Overview
An in-depth look at how Damage actually works in Sanctum 2.
Introduction
The Sanctum 2 Wiki[sanctum.gamepedia.com] has some pretty accurate information but the Damage Calculation[sanctum.gamepedia.com] isn’t completely correct.
I welcome you to test the behaviours I mention and I offer you some of my personal methods of testing. In reality, this is more of my research notes as it is a guide so feel free to break the game yourself.
TSYGAN[sanctum.gamepedia.com] – Basically doesn’t have any Damage Multipliers
Assault Rifle[sanctum.gamepedia.com] – 180 Damage, 50% Weakspot Multiplier and a Fast weapon
Plasma Rifle[sanctum.gamepedia.com] – 765 Damage, 100% Weakspot Multiplier and a Slow weapon
2-4-Outpost[sanctum.gamepedia.com] – Starts with a single Walker Patriarch[sanctum.gamepedia.com], high Health, easy Weakspot and 20 Armour
Base Damage
After a Hit, first calculate Base Damage.
Base Damage = Damage * ( Damage Multiplier / 100% )
The Damage can be found on the Wiki[sanctum.gamepedia.com]. There are many sources of Damage that aren’t weapons but there are a few quirks with some of them. The Damage Multipliers can be tricky but it starts at 100%, to signifiy that you deal 100% Base Damage.
What should be noted is that Damage Multipliers stack additively, not multiplicatively. Because of that, Damage Multipliers do not actually increase your damage by as much as you think.
Weakspot Bonus and Overkill
Then, if you Hit a Weakspot, add Weakspot Bonus to Base Damage.
Weakspot Bonus = Damage * ( Weakspot Multiplier / 100% )
The Damage and Weakspot Multiplier can be found on the Wiki[sanctum.gamepedia.com] but they give it already divided by 100%.
Then, if you have Overkill[sanctum.gamepedia.com], add previous overkill Damage to Weakspot Bonus.
What should be noted is that Weakspot Bonus is a consistent flat amount and is not modified by anything other than the above mentioned. Because of that, hitting a Weakspot does not increase your damage by as much as you think but you get to see a red number to signifiy it’s activation.
This seems complicated and unnecessary but I find that this simplifies other interactions with Weakspots that will be explored.
Armour Reduction and Armor Shredder
Then subtract, from Base Damage, the Armour, divided by 2 if Weakspot Bonus is applied. If you have Armour Armor Shredder[sanctum.gamepedia.com] then add the non-infinite amount of Armour to your Base Damage.
The Armour can be found on the Wiki[sanctum.gamepedia.com].
What should be noted is that Armour is half as effective when you hit a Weakspot. This means that Armor Shredder will actually increase your Damage by half of the Armour when you hit a Weakspot.
This is a consistent flat reduction which means it can make you do 0 Damage but it can’t make you do less than that. Because of the nature of flat reductions, Damage will favor slow but hard hits over weak but fast hits. Then again, a good majority of the Lumes you encounter won’t have Armour and Soakers[sanctum.gamepedia.com] exist as well.
Final Damage and Rounding
Finally you get the Damage but it’s unlikely that it’s a whole number. The game will truncate it which means it cuts off the decimals which means it rounds down.
You can do 0 Damage and you can see the 0. This counts as a Hit but you need to do 1 Damage for it to count as dealing Damage.
Now for the complicated stuff.
Skye Autumn, Hollowpoint Rounds, Bloodletter and Dicey Shootin’
Skye Autumn[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 2% to the Damage Multiplier for each Stack. She gains a Stack when she deals Damage and it lasts for 5 seconds. She can have up to 50 Stacks and any excess Stacks act as a buffer for when previous Stacks deplete.
Hollowpoint Rounds[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 100% to the Damage Multiplier on each third Hit.
Bloodletter[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 100% to the Damage Multiplier if you have killed 4 Lumes and will last 12 seconds. The duration will refresh back to 12 seconds after you kill another 4 Lumes.
