PC 1.3.0.5 Phantasm buff

[PeanutbutterAlchemist]

Vortex Beater certainly is only useful to ranged after the gigantic 29% nerf for non-ranged, and SDMG besides being yet another comically boring megashark clone just demolishes ammo.

I have to disagree that ranged weapons are utterly useless when not in a full ranger loadout. If you can kill something from a distance with it, it has its use in a melee loadout. if you can kill something without spending precious mana, it has its use in a mage loadout. Damage will suffer, yes, but you gain the utility of non mana-spending, non melee-range damage, which fits certain needs in certain builds

This is precisely the point of having specific damage types. If a tank-specific or mage-specific build could do as much damage with the Vortex Beater as a range-specific bulid, then specific builds like these would be moot - everyone would be a ranged-melee-mage. It sounds more like you're trying to argue that they should abolish specialization so that every weapon type is optimal with the same setup, which is a whole other debate. As of now, everything points to the intent that we need to specialize to reach optimal performance. You're free to use a weapon sub-optimally - to be a ranged-melee-mage - but don't expect it to be anything more than sub-optimal, because there's always a compromise.

As for ammo (which honestly is dirt cheap), if you're using a ranged weapon enough to consume more ammo than it's worth, you're better off switching to a ranged setup. Or just use the Phantasm, which has its own 66% reduction to ammo consumption.

 

[Snowhusky5]

Apologies this was very enlightening, and would explain why through testing a combined value over 100% wasn't infinite ammo.... thanks for telling me here before I go somewhere else, and then say the wrong thing....

Btw, you were right about multiplicative bonuses being better in most scenarios. Ammo consumption buffs mean lowering the chance to something, so multiplying is less effective than adding. Multiplying is better in cases where you want numbers to go higher, adding is better when you want to go lower.

Ex: for ammo consumption, 100% base chance to consume * 50% chance = 50%, * 50% chance = 25% chance to consume, while adding obviously equals 0% chance to consume ammo.
For Damage numbers, for example, 100 base damage * 25% bonus = 125, * 20% bonus = 150 damage. For additive, this would be 100 * (25%+20%) = 145.

 

[Silverlancer]

Btw, you were right about multiplicative bonuses being better in most scenarios. Ammo consumption buffs mean lowering the chance to something, so multiplying is less effective than adding. Multiplying is better in cases where you want numbers to go higher, adding is better when you want to go lower.

Ex: for ammo consumption, 100% base chance to consume * 50% chance = 50%, * 50% chance = 25% chance to consume, while adding obviously equals 0% chance to consume ammo.
For Damage numbers, for example, 100 base damage * 25% bonus = 125, * 20% bonus = 150 damage. For additive, this would be 100 * (25%+20%) = 145.

I didn't quite understand how the ammo consumption worked so I assumed we were wanting it to go higher...

 

[General Milky]

Vortex Beater and Phantasm still stand as, in all my testing, the highest purely destructive Pre-ML weapons in the game.

Solar Eruption is unweildy and only truly shines point blank, daybreak has DoT going for it that still doesn't amount to the 3-5k+ DPS's the Vortex weapons have, both nebula weapons are oddly specific in the way it must be used/RNG for their damage, and the summons are summons.

I don't know what the crying is about, that 20k HP pillar sure just melts like butter under a spotlight when I point my Unreal Phantasm at it.

 

[Snowhusky5]

Vortex Beater and Phantasm still stand as, in all my testing, the highest purely destructive Pre-ML weapons in the game.

Solar Eruption is unweildy and only truly shines point blank, daybreak has DoT going for it that still doesn't amount to the 3-5k+ DPS's the Vortex weapons have, both nebula weapons are oddly specific in the way it must be used/RNG for their damage, and the summons are summons.

I don't know what the crying is about, that 20k HP pillar sure just melts like butter under a spotlight when I point my Unreal Phantasm at it.

