Fusion of Mods, Need Assistance in Understanding

[Lucernam]

I've read the wiki article on fusion, but the whole thing makes my head spin. I understand that the best way is to fuse duplicates, next is fusion cores, next is... etc. What I don't understand is how to calculate how much I will need before hand. Right now it is merely a guessing game. Throw cores and duplicates in, see how far it gets me. Is there any way this monster of an article could be dumbed down for ease of understanding?

http://warframe.wikia.com/wiki/Fusion

[Mutt2679]

Your answer is actually in that wiki page. Each level takes a certain amount of energy. a duplicate gives 100% of it's energy. a mod with the same polarity or fusion core gives 50% and everything else gives 25%.

Energy Offered = 2 × Rarity × (2 + Current Rank)

Rarity is 1 for common, 2 for uncommon, and 3 for rare
current rank is the number of blue dots.

from there you need to figure out how much energy it'll take to rank up the mod you are trying to fuse:



Er = energy required. 
R= rarity (again 1 for common, 2 for uncommon, and 3 for rare)
r= current rank

That's the math behind it. there's charts that make this more simple:

1. 1 Duplicate
2. 3 Duplicates +2
3. 7 Duplicates +4
4. 15 Duplicates +8
5. 31 Duplicates +16
6. 63 Duplicates +32
7. 127 Duplicates +64
8. 255 Duplicates +128
9. 511 Duplicates +256
10. 1023 Duplicates +512

To get a serration mod from rank 0 to max out, it would take 1023 duplicate mods

 

And this chart shows the number of R5 rare cores it would take:

 

 

# of Rare R5 cores to rank	Rank
	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Common	From Previous	0.13	0.26	0.52	1.03	2.06	4.13	8.26	16.52	33.03	66.06
	From Rank 0	0.13	0.39	0.90	1.94	4.00	8.13	16.39	32.90	65.94	132
Uncommon	From Previous	0.26	0.52	1.03	2.06	4.13	8.26	16.52	33.03	66.06	132.13
	From Rank 0	0.26	0.77	1.81	3.87	8.00	16.26	32.77	65.81	131.87	264
Rare	From Previous	0.39	0.77	1.55	3.10	6.19	12.39	24.77	49.55	99.10	198.19
	From Rank 0	0.39	1.16	2.71	5.81	12.00	24.39	49.16	98.71	197.81	396
Legendary	From Previous	0.52	1.03	2.06	4.13	8.26	16.52	33.03	66.06	132.13	264.26
	From Rank 0	0.52	1.55	3.61	7.74	16.00	32.52	65.55	131.61	263.74	528

 

So serration would need around 264 total R5 rare cores. or from previous shows how many additional cores it needs from the previous rank. So theres 132.13 rare cores for a serration card between rank 9 and 10.

Hope that helps!

Edited June 21, 2016 by Mutt2679

[Maicael]

From what I'm understanding use the "Energy To Rank" chart and pick what you're trying to do (rank 0 to rank 5; rank 9 to rank 10) and that will tell you the "energy" required. For instance R0-R10 Legendary is 16,368 Energy.

Now what are you fusing with: Fusion Cores or other Mods? Look at the energy chart for whichever one you plan on using. If I'm using only R5 Fusion Cores for instance, then each one's "energy" is 62 (although this is misleading because only 50% of that energy gets fused, so it's actually only applying 31 energy)

Spoiler

This will be the amount of energy that actually goes into the mod you are ranking.

• Fusing a duplicate - 100% (1 duplicate required to reach level 1)
• Fusing of matching polarity or fusion core - 50% (2 matching polarity Mods to reach level 1)
• Fusing unrelated - 25% (4 unrelated Mods to reach level 1)

So I have the energy to get to the rank I want (16,368) and I have the energy from the cores I'll be using (62*0.5).

16,368 / (62*0.5) = 528 R5 Fusion Cores

[taiiat]

here's the only parts of the article that you need to pay attention to for what you're looking for.

how to identify how much Energy the Mod or Fusion Core you're looking at is worth:

 

and how to identify how much Energy a Mod needs to go from Rank N to Rank T.

[carbine7]

Really I would suggest using the autofuse function in the mods screen for basically every mod, it won't really go wrong, but I'll try my shot at explaining this anyways for the sake of people just looking to understand. I've written this so hopefully this can, in addition to answering Lucernam's question, serve as a "guide" of sorts to Fusion for new players or people who just have never bothered digging into the system.

I should note that DE has said they're looking to make this system much clearer and simpler "Soon" ^(TM), so if anyone reads this in The Future, make sure the system hasn't changed since.

Okay, this isn't a really simple system so the explanation won't be really simple either. If anyone else can put it more succinctly, then please be my guest. With that...

