Saryn Melee

[Theiyre]

So I've been getting into Saryn DPS recently for Bere and other farms, and noticed people often build her for melee.  I have a few questions regarding Saryn overall:

A: Do multiple stacks of Torid clouds increase the damage of the spores popped on enemies and molt?  The damage stacks but are they in separate instances that only 1 of which affects spores? (i.e how useful is multishot?  Is it only useful when directly shooting enemies?)  And is Viral or Toxin damage better for Torid?  Here's my current build for it:

B: What is the best way to go about melee Saryn?  Not the build, I get the high range and duration with medium strength, but in what order do I use the abilities?  How many sores?  How often?  Miasma?  Molt?  I've been using the Telos Boltace to pop spores and here's my build:

Are there better melee weapons?  Atterax or Lacera or something?  Weeping Wounds and Blood Rush or Maiming Strike and Organ Shatter instead of Fury and Vicious Frost?]

Saryn has so much utility and DoT but so hard for me to wrap my head around it.

EDIT: Do spores on MOLT gain bonus damage when shot with toxin weapons?  Does higher Torid damage mean higher cloud damage and high dps to spores ON MOLT?

Edited February 12, 2017 by Theiyre

[Magnar21]

For max damage, you want max melee damage and range. Generally speaking, the Atterax is this weapon. Max range and high damage make it a monster. Using Toxic lash will inflict a toxic proc on the enemies hit, and spread spores to enemies in range. HItting more enemies means more spores spread, hence more damage. That said, the Telos Boltace should be a strong weapon, provided you're mainly using the slide attack. You might want Relentless Combination, combinted with crit mods, and the bloodrush/body count combo to make this effective, if you don't have maiming strike yet. Might see it on the acolytes tomorrow though.

[Theiyre]

3 minutes ago, Magnar21 said:

For max damage, you want max melee damage and range. Generally speaking, the Atterax is this weapon. Max range and high damage make it a monster. Using Toxic lash will inflict a toxic proc on the enemies hit, and spread spores to enemies in range. HItting more enemies means more spores spread, hence more damage. That said, the Telos Boltace should be a strong weapon, provided you're mainly using the slide attack. You might want Relentless Combination, combinted with crit mods, and the bloodrush/body count combo to make this effective, if you don't have maiming strike yet. Might see it on the acolytes tomorrow though.

So is replacing the extra gas status (toxin stacked with the innate Toxic Lash viral) with crit more effective dps?  Naramon?  Maiming?  Bloodrush and Driting?

[Praxxor]

I personally use her with Lesion or Atterax with Weeping Wounds, putting electric on the weapon if it's Grineer, or only toxin if it's Corpus (Infested are weak even at level 120 mostly, except for aug armor sortie, in which case you should put electric to combine into corrosive just like for the Grineer). That allows it to destroy the corpus even on augmented shields sorties, and it removes a lot of armor from enemies that you can't one-shot (those are really rare).

However, for any of this to work, you need BloodRush+MaimingStrike+ComboTimer(ideally Drifting Contact instead of body count) + your regular damage, speed, and range mods. Blood Rush has the ability to multiply Maiming Strike's 90% Crit Chance, which means  that you're increasing your critical damage pretty much every time your combo counter increases. This allows any weapon, even an Orthos, to be really freaking scary when you use slide attacks.

P.S. If you didn't know, Crit Multiplier can increase even after you achieve Redcrits, 300% critchance means more multipliers than 200% etc.

P.P.S. These builds can work on any frame, but they are especially deadly with Saryn's lash and Spores, and even her S#&$ty passive helps sometimes.

 

 

And torid's damage doesn't matter at all for Spores afaik, and if it does, then you'd better use Pox anyway.

[Theiyre]

2 minutes ago, Praxxor said:

I personally use her with Lesion or Atterax with Weeping Wounds, putting electric on the weapon if it's Grineer, or only toxin if it's Corpus (Infested are weak even at level 120 mostly, except for aug armor sortie, in which case you should put electric to combine into corrosive just like for the Grineer). That allows it to destroy the corpus even on augmented shields sorties, and it removes a lot of armor from enemies that you can't one-shot (those are really rare).

However, for any of this to work, you need BloodRush+MaimingStrike+ComboTimer(ideally Drifting Contact instead of body count) + your regular damage, speed, and range mods. Blood Rush has the ability to multiply Maiming Strike's 90% Crit Chance, which means  that you're increasing your critical damage pretty much every time your combo counter increases. This allows any weapon, even an Orthos, to be really freaking scary when you use slide attacks.

P.S. If you didn't know, Crit Multiplier can increase even after you achieve Redcrits, 300% critchance means more multipliers than 200% etc.

P.P.S. These builds can work on any frame, but they are especially deadly with Saryn's lash and Spores, and even her S#&$ty passive helps sometimes.

 

 

And torid's damage doesn't matter at all for Spores afaik, and if it does, then you'd better use Pox anyway.

