Why not just run Toxin and Slash?

[Prof-Dante]

My Alliance builds, Overframe builds and Youtube builds all share the same strategy, building for a few specific element for each faction, or build for one element and just brute force the rest.

But I don't understand, If you have the capacity to obtain a third viral source like a Panzer, Nourish or even a weapon's innate viral, why won't you just mod for Toxin Plus slash?

Viral to boost damage to health, Toxin to bypass shields, and slash to bypass armor, and all three to chew through infested.

 

just think about, it saves a HUGE space for extra mods in your weapon, and it's very versatile.

and before, when you divided your three weapons to combat Grineer, Corpus and infested, now you can carry one weapon against all three, and leave the rest for a dedicated boss weapon.

 

for example: My Toxin + Slash weapon currently is sporothrix, it has innate viral so I don't need any viral sources, it takes care of any enemy in the game that can take status.

my Boss weapon is any gunblade, most notably Stropha, modded for radiation and Melee exposure for Corrosive, the two prime elements that most bosses and heavy units are weak to.

and my secondary is anything else I want, it can be an aoe for room clear like Occucor.

Edited March 1 by Qorvex99

[(PSN)slightconfuzzled]

I prefer Axl and Slash myself. 

[GPrime96]

“and all three to chew through infested” except for Cambion Drift ones

[trst]

Because using brute force is trivial. Viral Slash on it's own is enough to force your way through just about everything in the game.

But also building to include a forced combined element requires specific options thus limiting your build. Perfectly fine if those are options you already want to use and/or it already matches your playstyle. But not everyone enjoys the same things.

[Hexerin]

18 minutes ago, GPrime96 said:

“and all three to chew through infested” except for Cambion Drift ones

Slash shreds them because true damage. They're immune to viral procs, but that doesn't really matter, because again, slash.

Edited March 1 by Hexerin

[taiiat]

uh, sure, you could? if you have something else to Prime Viral first, then you can just stack DoT's.
provided you aren't fighting any Enemies which are resistant or immune to DoT's or Viral Status, though.

[UnstarPrime]

Why not supplement Slash with Toxin?  First it helps to understand why we build for Slash.

If you're just whacking on something without any status effects, you'll take out enemies with high shields soooooo much faster than you'll take out enemies with high armor.  It's not even a contest, which makes armor the thing to beat.  This means that you get far greater returns when building for Slash — which bypasses armor — than you could ever get for any effect that reduces or bypasses shields.

So why not supplement Slash with Toxin?  Then you'll be great against both armor and shields, right?  In practice, I've found that the answer is "not really".  Because by adding Toxin, you are reducing the amount of Slash procs you'll do, and thus making yourself less effective against armor, which is the much bigger threat.  And the benefit of this double-edged strategy is that you'll sometimes be able to deal with shielded enemies a bit quicker.  But they already weren't taking long, so broadly speaking I wouldn't say the juice is worth the squeeze.  (Plus, some enemies have both shields and armor, and in those cases, your Toxin is just going to be tickling them.)

[Kaiga]

Pure tox does work on some builds, like the torid or other infested weapons, but generally yeah viral+slash is the way to go, because of how those two effects interact, the amount of damage done to instantly reduced health is like Trst said enough to bowl over most enemies directly, but toxin also doesn't reduce health or strip armor like corrosive or viral can.

Against corpus though, it's very good.

[(XBOX)zThulsaDoomz]

I'm sorry, but I had to laugh when you mentioned Overframe builds

[Hexerin]

7 minutes ago, (XBOX)zThulsaDoomz said:

I'm sorry, but I had to laugh when you mentioned Overframe builds

It's terrible for sourcing actual functional endgame builds (generally), but it's still a decent resource when you're learning the game.

[Merkranire]

Is this a new concept or….?

I wouldn’t mind if they toned down the effect of Viral status, but it’s not like this is the only option worth using, and personally I like building my kit for interplay and roles, and one-weapon-to-rule-them-all is an every-so-often thing

edit: Also I‘m not tied down to one set of gear or way to build for the various options that include the presented ones

Edited March 2 by Merkranire

[VibingCat]

You're right. Viral+toxin+slash is the most versatile combination of elements to use against any faction, even at level cap. It makes a lot of sense in the Void, mod for toxin and Hunter Munitions and add Nourish.

[pwnSacrifice]

While you're not wrong in thinking you can get by with panzer or nourish, and you kind of can, is that it's not 100% reliable. Panzer picks it's own targets, and nourish can fall off or you run out of energy.

While slash is ok without viral, you will notice it's absence. Precious few weapons come with innate viral (phage and kompressa come to mind). When you do get the option though, and with the new rad mods, a viral corrosive rad setup is ideal on primaries. And let's not kid ourselves, we're only really talking primaries, as secondaries lack Hunter Munitions.

Yes, we have hemorrhage. How many secondaries can use it? It's why viral heat is the go-to for them. Not quite as strong, but generally gets the job done.

Is viral too centralizing? Probably, but what are we to do? Even at a lower total cap, the way it interacts with slash (and slash procs doing true damage) means we'd still use it. Short of a rework, I don't see much pushing me to use much else (besides Deimos and the odd boss fight)

[Ace-Bounty-Hunter]

2 hours ago, Merkranire said:

I wouldn’t mind if they toned down the effect of Viral status

Are you nuts?! The forums would literally implode from so much nerd rage. Players were having a meltdown about Eclipse just a week ago. 

[Ace-Bounty-Hunter]

7 hours ago, Qorvex99 said:

Viral to boost damage to health, Toxin to bypass shields, and slash to bypass armor, and all three to chew through infested.

