Continuous Weapon

HELD trigger weapons create a continuous beam and have a short warm up time to reach full Damage

—In-Game Description

Continuous Weapons (also known as Beam Weapons) have attacks that fire a continuous beam or stream between the weapon and its target in a fully automatic fashion.

Continuous weapons share these common features:

• Trigger Type is listed as "Held".
• Relatively high fire rate.
• Pinpoint accuracy.
  • Barely affected by  Heavy Caliber's and  Magnum Force's accuracy penalty.
• No recoil.
• Hitscan. Damage ticks are instantaneous upon holding trigger.
• Consumes 0.5 ammo per tick of damage (although not true for some continuous weapons).
• Initial damage starts at a low point and gradually ramps up to 100% of its damage over 0.6 seconds when firing. After the weapon stops firing for 0.8 seconds, the damage decays back to its initial point over 2 seconds.
• Multishot bonuses do not apply additional instances of damage. Instead, it provides a chance to roll bonus damage in multiples of itself, similar to how Critical Hits function. However, even though additional damage instances aren't added, Status Chance per tick will also increase linearly with Multishot bonuses.
• Limited range that can be increased with  Sinister Reach and  Ruinous Extension.

Unique Mechanics

“Very well. Keep your secrets.”

This article/section contains unofficial information, concepts, or terminology derived from or based on community discussion, invention, or knowledge. It may be subjective and contain information or terminology that is not used by Digital Extremes or in official WARFRAME communications, and may not be an officially recognized concept.

Some continuous weapons offer unique mechanics not seen in any other weapon class.

• "Beam chaining" - initial beam can attack secondary targets from the primary target
  • E.g.  Amprex,  Atomos,  Basmu's alt-fire,  Gaze (Secondary),  Kuva Nukor,  Larkspur ( Prime),  Tenet Cycron,  Tenet Glaxion,  Torid Incarnon Genesis, and  Vermisplicer (Primary).
  • Each subsequent chain beam will lose damage.
  • The range of chain beams are not affected by Beam Length bonuses.
  • Additional chain beams do not cost ammo.
• "Split beam" - more than one beam that converges into a single focal point when zoomed
  • E.g.  Convectrix and  Phage
• "Homing beam" - beam that automatically seeks targets near the reticle
  • E.g.  Klebrik Scaffold and  Vermisplicer (Secondary)
• "Conal beam" - beam that spreads out like a cone, similar to a flamethrower
  • E.g.  Embolist,  Ignis family, and  Lega Prism

List of Continuous Weapons

See Category:Continuous Weapons.

Patch History

Update 38.0 (2024-12-13)

• (Undocumented) Beam Range is now displayed in the arsenal.

Update 34.0 (2023-10-18)

• Fixed being able to push ragdolled enemies around with beam weapons.

Update 31.5 (2022-04-27)

• Made slight tweaks to beam length FX.
• Made improvements to Beam FX rendering.
• Fixed the FX on some Amp beams not triggering on impact.
• Fixed beam rotation FX depending on end point.

Update 22.15 (2018-03-07)

• Fixed misleading Status Chance over 100% for Beam weapons in the Arsenal Stats. This was due to recent Beam weapon Status Effect changes that now have a chance to Status proc for every tick of the weapon's Damage (based on Fire Rate), instead of only ticking once per second.

Update 22.14 (2018-03-01)

General Beam Weapon Changes and Fixes

• Fixed Beam weapons not being able to damage enemies (alive but in a ragdolled state) when being affected by certain ‘crowd control’ Abilities.
• Damage now ramps up over 0.6 seconds and after moving off target there is a delay of 0.8 seconds before it starts to decay over 2 seconds.
• All Beam weapons now start their Damage ramp up at 20% (instead of 10%) with the following exceptions:
  • Convectrix
    • Primary fire starts at 60%.
    • Alt fire starts at 80%.
  • Phage
    • Starts at 70%.
  • Embolist
  • Starts at 30%.
• The Multishot chance should now apply more consistently with Beam weapons.
• Weapon Range Mods (like Sinister Reach) no longer affect the distance of chains for chainable Beam weapons (like the Amprex). Main Beam distance is still affected by them.
• Fixed Beam weapons continuously firing when quick Meleeing.

Hotfix 22.13.4 (2018-02-22)

• Increased the Beam weapon Damage ramp-up time from 0.8 to 1 second.
• Fixed Beam weapon Damage ramp up not happening per target.

Hotfix 22.13.3 (2018-02-21)

Beam Weapon Changes

Beam Weapons & Warframe. Depending on how long you've played our game you've either only known them to function as they currently do (calculating per second), or remember a time when they calculated damage much differently. Perhaps 5 year-veterans speak of a different era of Beam Weapons.

Beam Weapon behavior was originally changed to help with performance but as we've made optimizations to the game over time, we can return them to their original status of hitscan weapons with pinpoint accuracy and zero recoil. Or at least we think we can.

Perfect accuracy and high fire rate is balanced by limited range and damage ramping up from 10% to 100% over 0.8 seconds when firing and decays back to 10% over 1 second after stopping. To help with ammo economy, Beam Weapons consume 0.5 ammo per trace - unless they are Flamethrowers.

Once this launches (hopefully this week on PC), we're hoping for some practical feedback on the changes and your thoughts! It's a bit tricky to grasp the behaviour changes on paper, but in practice it's something you'll be able to detect quickly. Please bear that in mind when replying - practical feedback will be the needle mover for any tweaks to come.

General Beam (Continuous) Weapon Changes

• Perfect accuracy and high fire rate is balanced by limited range and damage ramping up from 10% to 100% over 0.8 seconds when firing and decays back to 10% over 1 second after stopping. To help with ammo economy, Beam Weapons consume 0.5 ammo per trace - unless they are Flamethrowers.
• Beam weapons now state "STATUS" instead of "STATUS / SEC" in the Arsenal because they can now Status Effect more than once per second (like all other weapons).
• Currently Multishot Mods do not increase Status chance. Multishot works like all other weapons except the effect is in the same spot as the base occurrence. We are monitoring this closely!

Hotfix 11.7.3 (2014-01-17)

• Continued tweaks to Continuous Fire weapons:
  • Damage is now applied initially at 1/10th of a second instead of 1/3rd of a second, meaning that responsiveness on trigger-pull should be improved.

Update 11.7 (2014-01-15)

• Continued Changes to proc/status logic with Continuous Fire weapons:
  • Their proc/status is now determined per second – the Arsenal will display the “Status per second” value. Continuous fire weapons that had a weaker proc chance before should be yielding reasonable proc/status per second with this calculation.

Update 11.6 (2014-01-08)

• Changed logic that determines visual representation of damage mods on continuous-fire weapons (eg: Synapse, Ignis, etc).

The frequency of damage numbers used to be limited by using a minimum damage threshold. Since damage mods increase the rate at which damage accumulates, this would cause damage to be inflicted more often though each damage event would not necessarily be larger. This led to people thinking the mods did nothing because they didn't notice the increased rate at which numbers would appear (an easy mistake for low level damage mods). Similarly, headshots would make numbers appear more often but not necessarily create bigger numbers.

Now continuous fire weapons now limit the frequency of damage numbers by using a minimum time between impacts, regardless of how much damage has accumulated. This gives us a lot more control and should make things more obvious for players who are applying damage mods (it's easier to notice that numbers are 5% larger in magnitude vs being generated 5% faster)

Update 8.0 (2013-05-23)

•  Flux Rifle and  Ignis introduced, the first continuous weapons.