 

How Much Energy Does A Mod Need
First off, you need to determine how much "energy" the mod needs to be ranked to the desired level/rank (I'll use these terms interchangeably) . Each level of fusion requires a certain amount of "energy" in order to reach the next mod rank, and this amount increases with each level and the rarity of the mod, hence why those rank 10 legendary mods are hilariously expensive to fuse completely. Note that I'm referring to the rank of the mod, not its cost, i.e. the little dots at the bottom of the mod card, not how much capacity it requires.

The energy required is determined by this formula: E = 4 x R x 2^r  where E is the energy required to reach the next level, R is the rarity multiplier (I'll get to this), and r is the current rank. In other words: energy required = 4 x rarity x 2^{current rank}

Basically what this means is that the cost of fusing to the next level will double with every rank of the mod; i.e. if going from rank 0 to 1 costs 4 energy, going from 1 to 2 will cost 8 energy, 2 to 3 costs 16, 32, 64, etc...

Finally the rarity multiplier: This is pretty simple, it's just 1 for common mods, 2 for uncommons, 3 for rares, 4 for Legendaries.
What all this means: In order to find out how much energy you need, you'll need to either use the above formula for every level, adding the energy costs, or reference the wiki's nifty table of fusing costs (on the page you linked, just below the energy formula). I'll do an example though.

Spoiler

 

Let's say you want to fuse your shiny, brand new, rank 0 Primed Pressure Point to rank 8 so that it's just one level more effective than your regular Pressure Point. We're starting at rank 0, and our rarity multiplier will be 4 since we're fusing a Legendary mod. Thus, the base cost (in reality we'll need more energy than this from fusion cores) to fuse from rank 0 to 1, using the above formula, is:
E = 4 x 4 x 2⁰ = 4 x 4 x 1 = 16 energy.
Now, we can repeat this formula for every single rank up to 8 and add the energy costs to get the total.
E(1>2) = 4 x 4 x 2¹ = 4 x 4 x 2 = 32
E(2>3) = 4 x 4 x 4 = 64
E(3>4) = 128
E(4>5) = 256
E(5>6) = 512
E(6>7) = 1024
E(7>8) = 2048
Total = 16+32+64+128+256+512+1024+2048 = 4080

Obviously if you're not starting from rank 0 in whatever case, note that the formula still works, just run it as many times as needed from your starting level and add up the results as we've done here. Disclaimer: if the mod is not perfectly fused to a rank, i.e. you used whatever cores/mods you had at one point and only partially fused to the next level, you're out of luck as there's no way to see the present fusion energy. You can still use the formula as a guideline and estimate things, but everything here on will be just that, an estimate.

Seriously though, you're not going to want to do this every time, so I strongly suggest referencing the wiki table on the fusing costs.

 

 

Fusion Cores and Polarities
Alright, hopefully you're still with me after that, I promise it gets easier now. Now that we know how much energy we need, we need to figure out how many cores/mods it will take us to reach our desired energy.

Fusion Modifiers:
Now, no doubt you've noticed that duplicates are better than cores/matching polarities are better than random unrelated mods, however I'll go over this briefly for sake of completeness. Each mod or core that we fuse will contribute a certain amount of energy to the mod we're ranking up, dependent upon both what kind of mod we're putting in (fusion core, polarity, duplicate) and the energy inherent in that mod/core (more on this soon). First, let's discuss how the type of mod affects the energy put into the fusion.

As I've said, each mod/core contributes a certain portion of its energy to the fusion, and this depends on the properties of that mod/core. The energy contributed is affected as follows:

• Duplicates -  contribute 100% of their energy (i.e perfectly efficient)
• Matching Polarity, not a duplicate - contributes 50% of its energy (50% is lost)
• Fusion Cores - contribute 50% of their energy (obviously you can't fuse fusion cores with fusion cores, so this is always the case whenever you use a core)
• Unrelated, different polarity mods -  contribute 25% of their energy (75% is lost)

Obviously, if you have duplicates to spare of a mod, you'll want to use those before you use cores, but using matching polarities can be as good as cores (again, more on this later)

Mod and Core Energy
Almost there. Lastly, we'll need to know how much energy each mod/core gives us before we can modify it appropriately and figure out how many we need. Mods and Cores work differently in terms of energy, so we'll discuss them separately

Mods: This is fairly simple, the energy given by a mod is just
E = 2 x R x (2 + r) where R is again the rarity multiplier and r is the current rank

As in our example above, we needed 4080 energy to get our Primed Pressure Point to rank 8. If we were to do this using duplicates of Primed Pressure Point (stupid, I know, but just go with it), it would take:

Energy Required/Energy per duplicate = 4080/(2x4x2) = 4080/16 = 255 unranked P.P.P.s

Cores: This is more convoluted for reasons that will never be known to mankind, but regardless...(some blatant copypasta from the wiki here)

Each fusion core rarity at rank 0 gives the same fusion energy as an unranked mod of that same rarity, so a Common 0 will give 4 energy, just like a rank 0 common mod, same with the other core rarities and their rarity of mods. Now, this is where it gets weird: the amount of energy per rank of fusion core is basically completely arbitrary. It still adheres to a formula, but one that literally is just pulled out of thin air:

Common cores increase by 2.6 energy per rank, so that common cores give (4, 6.6, 9.2, 11.8) energy for the respective rank of core (0, 1, 2, 3)
Uncommons increase by 6 per rank (8,14, 20, etc.)
Rares increase by 10 per rank (12, 22.....62)

Yeah. Weird. Unnecessarily complicated.

