Update since it's been a while.

I did two runs:

• Set A, B. Leave after grabbing bonus chip from A.
• Set C, A, B. Full run. Grabbed remaining two bonus chips.

Seems the only flag is "did a run, this week, with a cursed sticker equipped to that mission."

Ivara my beloved, my second most-used frame after Zephyr. I love the design on all of her various skins. Her outrageous power carried me through many phases of the game. Now that Overguard mitigates Disruption debuffs (and most EDA and ETA debuffs to boot) she's highly effective at missions where you might want how much damage she brings, other than being relegated to just camping survivals or whatever. Navigator is honestly a really fun gimmick, especially now that we have Influence for a lot of the things you might want to Navigate ;)

I think so little about Artemis Bow, AKA Cernos Prime but not as much, that it honestly completely slipped my mind that it can equip arcanes now. I should go have a play around with it again.

That's not quite true that she has nothing left. She's one of two? frames that can force CC/CD onto Xata (other I know of is Dagath), which, combined with Prowl's weak point multiplier means she has some of the highest damage potential in the game. She can stack enough multipliers that she was, at one point, essentially tied with Mirage as a weapons buffer frame, putting her in the second tier behind Banshee. I haven't updated my strength scaling spreadsheets in a couple of years though.

I just saw wellplayedninjas's video of her sweep Lash ignoring LoS checks, lol. Play her before the nerfs come!

After playing around with her a bit, I really don't like how slow MV is (you're talking to a Zephyr player, there is a certain way I need to play this game, and it starts but does not end at +90% parkour speed), so I think Storm at least lets you spread vuln further and faster than waiting for the cast to blanket enemies in nice warm glass.

How does she scale off cast speed in general? I notice the sweep variant of Lash is a full body cast, although I'm not sure if it's subject to parkour cancels. I don't think I'm going to click with this frame if I can't remedy how much she needs to stop moving.

Awesome, thanks for testing this! Next week I'll try some TA runs where I move a specific sticker up through successive missions. (Like, AXX then XAX where A is a cursed sticker.)

Siphon + Eruption also augments her CC kit, and now that she's an Influence nuker the enemies getting yeeted away isn't as much of a KPM drag any more.

The chicken bones bae herself. Or the not stonks frame. What? She's the glass frame? Sure I guess!

I want to get into Gara but she just doesn't seem to have helminth slots, so she's kind of confusing for Circuit. Mass Vitrify is kind of cool but scales poorly, so you're locked into Spectrorage, and possibly also Siphon/Eruption too. I do appreciate how much CC she brings to the table, and honestly Spectrorage is kind of cracked.

Theoretically, Mending Splinters gives her extraordinary DR, since the health regen opens her up to exploit the RageThinking loop for a whole lot of DR. You know, on top of 90% from Splinter Storm. If you like that kind of build.

I think Gara has a lot of room for experimentation due to how powerful and interesting her augments are. But this is also a curse because she only has so many augment slots, and wants to go in so many directions at once. I still have not cracked the code!

Shattered Storm looks interesting due to applying Damage Vuln to everything hit. I assume it suffers from LoS checks though.

Any thoughts as a Gara player?

I wonder if I need to keep Splinter Storm if I'm doing a Shattered Storm build, given it's an augment for her 1 and triggers off her 4...

Weird, last week I didn't get extra pix chips when I did my second run for the week to help friends catch up. I had my cursed peely pix in the same order as my first run that week.

I'll try doing a run with them reordered, but maybe the lockout is per cursed peely pix?

That Citrine DX though... DE's really coming straight for my wallet right after the new Protoframes and that Gyre DX

Despite the Motovore's heavy slam being oddball and containing physical, it's pretty frighteningly effective as a light attack and tennokai heavy weapon I've found. 60% electric is amazing if you don't want to spend any vices on it.

Personally, my melees are staying Electric because none of them really need Magnetic for Vortex, and I don't like how Vortex gets messed up by terrain on weapons that aren't Okina and Ichor. Guns are all going Magnetic because it's a free overguard shredder and stays flexible with combinations. As my Vice collection grows I'll be experimenting with more Cold weapons now that we have directly moddable Magnetic, and which usually comes with nice stats. Think Bassocyst will be staying magnetic though since Chilling Reload is such a nice QoL cold mod.

If you're finding ADS annoying, it might not be worth it. Always optimise for fun! Galv Scope and similar mods are more like enhancements for a specific playstyle for people that already enjoy it. I like aiming because it induces a flow state for me, the extreme damage output from Galv Scope+Acuity builds is just a little extra seasoning, haha.

But yeah, Bassocyst is overshadowing most of the primaries I think. I have a feeling Pathocyst is going to be washing most of the melees out too.

To be fair, I think today was the first really interesting day for their story, assuming you've been doing your KIM chats daily.

On the crit build, I think you could put Elementalist and be done with it. Due to the way Blast works, getting even a single proc on an enemy before they die is equivalent to another 2.7x modded base damage from Elementalist. While weapon only has 15% status per tick, and I think ~8% blast per tick, the tick rate is quite high and I find in practice I was reliably proccing anyway.

What's the performance like on your blast build? I think if you play frames that can debuff enemies you can dump Serration to free up a slot for a crit mod, since Aptitude just needs a handful of weak enemies to get the ball rolling. Running both is for multiplicative GunCO weapons, which no beams are.

Well, you don't have to run blastcuity, I just used it for levelling since it's the highest KPM option available in my opinion. I tried a pure Frostbite build with no acuity and it's also quite performant.

