Braton Build Advice

[khangalanga]

Hey guys, I was wondering if you could give me any advice/feedback on my Braton build. The hidden mod is high voltage. Any and all comments will be appreciated!

 

Edited September 2, 2017 by khangalanga

[rapt0rman]

Pretty good. To an extent, I'd say that it's a bit more important to get your status chance up, then the extra elemental damage, especially since you rolled a riven with +slash.

Also blast as an extra element is great against infested (and it is a useful CC), but honestly, against armored enemies, it'll just be wasting potential slash and corrosive procs, and consistent headshot damage will be more useful than the knockdowns.

With those two things in mind, I'd replace cryo rounds with malignant force, and run corrosive/fire.

Beyond that it's pretty much the tried-and-true braton prime build.

Edited September 2, 2017 by rapt0rman

[khangalanga]

18 hours ago, rapt0rman said:

Pretty good. To an extent, I'd say that it's a bit more important to get your status chance up, then the extra elemental damage, especially since you rolled a riven with +slash.

Also blast as an extra element is great against infested (and it is a useful CC), but honestly, against armored enemies, it'll just be wasting potential slash and corrosive procs, and consistent headshot damage will be more useful than the knockdowns.

With those two things in mind, I'd replace cryo rounds with malignant force, and run corrosive/fire.

Beyond that it's pretty much the tried-and-true braton prime build.

I'll do that, but what do you think of crit hybrid? I heard crit/status hybrid is pretty decent on the braton. 

[rapt0rman]

3 hours ago, khangalanga said:

I'll do that, but what do you think of crit hybrid? I heard crit/status hybrid is pretty decent on the braton. 

Well... glad you asked >:D  Wall of text inc...

Point Strike and either Hammer Shot or Vital Sense (I prefer HS in this case, I'll explain it below), instead of Infected Clip and Heavy Cal, will get you a standard crit build. Other options are dropping shred too, and using HS+VS or HS+HC, which will result in better single target damage, or possibly rerolling your riven for something with crit stats or even multishot (which of course benefits your raw damage, crit and status).

Hammer Shot increases your slash proc damage through crit damage, while increasing your status chance without adding elemental damage (which would reduce your chances of proccing slash), honestly it's a hidden gem for critical slash proc builds.

Crit/status is what I run, but it's a slightly unorthodox build, so bear with me: upping crit damage, but leaving crit chance at 10%.

 

The idea is that fire rate and multishot are enough "brute force" to have even 10% crit proccing reliably, and more importantly, dropping point strike makes room for even stronger critical-headshots and critical-headshot-slash procs. And from my testing, the higher level the armored enemy, the more important higher damage crits are over critting more often.

My riven isn't quite ideal either, I'd prefer something like... +dam +crit dam +multishot -impact (but wouldn't we all?)

But of course the corrosive damage isn't for show either, there's actually a sort of balancing act between corrosive and slash. For instance, if your slash procs aren't strong enough, but your slash proc chance still outweighs your corrosive chance by too much, then it'll take longer to bring the armor down to a point where the rest of your damage can pick up the slack.

On the flip side, if your slash procs once again aren't strong enough, but you go too heavy on the corrosive, you might completely remove armor too fast, and then be left with corrosive now dealing less damage against cloned flesh (incidentally an extra element like fire can help in this situation).

BUT if you have strong slash procs, lots of corrosive and lots of boosted crit damage, then once their armor goes down to a certain point, fun things like this start happening:

 

Allowing you to easily finish off your enemy before you completely remove their armor. In this case I dropped shred for Vital Sense (at that level of enemy, single target damage will be more important than punch through, and fire rate will just be eating through ammo more quickly).

Edited September 3, 2017 by rapt0rman