Dicey Shootin’[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds either a -100% or 150% to the Damage Multiplier. There is an equal chance for either but if you get -100% then Weakspot Bonus is also disabled. You can see this effect if you use Smatter Band[sanctum.gamepedia.com] with Hollowpoint Rounds. If you Hit a Weakspot with the Smatter Band then almost all subsequent Hits will as well.
The game actually sets your Base Damage to 0 if you have a Damage Multiplier less than 100%. You can see this effect if you use the above with Skye Autumn and another Damage Multiplier instead of Hollowpoint Rounds.
What should be noted is that Skye Autumn, Bloodletter and Hollowpoint Rounds don’t double your Damage like it seems to imply. Because Damage Multipliers stack additively, if you gain 100% more Damage Multiplier with no other Damage Multiplier then you do double your Damage. However if you add another 100% Damage Multiplier on top of that then you’ve multiplied your Damage by 1.5 not 2.
A similar thing can be said about Dicey Shootin’ in that it’s only a -100% Damage Multiplier. You can still do Damage if you can get enough Damage Multipliers to counteract it.
TSYGAN and Head Start
TSYGAN[sanctum.gamepedia.com] and Head Start[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds a 25% * Magazine Size / Shot Cost to the Damage Multiplier whilst the effect is active on your equipped weapon. TSYGAN activates when her equipped weapon has no ammo and is lost when her equipped weapon has less than 1 ammo from the maximum. Head Start activates when your equipped weapon has 1 less ammo from the maximum and is lost when your equipped weapon has less than 2 ammo from the maximum. This simulates the effect of the last and the first shot but you can take advantage of the fact that they persist whilst the weapon has full ammo. The Magazine Size and Shot Cost can be found on the Wiki[sanctum.gamepedia.com] but there are a lot of quirks with these.
Unfortunately most secondary fire uses more than 1 ammo so Head Start will not activate and/or can be lackluster because of their Shot Cost. While it is basically the first and last shot of the magazine, Damage is calculated on the Hit instead of on the shot. This makes no difference to most weapons but there are some other behaviours to observe because of this.
Another thing is that these are the largest Damage Multipliers and can really put into perspective how additive Damage Multipliers do not increase your Damage by that much. Using the above build with Hollowpoint Rounds[sanctum.gamepedia.com] use a fully charged primary fire of the Ballista. Have the Ballista Hit triggering TSYGAN or Head Start without triggering a Weakspot Bonus, triggering a Weakspot Bonus and/or Hollowpoint Rounds.
You can swap to another activated weapon to change the Shot Cost and Magazine Size to change the Damage.The Shot Cost will be set to the same as the last shot from the equiped weapon. The Magazine Size is usually the weapon’s Magazine Size but because of balance reasons, some activations of either TSYGAN or Head Start will have a Magazine Size of 0.
What’s annoying about this is that some sources of Damage are hard-coded to follow the first and last shot idea. Most just set a permanent Damage Multipliers on that shot to bypass the Magazine Size limit. Basically, most weapons work perfectly as intended but some others are incredibly broken. These 2 can be really confusing and all I can say is if you’re unsure how it works, test it and it will test your sanity.
Tactical Juxtaposition
Tactical Juxtaposition[sanctum.gamepedia.com] multiplies your Base Damage and Shot Cost by 0.6 for Slow weapons or 2.5 for Fast weapons. It also halves Magazine Size and Fire Rate for Slow weapons or doubles Magazine Size and Fire Rate for Fast weapons.
This is the only method to increase your Damage output by 20% for Slow weapons or 25% for Fast weapons. If you have 400% Damage Multiplier then adding another 100% Damage Multiplier gives you 25% more Damage output. It also affects TSYGAN[sanctum.gamepedia.com] and Head Start[sanctum.gamepedia.com] by multiplying Magazine Size and Shot Cost which makes it much stronger on Slow weapons but much weaker for Fast weapons.
You can observe a lot of odd behaviours is by using TSYGAN with Ballista[sanctum.gamepedia.com], REX[sanctum.gamepedia.com], Tactical Juxtaposition and Head Start. It also interferes with the Magazine Size limit, just play around with it, there’s a lot to this and it get’s really confusing.
