Sniper Rifles

[Eirshy]

The problem is, you can't have pure poison on Lanka unless you make a magnetic or radiation or something else, while other weapons faceroll Corpus enemies with poison mods, Lanka has to use placeholder mods to get a pure element, loosing precious mod slots. What will you sacrafice for placeholder mod? Critical Chance? Critical Damage? Maybe fire rate?

Not to mention that Electric is the worst attack element in game, except Gas maybe - even 150 Physical base damage gives MUCH more raw DPS than 250 Electric. And you can build any combination with Physical damage without self-castrating with placeholder mods. 

 

 

 

This would be true if you needed only 1 element to deal with enemies. But you need 2 and even 3 in void to kill enemies. Weapons with Physical damage can always be balanced with elemental damage type they lack. Lanka Can't.

So you either have Corrosive in void, or Magnetic in Void, while you need both. Ofcourse you can drop crits but with non-crit Corrosive you will actually deal less damage to Corrupted Heavy Gungirl than with fullcrit-magnetic.

 

No, you really can make do with only one element if you're specializing in a specific target.

 

Against armored enemies, I'm fairly sure the armor bypassing damage is only bypassing for itself, not for the rest of your damage, so that's the only part that matters. This means you either go Radiation for all grineer minus Gunners, or Corrosive for Gunners and Ancients (minus Healers).

 

Corpus have no resistances to Magnetic on their health, in addition to Moas being almost entirely shield.

 

And for void, as much as their grineer troops have alloy armor, Corrosive/Cold would be sufficient against them for quite a very VERY long time simply because they have very small health pools, Cold disrespects the shield drones and moas, Corrosive does full against the Moas, and bonus against ancients and heavies. As for what mod, if I was changing my build to do CoroCold instead of just Coro (which still does full against the Moas) I'd simply swap out Hammer Shot for it. However, as I've found, the only time I don't kill the target with pure corosive is when I don't crit. If I didn't need Split Chamber to get a 90% chance at a second roll for a crit, I'd happily swap *that* out instead of Hammer Shot.

 

Piercing has a +50% armor ignore against Heavy Gunners. What it wouldn't benefit against are the Grineer lancers, against which it has a nearly-worthless 15% armor ignore. Radiation will vastly outperform piercing against the non HG grineer (and you CAN go Radiation/Toxin for a 25% bypass to help with them), and Corrosive finds HGs hilariously cute. Piercing would help against Grineer-only since you could then go Piercing/Radiation (which is only beaten by Coro/Radi vs Grineer), but in the void it's pretty meh due to Lancer health pools just requiring you smack them with a big enough base number.

 

If we went Impact, we'd have a -25% against almost all health pools in addition to no armor bypass... which is terrible (as the Vulkar demonstrates).

 

If we went Slashing we'd have no armor bypass but some bonuses against most health pools but no armor bypass which would make us useless against Heavy Grineer.

 

 

Dropping her damage from 250 to 150 would complete destroy her unless she was given Finisher damage that completely bypasses armor entirely- and even then it would still kill her as she wouldn't scale her numbers upwards sufficiently to be a threat. Physical wouldn't do it in the slightest, and fixing her RNG reliance would free up the slot occupied by Split Chamber, allowing you to just CoroCold and autowin at Infested and Void without screwing up the rest of your build.

 

 

 

I completely disagree on the idea that electric base is bad. It's bad by itself but the top three combo elements are all electric-based, meaning the Lanka is one of the lucky few that can actually run 280% of that element if its owner wishes.

Edited June 27, 2014 by TheBlueJelly

[JuanDeages]

A friend of mine fond of snipers pointed to Mass Effect 3's multiplayer and how snipers were useful because of the enemy's reactions to them.

 

Imagine -- a crowd of grineer are charging towards you. An ally of yours lets off a shot from their sniper. One of the enemies drops -- and the rest of the grineer see their buddy missing a head and react, diving for cover and breaking their assault, giving you an opening to find cover or eliminate them individually. 

 

Giving certain weapons the ability to suppress groups of enemies would serve the game well considering how much the game has turned to focus on large groups of foes vs 4 Tenno. Snipers, LMG like the Gorgon, etc, could all have this "panicking" property, just like bows/bolts have the ability to send bodies flying into other enemies, etc. It'd be a consideration beyond simple damage when selecting a weapon to bring into a fight.

