Warframe, Modding and Weapons

In an effort to increase my posting, I'm going to keep hitting on Warframe a bit longer, though we are approaching the limits of experience unless you'd like an in-depth review of each weapon in the game (there are some hundred or so total, across the three main categories... at least. I myself have experience with well over a dozen at this point).

Rather than give an overview of the Excalibur (which I will), I thought I'd hit up how modding and damage works.  This is a rather complex topic, shockingly so, which is only appropriate for an MMO about shooting techno-ninjas. 

Weapons have base stats, and from what I can tell there is some effort to balance them out so that any given weapon is not, as a base, stronger or weaker than any other, though this is objectively not the case.    All weapons do damage, have rates of fire, magazine size, and crit and status chances, and we'll talk about those in turn.  For the most part, weapon damage seems to be strongly balanced against rate of fire, so that any given weapon produces roughly comparable DPS. Fast firing weapons hit weaker than slow firing weapons, etc, and two weapons of roughly equal rates of fire should hit roughly the same in terms of raw numbers, even the objectively weak starting weapons show this sort of trend line. *

However, all is not equal. Weapons, like Frames, have levels and mod slots, the higher the level the more mods you can put into the eight or so slots (all weapons have the same number), while polarities encourage or discourage certain choices. In general, a polarity slot is better than an polar-neutral slot, because it allows more powerful mods to be installed, but it can severely limit your choices if you don't have 'good' mods of that polarity.   Expanding this are 'Potatoes', officially known as Catalysts, and Forma. Potatoes can be added whenever, and buying weapons with Platinum starts them with the Potato, and should be your first choice to upgrade a piece of equipment, as they straight up double your number of mod points.  Forma is more tricky, as it resets the level (and can only be used on a maximized piece of gear) and alters the polarity of a slot to one of your choice, such as making a neutral slot polar.  Since good, leveled Mods can run well over ten Mod points (up to around 15 or so), and you have some eight slots, and a fully leveled, potatoes weapon only as 60 points, for high end play Polarity is a must, but relevelling the weapons must surely be tedious.  

Proper Modding seems to be the key to the success with a  weapon. My relative frustration with my Strun (a shotgun) is more likely due to a general lack of good Shotgun mods than a failure of the weapon itself, based on testimonials I've found online praising it (a 'starter' shotgun) as one of the best shotguns in the game.  And weapon Mods are very heavily broken down by type. All my good Rifle Mods are useless on the Shotgun, as I suspect they will by on my first Bow, despite all three weapons falling under the general category of "Primary Weapon" in the mod library. 

In order to explain how to Mod a weapon, in order to understand, it is necessary to talk Damage.

Damage can be broken into three main categories, each with subdivisions.  

There is base damage, or physical damage, which all weapons have (barring some exotic exceptions I haven't experienced yet). This consists of Impact, Puncture and Slash.  The Braton, for example, is balanced between all three types, doing a little of each (around four base, as I recall).  Among the diehards, Puncture is favored over the others, I think mostly for the 'bleed' effect it occasionally engenders, but possibly also due to enemy resistance.   That's right, even the vanilla physical damage causes status damage. 

Then you have your core elemental damage, Fire, Cold, Electricity and Poison. There are mods that provide for each of these, and a handful of weapons come with one built in.

Then you have Hybrid Elemental damage, caused by mixing two of the core elements. These include Blast (Fire+Cold), Corrosive (Poison+Electricity) and so forth.  Note that each is made up of only two elements, and with the right mods you could, in theory, get up to four hybrid elements on each weapon. The key to mixing is that the mods are read Left to Right, top to bottom, just like a book. 

Now, each elemental Mod has a percentage of damage done in elemental. This is straight bonus damage, and is calculated by the weapons' base damage (Adding the three physicals, I believe). 

Damage Mods more or less come in three main flavors: Weapon Damage (Serration for Rifles, Hornet Strike for Pistols and Pressure Point for Melee), that straight up adds to all damages (Even elemental), and generally takes a lot of work to level up, but provides massive damage increases (my 3/4 maxed Serration adds 125% extra damage, for example, so should top out around 200%, Effectively tripling my rifle damage!).   Physical damage mods (Increasing one of the IPS) and Core Elemental, with rare Mods mixing two mod traits (and being stackable with different mods with the same traits). Note that Mods are exclusive by name, not by ability, so Infected Clip (Poison damage) stacks with Toxic Barrage (Er... that's the shotgun mod rather than rifle, but the principle is the same), which increases Poison and Status.  This is where the breakdown of Damage really comes into play, as a weapon with all one damage type can get a much stronger boost from fewer Mods over a more generalized weapon like the Braton. On the other hand, Enemy resistances vary wildly (willfully denying any one type of damage primacy!), making a generalized weapon very strong when the enemy is unpredictable.  Note two that many enemies have two types of damage resistances, such as shields and flesh or armor and flesh, or the same with Machinery instead of flesh... so even against a single target there isn't truly an optimal choice.

