Pseudo-Official Petition To Buff/rework Castanas

[YagoXiten]

I am absolutely in love with the Castanas / Sancti Castanas, but they are doomed to be horrible, inefficient weapons, and it's not hard to see why. They have exceptionally low stats across the board, are riddled with mechanical issues, and their damage is forced to scale linearly when nearly every other weapon in the game scales exponentially.

They don't scale with fire rate, because the low clip size, the travel time and the cap on the number of Castanas you can have out only lets you spend more time waiting and reloading than throwing them.

 

They don't scale particularly well with multishot, because it only serves to reach the painfully low Castana cap sooner.

 

They don't scale well with status chance because the base status chance is low, and they do not benefit from fire rate.

 

They cannot utilize critical hit mods.

 

To make matters worse, you also run out of ammo exceptionally quickly, but cannot run Ammo Mutation because you need to squeeze every ounce of damage out of them.

This thread is to brainstorm ways to fix these weapons and make them more than mere Mastery Fodder.

EDIT:


I came up with the following changes which I believe would fully fix the Castanas:

Clip size changed to 6. Castana Cap raised to 18.


With a build consisting of Hornet Strike, Barrel Diffusion, Lethal Torrent, Quick Draw, Pathogen Rounds, Deep Freeze, Heated Charge, and Convulsion, this would enable the user to hit the Castana cap in about .75 seconds, detonate them for ~30k damage, and reload in .7 seconds, or around 20k DPS on average.

For comparison, the Synoid Gammacor with a similar build (replacing Quick Draw for Ammo Mutation) deals about 30k DPS for 5 seconds before reloading for 2 seconds and the Tigris, can hit somewhere around 60k+ damage before it's 1.8 second reload.

Edited August 7, 2015 by YagoXiten

[shut]

I think that only tweaks are necessary. Give them pistol ammo (210 max, regain via red ammo drops) and raise the cap to 15 or so projectiles at once.

These are pretty much miniature sticky bombs, yet they're currently limited more harshly than actual full-size sticky bombs like those in TF2. In a PVE horde game. That's kinda goofy.

Edited August 7, 2015 by SortaRandom

[LABAL]

Uh, what? This is one of the rare weapons where you can put four elemental and four status-elemental mods at the same time without needing to think of anything else.

Edited August 7, 2015 by LABAL

[Blackout751]

They're pretty good as they are but could definitely use some buff-tweaks. Increasing the reserve ammo capacity and the amount of explosion-ready Castanas allowed out would be very useful, because they didn't need to be reduced to 32 maximum when weapons like Despair have upwards of 200.

[shut]

Uh, what? This is one of the rare weapons where you can put four elemental and four status-elemental mods at the same time without needing to think of anything else.

I don't follow.

You can do that with literally every weapon in the game. Doesn't mean that any of these builds will be viable, including castanas.

[YagoXiten]

They're pretty good as they are but could definitely use some buff-tweaks. Increasing the reserve ammo capacity and the amount of explosion-ready Castanas allowed out would be very useful, because they didn't need to be reduced to 32 maximum when weapons like Despair have upwards of 200.

Agreed. I would mostly like to see the Castana cap raised/eliminated, though some ammo tweaks would not be out of line.  'm not actually sure why there is a cap in the first place. Perhaps visual clutter, but that doesn't seem like a very valid point considering what I've seen Mirage with Concealed Explosives / Kulstar / Attica / Angstrum do. (And that mod single handedly outperforms the Sancti Castanas even on the MK-1 Kunai.)

[YagoXiten]

Just a reminder.