End Game Viability Of Continuous/heavy Weapons?

[CorruptArbiter]

For those endless survivals and defenses, how well do explosive weapons(Torid, Ogris, Angstrum, etc) and beam/continuous weapons(Glaxion, Amprex, etc) fare against high level enemies?

 

Are they worth a potato and forma compared to other top-tier weapons?

[Lokime]

If you like status, yeah.

 

Glaxion is more ammo efficient than Amprex, it  has 99.9% status chance, so you can use that in advantage against each faction. which is a good thing on the void, when everything one-hits you.

Edited December 3, 2014 by Lokime

[ThePredicament]

When it comes to high end enemies, utility and reliability become more important. Weapons such as Amprex and Synapse have high damage and status chance potential but their ammo consumption rate makes them not as reliable. This can be solved with two different things, one is ammo restore (which I personally have never used) and a ultra reliable Secondary such as Marelok, Brakk, etc.

 

The same could be applied to the heavy weapons but mostly require the secondary being the main weapon while the primary is a secondary.

[TheStag]

Ogris is nice in endgame once invested into, but it is also a risky weapon to use because you could down yourself and risk an important mission.

Angstrum tends to fall off hard after a while.

Amprex and Glaxion are great in endgame. Amprex is better, but for both you must find a way to manage ammo. Glaxion would be best for procs and Amprex would be best for killing things.

Edited December 3, 2014 by TheStag

[Romalic]

most weapons need multiple forma to be effective at high levels, i like the quanta, good ammo usage speed, the secondary cube attack gives a good boost of damage too in those 'damn, thats a lot of enemies' seconds

 

as for explosive weapons i rarely use them, far too easy to fire and kill yourself if something moves infront of you, friend or enemy

[InvaderMEEN]

Glaxion + Viral procs is amazeballs, especially with team play.

 

Synapse is one of the best DPS rifles in the game.

 

Penta is still pretty OP despite minor ammo problems.

 

Amprex is an amazing crowd-control weapon.

 

Angstrum is the best AoE bombing pistol, hands down (it also gives some primaries a run for their money).

 

Torid still sucks.

 

Ogris is still pretty powerful, but has fallen behind on the power curve.

[Grander.Alderman]

Quanta's alt-fire is often underestimated. I can do over 10,000 damage on an explosion that doesn't harm me (unlike most other explosive weapons), it also helps that it can rapid-fire about 6 of them per magazine and even more with multishot mods (and Mirage's Hall of Mirrors... yeah)

[Apex_Nemachode]

I just want to see some more assault rifle'ish weapons :/ not lasers, rockets, etc. but more auto fire such as Soma and Karak

[SpongyPenguin]

Glaxion + Viral procs is amazeballs, especially with team play.

 

Synapse is one of the best DPS rifles in the game.

 

Penta is still pretty OP despite minor ammo problems.

 

Amprex is an amazing crowd-control weapon.

 

Angstrum is the best AoE bombing pistol, hands down (it also gives some primaries a run for their money).

 

Torid still sucks.

 

Ogris is still pretty powerful, but has fallen behind on the power curve.

 

I agree with everything you said except your opinion on the Torid.

 

Torid is an amazing weapon for high level defense. It's an AOE status weapon that works amazingly well if you can predict enemy pathing. If you're moving around constantly, it's not going to be as great, but if enemies are coming to you, it is flippin' fantastic. It's my go to weapon if I'm playing Frost and on pod babysitting duty. If my team doesn't have 4x Corrosive Projection, Corrosive + Cold and high status will slow the enemies, allowing them to take a ton of corrosive procs before leaving the AOE. They can be killed easily by my teammates after this.

[Phoenix86]

You should try the Burston Prime built for status too... high precision, lot of headshots, status spam at any distance, close to no-ammo problems.

 

Works well against ANYTHING up to lvl 75-80 (aka 40 waves in a T4 Def)

[xyLoneZ]

Glaxion + Viral

Viral is kinda meh on glaxion since it doesn't stack. Glaxion + Radiation or Corrosive though, that's another story.

[[DE]Momaw]

I just want to see some more assault rifle'ish weapons :/ not lasers, rockets, etc. but more auto fire such as Soma and Karak

 

The problem is that when you get into "end game" which I would vaguely define as level 50+ enemies, ammo efficiency becomes a serious problem.  Heavy weapons and exotic weapons tend to be more clumsy or specialized than automatics but far more ammo efficient. If you really want end game "bullet spewing" automatics for plain old DPS, the Soma and Boltor Prime are pretty much it because their damage per round of ammo spent is so high.