What sort of build are you thinking of when you say there isn't room for crit and status? For crit I do: acuity, galv scope, vital sense. For status I do heat+cold and elementalist, leaving two flex slots. In my opinion, status dilution doesn't matter as much for Blast since the only proc that really matters is the one that's on the enemy when it dies and takes all its friends with it.

Still in the process of formaing it, but I'm using Primed Shred and a blast+acuity build so that it turns lines of enemies into lines of explosions. Damage output is quite good. Main way to abuse it is with Arcane Crepuscular due to its ludicrous 40% base CC, which comes out around 320% CC minimum with Acuity + Galv Scope and a single on-kill stack. Due to the punchthrough, blast builds will usually have several stacks at all times.

Other than that, while it has kind of low status for a beam, I think it's a more offensive thing primer/crowd deleter than the Tenet Glax. Native corr means you can either do a rainbow build with mag-corr-viral, or do mag-corr-cold with a single mod.

Rotation B weapons.

Unlocked so far:

• Bassocyst
• Synapse
• Tysis
• Caustacyst
• Hirudo
• Pathocyst

Update Batch 1:

Bassocyst

Oh my god? Probably my new primary that I'm going to weld to all my frames and never change. It's Blast Plasmor basically. Altfire has autotargeting in a cone and inflicts Blast, Magnetic and Impact and modded and innate(?) elements. Enemies open to Mercies will trigger a teleport and the Mercy animation. Hits like a truck too, straight out of the oven I was already hitting like 300k.

Caustacyst

Pretty fast for a scythe. Can crit now for Duplicate enjoyers. The sludge waves scale nicely, and the persistent hazard left by the sludge pools could be interesting for more CC-oriented setups like Radfluence. Be interested to see if stealth Xata can push the pools further, but that's a later project.

Update Batch 2:

Hirudo

Finally, a good muckin' Sparring weapon. This entire melee type is actually cracked since its first heavy is a 400% slam, which means it has a 12x heavy with Seismic Wave. For context, this is only otherwise shared by Sun & Moon and Hespar. Normal heavy slams are only 9x with Seismic Wave. In addition, it feeds you health and max health, which I think means it's definitively Inaros's BiS melee? I don't know, I'll let the Inaros players weigh in on that one.

Like daggers, the stance is deceptively fast, so you can churn out Discipline's Merit tennokai heavies extremely fast. Just an absolute monster of a weapon.

It has a Puncture bias too for Doughty builds.

Low status means you really want to do a 12x combo build if you're going to try and Influence nuke, but that's fine, because Sparring is a cool weapon type.

Pathocyst

I don't like glaives that much anymore, but the original Pathocyst was the secret king of the glaives (since 2022 in fact due to the Veilbreaker armour removal buffs, and completely due to the Jade Echoes armour caps), and this is just a direct upgrade. Everything is dead when you throw this bad boy. Influence, Retaliation, Duplicate, the choices are endless, the havoc relentless. And you get the cool pistol synergy glaive mods to play with too!

Due to the progenitor element system, the ability to set innate electric means you have very flexible and fun builds too if you're going the Influence route. I actually rolled Cold so I've been mucking around with a Power Throw + Melee Retaliation rebound build, and it will occasionally trigger Worthy Comradery crits in the millions, so that's hilarious.

Stop using Glaive Prime basically. The only other contender is Halikar Wraith, and this is much more available.

Update Batch 3:

Synapse

The critmonster is back. This thing hits hard, and it has exceptional range too with 37 m, or 49 with Sinister Reach. I may wind up using it extensively on Ivara.

Tysis

I've had this equipped since it came out, and it's taken me this long to test and commit to any builds. Kind of a goofy weapon, clearly oriented towards priming with its exceptional status chance and secret hidden multi-proccing ability due to the darts. I think the darts might be bugged because they trigger several statuses up front and then just do dry damage ticks after the fact 🤷

For damage, I settled on a basic Fortifier build as well as an Enervate build.

For proccing, I tried a Shiver build but it was not performant at all. I think for a corr-mag-cold utility build you'd go for Encumber.

For a hybrid approach I settled on a corr-mag-viral-heat, which wound up with pretty exceptional damage output.

I tried Baruuk but I missed the mobility from Slash Dash too much, lol. I also can't get the same numbers or speed from Baruuk that I get from Exalted Blade.

In terms of native survivability, you build around Slash Dash since it iframes you, albeit without protecting your shields, and I don't believe Overguard either. For Circuit, as long as you're running Fortifier on your secondary, there's a bug with the decrees where one (or several?) will actually inherit Fortifier onto all of your weapons, although I don't know which one/s. The melee kills -> overguard decree will do you too.

Otherwise it's just Vaz spam, hope you like Magus Cloud.

Slap Pillage over his 2 or 3 depending on what you're more comfortable losing between Furious Javelin augment or vanilla Radial Blind/Howl. That's my Circuit build. Condemn is honestly great too if you: get used to parkour cancelling* the animation, and always run a Fortifier secondary.

Otherwise do Health Conversion + Eclipse, and optionally Arcane Aegis so you have super chunky shields and then >90% DR if anything does make it to your health pool. Obviously doesn't scale, but it takes you through most content. With Molt Reconstruct, Slash Dash is an iframe ability that heals you and nukes everything.

What's parkour cancelling? Many animations, including ability animations, have a lower priority than parkour. For Condemn, simply being in the bullet jump animation turns it into a one-handed ability and cancels the slam and freeze animations. Double jumping will work too. Incidentally, double jumping will also prevent archguns with a recoil animation, like charged Mandonel and Larkspur.