Beam Shotguns and what does Status Chance mean for them?

[PwnMissile]

With the recent infested craze I've been itching to pick up an infested primary to run with Nidus, and since I've been meaning to try out some shotgun rivens too, Phage seemed like the correct choice. While status chance isn't as good on beam weapons as it is on many hitscan or projectile weapons, the possibility of both Viral and Corrosive was still an interesting prospect. Easily enough through fire rate and status elementals I got it's chance to 92.4% per second and proceeded to try and test it in the Simulacrum. However it did not proc as often as I expected it to. I repeated it a few times on enemies that took several seconds to kill to check it wasn't just bad luck and it consistently gave me lower rates than a roughly 90% chance each second. I added a bit more status chance and got it to 105.0% status/second to completely rule out bad luck. If my interpretation of it is correct, it should proc at least one time every second. Yet again it failed to meet my expectations, many times going two or three seconds without proccing one status at all.

I went on to test other beam weapons in the same way, while single beam weapons like the Synapse and I believe it consistently procced a status effect at least every second, the other beam shotgun, the Convectrix, on the other hand, suffered from the same symptoms as the Phage.

The fact that on shotguns the status chance means chance of at least one pellet successfully proccing status should not matter here, as a 100% chance, and not merely a number infinitely close to 100% means that AT LEAST ONE pellet (or in this case, beam) has to proc.

In the end I'm clueless and my question is: What does the percentage after Status/Sec mean to beam shotguns like the Phage and the Convectrix?

Edited January 8, 2017 by PwnMissile
Title grammar correction

[Chroia]

The '100% Status on shotguns' effect doesn't apply to continuous weapons.

Continuous weapons do chunked damage in time increments (0.2, 0.4, 0.4, ..., I think?).
Higher RoF = more ammo used per increment = higher damage, and their displayed status/sec is really just status-per-ammo*RoF.
Continuous weapons can only proc on their damage increments. This makes them pretty bad for repeatedly applying status effects.

Edited January 8, 2017 by Chroia

[bl4ckhunter]

if you want status weapons, comtinuous weapons are NEVER the best or even just a good choice so you might as well give up on the phage, on the phage and the convectrix the status chance stat indicates quite literally the number of procs that will occur per second as opposed to the chance at least a pellet has to proc, so even if you get it at 400% it only means that it will proc 4 times per second no matter what, obiviously this makes it mostly trash for applying status compared to pretty much everything else that can apply status even halfway reliably.

[Xekrin]

1 hour ago, PwnMissile said:

What does the percentage after Status/Sec mean to beam shotguns like the Phage and the Convectrix?

I don't know how it affects shotguns specifically, but the answer is glaringly vague and an obvious mystery.  100% chance per second is the answer.  A second in game terms is an age and a half.  A soma can fire a frak ton of bullets in a second.  Dera can strip armour off of a bombard in the blink of an eye.  Beam weapons? It takes oooonnnneee second just for a single proc, then tttwwwooo seconds for another.  

Does not matter how fast your fire rate it, it will consume an entire clip of ammo just to proc 5 times, maybe.  Except the Quanta, the golden child of beam weapons where 60 ammo lasts forever, barring the spamming of alt fire.

If beam weapons actually applied status per ammo the way other guns did they would be GODS of status.  Especially synapse and amprex.  Oh the futile dreams.

[Inarticulate]

Because the "100% status chance means every pellet has a 100% status chance" thing isn't a shotgun thing, it's an anything-that-fires-multiple-projectiles-per-shot thing. Mechanics like this are dependent on how the weapon behaves and now how the weapon is categorized. Categorization as a "shotgun" by the game only affects which mods you can equip (and sortie weapon restrictions) and really nothing else.

The Cernos Prime (which fires a base 3 arrows per shot) and the shotgun secondary weapons (and I'm pretty sure the Redeemer and Sarpa as well) follow this rule. The continuous trigger shotguns don't.