Latron prime and heavy caliber

[ultra_KING]

I suppose I'm making this thread just out of curiosity with other people's opinions as I guess I already made my choice. So I maxed the level on pretty much every weapon in the game and I decided to revisit my weapons and work on making them better so I can have lots of good weapons instead of just a couple really good weapons so I don't have to use the same weapons everytime I do harder missions because that's boring. Right now I'm working on latron prime after putting my 9/10 heavy caliber on it I'm now deciding it might actually hurt the weapon more than it helps it because it seems like I have to use half the clip to kill a single enemy that's farther away because I'm missing so many bullets. So I'm thinking I'll just take it off and use a element damage mod instead. I'm curious about what you guys did and if you came to the same conclusion about heavy caliber and latron prime as I did.

Edited May 7, 2016 by ultra_KING

[(XBOX)TheMadCash]

Yuup. Heavy Cal really hurts the Latron series. With Latron, You really wonna hit those headshots. Hard to do that if your firing half your clip & not landing heads. Replacing it with a 90 elemental is a good call. Also Piercing Cal is another good choice instead of heavy cal. I recommend not using Heavy Cal on Snipers, Bows, Launchers, Some rifles (Latrons, Miter, Harpak) because itll just hurt the weapon.

[Egg_Chen]

Absolutely agree, I only use HC on "spray and pray" weapons. Like you, I tried it on the Latron P but after one mission switched it out for an element.

 

[GinKenshin]

I used to use it on my latron p but I removed it a long time ago. Because I can't land most of my shots 

 

add another element of you want. I added bladed rounds to mine 

[LifeNine]

From what I found, Heavy caliber is terrible for the Latron Prime. Since it has a 2.5x crit multiplier, crit head shots do a lot more damage than regular shots, even if they are crit body shots. Even with just a half ranked or so Heavy Caliber, I find that I'm missing a lot of body shots let alone the head shots. If you can get a crit head shot with a slash proc, the procs will tick for 1k - 2.5k. While the crit head shots hit for 10k-15k, I think it was, on a level 115 Heavy Gunner. It takes about 12 - 15 rounds to kill the level 115 Heavy Gunner.

What I've found to be the best is just the standard stuff, Serration and Split Chamber, the two crit mods, shred for punch through and fire rate, then elemental mods. You can use either two 90% elements and one 60% for status or two 60% status mods and one 90%. I never formaed my Latron Prime enough to take all three 90% element mods, but I like the extra status because corrosive procs really helps make the Grineer easier to kill. That's why using two 60% status mods with one 90% element is about the same as using two 90% elements and one 60% status if you are fighting Grineer and have the element set to corrosive.

I haven't found a way to make this gun any better than what I've said above, and I've been using this gun forever. Like, it's been mainly the only weapon I've been using ever since I got it those many years ago. >.>  More fire rate doesn't help me because this gun really depends on crit head shots, so I don't fire at the full fire rate unless they are up close. The new +crit mods on head shots and +crit multiplier on kill, from what I found in the simulacrum, is still about the same number of shots to kill a level 115 Heavy Gunner as what I have because I have to sacrifice an element mod for the crit. Plus, it only applies when you're aiming. With the above average zoom on the Latron series, it gets pretty hard to aim on enemies that are close in an actual mission. I don't get the benefit of the mod all the time, so I choose not to use it.

I missions, I do most of my killing with the Latron Prime because Mag can't do crud to the Grineer (Yet!). I usually end up with about 20% head shot kills in stuff like survival and defense, unless I'm doing Corpus sorties and I need to use Shield Polarize to just nuke stuff. All in all, this is a good gun and my favourite by far judging by how much I use it, but it does really have a hard fall off as the enemies scale up. As soon as you need an extra bullet to kill something, you just lost half the amount of enemies you can kill in a single clip. I would say it's still good for Grineer up to the 80s to 90s. Maybe slightly lower if there is a lot of enemies. It can still do ok for slightly higher levels if you are only fighting a few enemies at a time though. This thing just doesn't kill that fast when they are so high level.

Maybe some one can come up with a better way to build the Latron Prime, but this is what I can come up with. If you have the Latron Wraith, it's a pretty good side grade. I do like the Latron Prime more for the higher base damage and the fact that I don't really make use of the extra fire rate of the Latron Wraith much. Also the Latron Wraith chews more ammo because of the higher fire rate and lower base damage.

[Sloan441]

I don't use HC on these rifles. They rely heavily (the Wraith in particular) on getting headshots and the increased dispersion works against this a bit too much on these high damage, relatively slow firing weapons.

The damage is already there with their high base damage. They don't benefit as much from HC as low damage, high RoF weapons like the Soma and BratonP.

You can try it and see how it fits into your playstyle with these guns, but they already have a premium on mod slots with their reliance on crit mods and they'd benefit more from adding Argon Scope, Bladed Rounds, or both.