However, if you just look at damage as numbers you are missing half the point. Status chances are like a second category of critical hits, and the nature of the status you inflict is actually somewhat important when planning your modding. 

Some, like Slash and Fire add a small but noticeable DOT to the target. Others, like Radiation and puncture debuff them slightly, making them less effective. Still others  (impact and Blast) provide a small stun effect. 

Now, one thing to keep in mind is that this game plays fast. Even boss fights rarely last a few minutes and most enemies die within fractions of a second once they've been targeted.  A DoT remains useful for finishing off an enemy that survived your attack as you moved to the next guy, but a rebuff seems pretty worthless, at least on a single target. Stuns still have use as they can 'lock up' a heavy enemy unit long enough to finish the job. 

So lets talk about the Elements, which is where things get confusing for noobs like you and me (if you ain't a noob, why are you reading me? Jesus, man, I'm probably not even playing the same game as you with my slow as shit computer and utter lack of Primes!).

The way I see it, at this noobish level of play, there isn't much call to worry overly much about speccing your gear for specific mission. First, you probably won't have enough gear to really do that until several months of play, and second, the marginal gains don't really matter until you're comfortable running a thirty wave endless defense, which you won't be.  That said:

Fire works great on flesh, and less great on everything else, but it DoTs, and that's cool. Also, I've noticed that fire mods seem somewhat more common than others. I still don't have electricity for my rifles or shotguns, but I've got fire for almost everything. 

Cold slows the enemies and seems to work well against shields, but is often denigrated by some players for being generally weak.  Hey, if you're like me and playing Lag-frame, then a slower enemy is an enemy you can actually aim at!  

Electricity is also an Anti-shield element, but one that is also strong against robotic enemies, and seems to have a stun effect, which is nice, making it slightly cooler than Cold. On the other hand, I suspect Electricity Mods don't drop until the outer planets, based on my own limited collection of them. 

Poison is another good anti-flesh power, and I believe it DoTs. I can't testify to its general rarity, as I got a nice collection of rares from the Cicero Event (one for every weapon type (bows? How do you mod Bows. I will research this, as I've built one, and get back to you...), that all had Poison as their theme, so I've been using it almost my entire game now.  

If you want full value for anything other than the raw damage numbers, you need Status, of course. Just a reminder.

The hybrid Elements are

Blast (Fire+Cold), which is a strong stun effect, but is somewhat weak due to resistances.

Gas (Fire+Poison), I'd avoid this one. Not only is it much weaker via resistances than Poison alone, but it's Status is a very small AoE effect that I can't say I've ever seen work. I can see it  being useful against infested at a choke point. Naturally, due to my mods, I actually tend to have this up a lot anyway. 

Radiation (Fire+Electricity), this seems to work well on everything, but its also a debuff power, making enemies slightly less accurate. Great for AoE spam and maybe boss fights, pointless against common mobs. 

Magnetic (Electricity+Cold): unpopular due to its weakness against heavy units and bosses, but does a number on shields

Corrosive: (Electricity+poison): Very popular for two reasons: First it is very strong (having no one resistant to it, but many mobs very weak to it), and because it lowers armor value as its status (and everything hard to kill has armor...), thus is the 'go to' element to shoot for. 

Viral (Cold+poison): This essentially does extra damage by reducing max health, but is second place to Corrosion as machinery is slightly resistant to it. 

Now, so far we're just talking more or less right off the Wiki here, but since you're reading me that means you probably struggle with some of the insider ball (is red good or bad in the chart? Bad. How does the chart work in the game?...). 

