MODS CONTINUED:
OVERLOAD OR PENETRATION?Some of you are wondering whether you should pursue overload or penetration as your anti-shield strategy. The answer will vary depending on what you are trying to accomplish though some classes benefit much more from the use of one over the other. Not to mention, the weaponry available to the various classes also tend to favor one over the other because of the mod slots available to those weapons.
The best way to consider the use of overload vs. penetration is to inspect the classes to analyze which strategy may be most productive for each. Please keep in mind that what follows are generalities and that variances in build, strategy, and the like may cause a different anti-shield strategy to become more ideal than typical.
CHOOSING OVERLOADThe goal of an overload strategy is to peel off enemy shields in order to make them vulnerable to effects and, more importantly, expose their health. It seems that overload may be an ineffective way to approach the potential for effects when you can simply bypass shields via penetration, however, three classes can find overload as a more ideal strategy than penetration: Guardian, Summoner, and Engineer.
For the Summoner and Engineer, the reason for use of overload instead of penetration might become immediately obvious--foes without shields are exposed to the effect attacks of pets, such as the ignite effects of fire elementals and the rocket bot w/Molotov. Using AOE attacks with strong overload can rapidly turn groups of otherwise tough or annoying enemies into squishy (and then dead) ones because pets will make quick work of their unprotected health.
Guardian use of overload is a little more situational than found for Summoners and Engineers because their use of overload is based on exposing squishy health for teammates and not pets. That is, the Guardian takes up the goal of grouping mobs around them and then quickly wearing down their shields so that player allies (and their pets, if any) can kill off those monsters safely and more easily.
Having said that, a solo Guardian may find it a much more efficient strategy to use penetration with either ignite and/or phase in order to improve their otherwise and comparably low DPS.
Of course, part of the consideration also comes down to weapon selection for the various classes. For example, several Summoner weapons come with only fuel mod slots, leaving overload as the only viable option (so long as an innate affix doesn't provide penetration). Naturally, it means that these weapons are also designed with the implied use of overload and can be extremely effective at the job.
In all, overload is beneficial when fighting in a party or when you have pets whose lethality is magnified once shields are negated. A party of three Summoners will find that it is very effective to utilize strong overload tactics so that enemies are made vulnerable to the swarms of elementals that are sure to follow.
CHOOSING PENETRATIONPenetration strategies are a better choice for classes who already deliver high amounts of damage or are particularly honed to cause effects as a direct result of their attacks (as opposed to effects indirectly caused by allies and pets).
The three obvious class examples encountering a strong advantage from the use of penetration strategies are the Blademaster, Evoker, and Marksman. For each of these three classes it tends to matter little whether their ultimate goal is to deliver effects or high damage (or both) as they tend to do so in such great amounts that ignoring shields entirely merely magnifies their high and direct DPS capabilities.
In group situations the opportunity for these classes to mod differently--ignoring the pursuit of high penetration or overload--becomes possible and, instead, they can mod for the highest damage they can achieve because they will rely on allies to use strong overload to wear down shields for them. The result is that their high DPS will become even larger through modding solely for damage rather than damage and penetration.
Gear for these three classes also suggest and tend to improve penetration strategies and that includes the types and number of mod slots available. For example, the hunter XM55 20mm rifle, a commonly found weapon, comes with only ammo, battery, and/or tech slots, providing a means to increase penetration significantly but offering no means for the use of overload. Even still, the weapon can also be considered most effective as a high penetration, single-target weapon designed to stun, interrupt, and kill very efficiently.
It may seem contrary to suggest that a Blademaster should pursue penetration instead of overload due to the high overload values swords offer innately. However, Blademasters often achieve extremely high critical hit chances (and damage) and the ability to deliver these high damage attacks directly to health and/or keeping an enemy phased, as a primary effect example, can often mean the difference between living or dying.
ANTI-ARMOR
---------------The latter effect heavy method is also the strategy of choice against heavily armored foes who, in contrast, tend to have little or no shields to be concerned with. In fact, some of these opponents can be extremely difficult to deal with unless you use at least one special effect attack against them--preferably something they are weak against.
Weapons with many mod slots provide the capability to mod in one or more very strong special effects, even if the weapon does not inherently provide the damage type you need to obtain the special effect type you desire.
