemies a 50% damage boost multiplicative and 12% unremovable damage reduction since min maxing and gating walks are the only thing that exist in warframe

[MaxTunnerX]

Can we maybe get back to the topic?

[(XBOX)Mastermitchel89]

topic steel path grineer being overpowered how kill

On 2023-08-26 at 11:15 PM, MaxTunnerX said:

Can we maybe get back to the topic?

slash proc, viral, armor strip, puncture and cold, punchthrough, faction mods and crits (multiplicative damage) or brute force, radiation procs, heat overdose, corrosive, specters, summons, friendly fire abilities, better weapons (5% of them most locked behind literally time or someones inventory via trading) or cheese, insta kill, true damage, incarnons, revenant, thrall then reave, viral then reave, gloom

The 3% of gameplay with warframes vs enemies (at the moment grineer)

We'll just ignore arena and archons

[MaxTunnerX]

48 minutes ago, (XBOX)Mastermitchel89 said:

topic steel path grineer being overpowered how kill

slash proc, viral, armor strip, puncture and cold, punchthrough, faction mods and crits (multiplicative damage) or brute force, radiation procs, heat overdose, corrosive, specters, summons, friendly fire abilities, better weapons (5% of them most locked behind literally time or someones inventory via trading) or cheese, insta kill, true damage, incarnons, revenant, thrall then reave, viral then reave, gloom

The 3% of gameplay with warframes vs enemies (at the moment grineer)

We'll just ignore arena and archons

So if I want 100% damage from the start I should go radiation heat?

[(XBOX)Mastermitchel89]

15 minutes ago, MaxTunnerX said:

So if I want 100% damage from the start I should go radiation heat?

Phantasma is an example of status and multishot 

Heat infinitely stacks it goes to about 250 before steelpath grineer disappear to char (with viral)

Radiation distracts enemies and do more damage to each other when they bother, thats why i mentioned this in the neutral section

If you combine radiation procs and heat procs it would work with revenant thralls if not the radiation is forced redundant by the heat "staggering" enemies

Either viral heat effective brute force or radiation viral neutral unless revenant thralls

Clockwork

[MaxTunnerX]

8 minutes ago, (XBOX)Mastermitchel89 said:

Phantasma is an example of status and multishot 

Heat infinitely stacks it goes to about 250 before steelpath grineer disappear to char (with viral)

Radiation distracts enemies and do more damage to each other when they bother, thats why i mentioned this in the neutral section

If you combine radiation procs and heat procs it would work with revenant thralls if not the radiation is forced redundant by the heat "staggering" enemies

Either viral heat effective brute force or radiation viral neutral unless revenant thralls

Clockwork

Ah OK, thanks.

[PollexMessier]

Generally. You don't. SP is hard mode. Hard mode means not one-shoting everything with little more than a stern glance...

...Unless you use a crit-focused build with corrosive damage on Kuva Bramma or Tenet Envoy... I've even one-shot Acolites with those tho usually it takes 2-5 shots... You're not getting through Overguarded enemies that easily tho.

Cedo or Bubonico with a hybrid build primarily focused on viral won't one-shot, but pressing the alt fire button vaguely in the direction of a crowd and then spraying bullets into it will generally not leave much left standing unless one of the things in the crowd is a Nox or Bursa.

Viral+heat on a Kuva Nukor status build (Or really any other good status spreading weapon like Cynex) used in conjunction with a strong mele with condition overload is just bullying the enemies at that point.

Glaive prime with a heavy attack build and used properly will vaporize a small continent do just about any job you want it to. Xoris with a similar build will get you most of the way there.

Still struggling? Armor strip or damage buff ability. My personal favorite is shield pillage cus it deals with both armor and shields, and is a survivability tool.

Nowadays I find the game more enjoyable to just take whatever weapon I feel like using and try to work out how to make it good enough. But I was big on playing as optimally as possible for a good long while.