 

That sounds kind of interesting... I wonder if DE would ever make the enemy AI react to their allies dying around them. It could be an interesting mechanic. Some enemy types could go for cover, while others go berserk. Cool idea.

[NullCurrent]

In my opinion, what the snipers need is some way of increasing that crit to play on an even footing with the bows. Right now the crit damage of the bows is just ridiculous with the absurdly high crit chance and crit damage. As has been mentioned by others; having weakspot-hits be guaranteed crits would be an interesting and suitable mechanic for snipers, and opens up for more of a variety of builds (eg. "do I take point strike to improve my damage overall, or do I believe that I can aim well enough to go without it?"). Another thing which needs to be adjusted is the critical damage modifiers, currently +50% damage as a base on a crit is too low.

 

As for the Lanka, Lanka is also one of my favourite weapons in this game, and if the damage is lowered, changed to any physical damage, fire rate lowered, increased projectile size (it is already pretty big, larger than that and you won't be able to score headshots) then it will not be at all as useful as it is. Right now it is a high-powered rifle which can take almost anything down in a single shot if modded correctly (besides bosses). If you claim that electric damage handicaps it in any way, then you have not played against enemies of a high enough level, because there you *need* the specialized damage which the lanka provides.

 

With the Lanka you can still one-shot level 350+ enemies with a crit-headshot without a problem (requires the correct build though, can't go for status or similar builds, those are just for playing around). The Lanka is a weapon to use to take out high-value targets, like infested ancients (corrosive just melts those), heavy grineer (hiii, radiation) and corpus techs (magnetic, though this is the only faction where the Lanka is slightly less effective, prefer the snipetron vandal there). Electric is one of the most versatile elemental base-damages there is in the game, just don't use it pure for any harder content.

 

And as for speciailzing, use a secondary which compliments your primary. When you use a weapon which is as specialized as the Lanka is you need something which can compensate either in different damage types, closer range or AoE and so on. I personally prefer the Embolist or Stug for this job, as both have AoE and very good damage. To not grab a complimentary secondary is just madness, unless you are doing content easy enough where you don't need the Lanka (or a sniper) to level the secondary in which case you should just use the secondary without any primary.

 

Personally I usually just go with a pure corrosive crit build, with Heavy Caliber, to melt most of the things. Only for really high-level grineer do I swap for radiation (as headshots aren't really cutting it anymore with corrosive on napalms and bombards). Corrosive works surprisingly well as a brute-force elemental to cut down enemies, and the high damage of the Lanka helps a bit. The issue is really if I can crit on a headshot or not.

 

For the rest of the snipers, giving them punch through would not make them better. What makes a sniper useful is the ability to make well-placed shots which count, not to shoot through hordes of enemies. If you imagine that the Lanka, which already possess this feature, is effective against crowds, then think again. The main damage of a sniper comes when you hit a weak spot and crit, which you can't do if you shoot through bodies of enemies. The only good use of the punch-through I have found is to headshot enemies behind cover, that is it. A Lanka modded for killing crowds is a lot less efficient at doing it compared to most other weapons, automatic or innate area of effect weapons are a lot better at doing this efficiently.

 

So what I would like to see is something along these lines:

 

* Snipers should have guaranteed crits on weak spots, no matter what their modded crit-chance is.

* Increased crit-damage base on snipers to bring them up to par with bows and other crit-reliant weapons.

* Shortened reload on the Vulkar. Yes, really, this is definitely needed. It is the worst weapon in the game and has been for a long time in my opinion.

 

This will go a long way of making snipers useful again compared to bows while filling another niche in how they are used.

[SonicSonedit]

 

Corpus have no resistances to Magnetic on their health, in addition to Moas being almost entirely shield.

The thing is: Toxic ignores shields completely. And even against Corpus Tech pure Toxic is as effective as Magnetic - you will need same amount of shots to kill him. But all other units are killed much much faster with Toxic. Needless to say about Anti Moa...

 

And for void, as much as their grineer troops have alloy armor, Corrosive/Cold would be sufficient against them for quite a very VERY long time simply because they have very small health pools, Cold disrespects the shield drones and moas, Corrosive does full against the Moas, and bonus against ancients and heavies. As for what mod, if I was changing my build to do CoroCold instead of just Coro (which still does full against the Moas) I'd simply swap out Hammer Shot for it. However, as I've found, the only time I don't kill the target with pure corosive is when I don't crit. If I didn't need Split Chamber to get a 90% chance at a second roll for a crit, I'd happily swap *that* out instead of Hammer Shot.

