User:Resonance/Primary Weapon Builds

Introduction
All weapon builds can vary greatly depending on available Riven Mods. This is a guideline only.

General Principles
Damage boosts come in the following categories:
 * Base damage
 * Crit damage
 * Type-specific damage (elemental or slashing/piercing/impact)
 * Rate of fire (including reduced reload downtime)
 * Accuracy (including recoil reduction or improved blast radius)
 * Enemy-specific damage (e.g. bane mods)
 * Using the correct damage type for a specific kind of target
 * Synergistic damage multipliers for other effects (e.g. bleed procs for melee followup, corrosive status or other armor stripping effects against high armor targets, enemy crowd control so you can spend more time shooting and less time in cover waiting for shields, etc.)

Damage from these categories effectively multiplies with each other. This means that a mod that adds x% to total damage contribution from one of the underutilized categories will generally improve total sustained DPS more than adding that same x% to a category where you already have a lot of bonuses. Note that this does NOT mean "+90% crit is always better than +90% damage if you don't have crit yet" or "+90% fire rate is always better than +90% damage if you don't have speed yet" -- you always have to check total damage contribution (e.g. am I adding 90% improvement to something that's only 10% of the total damage to begin with), and effects like fire rate can have negative side effects on accuracy or downtime from reloading.

All Primary Weapons
Almost all primary weapons will start with Serration, Split Chamber, and two mods that increase type-specific damage. This leaves 4 slots free to either stack with more type-specific damage, increase fire rate, or add utility mods to compensate for weaknesses in the weapon or change weapon behavior.

Crit Weapons
Weapons with at least 20% base crit chance should almost always add Point Strike and Vital Sense. Along with the two type-specific damage mods, crit weapons will only have two spots left over that you have to think about.

Crit weapons are much more reliant on accuracy than non-crit weapons, because their effectiveness goes up drastically with the ability to make repeated headshots.

Status Weapons
Status chance can be non-intuitive, because the base chance for a status effect doesn't tell you on its own whether a weapon will generate a lot of status effects, and depending on the status effect that can be extremely important. That is determined by status chance, fire rate, multishot, and AoE potential. A weapon with a 50% status chance but an effective hit rate of only 2 impacts per second will strip armor much less quickly than a weapon with 20% status chance but 20 impacts per second, and an AoE weapon with a control effect will mitigate a lot more damage than a single-target weapon with the same status chance and fire rate. That said, any weapon with at least a 25% base status chance may be worth modding with lower-damage hybrid status/elemental mods.

Damage Per Shot vs Fire Rate
High damage per shot weapons can lose overall effectiveness due to overkill, but against extremely hard targets benefit the most from amplifiers like Void Strike. Still, even if suboptimal, large damage numbers can be very entertaining.

Specific Weapons
These are some examples for some of my favorites. Unless otherwise specified, assume that all builds will start with Serration and Split Chamber and two elemental damage mods appropriate to the type of enemy you are facing. Crit weapons will also always have Point Strike and Vital Sense. They will not be mentioned individually unless there is a deviation from this general pattern.

This is not intended to ever be a complete list of top weapons. A weapon not being mentioned here does not imply that it's not worth a catalyst and some forma. Similarly, some weapons mentioned here may be personal favorites only for very specific circumstances or because the side effects make me giggle, even if they aren't entirely practical.

This is a game. It's about having fun.

Lanka
This has the highest damage-per-shot potential in the game, and the 6s combo delay means you can easily sustain a 2.0+ multiplier making it potentially the highest sustained damage output in the game as well, but most of its potential will be wasted on overkill on weaker targets and the charge time and high innate zoom make it difficult to use against enemies that faster weapons could also take down with one or two shots.


 * Speed Trigger - The base charge time is excruciatingly long
 * Vigilante Fervor - From a pure DPS perspective, this is inferior to Speed Trigger, but the 5% chance for a crit upgrade can result in hilarious overkill numbers
 * Primed Cryo Rounds -- Even though Cold damage only has a +25% bonus against Eidolons and Radiation has 75%, the 165% damage modifier is still more effective than adding another 90% in fire/electric
 * Hammer Shot
 * Riven mods that have -Zoom as the penalty can actually improve the handling of this weapon. Getting crit chance to over 100% via Riven will also make the damage much more consistent.

Vectis Prime
This is a crit weapon with only two shots before reloading, but a reasonably quick reload speed that can be improved by the Chroma Toxic effect.


 * Shred
 * Primed Fast Hands - 0.9s reload drops to 0.5s
 * Magazine Warp - This gets you 3 shots before reload instead of 2, and the striking pattern of 3 kills, then a 1s downtime can be more comfortable than 2 kills and a half second downtime.
 * Vigilante Armaments
 * Harkonar Scope
 * Argon Scope
 * Critical Delay - This mod will actually *reduce* your net DPS if you can aim faster than the reduced fire rate allows, but if you aren't fire rate limited, it's effectively free extra crit chance.
 * Primed Bane specific to an enemy type
 * Riven mods that have -Zoom as the penalty can actually improve the handling of this weapon. -Bleed as a penalty will be barely noticeable as well.