When to Build for CC/CD or Status?

[reznho]

I'm returning to the game after a very long break (roughly a year), and I've forgotten almost everything about modding.

How do I know when to specifically build for critical chance/damage, flat damage, status, or hybrid (cc/cd and status)? I remember being told before I left that it's based on the weapon's base cc and status chance, but I don't know if any changes made to the game throughout my absence changed that criteria.

Any advice helps. Thanks.

 

[Zakkhar]

Depends on a weapon and content you are doing. In general it is not worth putting all eggs in the same basket as the baskets are multiplicative. You want a bit of that and bit of this. In general you want to scale with crit, multishot, elemental damage, %dmg, fire rate/aspeed and maybe do some status on top of that.

If weapon has above average stats in cc/cd it is worth building for that (15/x2 are "average" crit stats), if has above average status it worth investing in that.

Hybrids builds are usually either viral+bleed, viral+heat, corrosive+heat and lately also corrosive+rad+heat. It kinda depends on faction.

You got for pure damage/elemental damage if the weapon has poopoo stats in both or it relies on you not critting (mainly Devouring Attrition Evoution of certain weapons).

There are certain weapon that are used for Priming (affecting your target with as many status effects as possible) in order to boost your other damage that relies in Condition Overload or GUN CO (Galvanized Aptitude)

You cannot be told really, you should try to understand how it works.

Check the biggest build site (most builds are outdated or bad cause everyone can upload and upvote one, they do not have IQ tests), but it can let you understand stuff better:

https://overframe.gg/

And another outdated site that can give you some understanding: https://www.cephalonwannab.com/

Edited January 4 by Zakkhar

[(PSN)Sentiel]

This depends on a weapon but it's generally best to mod for both Critical and Status.

Debuffing the enemy with Corrosive and/or Viral will enhance the damage your Crits do, so it's best to have both.

Naturally, not all weapons can do that, in which case you're forced to focus only on one aspect.

[BroDutt]

Common Range weapon : CC/CD for single target weapon. Status for beam/area of effect weapon

Common Melee weapon : CC/CD with Condition Overload stack from your primer (secondary or companion)

Hybrid (with alt fire) depend which mode you prefer. Example Bubonico : combination of decent status chance for alt fire with decent CC and fire rate for main fire

Incarnon : depend on the evolution you choose. For Duviri Incarnon most player go for cc since companion can be your primer for status proc. For zariman more status since most choose Devouring Attrition Evolution.

Edited January 4 by BroDutt

[Hexerin]

Status doesn't scale, so you always want to build for critical (chance and damage) whenever possible.

The discussion goes a bit more deep beyond that, but that's the baseline you work off of.

[(PSN)Pablogamer585]

You do remember well, modding does indeed depend on the weapon's base stats, and that mantra stays this way almost entirely up to this day.

On weapons with good crit but low status, for example the Acceltra, you want to focus on critical stats and raw damage by adding elemental mods that provide higher elemental damage so you can get the benefit of said damage against X type of health / protection.  Say you go against Grineer; Although you won't have enough status chance to inflict statuses often - outside of using Hunter Munitions which procs with crits - you'll still get the benefit of the added damage that corrosive has against armour.

On a weapon with high status but low crit, like the Exergis, focusing on having as much status as possible is better for you exploit the effects of whatever status you apply best. Certain mods like Galvanized Aptitude do give you more damage per status affecting the enemy so this is quite effective.

On a weapon with neither, like the Tigris, focusing on pure damage is effectively the best. But unless a weapon with low crit and status has a special mechanic / you like it a lot, you shouldn't be using it.

On weapons with forced procs, like the Quellor's alternate firing mode or Daykiu's fully charges shots, special mods like Haemorrhage or Internal Bleeding can be used to squeeze very effective DoTs that can deal ludicrous amounts of damage.

Also, puncture and cold got buffed and a new effect was added to each.
Puncture now only has 5 max stacks but keeps its full effect of reducing enemy damage, and now also gives your weapons a +25% critical chance that is added on top of your existing one, which means some status-based weapons can now crit from time to time, and some hybrid ones can crit considerably often.
Cold now slows down enemies up to 90% with 9 stacks, while also increasing your critical damage by 50%.

 

Unlike Hexerin claims, status does scale and is way better than just crit at higher levels, but the mixture of both is in the end what gets the best results. For example, heat.
Every instance you apply of heat to an enemy refreshes the timer of it and deals twice as much damage. Or viral which increases the damage enemies take to health while also doing more damage to health directly, first part being what makes it so popular when combined with other statuses like slash to bypass armour, or heat simply because of the really good scaling this one has. That said, slash & toxin do not refresh and scale like heat, but still are very good damage types for their intended factions.

As for other damage DoTs, electric and gas work best the more enemies there are nearby due to overlapping & sharing ticks of damage.
Only statuses that do not deal more damage the more of them you apply are either blast, cold, puncture, impact, void, or radiation.
Corrosive & magnetic do, up until they reach their intended caps.

Hopefully this brings you up to speed, good luck out there.

Edited January 4 by (PSN)Pablogamer585
Added note about weapons with forced procs.

[Tiltskillet]

Mostly you build for both.   Due to low stats in crit damage or status application, some weapons can't effectively be built for both.  Most of these are bad weapons but not all.

Lower than ~1.8x crit damage and you might not bother with crit.  There are ways to stack good crit chance on low crit chance weapons, so that isn't as big a deal in the meta.  But if you don't have access to those, then you'll also want to look out for crit chance lower than 15%, especially if it's combined with lower than 2.0x crit damage.

Too low of status chance is far harder to generalize about because a lot depends on RoF, innate multishot, multiple damage instances, forced procs--higher can get away with lower status chance.  (You could go to this page and look at "average procs per second".  Lower than 2 per second can be a red flag, but it's still rather complicated in many cases.)  Status is also becoming easier and easier to outsource somewhere other than one's dps weapon, so pure crit+damage builds are becoming more common.