Edited December 3, 2014 by Momaw

[Tatersail]

 

Torid still sucks.

 

Ogris is still pretty powerful, but has fallen behind on the power curve.

 

somebody that doesn't play much with these guns I see.

 

Torid is perhaps the single most powerful gun in this game, able to kill level 200-300 mobs in seconds

You crit build it, Serration, heavy cal, split chamber, Vital sense, point strike, Corrosive combo, + spare for fire or whatever you fancy http://goo.gl/uHSM30

then shoot at vortex, I have seen 30k torid dot ticks, often high infested eximus just touch vortex and die.

the 34k damage number you see in your HUD when putting mods on the weapon does not account for the dots dealing damage every second for 10 seconds, and them critting 37% of the time.

 

 

Ogris is still as strong as ever with a 600 damage base this gun is able to one shot till about an hour in to most games and continues to 2 shot later on IN AOE.  The only limiting factor on Ogris is ammo, which can be solved by using ammo plates, Nekros/carrier or simply using a Sansha Kubrow to feed ammo.

 

 

Amprex is great but will run out of ammo, Synapse holds up well and is buffed more by volt shield, but like Boltor prime, Soma and most autos it eventually runs out of ammo on higher levels as HP scales up.

 

 

and yes!  YES FORMA!

 

Forma Ogris, Torid, Synapse, Amprex, Opticor, Quanta, Phage, Angstrum, Stugg and even Penta (tho penta is alot weaker)

These weapons are not only worth the forma they outclass most others.

 

 

and sadly even with forma Glaxion and Flux rifle are poor and mainly used to CC and status

Edited December 3, 2014 by Tatersail

[MechaGent]

I prefer Penta over Ogris, for a couple reasons:

1) If an unexpected obstacle wanders in front of your gun as you fire, you have time to notice and vacate the area before detonation

2) I find the Penta more fun than the Ogris (which, I realize, is rather subjective) due to its ability to bank shots off of geometry. Off-topic, I think it would be an interesting Ogris augment mod that bestows bounce upon the rockets...

3) Yes, the Penta technically does less damage than the Ogris. However, it can be pooled around an area trap-style for greater damage.

4) Finally, in my humble opinion, nothing is more satisfying than bricking some mob in the face, and waiting until they recover from the stagger to detonate.

In closing, a suggestion: make your weapon's energy color very noticable, and you'll have a good time. Also, don't be afraid to use Shred as a sort of training wheel, as the grenades will punch through mobs, fellow players, and what I refer to as set-pieces: anything environmental that could be described as furniture. They wil usually not punch through the actual floor, though, allowing some banking practice.

[ChaoticLizard]

It's my honest opinion that the Quanta is pretty great, so much so that most members of my alliance have put the most resources into that over any other primary.

 

The quanta's alt fire is great for crowd control, and the ammo efficiency with the regular fire is just plain stupid. Personally, I have a maxed out shred mod on mine so I don't have to worry about cover and also so I can just destroy halls of enemies at once (very useful during Void Defense). Additionally, if you have shred on the quanta, the cubes will be more effective since they deal more damage if you shoot them yourself rather than if they explode on an enemy - in other words, the cubes pass through some enemies (dealing a good amount of damage in the process) and then exploding.

 

I also really like beam weapons with Mirage, and not just for the visual effect; I can just simply hold a hallway with beams of continuous damage using hall of mirrors and just burn through level 50 enemies with ease. I don't have that much experience with enemies above level 80 though, so I don't know how it would hold up there.

 

(As for beam style secondaries, the Synoid Gammacor is something I've got my eyes on since it has more base damage than the Marelok with an enormous magazine and ammo efficiency)

[jonnin]

ammo is going to be a major problem a "some point".  

 

I am a die-hard galaxion user, and I love the gun.   But mine is modded to run over 40 rounds/ second.  Yes, that is a lot, but a mob has X health.  You have to hit it for X damage.   I could mod it to use about 1/2 that much ammo and shoot at it for twice as long, but the net result is still # of rounds * damage per shot = X.  Modded the way mine is, it does about 5k dps ON PAPER before the elemental mods get a bonus and crits and all that are factored in -- it probably runs closer to 7500 dps if modded for the enemy at hand (which can be tricky on some enemy due to inherent cold damage mixing with other mods).  