Probably because they're used to pillars melting like butter under a laser instead of a mere spotlight

 

[General Milky]

Probably because they're used to pillars melting like butter under a laser instead of a mere spotlight

So it's more like "Wahh! My weapon isn't ten times better than everyone else's!" and less "Waah! My weapon is bad!"?

Deal with it.

 

[Terrasyn]

Probably because they're used to pillars melting like butter under a laser instead of a mere spotlight

*cough* Last Prism *cough*

Heh, I kid, I kid.

 

[Rough Draft]

While I can't beat expert moon lord solo with them, that's a matter of personal skill with the game on my part. I still found the vortex beater was fantastic as of 1.3.0.5, and I haven't tried the phantasm yet... but with luminite or holy arrows, it certainly can't not be hyper-destructive. Admittedly, all of my testing with these weapons has been on expert mode, and for all I know, they may be weaker against enemies with 2/3rds as much defense and half as much health.

 

[danieldaniellam25]

I think instead of merging phantasm,buff up sdmg may be better in my opinion
[doublepost=1482485885,1482485487][/doublepost]I think instead of nerfing phantasm,buff up sdmg may be better

 

[•ӍλЯѴЇИ•]

Vortex Beater and Phantasm still stand as, in all my testing, the highest purely destructive Pre-ML weapons in the game.

Solar Eruption is unweildy and only truly shines point blank, daybreak has DoT going for it that still doesn't amount to the 3-5k+ DPS's the Vortex weapons have, both nebula weapons are oddly specific in the way it must be used/RNG for their damage, and the summons are summons.

I don't know what the crying is about, that 20k HP pillar sure just melts like butter under a spotlight when I point my Unreal Phantasm at it.

This, the laser machinegun is better than both of the nebula weapons, this also includes the typhoon.

 

[Arvandor2]

Slight necro, but random thought on multiplicative vs additive. The answer is, as is often the case, "it depends."

In this case, each added bonus basically only impacts the remaining chance left (since as someone else mentioned, they're separate checks). There's a mobile game I play where there are both additive and multiplicative damage reductions, and additive is better for the same reason.

Anyways, the math (if I understand it correctly) works out more like this:

The Vortex beater has a 66% chance to not consume ammo. This means you have a 34% chance to use up ammo. If you throw up an ammo box buff, which provides 20% chance to not use ammunition (and has no bearing on the 66% chance, neither making it 86% nor 79.2%, which would be additive and multiplicative, respectively, where you'll notice additive is stronger). Instead, in the 34% chance a bullet gets used by Vortex Beater, it then has a 20% chance to maybe not be used. 34% * 0.2 = 6.8% increased chance to not consume ammo, making it 72.8%. Now you have a 27.2% chance to consume ammo. If you then throw on the Vortex armor for another 25%, 27.2 * 0.25 = 6.8% again, heh. So now we're up to 79.6% chance to not consume ammo, and a 20.4% chance to consume ammo. If we lastly throw the ammo potion on the stack, for a final 20%, we're down to only 20% of 20.4%, which is a measely 4.08%, bringing our grand total to 83.68% chance to not consume ammo, and a 16.32% chance to use ammo.

So, with this kind of setup, it's literally impossible to ever hit 100%. You could get super close if you could stack more sources that don't exist in the game, but never literally hit full 100% (unless you found a programming limitation that would break the variable type by going out too far in decimal places and it just rounds up or something), but as that's impossible to do without cheating anyways, it's a moot point.

Also, assuming (from a quick search, don't know how accurate this is), we'll say the Vortex Beater fires about 4 bullets per second. That's 240 per minute. At 16.32% chance to consume ammo, that's about 39 bullets per minute used (not a whole lot, really). The SDMG fires more like 10 per second, which is 600 per minute, and will chew up an average of 98 bullets per minute. More than enough for a full stack to full on fire for the full duration of any boss fight and event except maybe Pillars.