Talk:Enemy Vulnerabilities/@comment-92.80.50.113-20130918165437/@comment-11753608-20130925195512

The fact that you don't think armor is a "big deal" should be enough for anyone to doubt your suggestions. It has nothing to do with aim or weapon accuracy because the AP damage will benefit from this as well. Go ahead and try to shoot a Corpus in the head with a fully serrated Soma with no AP damage and let me know how that works out. Shooting a grineer in the head with bullet damage is still going to yield lower DPS than doing so with AP damage mods on it.

I am the co-author of one of those calculators your don't touch. I can't speak for other calculators out there, but the one hosted here at the wiki is accurate - backed by datamined stats, in-game research, and just damn good math. But if you won't touch a calculator, try it in game. Take a Soma and put a maxed Serration mod, Point Strike, and Vital Sense on there and go into something like Kappa or even Outer Terminus and feel it out. Then swap out the Serration for Piercing Hit and see how your subjective experiences is. Try the same thing but put in a Hellfire for Infested.

But let's me just enlighten you with a short version of the calc even without the crit mod. Let's say you are fighting a level 1 Grineer Lancer and you nail him with a headhot.

Soma + Full Serration 

10 * 2.65 = 26 base damage

26 * 2 * 1.5 (body part and type MPs) = 78 modded damage.

87 * .33 (roughly the armor mitigation) = 25 final damage.

Soma + Full Piercing Hit

10 * .6 = 6 AP damage and 10 Bullet damage.

Bullet Damage is 10 * 2 * 1.5 = 30, then 30 * .33 = 10 bullet damage final

AP damage is 6 * 2 * 1.5 = 18 final AP damage... No armor is applied.

For a final damage of.... that's right 28 damage.

The maxed AP mod is 3 higher than Maxed Serration and this is only attacking a level 1 Medium Grineer. This damage spread will increase significantly as you fight higher level enemies. And the calcs are probably similar for a Fire mod and Serration comparison against infested - while both damage types are subject to armor, fire has that nice x2 MP helping it along and elemental mod values are rounded not rounded down while base mods round down. So, 15% serration will add only 1 damage while 15% will add 2 and then with the MP be 4.... Are you getting it yet?

With a maxed weapon, it doesn't matter so much because anyone without Serration and AP on a fully leveled weapon is an idiot to begin with. My point from the beginning was that your mod order is not applicable in all situations when leveling certain weapons. This is one of those examples and could be applied to similar weapons - anything with non-armor-ignoring damage types and low base damage.