What's the point of Corrosive shards now?

[quxier]

Why bother putting 2 combined (aka 4 normal) shards when you can just put viral and have similar or even better results?

[Gaxxian]

Great question :) Sadly I have no answer.... because Saryn? Idk. Now those shards are trash too.

[(PSN)Sentiel]

Unless you use both Corrosive and Viral at the same time then there's no point and Viral+Slash will be a better choice now. Your TTK can be higher thanks to the enemy HP increase but that's all.

The only exception are enemies resistant to Status effects, like bosses and such. You need raw damage there and unless you can armor strip them, your Viral+Slash won't do them much harm since you can't stack Slash on them as effectively. 

My solution to the above is to have one weapon for clearing trash mobs that has Viral+Slash (bonus points for having Magnetic because some of the new shields are pretty tanky on Amalgam enemies) and one weapon for bosses that has Corrosive and high raw damage. It's been working well for me so far.

[quxier]

1 hour ago, (PSN)Sentiel said:

The only exception are enemies resistant to Status effects, like bosses and such. You need raw damage there and unless you can armor strip them, your Viral+Slash won't do them much harm since you can't stack Slash on them as effectively. 

Ok, but how does corrosive raw damage are better than just anything else? Except resistance & such (0.5x vs 1.5x damage) there is no point of it, I think.

And again, what's the point of Shards specifically here? If you cannot proc then plus 2-4 stacks from corrosive is useless.

[(PSN)Sentiel]

1 hour ago, quxier said:

Ok, but how does corrosive raw damage are better than just anything else? Except resistance & such (0.5x vs 1.5x damage) there is no point of it, I think.

And again, what's the point of Shards specifically here? If you cannot proc then plus 2-4 stacks from corrosive is useless.

Imagine you're fighting an Acolyte, which should have no weaknesses as per the Codex. You took down it's Shields, it has it's Armor on, and you don't have a defence stripping ability.

Your raw damage will get increased as the limited Corrosion status effect reduces their armor effectiveness. You can increase the number of Corrosion stacks on the Acolyte with Emerald Shards which will then in turn increase the damage you do to them. They're not immune to the increase from Emerald Shards, they just have the base Corrosion ceiling lowered, so you would need more Emerald Shards to fully arnor strip them when compared to a normal enemy.

In contrast, if you would use Viral+Slash, it would result in a weaker and slower effect because you can stack only 4 Slash status effects on them and have to wait for the ticks to damage them (unless you can expedite them). Naturally, if the Slash would be from some obscenely powerful source, it could kill the Acolyte anyway (cough Ceramic Dagger cough), but majority of weapons can't do that and it relies on luck. There's an additional issue with this. New Slash procs rewrite the old ones. So your Glaive Prime Slash can get overwritten by something weaker. This makes this approach for such enemies unreliable.

This is why, in these specific situations, Corrosive is a better and somewhat lazier choice, further improved by Emerald Shards.

However! This changes entirely if you can fully armor strip them. If you can do that, Viral will be a better choice. You're quite likely to have someone in team who can armor strip, which makes this approach unreliable 

In conclusion, the above is why I wrote there is no point in using Emerald Shards now. The above niche scenario will benefit from them but not enough to slot them.