 

The cost of that is, that 1500 rounds lasts a whopping 35 or so seconds of shooting!    I fire mine in bursts, one mob at a time, most of the time (and it has shred so it often kills 3 or so per burst).  I mean I literally click fire and release it as fast as I can and that is fatal on anything up to a certain point (anything on the starmap will die to that, and for the first while in endless missions it works).  After a point though I have to hold the buttton down to get a kill, not for long, but for longer, and longer, and longer...   at some point the # of shots fired per kill is much greater than the # of kills and even if every single mob dropped a rifle ammo, it would still run dry.  

 

As others said you can re-mod the gun to be a status monster and do well with it, but my point is that high fire-rate guns will eventually have a breaking point against the toughest enemy.  Where that point is depends on how well the gun is modded and how much ammo you can scavenge along the way, but at some point, these weapons are going to run dry.   And while I feed mine with a digging, locker popping kubrow when I do lower end content, the dog cant take a hit in high level content -- you can't really drag one into those missions so the free 60 rounds of ammo every time you get out of combat is not an option. 

 

It has nothing to do with continuous.  PHAGE for example uses 1 round / second I think, or something like that.   And there are full autos like gorgon that can drain a barrel of ammo in seconds.    The issue is simply what happens when rate of fire is high and enemy take many, many hits to kill.  As soon as most kills are taking more rounds to kill than you get back from killing them, it will not be long before you have a problem. 

[Darzk]

But mine is modded to run over 40 rounds/ second.  Yes, that is a lot, but a mob has X health.  You have to hit it for X damage.   I could mod it to use about 1/2 that much ammo and shoot at it for twice as long, but the net result is still # of rounds * damage per shot = X. 

Well, that's not quite true.

 

You have to consider overkill. Because a continuous weapon ticks every 1/3rd of a second (after the first tick at 1/10th), a higher fire rate means more overkill. 

 

With 40 rounds per second, each tick after the first is consuming 13.3 ammo, so you're wasting an average of ~6.6 ammo per enemy killed. If you halved the fire rate you'd also half the average wasted overkill ammo per kill.

 

But the main points are valid - higher fire rate always means ammo issues. Something I usually do is bring an efficient and equally powerful sidearm and switch to it whenever my ammo runs low, and switch back after I've had time to pick up some more primary ammo. Carrier helps a lot too :P

[InvaderMEEN]

somebody that doesn't play much with these guns I see.

 

Torid is perhaps the single most powerful gun in this game, able to kill level 200-300 mobs in seconds

You crit build it, Serration, heavy cal, split chamber, Vital sense, point strike, Corrosive combo, + spare for fire or whatever you fancy http://goo.gl/uHSM30

then shoot at vortex, I have seen 30k torid dot ticks, often high infested eximus just touch vortex and die.

the 34k damage number you see in your HUD when putting mods on the weapon does not account for the dots dealing damage every second for 10 seconds, and them critting 37% of the time.

 

Orrrr I could just use my THREE-forma Dread that does up to 80k damage per burst, and has ragdolls and punch-through, awesome ammo efficiency, and razor-sharp accuracy. With a crit-corrosive build the Dread also becomes an excellent anti-heavy weapon, too.

 

That's why I say the Torid sucks (requires tons of forma for performance that can easily be surpassed by cheaper guns like the Opticor/Dread etc).

Edited December 4, 2014 by InvaderMEEN

[jonnin]

Well, that's not quite true.

 

You have to consider overkill. Because a continuous weapon ticks every 1/3rd of a second (after the first tick at 1/10th), a higher fire rate means more overkill. 

 

With 40 rounds per second, each tick after the first is consuming 13.3 ammo, so you're wasting an average of ~6.6 ammo per enemy killed. If you halved the fire rate you'd also half the average wasted overkill ammo per kill.

 

But the main points are valid - higher fire rate always means ammo issues. Something I usually do is bring an efficient and equally powerful sidearm and switch to it whenever my ammo runs low, and switch back after I've had time to pick up some more primary ammo. Carrier helps a lot too :P

 

Fair enough.   Overkill is an issue and worth pointing out, for sure.   I use angstrum mostly, about as efficient as it gets, one shot, and a group dies, but not exactly a huge supply of rockets for that one either.   TBH endless stuff is beyond my attention span and one shot killing me is beyond my tolerance for frustration so I typically do lesser content where my galaxion is fun and rarely runs dry.    If I try to go past 30 min again I will try taking speed trigger back off.  With only shred, its nowhere near as hungry.