 

FUSING YOUR MOD
Yes. We're here. Finally.
Based on all of the above, we finally have a method for determining how many mods/cores we need to fuse a target mod to a specific rank. In general:

# of copies required = Fusion Energy Required / Fusion Energy Per Copy

As an example, say we still want to fuse that Primed Pressure Point to rank 8, but with R5 Cores instead of the bazillions of ducats in duplicates we'd need, because we're smart like that. We need 4080 Fusion Energy to go from rank 0 to rank 8. We want to use R5 Fusion Cores, which have a Fusion Energy of 62 per core, however because Fusion Cores only have a Fusion Efficiency of 50% per core, we'll need to account for that. First, let's get the Fusion Energy Per Copy(Core).
Energy per Core = Core Energy x Fusion Efficiency = 62 x 0.5(50%) = 31 Energy Per Core
So our number of required R5 Cores is:
# Cores = Required Energy / Core Energy = 4080 / 31 = 131.61

Obviously this is slightly inconvenient (okay extremely inconvenient), we can't just fuse 0.61 of an R5, and using 132 won't fuse us exactly to the level we need, which throws all subsequent calculations off unless you remember exactly what cores you've used for the rest of eternity. Welcome to the Fusion system, isn't it great.

Now, theoretically you might be able to find an exact combination of various ranks and rarities of cores that will get you to the exactly 4080 Fusion Energy that you need, but that is going to be a massive headache, which brings me to another point...

Cost
I won't go into this too much because it really warrants a whole other post of its own, so I'll just loosely borrow from the wiki here. Basically what you really care about when fusing mods is the energy/cost ratio, so that you get the most energy for your credits. Higher rarity and rank mods cost more money when they're fused into your target mod while also giving you more energy, same with Fusion Cores. However, since you don't have to pay to level the Fusion Cores in the first place, this makes them more efficient than everything but unranked duplicates of your target mod, with R5s being more efficient than Uncommons and Commons.

My point is, if it's cost you care about, in the time that it will take you to figure out the exact number of the right kinds of cores to fuse your mod to exactly the right energy, you could've made up any credits you'd lose by wasting an R5 or two, and probably gotten a few more R5s in the process.

Summary and Disclaimer
Hopefully that made sense, god knows I had a Fun^(TM) time writing this (as you probably noticed my gradual descent into insanity), really made me realize just how convoluted and obscure the whole system is to begin with.
To summarize the whole process:

1. Determine how much energy you have (if not starting from rank 0) and how much energy you need to get to your desired rank.
2. Identify what you have at your disposal to fuse to that energy with: duplicates, which kinds of cores, etc.
3. Calculate how much energy your mods/cores of choice will give you per copy, not forgetting the Fusion Efficiency
4. Divide the required Energy by the Energy Per Copy to find how many copies you will need.

Lastly, a few caveats.

• If you're now fusing a mod that has been partially fused to some arbitrary energy and you want to determine what you need to get to [X] level, god help you. In some cases, even starting from rank 0, there is not a round number of R5s or other mods that will go into the energy you need. In this case, it's probably just better to waste a core or one of those 200 copies of spare Sentinel mods you have kicking around (you know you do).
• Any mod that can be fused to rank 10 can be fused there using a round number of any kind of core, regardless of rarity, so long as you use only that kind of core. If you want to be perfectly efficient, just dump in only R5s, though this doesn't apply to any other rank outside rank 5. (This is probably the reason for the asinine core energy scaling)
• That said, in most cases you can just trust the autofuse functions, though I personally wouldn't be putting anything but R5s into Rare and Primed Mods, it's just too wasteful in terms of credits and duplicates.
• If you ever happen to get a Legendary Fusion Core, ignore absolutely everything I've said, because it will instantly fuse whatever mod to max rank. Save it for that brand new Primed Mod.

As I mentioned, DE is looking to overhaul this, or at least make it less obtuse, so for anyone else reading this 2-3 months from now, note that some or all of the above may no longer apply. Lucernam, I realize that this isn't the short and sweet explanation that you probably wanted, but I tried my best. That said, I hope this helps. If you have questions, please ask, I'll do my best.

EDIT: My internet went down while writing this, so forgive it if it's a little out of context from the previous replies.

Edited June 21, 2016 by carbine7
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