That's true that you oneshot anything with Corrosive for a while. But soon you will fail to oneshot Crewmen, while other weapons, which have base physical damage and therefore no restriction on combining elemental damage types, still oneshot anything.

Furthermore, you will have noticable problems with Corrupted MOA at 20+ waves of T4 Def already.

 

 

Piercing has a +50% armor ignore against Heavy Gunners. What it wouldn't benefit against are the Grineer lancers, against which it has a nearly-worthless 15% armor ignore. Radiation will vastly outperform piercing against the non HG grineer (and you CAN go Radiation/Toxin for a 25% bypass to help with them), and Corrosive finds HGs hilariously cute. Piercing would help against Grineer-only since you could then go Piercing/Radiation (which is only beaten by Coro/Radi vs Grineer), but in the void it's pretty meh due to Lancer health pools just requiring you smack them with a big enough base number.

You can run damage calc and see that Vectis as pure Physical damage deals about 50% more damage to everything than Lanka if you set his damage to 250.

And you say "Radiation will outperform" Like you can't to install radiation on Physical damage based weapons or like Physical damage doesn't apply if any elemental damage is installed. They combine. They have extremely high combined damage output and flexibility.

 

I can agree that dropping damage to 150 is too much, but still, Lanka currently performs worse than Vectis in terms of DPS because of base electrical damage.

 

NullCurrent

It's fun when guys like you state a baseless opinion without even reading original post.

 

 

If you claim that electric damage handicaps it in any way, then you have not played against enemies of a high enough level, because there you *need* the specialized damage which the lanka provides.

 

I tell you this as a dedicated Lanka user who has over 1300 hours in Warframe. Her charge mechanic is more than enough to make her "unique", electric damage type is not needed.

 

 

And where are your arguments? What I stated IS a fact:

- Lanka can't have Toxic damage without placeholder mod.

- 150 Physical Damage have almost same DPS as 250 electrical against everything except robotic and shields. Go check any DPS calc.

 

The only your "argument" is "In my opinion..."

Edited June 28, 2014 by SonicSonedit

[Eirshy]

The question I have is does 150 physical have almost the same DPS as 250 base when you bring in dual elements. That's really the argument here- whether or not the fact that the three most desireable dual elements are electric-based makes up for the base electric and the difficulty in getting an element that isn't one of those three dual elements (or electric + a dual element that doesn't use electric).

 

 

 

Also, I'm curious as to what DPS calculator you're plugging this into, because Electrical only has a negative ratio against alloy (everything else is 100% or better), and IPS doesn't have a single bonus over 50% against anything, and while 250 is only ~44% higher than the Vectis's 174 (which by the way, is HIGHER THAN 150), the highest sub-percentage is roughly 40% impact.

DISCLAIMER: the following information ignores crit chances and the fact that the Vectis can use Charged Chamber to multiply its damage by 1.3 on every shot. This is done as a thought exercise showing that 250 pure electric is better than 70-61-43 IPS (174 total) in all cases.

 

Targetting things IPS has an advantage against first...

 

Shield

Lanka- 250 electric

Vectis- 199.85 IPS

 

Infested Flesh

Lanka- 250 electric

Vectis- 195.5 IPS

 

So then you'd assume IPS would win against Alloy on Cloned Flesh, since Pure Ellectric amps the armor by 1.5x.... but so does Slashing (which then gets an x1.25 on whatever is left), and while Impact gets the normal armor value, does only 75% against Cloned Flesh.

The Lanka's pure electric is still going strong at 1.5m Alloy on Cloned Flesh, with 0.033329 against the Vectis's IPS's 0.032013.

 

Switching to Ferrite on Cloned Flesh (Slash at 1.15x armor, Electric at 1x armor, Piercing at 0.5x armor)...

The Lanka's pure electric is still going strong at 1.5m Ferrite on Cloned Flesh, with 0.04999 against the Vectis's IPS's 0.044234.

