Phage

The Phage is an Infested shotgun that fires seven beams in a fairly wide spread. Zooming in focuses these beams closer together, allowing the Phage to perform well against groups or individual targets when needed. Contrary to its description, it deals Viral damage.

Characteristics
Advantages:
 * Extremely low ammo consumption rate, roughly 1 unit of ammo per second.
 * Deals Viral damage, making it good against most Corrupted, Grineer and Corpus.
 * Good status chance even for a shotgun, excellent for a continuous weapon.
 * Multiple fire modes, changed by holding zoom.
 * One polarity slot.
 * Has innate Punch Through of less than 0.5 meters, allowing it to bypass a Shield Lancer's shield.

Disadvantages:
 * The starting spread is quite wide, and it takes some time to focus the beams together.
 * It will lose focus the instant you stop firing, land from a jump, or step off a ledge.
 * Deals reduced damage against Chargers and Leapers.
 * Limited range of 25 meters, on par with the Flux Rifle.
 * Requires Mastery Rank 6.
 * Blueprint can only be acquired by Clan Research.
 * Requires a Forma to craft.

Weapon Loadouts
See the user build section for builds using this weapon.

Tips

 * The "Focus" of the beams can be paused at an intermediate stage by releasing zoom. This can be used to dispatch different groupings of enemies more efficiently.
 * Vicious Spread and Tainted Shell will only affect the initial spread of the beam.
 * The time required to focus the beams cannot be modified by any means.
 * Hell's Chamber will increase the amount of beams fired, with the extra beams clearly separate from one another.
 * Firing the beams through Volt's Electric Shield will cause the beams to focus into straight lines and gain very long (although not infinite) range.
 * Using Seeking Force will allow the beams to go through objects.
 * Due to its spread being controllable and damage being continuous, this weapon is quite effective at destroying reactor cores for Sabotage missions.

Trivia

 * Phage is the Greek word for "devour". The Phage itself may derive its name from Bacteriophages (viruses that consume bacteria) or Macrophages (cells that consume bacteria and cellular debris).
 * This is the first shotgun to have a continuous-firing feature, as well as the first Infested shotgun. It is also the first purely elemental shotgun.
 * The Phage, due to its aspects, can be called vaguely in many names by the community, such as: the Squid Gun, the Octogun or the Tentacle Gun.