QoL request on Felarx's "Mounting Momentum" incarnon perk

[Stoxon]

Hello! Recently I dug Felarx out from the depths of my inventory and I've been having a wonderful time with it again, especially so now that the incarnon form can be treated as a full-auto weapon with the recently-added accessibility setting. Using it, I found out that it can reach a ridiculously high fire rate with Mounting Momentum (although I don't claim to be the first person to do so #1 #2) by either using the Synth mod set or Lock and Load, or by repeatedly entering and exiting incarnon mode with at least 2 rounds missing from the base form's magazine.

I'd like to say, first and foremost, that this is overall a very fun way to use this weapon - it's essentially the same idea as what's behind Molt Augmented or the Galvanized mods, but with the twist of demanding careful ammo management instead of a certain number of kills or kills per second. By rising to this challenge, players can take the incarnon mode's fire rate from a plodding 1.5 all the way up to 16.35 over the course of a few minutes of gameplay - or at least it would, if not for the fire rate cap for semi-auto weapons. But as fun as this may be at its core, it comes with a few problems that aren't so fun in comparison:

• Reduced time in incarnon mode: Since Felarx can hold a maximum of 60 incarnon charges, you end up with 6 seconds in incarnon mode at anywhere beyond 66 stacks, compared to 40 seconds without any fire rate bonuses, or roughly 15 seconds with Primed Ammo Stock and Burdened Magazine, the two best mods for shotgun magazine capacity at the time of Felarx's release. At 99 stacks, you spend more time switching between modes than actually using incarnon mode!
• The buff is more easily lost the stronger it becomes: Base Felarx ends up with 32.7 fire rate at 99 stacks of Mounting Momentum, and the semi-auto -> full-auto setting doesn't pause the trigger when leaving incarnon mode, so unless you're extremely attentive at that moment you risk losing the entire buff and having all the work of building it go to waste. Six shells in the chamber will disappear in about 183 milliseconds, which is significantly lower than the average person's reaction time. I compared Mounting Momentum to the Galvanized mods earlier, and this is one spot where it could be brought in line with (the majority of) them: A higher stack count should serve as a buffer against catastrophic failure similar to how G. Diffusion or G. Shot only lose a single stack and reset their decay timers.
• Insane recoil: Felarx incarnon's recoil seems to be, reasonably, designed for its base 1.5 fire rate, not 10! It's honestly not too bad once it stabilizes, but since it takes about a second to do so there's huge potential to miss those first 10 shots every time you start firing - a sixth of its maximum charge. Additionally, if you don't mod for recoil reduction or choose Kinetic Baffle as Felarx's tier 1 upgrade, it becomes excessively difficult for the base form to build incarnon charge at higher fire rates.
• Online inconsistency: Lock and Load / Synth mods make it a breeze to reach the fire rate cap, even as slow as it is when you use the base magazine capacity, and they provide a very valuable safety net when you've missed every shot and would otherwise be stuck with no incarnon charge to reset the base form's magazine. But as it turns out, they only add stacks to Mounting Momentum when you're the host or playing solo! They still refill the magazine as intended when you're a client, but they won't help you grow the buff. Instead, you need to transform between incarnon form and base form to build charges, and you will gain 1 charge per transformation and unit of ammo missing from the base form's magazine. That is, if you transform after firing just 1 shell, you will gain 1 stack upon entering incarnon form and 0 stacks upon returning to base form, but if 2 or more shells are missing from the chamber you will also gain the 1 extra stack when returning to base form. I actually like how this plays, so I think it should be promoted to a core mechanic of Mounting Momentum.
• Brickwalled by damage attenuation: As far as I can tell, every enemy that uses damage attenuation includes fire rate in its set of factors. I don't intend to complain about this aspect of damage attenuation in general here, but the current extreme boost to Felarx's fire rate means a similarly extreme reaction by the damage attenuation algorithm, causing dissonance with the feeling you get of gradually gaining power over the course of a mission when using it against basic enemies instead.

With all of this in mind, I would like to suggest Mounting Momentum be reworked as follows:

Quote

On transform to incarnon mode: Gain between +0 and +0.15 final fire rate bonus depending on incarnon charge level, up to +4.5 total. Lose half of current bonus on beginning reload.

Comparing to the current implementation of Mounting Momentum, this is equivalent to 15 stacks for 7.5 maximum fire rate in base form, and 30 stacks for 6 maximum fire rate in incarnon form. This would address all of the issues laid out above:

• Minimum time in incarnon mode is increased to 10 seconds with no other fire rate boosts.
• Base form now takes 0.8 of seconds to empty its default magazine, which I think would be a fair amount of time to react in order to avoid the reload penalty.
• Lower fire rate all around means more manageable recoil, and even if it's still pretty wild it's easier to react to how each shot affects it.
• If Mounting Momentum is intentionally redesigned to use this behavior, it will, presumably, work when playing as either host or client!
• Lower fire rate also means more lenient damage attenuation, which I suspect means roughly the same damage per second while allowing Felarx to deal more damage overall in incarnon mode due to the increased uptime from 6 to 10 seconds at max bonus. Base form is a bit trickier to think about, but I suspect the fact that you need to wait out a reload to build up the current buff anyway is its own form of DPS attenuation regardless, to the point where the current implementation of Mounting Momentum might not really be worth choosing anyway in terms of DPS.

...And it would also help to address the sentiment I've seen that Felarx's incarnon form is outclassed by its base form. This is at odds with the opinions I've seen of other Zariman incarnon guns, and indeed, feels antithetical to the idea of incarnon weapons as it was when they were first introduced. Additionally, I doubt that this kind of ergonomic buff would risk upsetting build diversity across the community, especially given that Felarx is already one of the most popular weapons and there are plenty of similarly-powerful incarnon genesis weapons to choose from (but I'm no expert on community trends, of course).

I will admit that this proposed change might mess up a different playstyle that combines Mounting Momentum and Ruptured Plenitude; with a magazine capacity riven and all the other related mods, you might expect to see 24 capacity, which basically comes together as 80 effective magazine capacity at 10 fire rate - but honestly, that playstyle is pretty similar to where this change would leave the incarnon form, while allowing you to pick one of the other tier 5 upgrades to make up the difference in total damage. Still, I'd welcome input from others with more experience with this type of setup.

 

Edited September 18 by Stoxon
Forgot about the fire rate cap and did some more tests to choose better numbers