This doesn’t affect Weakspot Bonus at all so Slow weapons start doing more Damage with Weakspots but Fast weapons start doing less. With Plasma Rifle[sanctum.gamepedia.com], you do 459 without Weakspot Bonus and 1224 with Weakspot Bonus, 765 * 1 = 765 extra, making the Weakspot Multiplier effectively 166.66…% = 100% / 0.6. With Assault Rifle[sanctum.gamepedia.com], you do 450 without Weakspot Bonus and 540 with Weakspot Bonus, 180 * 0.5 = 90 extra, making the Weakspot Multiplier effectively 20% = 50% / 2.5. This is the reason why you need to calculate Base Damage and Weakspot Bonus seperately.
Remember that Armour is a flat reduction so you want to try to do more Damage per Hit if possible giving an edge for Fast weapons. There’s a lot of good reasons to use Tactical Juxtaposition so use it if you care about doing Damage with your weapons.
Sweet Autumn
Sweet Autumn[sanctum.gamepedia.com] Burns Lumes dealing Damage equal to 4% of the Weapon Damage. Damage Multipliers, Weakspot Bonus, Armour Reduction and Tactical Juxtaposition[sanctum.gamepedia.com] are not counted in this calculation. Because of that, you can still cause the effect to Burn the Lume even if the Final Damage is 0.
Damage Multipliers are applied to each Hit of the Burn but the Base Damage is rounded immediately. You can observe this by using Sweet Autumn with Plasma Rifle[sanctum.gamepedia.com] and Hip Fire[sanctum.gamepedia.com]. The secondary fire of the Plasma Rifle only deals 20 Damage so the Base Damage of the Burn is 20 * 0.04 = 0.8 so it will never burn for damage.
It is critical to note that this source of extra Damage only applies Damage Multipliers once during it’s Damage calculations. Unlike what comes next.
Static Discharge, Penetrator Rounds and Headache
Static Discharge[sanctum.gamepedia.com], Penetrator Rounds[sanctum.gamepedia.com] and Headache[sanctum.gamepedia.com] deals Damage based on their self-explanatory conditions. When Damage is dealt, it sets the Damage of the effect as 50%, 200% or 20% of the Final Damage of the initial Hit. This cannot trigger Weakspot Bonus but some Damage Multipliers and Armour Reduction will apply again.
If you have a high enough Damage Multipliers then Static Discharge and Headache can actually deal more Damage then the original. Try Static Discharge with TSYGAN[sanctum.gamepedia.com] and/or Head Start[sanctum.gamepedia.com].
I can’t stress how big of a deal this is, the same Damage Multipliers are applying to the Damage twice and it’s applied multiplicatively.
SiMo, Marksman and Warming Up
SiMo[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 30% to the Damage Multiplier if Weakspot Bonus is triggered. He also gains a Stack that increases this bonus for 10 seconds based on 1.1% of the Damage of hits where Weakspot Bonus is triggered. He gains up to an additional 220% to the Damage Multiplier if Weakspot Bonus is triggered. He needs to deal 20000 Damage to reach the max and any excess Stacks act as a buffer for when previous Stacks deplete.
Marksman[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 45% to the Damage Multiplier if Weakspot Bonus is triggered.
Warming Up[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 12% to the Damage Multiplier for each Stack if you trigger Weakspot Bonus. You gain a Stack each time you deal Damage without triggering Weakspot Bonus and it lasts for 15 seconds. You can have up to 10 Stacks and any excess Stacks act as a buffer for when previous Stacks deplete.
None of these actually increase Weakspot Bonus so they don’t do exactly what you’d expect, especially with Tactical Juxtaposition[sanctum.gamepedia.com]. Use a Plasma Rifle[sanctum.gamepedia.com] at a Weakspot of a Walker Patriarch[sanctum.gamepedia.com]. Marksman causes you to do 1864 Damage, an additional 765 * 0.45 = 344, rounded down, on the standard 765 + 765 * 1 – 20 / 2 = 1520, about 23% more Damage.