 

I honestly see no point in finding the break even point when we're already at 1.5 MILLION armor, as that level of armor is equivalent to 99.98% Damage Reduction (0.02% or 1 per 5000 damage allowed, or a 5001x Effective HP Multiplier), at which point literally nothing would be able to stop whatever it is you're shooting at anyways unless it was capable of COMPLETELY bypassing said armor (even at 75% bypass, you're still looking at 1251x EHPM, or a little under 0.08% (1 per 12.5) damage allowed).

 

 

Like, even as pure electric, the Lanka wins thanks to the 250 being as high as it is. The only downside is if you're trying to get multiple elements, but even then, the Lanka is *meant* for monoelementing.

 

 

 

The reason the Vectis out-performs the Lanka is NOT because of IPS. It's the 25x2 crit (Lanka is stuck at 20x1.5), the 1.3x all damage it gets with Charged Chamber, and its backloaded 1 second between shots compared to the Lanka's frontloaded 1.5 seconds between shots with an additional 2 second delay after the 10th shot. Oh and Hitscan vs Projectile, but honestly that doesn't matter once you get good with it, and it's part of why they let the Lanka have punch through of Yes.

 

 

 

EDIT incoming, will have even more numbers.

 

 

If we go 5-140-5 on that 150 IPS, the advantage will be against Grineer-based units.

5-140-5 IPS beats 250 E at 3941 Alloy on Cloned Flesh (12.0744493 vs 12.07437817)

5-140-5 IPS beats 250 E at 1538 Ferrite on Cloned Flesh (40.80749985 vs 40.80522307)

 

Against Corpus-based units your damage would suffer greatly due to a split-adjusted +1.667% from Impact and a -14% from Puncture against shields for a net -12.333%.

 

Against Infested-based units your only potential advantage would be against Sinew (healers), against which your split adjusted gain is +23.333% from Puncture only (which is lower than the needed +66.667% for 150 to match 250)

 

This math is all based on simply DamageTypeValue * DamageTypeMult * AdjustedArmorForMatchupAllowedDamage , then summed up together. The longest part of setting up a calc for this is loading up Excel and the Damage 2.0 chart on the wiki, honestly, so I'm not going to bother clogging Imgur's servers or my own dropbox with the spreadsheet I'm using- doubly so because I'd then have to prettyfy it instead of doing it in a very hack-like manner.

 

 

As for wanting to run Toxic vs corpus, you really don't understand how much 280% Magnetic (because you actually get 280%, not 180%) Magnetic completely disregards shields. You're looking at 4.9x your base damage just from the two +90% elemental mods and the type match up. Ignoring the shields for health damage with toxin is nice, but you really don't need to when you're doing nearly five damage for each point of base damage. If you were really concerned, too, Magnatox is a thing you *can* do, and just laugh heartily at anything corpus.

 

As for Void, Coro Cold is also a thing you can do, and with the gigantic amount of Corrosive you can get, the split-adjusted +12.1622% (or rather, +36.4865% over pure Corrosive assuming a free mod slot) is very rarely needed. It's all about answering the question: Did you crit?

 

If you critted, you killed it. If you didn't crit, you didn't kill it. Even wave 20+ on T4 (I'm assuming that's around the same as 30+ on T3; I've basically quit this game until they buff sniper rifles or release ships (at which point it's spiff up my ship then quit again) because seriously this game's balance is complete @$$), those fusion moas? Honestly the rate at which I wasn't ohkoing was about the same as the rate that I wasn't ohkoing everything else with my pure Corrosive Lanka. And you know why that is?

50% crit chance 90% double chance.

 

You have to crit to deal damage with the sniper rifles. And that's the RNG for you.

Edited June 28, 2014 by TheBlueJelly

[NullCurrent]

The thing is: Toxic ignores shields completely. And even against Corpus Tech pure Toxic is as effective as Magnetic - you will need same amount of shots to kill him. But all other units are killed much much faster with Toxic. Needless to say about Anti Moa...

 

That's true that you oneshot anything with Corrosive for a while. But soon you will fail to oneshot Crewmen, while other weapons, which have base physical damage and therefore no restriction on combining elemental damage types, still oneshot anything.

Furthermore, you will have noticable problems with Corrupted MOA at 20+ waves of T4 Def already.

 

You can run damage calc and see that Vectis as pure Physical damage deals about 50% more damage to everything than Lanka if you set his damage to 250.

And you say "Radiation will outperform" Like you can't to install radiation on Physical damage based weapons or like Physical damage doesn't apply if any elemental damage is installed. They combine. They have extremely high combined damage output and flexibility.