For example, sniper rifles commonly provide spectral damage and can therefore be used to phase opponents by increasing the phase strength of the attacks. Some also have as many as 8 mod slots available, presenting an opportunity to generate powerful special effects of another type (or multiple types).
To accomplish this you must utilize at least two specific types of mod (or a single fortunate mod with the two effects you require); a +% damage mod and an +effect strength mod.
CHOOSING AN EFFECTSelecting which effect or effects to mod a weapon to potentially apply is a question with many answers. It depends on what you are trying to accomplish, and why, and also includes side questions such as what weapon is involved, or could be, and what mod slots are therefore available?
Regardless, there is some consensus among experienced players that three of the effect types are most desirable--ignite, phase, and stun. The remaining two effects, poison and shock, appear to have limited use (or at least a more narrow use) for PvE though they likely have much higher values when considered for PvP.
Choosing IgniteIgnite is a purely offensive effect. No matter which enemy is involved, ignite will deliver a 5% per second reduction in hit points. Because of its high offensive value it is prized for use against the toughest of enemies who often sport extremely large hit point and armor rating values.
You'll want to mod for high ignite strengths when you need to deliver effect based damage, as opposed to high direct weapon damage, in order to tackle difficult or ignite weak foes with greatest ease. In all, ignite is the choice effect when offensive punch is your major consideration.
Choosing PhasePhase provides both offensive and defensive benefits that make it an excellent all-around effect type to pursue, even if only in mild degrees. In essence, a phased enemy takes 50% more damage from all sources and has all of their damage reduced by 50% in addition.
Because phased enemies are vulnerable to any attacker, use of a phase effect represents an extremely efficient offensive effect for players who rely on pets. This, naturally, brings increased survivability to those same pets as the attacker cannot dispatch them as readily as they might normally.
Evokers and Blademasters may find phase to be an effect of choice because of the defensive boost it provides, increasing their own survivability while magnifying their substantial offensive power, in addition. The ability to phase groups of otherwise deadly monsters can be a life or death difference to these classes, who are lethal themselves but fragile in terms of a class vs. class comparison.
Considered in whole, phase makes a prime effect type to pursue as a general course of business, for any class type.
Choosing StunStun is primarily, perhaps wholly, a defensive effect that can be very potent. If you've run across Blade Husks to any degree you'll know that a stun effect can lead to a quick demise even though it is not, directly, offensive.
A stun causes a foe to stagger, in dazed fashion, for a brief period of time. This shouldn't be confused with interrupts which merely cause an enemy action to be halted, such as casting a spell or moving forward to engage. The animations between an interrupt and a stun are fairly similar, however, and to a certain extent the same result is produced.
As with most effects, stuns can be extremely beneficial when applied via AOE attacks, making it possible to stagger entire groups of enemies for notable periods of time.
If you are looking to maximize your defensive capabilities, stun makes for perhaps the ideal effect to utilize.
Choosing PoisonSeveral aspects of poison remain in question so far, though it does have some usefulness that is overlooked.
If you've been poisoned you know that you cannot use health stims for the duration of the poison effect. Because monsters do not tend to use health packs, this effect has virtually no use for PvE, in that capacity.
Several times I've come across claims that poison is useful against regenerating monsters, and that may be the case, though I've tested its use against the regenerating boss in the British Museum hellgate (sorry, his name eludes me) and I can't say that it definitively stopped him from the use of his regeneration power.
Nonetheless, poison does have two discernible and arguably useful reasons for its application; movement speed decrease and DOT.
A poisoned creature encounters a decrease in their movement rate and this decrease may be dependent on the "poison strength" value listed for an appropriate weapon. This inherent strength may also carry over into any damage over time benefits that poison also seems to provide, though it is unclear how the damage and duration is determined.
In hopes of providing some insight I did some limited testing, albeit with a fair amount of difficulty, to see if I could determine how the poison effect works. This I did against a naked and similar level evoker with three different poison based weapons with various effect and "damage of poison effect" values (namely, one with no listing, one with 50%, and a third with 100% damage of poison effect).
It appears that the poison effect is extremely brief, against other players at least, and the DOT is dependent on the weapons inherent "damage of poison effect" value. We noticed that the ticks of damage were very rapid 2 damage ticks with the 100% weapon, 1 damage ticks with the 50%, and either 1 or 0 with the 0% weapon (it was difficult to tell because of how the weapon worked).