It's worth mentioning that all of the Murmur enemies are resistant to both viral and slash. Especially the Rogue Voidrigs that are capped at four status effects and laugh off Slash and Toxin procs. Electricity and Radiation has proven to be more effective against that faction.

Edited March 2 by Ace-Bounty-Hunter

[Skoomaseller]

people do that, it's just that not everyone runs panzer vulpaphyla

[Skoomaseller]

2 hours ago, Ace-Bounty-Hunter said:

It's worth mentioning that all of the Murmur enemies are resistant to both viral and slash. Especially the Rogue Voidrigs that are capped at four status effects and laugh off Slash and Toxin procs. Electricity and Radiation has proven to be more effective against that faction.

I'm quite sure viral is still the premier status because they resist viral damage, not the procs.

the voidrig and the fragmented bosses (and I think the magnetic worm thing? not sure) are the only ones with caps to viral, and since they're not as plenty as their murmur brethren it's not worth modding for them unless you're specifically looking for them only. 

[0_The_F00l]

You can do that , nobody is stopping you.

As long as it's killing the enemies in a reasonable amount of time it is not such a problem.

The problem arises when you can't get the same damage consistently , most of my loadouts take the consistent approach where even if there is no external source (due to lack of energy /unreliable procs/downed companion) I don't feel handicapped.

[Hexerin]

2 hours ago, Ace-Bounty-Hunter said:

It's worth mentioning that all of the Murmur enemies are resistant to both viral and slash. Especially the Rogue Voidrigs that are capped at four status effects and laugh off Slash and Toxin procs. Electricity and Radiation has proven to be more effective against that faction.

Resistances mean nothing to the true damage of slash procs. Any primary weapon with Hunter Munitions and a proper build will vastly outperform elemental matching (which is an extremely mediocre system nowadays).

The Rogue Voidrigs are rare spawns that also require the Rogue Culverin spawning them to survive for like 10 seconds at the console. Literally any kind of CC effect, blowing off one of their arms, and/or killing them will interrupt them. It's extremely unlikely for Rogue Voidrigs to spawn if players are paying even the slightest attention.

Edited March 2 by Hexerin

[Tiltskillet]

17 minutes ago, Skoomaseller said:

people do that, it's just that not everyone runs panzer vulpaphyla

Can it be good at spreading viral adequately now?   Before Bonds, I generally didn't find it useful for that except as a supplement.   Unreliable and too slow even when it was reliable.  And I play pretty slow compared to a lot of people.

Much better than old Panzer is new Manifold Diriga.  Better than that potentially is Melee Influence, if one wants to use melee.

I still think these won't be ideal compared to supplying the viral oneself for a lot of builds.  OTOH the game can be so easy that "ideal" priming isn't needed, and may not even be noticed.

[Skoomaseller]

11 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

Can it be good at spreading viral adequately now?   Before Bonds, I generally didn't find it useful for that except as a supplement.   Unreliable and too slow even when it was reliable.  And I play pretty slow compared to a lot of people.

Much better than old Panzer is new Manifold Diriga.  Better than that potentially is Melee Influence, if one wants to use melee.

I still think these won't be ideal compared to supplying the viral oneself for a lot of builds.  OTOH the game can be so easy that "ideal" priming isn't needed, and may not even be noticed.

even better than manifold diriga, manifold hound with synergized prospectus.

panzer's still good if all you want is viral, but the hound can spread much more than just viral. cold, puncture, slash, all good for crit and CO/gun CO

[Tiltskillet]

Just now, Skoomaseller said:

Even better than manifold diriga, manifold hound with synergized prospectus.

Ah, I always forget hounds are a thing since I still haven't done SoP content.  I should do something about that some day.

[Hexerin]

8 minutes ago, Tiltskillet said:

Ah, I always forget hounds are a thing since I still haven't done SoP content.  I should do something about that some day.

Just know that I'll always hate being in a squad with you if you use Null Audit.

[Merkranire]

5 hours ago, Ace-Bounty-Hunter said:

Are you nuts?! The forums would literally implode from so much nerd rage. Players were having a meltdown about Eclipse just a week ago. 

I think it’s about time they imploded

[Ace-Bounty-Hunter]

4 hours ago, Skoomaseller said:

I'm quite sure viral is still the premier status because they resist viral damage, not the procs.

It's still worth bringing a weapon or companion built for viral as a primer, but you'll do more damage overall with the elements they're weak to. Especially if you're using weapons with high burst damage.

4 hours ago, Hexerin said:

The Rogue Voidrigs are rare spawns that also require the Rogue Culverin spawning them to survive for like 10 seconds at the console. Literally any kind of CC effect, blowing off one of their arms, and/or killing them will interrupt them. It's extremely unlikely for Rogue Voidrigs to spawn if players are paying even the slightest attention.

I know you can prevent the Voidrigs from spawning. But at least from my perspective, I purposely let them spawn because they have a high chance of dropping Entrati Lanthorns. Even after running thousands of Zariman missions with a drop booster I was only sitting at around 200 of them. But that number has at least doubled now thanks to the Whispers update.

4 hours ago, Skoomaseller said:

people do that, it's just that not everyone runs panzer vulpaphyla

Panzer was literally the go-to companion before the rework because of its immortality (So did Djinn, but its revival time was way too long). But now that all companions can no longer die permanently during a mission and you have access to mods that significantly reduces their downtime, it is significantly outclassed by superior options.

1 hour ago, Merkranire said:

I think it’s about time they imploded

I think you're getting the forums confused with Reddit.