 

I can agree that dropping damage to 150 is too much, but still, Lanka currently performs worse than Vectis in terms of DPS because of base electrical damage.

 

I will have to back TheBlueJelly here, the reason that Vectis outperforms Lanka in damage per second and damage per hit in your calculations is because its 25% base crit chance and 2x base crit multiplier, versus the Lanka's base of 20% and 1.5x. It is not because of the physical damage. The physical damage of the Vectis makes it a better weapon on average when not modded with any elemental mods, but once you pit it against a specific faction and use elemental mods the benefits of the physical damage will mostly be eclipsed by the elemental damage.

 

I don't know why you claim that the base electric is so bad, because a Vectis without 2 elemental mods is really bad in terms of DPS (8389 DPS, unusable because heavy caliber, 6803 DPS, 2x poison mods). The best you can do with a Vectis in terms of DPS is something like this (10509 DPS), if you like to use it like a shotgun.

 

And to get 2 elementals on any weapon, you will need to use 3 slots for elementals, no matter if it is a base-elemental or not. The only downside is that you will be limited for the combined elemental of the two.

 

As for the argument that you can also install radiation on a physical weapon, sure, that works. But it is not as effective if you look at the damage against a particular enemy as a full radiation will get all the benefits, while the physical + radiation will not. Of course this goes for the reverse too, a full on radiation weapon will have all of its downsides too, without anything to compensate for it. But then we are not talking about a weapon which is specialized.

 

Lanka is also really bad without 2 elemental mods, so not using a combined elemental is pretty bad. On the other hand it does not suffer much from Heavy Caliber, even maxed it is possible to headshot enemies from far away, which makes it possible to effectively use a build like this (10814 DPS). But if you are really worried about shielded enemies, and want a secondary element, this magnetic + toxic (8807 DPS) isn't so bad.

 

Of course armor scaling has to be taken into account, but that applies to toxic too. The only thing pure toxic gives you is the shield-bypass, which might make a pure toxic Vectis slightly more effective against well-shielded enemies at really really high levels, when magnetic crits are not enough to go through the shield (but then you will have problems to crit the HP of the enemy too). So a magnetic + toxic Lanka is somewhat equal to a 2x toxin modded Vectis, with the Lanka winning in DPS as long as it can one-shot the shields.

 

And where are your arguments? What I stated IS a fact:

- Lanka can't have Toxic damage without placeholder mod.

- 150 Physical Damage have almost same DPS as 250 electrical against everything except robotic and shields. Go check any DPS calc.

 

For the first, yes, that sucks, but that is a downside of pure elemental weapons, and as you can see the Lanka does not need a secondary element usually, it is enough with a combined element in two mod slots (Stormbringer + something).

 

No it does not, not when modded properly. See above.

[Eirshy]

Two things....

 

One, DPSFrame miscalculates fire rate on the weapon, you can prove this by putting Speed Trigger on the Vectis, and observing that the dps increases.

 

Demonstration that fire rate does nothing:

 

This is actually a common problem with nearly all DPS calculators, as the easiest way of getting dps is to acquire the time per shot and divide the damage per shot by that (or to calculate the time per shot, multiply the clip size by that, add the reload time, and divide the damage*clip by that if going for full cycle instead). In actuality the last shot in the clip does not pay the fire rate time penalty if you manually trigger the reload. So while it might be somewhat accurate to say something like the Gorgon or Supra will likely pay the fire rate time penalty before reloading because their frtp is really really short to where you don't notice it, something like the Vectis with a 0.75 second frtp, you'll manually trigger it to bypass it.

 

 

 

Two, someone I have respect for here (Taiiat) stated that the armor stats also count as raw HP as well, meaning my calculations were a tad off (as well as damn near impossible to really calculate without designating a specific enemy, as I would have to know the percentage CFlesh compared to the percentage Armor, in addition to if you can break the armor without killing the target, and if the armor DR scales down with the remaining armor health- in other words I'd have to be DE). I'll actually be testing this momentarily, and will edit this post with the results.

 

 

EDIT: Just tested it, Lancer died in 8 hits for 14 (unmodded brat-mk1 non-headshot), which is 112 damage, meaning that, assuming 100/100 health, their armor does not count as HP as well

Edited June 28, 2014 by TheBlueJelly