Options For 8Th Mod Slot On Latron Prime

[GravesTheOutlaw]

I've been using this build on my Latron Prime to great success for quite a while (just dealing with void builds for the time being for the sake of simplicity):

http://warframe-builder.com/Primary_Weapons/Builder/Latron_prime/t_30_23000000_128-4-3-132-1-5-133-3-5-134-7-5-137-0-10-140-5-5-141-2-5-159-6-5_137-7-132-19-141-11-133-11-128-7-140-9-159-9-134-11/en/2-0-15

 

Lately though I've been getting some doubts about Shred for long survivals and such where I don't really need the punch-through properties of shred and I just want raw damage to eat away at those annoying hour-mark corrupted heavy gunners (though using those void doorways to abuse shred on them is a nice perk).  I've thus been looking at a few options to run for high level content besides Shred.

 

 

 

These are the damage values for my Latron Prime with Shred against the armor types/enemies that actually matter in the Void.  Note that I am counting DPS (and disregarding all the advantages of punch-through, I know how good it is etc etc):

 

Corrupted Heavy Gunners: 18686

Shields: 10893

Corrupted Ancients: 17513

Status Chance: 61.6%

Chance to proc 4 times in 5 shots: 36.5% (I'll explain this seemingly arbitrary figure later)

 

It's decent, but I can obviously do better because from a flat DPS standpoint ...well, Shred will be Shred.  Also disregarding ammo economy problems because the Latron Prime doesn't run out of ammo.

 

 

 

This is what I'm looking at when I replace Shred with Cryo Rounds.

 

Corrupted Heavy Gunners: 18707 

Shields: 13290

Corrupted Ancients: 17046

Status Chance: 61.6%

Chance to proc 4 times in 5 shots: 36.5%

 

Negligible changes versus Heavy Gunners and Ancients (Ancients aren't usually what I have problems with anyway) but more effective versus those pesky shields.

 

 

Not going to go over replacing both Malignant Force with Hellfire and replacing Shred with Cryo rounds because it does much worse than any of my builds versus Heavy Gunners, the status chance is garbage, and let's be honest, there are quite a few times where I don't want a blast proc and have to run up on top of the knocked-down Heavy Gunner to slam rounds in her face while her friends are having a field day with me /endrant.

 

 

 

This is what I'm looking at when I replace Shred with High Voltage:

 

Corrupted Heavy Gunners: 19140

Shields: 11123

Corrupted Ancients: 18129

Status Chance: 77.28%

Chance to proc 4 times in 5 shots: 68.1%

Chance to proc Corrosive 4 times in 5 shots: 1.06% (this one might be wrong, but wrong or not the probability is miniscule)

 

So with High Voltage I'm getting small bonuses against all armor/enemy types across the board, but the main selling point of this one will obviously be the great status chance...but do I realy need that much status chance?  Nobody cares about IPS.  Well, maybe Impact.  Puncture?  If the enemy does 150% of my effective hp in 1 shot, reducing the damage by 30% is 105%.  It's still going to kill me.  Slash?  Bleed's cool and all, but it only scales off of base damage and I dont have 7 seconds to wait for the enemy to bleed to death in a survival when I have better things to do.  I want corrosive, but the probability of shredding 100% of its armor in just over a second is dismally small.  The probability of it proc'ing in the 15 round magazine is a more respectable 36.7%, but I might as well use something with more DPS if it's going to take me that long to shred all that armor away.  

 

So maybe I'll include Impact with the Corrosive procs, since they're both useful (enough):

 

Chance to proc Corrosive or Impact 4 times in 5 shots: 12.77%*

 

(Again, I might be wrong, I'm multiplying the cumulative probability by the chance to proc 4 times in 5 shots (68.1%) so my logic may be incorrect here, please correct me if this is true).

 

Okay, that's a little better, and in 15 shots I get a 67% chance to either stun or corrode the enemy 4 times.  Is that what I really want?  I don't know.  Anyway, moving on.

 

 

 

Probably my strongest contender is replacing Shred with Hammer Shot.  This is what I get:

 

Corrupted Heavy Gunners: 19478

Shields: 11355

Corrupted Ancients: 18255

Status Chance: 72.5%

Chance to proc 4 times in 5 shots: 58%

Chance to proc Corrosive 4 times in 5 shots: .91%

Chance to proc Corrosive or Impact 4 times in 5 shots: 10.9%

 

On paper I do better raw damage with Hammer Shot than High Voltage (thanks to the great crit multiplier on the Latron Prime).  However, I lose some crit chance...it's not major in any case besides 10% less proc chance in 4 times out of 5 shots.  But again, that could be a worthless puncture proc or slash proc, so that's something to consider as well.  Probably my bigger concern is throwing base damage away in favor of higher crit damage - and as we all know RNGesus can be cruel to us at times in Warframe.

 

 

 

For kicks, replacing Malignant Force with Cryo Rounds and Shred with Hammer Shot.

 

Corrupted Heavy Gunners: 18954

Shields: 13975

Corrupted Ancients: 16945

Status Chance: 55.48%

 

Does the best out of the group against shields...and that's about it.  Nothing special to talk about here.

 

 

 

So now since I've spouted all my opinions, do any of the alternatives look viable enough to sacrifice the punch-through mechanic, or is the damage boost not worth losing the ability to shoot multiple targets and/or through walls.  If you have another build you feel works better, please do feel free to let me know.  If you're a statistician maybe review my math and give me some feedback on your opinion(s) as well.  Thanks for your time!

 

[noveltyhero]

I don't know, I slap on some mods then play to have fun O.o

[bejuizb]

I don't know, I slap on some mods then play to have fun O.o

[Darzk]

Honestly, I'd stick with it the way it is now.