The duration didn't appear to be affected by the damage of poison effect value, any weapon's poison effect was extremely brief, perhaps only a second or two in duration with a few ticks per second occurring.
In summary, the only realistic reason that a poison effect should be sought is to affect monster movement rate though that can't be relied upon for a duration of more than a few seconds, at best. Poison seems to be a less than optimal effect to pursue when contrasted against the others (excepting shock, see below for more).
Choosing ShockShock, like poison, remains very questionable for use in PvE situations. Unlike the effect it has upon players it does not appear to incapacitate a monsters ability to use skills.
I have seen a comment or two that creatures can be stopped from using skills, via shock, but that they will be able to use a skill that is already in progress. This may be the case in certain circumstance, or with the AI of certain monsters, and I've done some limited testing as part of a duo that anecdotally lends to this as a possibility.
Keeping that in mind, I suspect that it may require a weapon that inherently has a "strength of shock effect" value in similar fashion to that of a poison based one, mentioned above. That is, only weapons that are both natively electric and have a "damage of shock effect" listing in the properties has any value for locking down skill use of a monster. Even then, perhaps only "100%" weapons can do this reliably, but this is just speculation on my part.
If anyone has done testing on the shock and/or poison effects and has information of interest, either PvP or PvE, please share and comment on it!
EFFECT MODDING EXAMPLEIt may be easiest to demonstrate this by use of an example. Lets use a Swarm Hive rifle as our sample weapon. We'll presume that it has 2 Fuel slots and 3 Relic slots.
A Swarm Hive rifle inherently does Toxic damage, providing direct and easy access to modding for a strong poison effect. Lets presume that we want to do that as our first example of modding for special effect strength. As such, we only need to find mods providing "+Poison Attack Strength."
Any mod type may come with "+Poison Attack Strength" so finding 2 Fuel and 3 Relics of that kind shouldn't be overly difficult. It would be smart to go with a slightly less powerful poison effect so that we can deal with enemy shields more effectively. Relics offer access to both Shield Overload and Shield Penetration while Fuel provides only Shield Overload. If we didn't do this, we'd have to first work our way through enemy shields before our poison effect has any chance of happening.
Overload lets us attack shields more rapidly but penetration allows us to bypass them entirely. So, in our case, we'll go for a little Shield Penetration so that we can deliver a Poison effect to Proc with each attack, even against foes who have actively strong shields. Our resulting weapon setup looks like this:
Swarm Rifle (2 Fuel/3 Relic)
1 Fuel w/22 Poison Strength
1 Fuel w/30 Poison Strength
2 Relics w/22 Poison Strength
1 Relic w/17% Shield Penetration
Thus, we have a weapon with 96 Poison attack strength (presuming the weapon starts with a 0 poison attack strength) and 17% shield penetration. Most base creatures who aren't particularly weak or strong against Poison might have a rough 100 resistance to poison, varied by level, monster type and quality, etc. Our weapon should do a pretty good job of spreading poison, especially against poison weak monsters such as Orbiles, effortlessly bypassing their shields and forcing them to check against the effect with each attack.
What if we want to cause a different effect type that the one native to the weapon damage? Maybe a phase or ignite attack? How about a Swarm rifle with both?
This requires a little analysis of the available slots in our Swarm Weapon. Since we want the potential to cause both phase and ignite we'll need four mod effects--1 +% Spectral damage, 1 +% Fire damage, 1 +Phase Attack, and 1 +Ignite Attack. Without these, at a minimum, we have no chance of causing those effects to proc.
We know that Fuel mods can come with +Phase attack strength but we'll never find a Fuel mod that has +% Spectral damage. They just don't exist. As luck would have it, Relic mods are available for both +%Fire and +%Spectral damage, so we can successfully mod our Swarm rifle as an "Ignite/Phase" weapon.
After a bit of shop-hopping and vendor crafting, here is the final setup on our Swarm rifle:
2 Fuel w/30 Ignite Strength
1 Relic w/27 Phase Strength
1 Relic w/+5% Fire damage
1 Relic w/+7% Spectral damage
Our weapon would do an extra +12% overall damage, part fire and part spectral, combined with a 27 Phase and 60 Ignite attack strength for our effects. Low-ignite resistance zombies would burst into flame with some sense of regularity, burning even more rapidly if they have the misfortune of being phased as well!