Hip Fire
Hip Fire[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 40% to the Damage Multiplier while disabling your ability to trigger Weakspot Bonus. Most people think this skill is bad or at least a very “nooby” skill but it really isn’t. The Weakspot Bonus works very similarly to a Damage Multiplier and a good amount of weapons don’t have a Weakspot Multiplier higher than 40%. There’s also Tactical Juxtaposition[sanctum.gamepedia.com] which has the effect of changing your Weakspot Multiplier.
Consider Gatling Laser[sanctum.gamepedia.com] with Tactical Juxtaposition with a 30% Weakspot Multiplier which’s effectively 30% / 2.5 = 12%. If you can Hit the Weakspot 100% of the time then add 12% to the Damage Multiplier. Hip Fire adds 40% to the Damage Multiplier which nets an additional 28% Damage Multiplier. 28% is a fair addition to the Damage Multiplier, it’s 25% more Damage, and its only that if you assume you can land Weakspot Hits 100% of the time, even with the secondary fire.
Everything Else
Haigen Hawkins[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 35% to the Damage Multiplier if the Lume is within 2 Squares.
Phoenix[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 25% to the Damage Multiplier for 15 seconds after respawning.
Against All Odds[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 10% to the Damage Multiplier for each Lume within 3 Square up to 6.
Exposure Rounds[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 15% to the Damage Multiplier for 0.5 seconds after you Hit the Lume. It’s 0.5 seconds not 5 seconds, it seems a decimal was misplaced.
Consuming Rage[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 1% to the Damage Multiplier for every 2% of health you are missing.
Core Guardian[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 50% to the Damage Multiplier and -10% for every Square you are away from the Core up to 5 Squares.
Trickster[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 10% to the Damage Multiplier. 100% of the time.
Fast Hands[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 35% to the Damage Multiplier for each Stack. You gain a Stack if you swap weapons while reloading and it lasts 5 seconds There’s technically no limit but gaining Stacks has a 3 second cooldown. Also swapping weapons takes about 0.5 seconds and reloading takes about 3.5 seconds.
Long Range Superiority[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 5% to the Damage Multiplier for every Square between you and the Lume up to 10 Squares.
Parthian Tactics[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 30% to the Damage Multiplier if you are at full health.
Collateral Damage[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 20% to the Damage Multiplier for each Stack. You gain a Stack if you kill a Lume and it lasts for 7.5 seconds. There might be a cap but I’m not 100% sure.
Tech Junkie[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 40% to the Damage Multiplier if you are within 2 Squares of a Tower.
Steady Aim[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 5% to the Damage Multiplier for each consecutive second you stood still in the last 10 seconds.
Spray ‘N ‘Pray[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 40% to the Damage Multiplier. 100% of the time.
Upper Class[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 10% to the Damage Multiplier for every meter you are above the Lume up to 7.5 meters. A Tower base is about a meter high.
Hold your Fire[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 20% to the Damage Multiplier for each consecutive second you didn’t deal Damage in the last 5 seconds.
Stabilizer[sanctum.gamepedia.com] adds 5% to the Damage Multiplier for each consecutive second you moved in the last 10 seconds.
Putting it into Practice
So now with all this information, what can you do with it. Nothing really, if you truly want practical information go to this guide.
[link]
Outside of that, you can now explain why a lot of good builds are good. But I’m a cynical piece of sh*t so instead I’ll use this information to explain why a build is terrible.
A common completely terrible build that I see a lot of people play is the artillery Sweet. The core of the build is using some combination of the perks Core Guardian, Long Range Superiority, Parthian Tactics, Tech Junkie, Steady Aim and Upper Class. The build relies on staying in a safe advantageous position and using weapons like Voltaic Hand Cannon, REX and Drone Launcher, mostly for their ease of use. I can’t really comment on the weapons since all weapons pull of basically the same output so there’s no real reason not to use the ones that are easier. The real problem with the build is the terrible perk selection.