The Best advice I could really give is watch a bunch of build videos of your favorite weapons and frames, try the builds out, try to get a feel for what's lacking in those builds for how you prefer to play the game, and try to work out what mods you can swap to get it to function in a way you're happy with. Basically: learn how to mod your gear properly. Which is unfortunately the hardest part of the game.

[MaxTunnerX]

On 2023-08-24 at 6:39 PM, Tiltskillet said:

Are you using a Grineer Bane?  It will dramatically increase the power of the weapon, especially the bleeds.  Also maxed Primed Magazine Warp will give it two shots, another a big boost in dps.

Tested grineer bane a few days ago and now I tested magazine warp. Grineer bane did pretty much nothing, but magazine warp is awesome. It doesnt really allow me to one hit kill enemies, but it makes the kill time much faster, not to mention its so relieving and awesome to have 2 tonkor shots instead of 1 (+ wuclone has them too). So thanks again for mentioning the magazine warp, its very cool. BTW, it doesnt need max rank, I only have the rank before max and it already gives the 2 shots.

[Tiltskillet]

36 minutes ago, MaxTunnerX said:

Grineer bane did pretty much nothing, but magazine warp is awesome. It doesnt really allow me to one hit kill enemies, but it makes the kill time much faster, not to mention its so relieving and awesome to have 2 tonkor shots instead of 1 (+ wuclone has them too). So thanks again for mentioning the magazine warp, its very cool. BTW, it doesnt need max rank, I only have the rank before max and it already gives the 2 shots.

Yeah, it makes it a much more comfy weapon for sure,  I still prefer building for one shot plus fast reload.  But not because it's better, only because it's what the Tonkor's all about for me.

I'm surprised the bane did nothing for you.  That implies to me that on your build HM might be better replaced with something else too.

[RobWasHere]

Slash proc bypasses armor like Toxin damage does to Corpus shields, the problem is to apply the procs that are strong enough in the first place. The most reliable ways are Glaive Prime, 2h Nikana of choice (like Azothane) or something like Innodem. Viral procs help but there is no need to apply them yourself with different weapon if you run Panzer or Nourish as helminth.

Alternatively you can prime enemies with few procs and use Kuva Chakkur or Arca Plasmor with gundition overload. Incarnon weapons are also great, even Bronco or Lato work wonders.

Phenmor or Laetum will also work very good.

[Artekkor]

You can't. Enemy armor scaling is still insane despite various overhauls they did and so grineer are still the most durable faction out of 3 through the power of 99% damage reduction.

You need to do something about armor to kill them, or use one of the stupid OP weapons that don't care like one of the Zariman guns, especially Felarx.

[Chewarette]

It depends if you're talking about SP Grineer or level cap SP Grineer tbh.

Because I really don't know what's that urban legend about Terrify. I've never Helminthed it anywhere, I'm rarely (if ever) using armor debuffing abilities in regular SP (which means Alerts + from time to time some medium endless like ~10 rounds for funzies), and weapons/regular abilities just kills them okay-ishly. Most of my loadouts still have the good ol' Corrosive that's not meta anymore but I'm not struggling against anything really.

If what you're talking about is level 2k+ SP Grineer, well then you start going into dedicated-players area, so yeah, breaking news you'll need min-maxing / meta strategies. But that's niche af and if you're trying to stay more than 6 hours in SP Taveuni, I'd suspect you already have the answer to your own question as no one does that unprepared.

[Pakaku]

If you mean damage over time, then you'll want to look into Slash procs because those ignore armour. Heat doesn't do that, but the procs reduce armour, and that makes armour resist less of the rest of your damage. Heat is also good against Grineer health.

Another good thing about Heat is it won't mix with Viral or Corrosive; you'll want Viral to make enemy health weaker to Slash procs, and Corrosive is worth it if you don't proc slash often.

If you're stripping armour down to 0% in other ways, you won't need Corrosive. If you're stripping it but not down to 0%, then it may be worth modding for Corrosive or Radiation in order to still get damage bonuses from them. But of course Radiation means losing out on Heat and Corrosive.