Talk:Zarr/@comment-67.43.247.201-20161127012220/@comment-89.16.150.128-20161127044710

Well if you really want to minmax a weapon, I would not trust the numbers on warframe builder anyway. Go and try it in the Simulacrum, although that's also not exactly a great way to figure out how good a weapon really is either. The situations there are too controlled compared to regular, more chaotic gameplay. But it does give you a much better perspective on for example the impact of a status vs pure damage build, which warframe builder does not offer.

What I like to do to test my heavy late game weapons is use Inaros, charge my 4 and then spawn 20 max level corrupted heavy gunners  (max level is 130 for me right now, depends on your mastery rank). I then cc them with my 1 and 4 and try to kill them all, of course. When comparing different builds for the same weapon I look at time to kill all the enemies (or run out of ammo), and how much ammo I used to kill them (or how many I killed before running out). I then do multiple runs with each build and that gives a rough idea of the weapon performance versus heavily armored late game targets.

To give more perspective, I like to then do at least one run agains all max level ancient healers as well, to test the weapon agains unarmored targets. The Tonkor, for example, will perform quite well against the ancients because of it's extremely high raw damage, but will struggle against the heavy gunners due to it's lack of status and low ammo max. The Zarr will behave exactly the opposite, performing slightly worse against the ancients because of it's lower raw damage and less consistent aoe, but then outperform the Tonkor by far against the gunners, due to it's much higher status and the fact that one shot procs multiple times thanks to the bomblets.

But getting to your specific question comparing the two mods, the answer is tough. And it of course depends on the build you want to pursue. Going off of the best Zarr build I found so far, which is [Serration, Split Chamber, High Voltage, Malignant Force, Thermite Rounds, Firestorm, Point Strike, Vital Sense], I would simply replace Vital Sense with the toxin and crit mod, as the other one sort of ruins the build no matter what you take out. Even just replacing Serration with the damage and cold mod instead would create blast damage with Thermite Rounds, leaving you with no heat damage and making you proc blast far more often than corrosive, which is obviously not ideal. The best would probably be to replace Thermite Rounds with the damage and cold mod if you really wanted to use it. Cold is slightly worse than heat, but you also get the massive damage boost. The problem is that you proc less. The lower damage of the more status focused build is not going to matter in lower levels, and in higher levels the procs will matter. How big the difference would be? No idea, that's when you test in the Simulacrum. But generally, if you plan to minmax in a team and bring corrosive projection, of course raw damage would be better. But solo or pubs, I usually put my money on procs.

And to touch on utility bonuses, that heavily depends on the weapon. Punch through for example can be terrible on "special" weapons like the Simulor, but is pretty much essential on "regular guns" like the Soma. Flight speed is especially interesting on the Zarr, as it extends the range of barrage mode. Reload speed is pretty much a direct dps increase. But it works more like fire rate, in that the better dps comes at the cost of faster ammo consumption. Compared to reload speed, fire rate however also allows for more burst before having to reload at all. Then again, it also increases the number of wasted bullets on already dead enemies due to human reaction time delay.

TL;DR: I don't think there is a specific metric we can apply here. The Simulacrum is probably the best bet to get a rough idea of performance, and then it's just testing in actual missions. I believe the correct proverb to use for this is "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" ;)