Let’s stand on the Core using the perks Core Guardian and Steady Aim to boost our damage. Since we do so much MAD DEEPS, let’s also use Bloodletter to DOUBLE our damage after we inevitably kill 4 Lumes with them MAD DEEPS.
First off, that’s not how linear scaling works. Bloodletter linearly increases your damage by 100%, that would double your damage if you had no other increases. However, Core Guardian and Steady Aim are contributing a 100% increase in damage. So Bloodletter makes you do 300% damage from your original 200%, 300 / 200 = 1.5 so you only do 50% more damage. Just use Slowing Rounds which has amazing synergy with Sweet and is an incredible support perk.
Second you do not do MAD DEEPS because you’re using specialized perks and doing a very specific thing. Let’s consider Core Guardian that forces us to stand on the Core and increases our damage from 150% to 200% damage That’s only 33.3…% more damage and consider that Tactical Juxtaposition always gives 20% more damage. So being forced to stand on the Core only gives 133.3… / 120 = 1.1… which is about 10% more damage. Then there is another factor of Sweet’s passive burning which is not affected by Tactical Juxtaposition. While Tactical Juxtaposition causes your weapon do to 60% damage, it burns for the original amount so you burn for 40% of your output instead of 24%. Though it forces the use of slow weapons, it includes Voltaic Hand Cannon, REX and Drone Launcher as well as generally powerful ones like Ballista and Plasma Rifle.
Now for the third and final perk, Steady Aim which gives 50% increased damage. While that sounds amazing it has to be compared to other perks including Fast Hands which is effectively a permanent 35% increase in damage. Using Steady Aim instead of Fast Hands only gives 150 / 135 = 1.1… which is again about 10% more damage. This really isn’t worth having to stand still when swapping weapons while reloading is something that you have to do to get the best damage output.
Putting it all together, using the original Core Guardian and Steady Aim gives 200 * 1.24 = 248% damage in total. Using Tactical Juxtaposition and Fast Hands gives 135% * (1.2 + 0.48) = 226.8% damage in total. Note that most of the damage comes from the multiplicative increases that Tactical Juxtaposition applies. A lot of perks are terrible because they severely limit your gameplay while only offering small increases over less inhibiting perks. Maximization is not optimization, optimization is taking full advantage of all your perks which you can’t do with linear scaling. This is essentially the reason why Haigen can get away with using no damage perks.
Something to Consider
While I just said that you shouldn’t stack up damage multipliers, there are actually reasons why you would. Consider this, would you rather deal 1000 damage every 10 seconds or 10 damage every second. Clearly 1000 damage every 10 seconds is 100 DPS which is better but what if the Lumes only had 10 health. Now suddenly dealing 10 DPS is much better. Also consider this, would you rather deal 1200 damage every 3 seconds or 1000 damage every 2 seconds. Once again, clearly 1000 damage every 2 seconds is 500 DPS which is better than 400 DPS. Once again, what if the Lumes only had 1200 health and once again, the lower DPS becomes better.
Why is this, because of damage breakpoints. In the first example where Lumes have 10 health, 1000 damage hits kills every 10 seconds while all that is needed is 10 damage. In the second example where Lumes have 1200 health, 1200 damage hits kills every 3 seconds while you need 2 hits of 1000 damage which takes 4 seconds. When health is fixed and it only takes a few shots to kill, it becomes very important to do just enough damage to get that kill.
However this is not critically important as there are other sources of damage like towers and a second weapon. Also nearly all weapons cannot pull off the damage to be able to kill in only a few shots. But there is an exception, Gatling Laser has a high damage no drop-off AoE whilst being a fast weapon for Tactical Juxtaposition. The secondary fire of the Gatling Laser with Tactical Juxtaposition does 1750 * 2.5 = 4375 damage to all enemies in an area around you. Now with this, you can completely break single-player.
Consider a Walkers has 5000 base health which is a super common high end for Lume health.
