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.

Holding Zoom narrows from an extremely wide spread to Synapse-like accuracy over about 1.5 seconds. Every time you hold the trigger, it must readjust before it can focus its firepower.

Characteristics
This weapon deals primarily damage.

Advantages:
 * Extremely low ammo consumption rate, roughly 1 unit of ammo per second.
 * Innate 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.
 * 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.

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.
 * 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 oval bulb near the trigger beats like a heart, which suggests that this weapon is alive.
 * The Phage could possibly be a reference to Star Trek: Voyager, in which an alien species has an outbreak of a disease called the Phage.

Bugs

 * Like with all continuous weapons, you can be cloaked by a Shade or Huras Kubrow as you are firing the weapon, and the cloak will not disengage unless you move out of range of enemies or stop firing the weapon and fire it again, granting high DPS to enemies with little retaliation.