Are you kidding me?  Pox does way less damage than Torid does in the clouds.  And ofc the clouds affect the spores, the more toxin on the target which the spores are being popped on means more damage spread.  "If an infected enemy is being damaged by a  Toxin proc, popping a spore on that enemy will also spread  Toxin damage to surrounding enemies. The spore will have 25% of the initial base damage that triggered the  Toxin proc added to its burst damage as  Viral damage with a 100% status chance for  Viral and  Toxin effects"

[Praxxor]

4 minutes ago, Theiyre said:

Are you kidding me?  Pox does way less damage than Torid does in the clouds.  And ofc the clouds affect the spores, the more toxin on the target which the spores are being popped on means more damage spread.  "If an infected enemy is being damaged by a  Toxin proc, popping a spore on that enemy will also spread  Toxin damage to surrounding enemies. The spore will have 25% of the initial base damage that triggered the  Toxin proc added to its burst damage as  Viral damage with a 100% status chance for  Viral and  Toxin effects"

If I understand correctly, it should be spreading based on the weapons' initial damage, not the cloud's damage. And I was referring to molt, does molt even get status from your attacks?

[Theiyre]

15 minutes ago, Praxxor said:

If I understand correctly, it should be spreading based on the weapons' initial damage, not the cloud's damage. And I was referring to molt, does molt even get status from your attacks?

A: I'm talking about using Torid for both molt dps as well as on enemies to spread spores, what are the stats to build for in either case

B: how the hell would the spores pop if the clouds didn't do damage...  Would weapons just damage a spore once and then pop all the ones after that?

[Magnar21]

Molt doesn't gain status from your attacks. The spores can have status inflicted on them, but this doesn't add the proc to the spore damage, best I could test.

As for melee, I run something like this http://warframe-builder.com/Melee_Weapons/Builder/Atterax/t_30_222000004_226-5-5-239-4-5-313-8-3-488-1-10-625-3-5-637-2-10-641-6-5-733-0-10-802-7-3_733-7-488-7-637-7-625-9-239-9-226-9-641-9-802-9-313-10/en/4-0-65/

The last mod, Relentless Combination, can be replaced by Drifting contact if you wish. Relentless Combination lets you recover your status a little more quickly if you lose it, while Drifting Contact will help prevent you from losing it altogether. Most of the other mods are essential for any crit build. Assuming that level 3 crits are possible, it might be interesting to see a build with True Steel in it, but i'd need to test that out later.

[Theiyre]

8 hours ago, Magnar21 said:

Molt doesn't gain status from your attacks. The spores can have status inflicted on them, but this doesn't add the proc to the spore damage, best I could test.

As for melee, I run something like this http://warframe-builder.com/Melee_Weapons/Builder/Atterax/t_30_222000004_226-5-5-239-4-5-313-8-3-488-1-10-625-3-5-637-2-10-641-6-5-733-0-10-802-7-3_733-7-488-7-637-7-625-9-239-9-226-9-641-9-802-9-313-10/en/4-0-65/

The last mod, Relentless Combination, can be replaced by Drifting contact if you wish. Relentless Combination lets you recover your status a little more quickly if you lose it, while Drifting Contact will help prevent you from losing it altogether. Most of the other mods are essential for any crit build. Assuming that level 3 crits are possible, it might be interesting to see a build with True Steel in it, but i'd need to test that out later.

Why would you not put gas or toxin on  the melee?  Honest question, does crit allow for more spore dps than high status chance gas does?

[Magnar21]

6 hours ago, Theiyre said:

Why would you not put gas or toxin on  the melee?  Honest question, does crit allow for more spore dps than high status chance gas does?

Depends on what you're going for. Theoretically, Gas would be better for crowds than no additional elements, provided you can get enough Toxin damage on your weapon. Assuming the wiki is correct (and i'm not in the mood to test and math this out), Slash procs are based on your "base" damage (What damage you do before resistances/weaknesses come into play), while Gas scales ONLY off of the Toxin damage on your weapon. This is why I don't mod Gas or Toxin on my melee builds. On the other hand... Toxic Lash scales off of the weapon's total damage, regardless of what those damage types are. Thus, i'm letting the Toxic Lash scaling scale for me, and just emphasizing raw damage. As for why Slash? Slash procs ignore armor (as they are Finisher damage), which helps scale against Armored enemies, something that Toxin and Viral (the main damage types Saryn will be dealing... for most people, since almost no one uses Miasma any more) don't scale well against. Course, if you use Miasma, it's going to deal double damage (assuming both Viral and Toxin procs are on the target, which is almost certain if you're running Spores and Toxic lash), and is also Corrosive, which helps vs high armor enemies.

 

TL;DR, damage type is insignificant when compared to Toxic Lash's damage, but Slash procs (on a crit status monster like the Atterax) will cover the weaknesses of Saryn better than damage alone.

EDIT: Also, most people who rave about Gas as a status are building exclusively for groups, which  it certainly is effective for, or they are running a melee stealth build (such as Loki, Wukong, or Shadow Step). On weapons that offer this, I'd much rather have Slash procs any day, since they ignore armor. This is one reason that the Tigris Prime wreaks such havoc at high levels, though I haven't had the will or spare forma to work on a pure damage build to compare it with. Also, it doesn't matter (best I can tell off the wiki) which weapon you pop the spores with, the only things that matter are the damage of the Viral and Toxin procs on that enemy. That said, Toxic Lash seems to apply its damage prior to bursting the spore, which could be why it seems to scale so hard. Many times in old draco, I could get more kills playing a melee Shadow Step build than I could with a Gas/Radiation Sonicor or Concealed Explosives Hikou Prime.

Now, if i'm misunderstanding the wiki, i wouldn't mind someone clearing up how Saryn works, considering most info we have is derived from player experiments and observations, rather than concrete data from DE.

Edited February 13, 2017 by Magnar21