With the Titan Slayer feat, they have 7500 so they get 2 shot by 4375 damage. A quick aside is that a Heavy Pups has 5000 base health as well but 300 armour so 7800 damage would be slightly more preferable. 7800 / 4375 = 1.79 and 7500 / 4375 = 1.72 so 79% and 72% damage multipliers are what need to be sought after. This will allow you to instantly one shot basically everything, exceptions are Rhinos, Hoverers, Screamer Matriarchs, Walker Warriors, Armoured Heavies, Soakers, Healers, Mutators, Spore Keepers and any boss.
[link]
Haigen comes with an essentially free 35% and so only 44% or 37% damage multipliers are needed. Simply using Hip Fire or Spray ‘N Pray is sufficient, Heavy Pups will be left with a small amount of health. A less inhibiting perk is Against All Odds which has the potential to leave more health but the second weapon can be used to clean up. Also some may have looked at the list and shuddered as the realization that Mutators will survive. They have 7500 base health, 11250 with Titan Slayer, so they need 11250 / 4375 = 2.58 which is a 158% damage multiplier. This also puts you in range to one shot Rhinos, Hoverers and Healers. As it turns out, Skye with Against All Odds reaches a peak damage multiplier of 160%. The second weapon needs to be able to maintain her damage multiplier while being able to clean up in cases outside of the peak. As it turns out, there is an amazing weapon called the Drone Launcher Plasma Rifle.
Now you can just about solo every mission with all 5 Feats of Strength without even using towers. DO NOT take this build into co-op, it will absolutely fail spectacularly. You should be able to figure out why if you understand the above wall of text.
Something to Ignore
Did you know SiMo has the highest damage output of every character, makes sense considering his passive adds up to 250% to the damage multiplier. Though I’m harsh on linear scaling, Warming Up is quite substantial and can be used to shore up damage from misses. SiMo can easily sustain over 10k DPS with just that, with any weapon too yet he is easily the worst character in the game.
The reason for this is that he relies on weakspot hits and this demonstrates a fundamental problem. As if an entire section dedicated to Hip Fire wasn’t enough to show why weakspots are worthless.
SiMo does have the highest DPS of all characters but that’s against a Walker Patriarch on the first wave of 2-4 Outpost. I can kill that thing in a solid 20 seconds of glorious DEEPS but that wave is a joke. A Walker Patriarch is a very dangerous and high threat target, only when there are other Lumes which makes up the difficulty of 4-4 End. A Lume by itself is just target practice, it’s the swarms that are the real threat. There is a wide variety of weakspots that require different positioning to hit, most of said positioning don’t overlap.
That’s not to say you should completely ignore aiming for the weakspot. Weakspot hits do let you bypass armour and can be a free boost to damage. It’s just not something you can rely on which makes perks that rely on weakspots much less useful. If you have to spend twice as much time to do 50% more damage, you’ve actually decreased your damage output.
Taking Full Advantage
While I just said SiMo is the worst character, that’s not actually true because TSYGAN exists. But TSYGAN has the advantage of glitches in her passive. A common misconception is that you can just use the secondary fire of the Shotgun or the Gatling Laser. This would allow you to deal massive damage twice over as it’s the first and last shot. First, that’s not how Head Start works, second, that’s not how TSYGAN works. In this case, only TSYGAN will trigger as Head Start requires ammo count to be 1 less than the maximum. Also charging up the shot increases the shot cost to a point where Haigen does more damage than TSYGAN. If you’re confused, go read the dedicated section, when you’re still confused, I’ll give you step by step instructions on how to abuse it.
[link]
First off, our damage multiplier is so incredibly high that weakspots and any other damage multiplier is completely worthless. Head Start is an obvious choice as it effectively doubles your damage output while being a lot easier to work with. It is necessary to find a weapon with high damage per hit that has a shot cost of 1. The Ballista is literally the perfect fit, also the only default weapon that actually works well for the character it’s on. Conveniently, Ballista is a slow weapon so Tactical Juxtaposition can be used to multiply our damage further. Magazine size will double and shot cost will be multiplied by 0.6 which gives 44% more damage even with the 60% base damage from the perk.