 

Swapping Shred for Hammer Shot would increase the damage per shot by ~21%, but you have to consider the RoF increase from Shred just as much as the Punch Through. A straight 30% increase in RoF is a 30% increase in burst DPS, and nothing's gonna live through a whole clip so sustained is not as much of an issue.

 

The base fire rate is low enough you will notice the difference when using Shred. It's a bit of a challenge to keep shots accurate when using the full rate of fire tho.

 

Basically, IMO the occasional 2-4x damage from multitargeting via punch through is worth the loss of ~20% damage per shot and the extra RoF is noticeable enough to appreciate.

Edited June 30, 2014 by Darzk

[Darzk]

If you run with 2 event mods and no other status mods:

55% status per bullet, 1.045 procs per trigger pull. 50% of those procs are physical, broken down to 10% Impact and Slash, 80% Puncture. 50% are Elemental, all of which are Corrosive. Thus 2.75% Impact, 2.75% Slash, 22% Puncture, 27.5% Corrosive.

 

Total of 30.25% useful proc per bullet, which is an average of 0.57475 useful procs per trigger pull. 

 

Not sure of the statistical logic from there, but its really the more relevant figure - basically a useful proc every other trigger pull.

 

Edit: Also note that Corrosive takes a lot more than 4 stacks to reduce an enemy's armor to 0. Its still useful, but each proc reduces the current armor value by 25%, not from the original value. So enemy armor goes from 100% to 75% to 56.25% to 42% etc.

Edited June 30, 2014 by Darzk

[GravesTheOutlaw]

Honestly, I'd stick with it the way it is now.

 

Swapping Shred for Hammer Shot would increase the damage per shot by ~21%, but you have to consider the RoF increase from Shred just as much as the Punch Through. A straight 30% increase in RoF is a 30% increase in burst DPS, and nothing's gonna live through a whole clip so sustained is not as much of an issue.

 

The base fire rate is low enough you will notice the difference when using Shred. It's a bit of a challenge to keep shots accurate when using the full rate of fire tho.

 

Basically, IMO the occasional 2-4x damage from multitargeting via punch through is worth the loss of ~20% damage per shot and the extra RoF is noticeable enough to appreciate.

 

If you run with 2 event mods and no other status mods:

55% status per bullet, 1.045 procs per trigger pull. 50% of those procs are physical, broken down to 10% Impact and Slash, 80% Puncture. 50% are Elemental, all of which are Corrosive. Thus 2.75% Impact, 2.75% Slash, 22% Puncture, 27.5% Corrosive.

 

Total of 30.25% useful proc per bullet, which is an average of 0.57475 useful procs per trigger pull. 

 

Not sure of the statistical logic from there, but its really the more relevant figure - basically a useful proc every other trigger pull.

 

Edit: Also note that Corrosive takes a lot more than 4 stacks to reduce an enemy's armor to 0. Its still useful, but each proc reduces the current armor value by 25%, not from the original value. So enemy armor goes from 100% to 75% to 56.25% to 42% etc.

Thanks, something for me to think about.

 

Does status chance stack additively?  I was under the impression that multishot was calculated as two separate shots and was thus under the rules of binomial distribution, resulting in ~76% procs per trigger pull, not 104.5% proc chance (is it possible to get more than 1 proc?).

Edited June 30, 2014 by GravesTheOutlaw

[Darzk]

Does status chance stack additively?  I was under the impression that multishot was calculated as two separate shots and was thus under the rules of binomial distribution, resulting in ~76% procs per trigger pull, not 104.5% proc chance (is it possible to get more than 1 proc?).

 

Each bullet has its own chance to proc. So while you'd have a 77% chance to get at least one proc you'd actually have an average of just over one proc per trigger pull. The status chance statistic displayed is the 77%, which does not take into account the times where you get a proc with both bullets.

 

Basically, when Multishot procs, you'd have a 49.5% chance to get a single proc (55%(proc)*45%(noproc) per bullet, so *2), and a 30.25% chance to get a double proc (55%(proc)*55%(proc)). So a 79.75% chance to have one of those situations occur. But when counting the *number* of procs per trigger pull, the 0.3025 from the double procs gets counted twice (cause there's two procs). So we have 0.495 procs from the single, and 0.605 procs from the double, adding up to ~1.1 procs per trigger pull.

 

Those numbers are of course then used in a weighted average to find the final values - (79.75%*9/10)+(55%*1/10) = 77.28% chance to get at least one proc, and (1.1*9/10)+(0.55*1/10) = 1.045 procs per trigger pull.

[GravesTheOutlaw]

Each bullet has its own chance to proc. So while you'd have a 77% chance to get at least one proc you'd actually have an average of just over one proc per trigger pull. The status chance statistic displayed is the 77%, which does not take into account the times where you get a proc with both bullets.

 

Basically, when Multishot procs, you'd have a 49.5% chance to get a single proc (55%(proc)*45%(noproc) per bullet, so *2), and a 30.25% chance to get a double proc (55%(proc)*55%(proc)). So a 79.75% chance to have one of those situations occur. But when counting the *number* of procs per trigger pull, the 0.3025 from the double procs gets counted twice (cause there's two procs). So we have 0.495 procs from the single, and 0.605 procs from the double, adding up to ~1.1 procs per trigger pull.

 

Those numbers are of course then used in a weighted average to find the final values - (79.75%*9/10)+(55%*1/10) = 77.28% chance to get at least one proc, and (1.1*9/10)+(0.55*1/10) = 1.045 procs per trigger pull.

Ah, I see.  Thanks for the breakdown.