Now, lets get back to modding. Me? I'm a simple guy, I'm all for cramming as many damage mods into a gun as I can and calling it a day. This is actually a bad idea unless you've got one hell of a mod set.  As noted, upping Status is a good thing, as it gives you those neat extra effects, though recall you are getting percentage buffs, not straight numbers. Keep that in mind, every mod is a percentage mod, so the game rewards specialization. If a weapon has a low crit chance, the most powerful crit buffs will only make it slightly less crappy. If it has a high crit chance, even a low ranked crit buff mod makes you all the more crit-spammable.  I've heard that the new pistol, the Tysis, can hit 80% status chance easily, meaning that four out of every five shots will inflict Status damage.  Imagine that with two or more Hybrid Elements!   Also, most guns have a glaring weakness or two, which can be offset with Mods. The Strun, for example, has a very low ammo capacity and a very long reload time, but each shot (if well placed.... ugh..) is beastly. While trying to offset the ammo capacity is a fools game (gaining at best two more shots at the cost of both a mod slot and lots of mod points), reducing that long load time is dead simple (again: Percentages. Slow guns gain more from reload speed than fast guns.). Magazine size is a tricky issue. Generally, guns with a great capacity don't really call for modding, but they gain the most from it, while guns with shit capacity need each shot they can get, but get so very few.  Rate of fire is almost always a good call. My brand spanking new, unranked and umodded gorgon starts with a slow but steady rate of fire, equal to anything I've got but the Grakata, but spools up to an absolute beast mode (go Seahawks! Fuck yeah!) in short order. Fire speed actually reduces the spool time... and more illustratively, even a fast firing weapon gets deadlier by shooting even faster still!. 

I've noted a few weapons absolutely lack certain traits. The Sentinel weapons, for example, cannot crit, and gain nothing by adding crit chances. I'm not sure they can do status either. As far as I can tell, they never truly run out of ammo (they do have to reload, however) so increasing total amount of ammo carried is pointless.   Curiously, I noticed that adding a new element to a weapon that already does elemental damage (such as a Heat Sword) doesn't seem to hybrid that damage. However, with the Heat Sword (and the Amphis staff), the elemental damage only comes from a specific type of attack (Ground slam), and is not listed in the base damage.  I believe if the element is listed, it will hybrid with the first element added to the weapon as if it were a mod just fine. 

My point, since I've drifted, is that pure damage misses an important part of the equation.  You can't hurt someone if you're busy reloading, so if reload times are killing you, mod your weapon to reduce reload speed, or add more magazine capacity.  If a weapon (like the Vasto and Akvasto) seems to be a crit-monger, up its crit chances for maximum killy goodness. This may seem common sense, I know, but the game doesn't tell you the Vasto is a crit weapon. It doesn't tell you that putting Impact mods on a Boltor (Puncture only) is a waste of time, and you can't see the impact of a mod from the modding screen, only from the equipment screen, so you might not be looking at it. 

Lastly, there seem to be some specialty mods that do unique things. One is making arrows explosive, which seems to be less cool than it sounds due to the high end bows losing their special cool powers when explosified, and another is penetration.  It sounds a little like "armor penetration" but that's not it.   No, penetration (actually called "Punch Through") measures how many meters of obstructions you can shoot through to hit a target, to include things like railings, boxes and dead bodies that are still falling over (or for that matter: Your asshole teammates who run right in front of you, blocking your shots). I pretty much try to keep this one on at all times for two reasons: One, I can't aim for shit thanks to lag, so hitting through cover is a godsend, and two: Certain bosses seem to have special shields that, unlike the normal shields, can be punched through. I have a crap memory, so I can never tell if that boss I'm about to go kill is the right guy, so its just easier to keep the mod on (and again: Useful). Sadly, I only have the one Metal Auger, and since my DethCube Sentinel is a better shot than I am (but also stupid), I keep Metal Auger on the dethcube to maximize its killy.  Since I'm sure its putting out twice the numbers I am in any given mission this is just good sense. However, when I do tower or derelict runs the calculation returns to my favor, as my Boltor actually kills stuff, while the poor, weak Dethcube machine gun merely annoys them. 

And that's it for basic weapon modding for dummies.  My next Warframe Post will be the Excalibur, then I might return for Modding for Frames. If you catch me calling a Mod a Card, let it be, that's what the damn things look like when you're actually using them. 

*The Mk-1 Braton is nearly identical to the Braton, only it does roughly 15% less damage in every category. The Skana is identical except weaker than the Cronus. I haven't precisely determined the exact upgrade for the Lato. I moved to the Sicarus, which did similar numbers shot-for-shot, but fired three round bursts instead of slow semi-auto, a significant, if occasionally frustrating, upgrade. I suspect the similar looking Lex might be the 'stronger Lato', but have not tested this theory yet.