Notably our damage multiplier on the Ballista is a massive 500% so we can take advantage of another glitch in Static Discharge. Static Discharge has a shot cost of 1, instead of the 0.6 the Ballista has, which translates to 300% damage multiplier. The base damage of Static Discharge is based on the Ballista which is doing 6 times as much damage. Then Static Discharge gets 4 times as much damage so it will deal twice the original damage instead of half. This means that it’s doing 24 times as much damage as it would have done without this combination of perks.
[link]
Now we need a secondary weapon, unfortunately there’s nothing else like the Ballista. But we can look to other glitches like the REX, take some notes artillery Sweet. Head Start can be used to give about 72% more damage on the delayed hits of the REX’s secondary fire. Simply reload your Ballista and fire off 1 bolt to activate Head Start. This will persist until you fire off a second bolt, you can actually reload without affecting this. Now we use the REX’s secondary fire and swap to the Ballista before the rockets reach their target.
[link]
Artillery Sweet can take advantage of this by using Tactical Juxtaposition and Headstart.
Start the round by firing off 1 Ballista bolt, reloading and swapping to the REX. Fully lock on with the REX’s secondary fire then swap back to your Ballista. It’s best to shoot off 1 Ballista bolt but the most important thing is to wait for the REX to hit before swapping back to it. Then just repeat the process over and over again. You can swap out Ballista for Voltaic Hand Cannon so that you can ignore aiming with the homing balls. Notably Drone Launcher does not work for this.
So the real question about this build is whether the glitches are breaking the game. Simply put, the SMG with TSYGAN broke the game a long time ago but this doesn’t actually do that much. The first and last Ballista bolt does 10.5k damage with the Static Discharge doing 21k so 63k damage there. The REX taking advantage of Head Start does 1k damage with each of the 36 missiles so 36k damage there. This cycle of bursts can be repeated about every 6 to 8 seconds so you hit about 14k DPS on the high end.
Note that the REX without Head Start, using TSYGAN as originally intended, does 630 damage instead which is about 3.5k less DPS. That’s even if you can use the REX’s secondary fire which is often too difficult to find targets that won’t die before taking all the damage. Most of the time this won’t even be a factor so the average is actually about 9k DPS. SiMo can easily sustain 10k DPS after buildup with much less investment.
Also recall damage breakpoints, this build simply does too much damage on a single target because of Static Discharge. It works out pretty well for co-op but it is way too much for single-player. The gut instinct is to use Overkill but it’s complete sh*t damage is substantially less without Static Discharge. However there is a beautiful perk called Corpse Explosion which receives 300% damage. As it turns out, enemies exploding for 100% of their base health is pure ecstasy really good. Of course, this still scales terribly in co-op but then you have Static Discharge for that.
This build allows you to be the sniper that SiMo never got to be. SiMo generally needs to be up close and personal with the Lumes to be able to take advantage of weakspots. Perch yourself on an advantageous position and take out any threat with one clean shot then look for your next target while you prepare your next shot. These glitches are pretty tame whilst giving a viable alternative method of play.
What is a little broken is the fact that Orbital Strike Relay you build count as dealing your damage so they receive your damage multipliers, as well as effects like Corpse Explosion. This actually makes the tower sort of passable, maybe a little powerful, but it’s hilarious as f*ck[streamable.com]. It’s a bit sad that the Orbital Strike Relay is only good when it deals 4 times as much damage and causing enemies to explode for 100% of their base health. It’s the same with AR-Mines you place.
End Stuff
That’s basically everything.
There’s also Towers but you don’t see their Damage numbers and they don’t have as much Damage Multipliers. Though notably tower perks scale linearly with Amp Spire.
I haven’t tested everything and there are probably behaviours that I haven’t noticed. There are so many random things that increase your damage for seemingly no reason.
To list a few,
reloading and swapping to certain weapons
hitting targets with long enough range with certain weapons