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Just need some thoughts on my build


Cheshire Rabbid.7430

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What's the point of having Viper's Gear, if you have 100% Burning and Bleeding duration from other sources? It makes Expertise worthless at this point, because condi duration cap is 100%. Everything that is more than 100% doesn't count.Take Sinister's gear instead for more pure condi damage.Blowtorch with Viper's Gear: Maximum 15k dmg (12s).Blowtorch with Sinister's Gear: Maximum 16,3k dmg (12s).Check this.

Thermal Release Wave would deal more damage (dodge) + you can stay longer in Photon Forge.

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A few notes:

I love the falling damage reduction trait, it helps heaps in open world.

You don't need to take that rune since vipers + your firearms traitline makes it so that your main two conditions (bleeding and burning) are at 100% duration without the rune. If you were not aware, the longest you can extend a condition's duration is 100%; you can't make it triple the base duration, for example.

I would recommend the sigil of earth instead of the sigil of geomancy. You will have 100% fury uptime due to short fuse, and you will have about a 65% crit chance in total between fury and hematic focus. This beyond all shadow of a doubt guarantees that you will proc the sigil of earth's bleeding every single time that it comes off of its 2 second internal cooldown because we do so many attacks every single second. In fact, at 65% crit chance, you get two critical hits with every grenade attack because you throw three of them at a time; grenade barrage is 4 critical hits out of the 6 grenades you throw for it. That fact affects steel-packed powder and shrapnel as well because each grenade counts as a separate explosion.

Sigil of battle will help a lot too since kit swaps do count as weapon swaps.

As for what to replace your rune with, renegade runes are nice because they make your conditions do more damage, and the ferocity helps us since about 20% of our damage, even as a condi class, comes from power.

This build is considered a glass cannon because it focuses on almost purely damage; to that end, I would recommend running forge 3 1 3 instead of forge 1 1 3 because you're going to run out of heat incredibly fast that way; you get more burning damage with solar focusing lens (which keeps thermal vision active longer), and stay in forge far longer due to lower base heat generation, allowing you to melt your enemies faster. Thermal exhaust vent was recommended above but you lose a lot of dps when you're dodging on purpose (I remember seeing a post somewhere claiming that snowcrows tested it all sorts of ways to try to make it meta but it just costs too much DPS dodging all the time). Plus, you need to save your dodges for dodging when enemies do survive to try and hit you.

I would recommend sticking with PBM or giving ECSU a try and staying between 95% and 149% heat. Doing that would dramatically improve your might stacks to the point that you could switch that sigil of battle to a sigil of bursting (+5% condition damage). If you did run ECSU, you also wouldn't care about bleeding as much, again because of your incredible might generation, allowing you to switch firearms to 1 2 3 instead of 2 2 3, and swap the sigil of earth to, hmm, maybe sigil of doom for some more poison! Do note that without the burning inflicted by PBM your thermal vision may drop for a second or two here and there, but the recent patch notes made Afterburner activate for 2 hits when you deactivate forge, so it will most likely remain at 100% uptime anyway.

The idea with this build is that you completely destroy most enemies before they can even do a single attack, and veterans far before things like damage reduction have time to come into play. If you were trying to solo a champion, I would have different feedback entirely such as incorporating toughness and vitality, protection uptime, maybe using pistol shield or even switching to a power build to run sword/shield.

A final note about open world: in general, this game has the two types of damage class. Damage over time, or condition based, and power, or damage right now. Open world favors power classes because things die so fast. Your physical (power) damage even as a condition holosmith is going to melt most enemies far before you have a chance to ramp up your conditions on the foe because the raw damage of the photon forge is insane. Power holosmith is incredibly easy to play compared to condition holosmith, but whatever you choose to do, make sure you enjoy it, or it isn't worth running.

Hope this helped!

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