Note that +% damage mods do in fact add to overall damage and do not simply convert a percent of existing weapon damage to the new type. That is, you will in fact do more damage with a +% damage mod. For example, a weapon that does 100 Fire damage with a +5% Physical damage mod will do 100 Fire and 5 Physical damage. At that point it may also be modded to cause either, or both, ignite and stun effects.
If you are looking for straight, high damage, another strategy is likely better than using mods providing +% elemental damage.
MODDING FOR DAMAGEModding for high damage entails a different strategy than found when seeking good effect strengths. Damage modding may, or may not, incorporate the use of shield overload or shield penetration. For that matter, it is less than ideal to mod a weapon for both Overload and Penetration, but neither is specifically necessary when simply pursing maximum damage output.
With all of that in mind, I'm going to avoid a bit of discussion as relates to DPS (damage per second) and the consideration of high critical hit % vs. high damage. Basically, you are likely pursuing a high critical hit rate or you are not, and you'll know if a focus on increased critical hits or damage is the path to pursue in order to maximize your damage output.
Regardless, a real consideration is that of using +% x elemental mods, or not, when trying to maximize weapon damage. The answer is generally no. More often than not, those mods are most useful for configuring effect strength weapons and strategies but cannot compare when utilizing another set of mods.
What it comes down to is this: four types of monsters exist in the game (beasts, demons, necros, spectrals) and the mods available to do increased damage to them tend to come in much higher +% increments than those for elemental damage types. For example, while you might regularly find +5% Fire mods you'll also be finding +16% damage to Beasts.
Stacking a weapon with +% vs. monster type mods can result in significant DPS improvements against those monster types. The downside is that the increase is only valid against that monster type. This is where the +% elemental mods could come into favor, if you are simply looking for a more mild yet more versatile increase to weapon damage (and therefore DPS).
Even still, we also need to consider that you can use up to six weapon slots (two per weapon set). A lot of possibility exists to create sets of weapons covering all four monster types, and you can even refine the strategy by pursuing straight damage increases or, if critical hits and critical damage is your path of choice, by increasing your chances there as well.
Familiarity with the monster types and the individual kinds that you're likely to encounter can also help to refine a weapon configuration.
For example, many beasts have zero shields, so you might want to ignore overload and penetration mods when modding a "beast killer" weapon. A plethora of demons, by contrast, tend to have very good shields so at least some overload or penetration can make a big difference in the weapon's overall effectiveness.
Monster specific weapon strategies can work very well when the strategy is aligned between two or more players. Each team member creates a primary weapon set designed to maximize damage against a specific monster type, and during encounters they will focus as much as possible on dealing with those monsters. Essentially it calls for team member specialization with secondary weapon sets of a more general purpose, swapped to when monsters of their "chosen" type aren't in great appearance, or a secondary set designed for yet another monster type (with a tertiary "general" setup).
Mods designed to do enhanced damage against any monster type also exist but are comparatively rare and more difficult to accumulate. In fact, you'll probably find that you can collect +vs. monster mods in entire sets, which may then swapped into and out of a preferred weapon, and this long before you'll find a comparable set of all +damage mods.
A rough exception to this is found in Tech mods, so long as your strategy is focused more on critical hit % and critical damage. You'll also require more Accuracy than typical because mods of that type require Accuracy rather than Willpower to use. For a critical focused hunter (and more especially Marksman), this can be a true path to extreme damage output.
In all, several strategies exist to increase weapon damage output and overall DPS. With proper planning you can create some devastating weapons. Coordinated with your friends, this can have an even greater impact--consider if most of your party enters a zone like 314s brain with weaponry heavily modded for damage vs. Spectrals, as one example.
ENERGY CONSUMPTIONA perplexing mod type is the "Energy Consumption Reduction" mods. These mods are only of use in a weapon that relies on an energy level to determine its damage or effectiveness. Laser rifles and pistols are two examples of energy based weaponry.
You'll know that you are using such a weapon by the appearance of an energy meter near your cross-hair and identifying the weapons current energy level. You may also check a weapon's details to see if the weapon is energy based; it will say "continuous" instead of providing a rate of fire figure.
Mods that reduce energy consumption cause these types of weapons to sustain energy levels more easily, or said differently, to lose energy at a slower rate. In essence, these allow energy based weapons to retain their effectiveness over longer bursts, sustaining and raising overall damage per second rates.
Source:
http://forums.hellgatelondon.com/showthread.php?t=54044