Standard Viral Slash build for high level Grineer and Corrupted. Slash status DoT bypass armor and this is magnified by viral status (4.25x) and faction mods (2.401x).
Raw damage build variant (shard polarities): https://overframe.gg/build/314745/phenmor/the-devouring-void-raw-viral-heat-phenmor/
Evolution I - Incarnon form - 12 headshots (less with multishot) lets you switch to Incarnon mode after alt-fire which has about 408 rounds
Evolution II - Void's Guidance - +50% Accuracy and -50% Recoil. The combination of this perk with Primary Deadhead gives -100% recoil. If you run stabilizer in exilus as well as primary deadhead, you can run Rapid Wrath (+20% fire rate) instead.
Evolution III - Ready Retaliation - +100% reload speed for 6s when reload from empty. This actually also affects the transformation time, cutting it down from 3.4s to approx 1.7s if you manage to reload from empty.
Evolution IV - Elemental Excess - +20% status chance, -10% critical chance. This drops the final crit chance to 10% to synergize with Devouring Attrition and makes the final status chance approximately 70%.
Evolution V - Devouring Attrition - 50% chance to deal 2000% damage on non-critical hits. This 2000% multiplier is currently a separate multiplier to base damage mods such as serration, deadhead, galvanized aptitude
Galvanized Chamber - +230% multishot at max stacks
Galvanized Aptitude - +80% dmg per status, so +240% with slash, radiation, viral or even more if you use an external primer.
Primed Shred - needed for fire rate and punchthrough. Flexible for shred.
Vile Acceleration - even more fire rate!
Primed Bane of Grineer - additional 1.55x multiplier to raw hit and 2.401x to bleed DoTs (banes double dip). If you don't like bane you can replace for Amalgam Serration or Vile Acceleration
Viral - A single viral status proc doubles the damage of all subsequent health damage, to a max of 4.25x at 10 stacks of viral. Viral also has a damage bonus against Cloned Flesh and Flesh possessed by Grineer and Corpus. We want to keep Slash weighting high so the chance of proccing slash per hit is higher than viral, but also have a high status chance.
You can either run max ranked tox + cold, unranked mods, or one max and one unranked. Increasing the rank improves your status chance but reduces slash bias, so while you have a higher chance per hit to proc any of the three statues, you will have a slightly lower chance that the status will be slash. Since viral caps at 10, you don't want the viral to be higher than slash as you will then have wasted status procs, but at the same time you want viral status to cap as quickly as possible to take advantage of the multiplier for as many hits as possible.
With both unranked viral, you will have 72% slash weight with 62% status chance giving 45% chance per bullet to create a slash proc and 12% chance to create a viral proc. This means with 3.3 multishot and 7.35 fire rate, you will have about 10.8 slash and 3.3 viral per second. While you gain lots of slash procs, it takes on average 3 seconds of shooting one target to hit 10 viral. With one rank 3 and one rank 0, you get 10.2 slash and 5 viral per second and with max rank you get 9.8 slash and 7.6 viral per second. You can see the differences become quite negligible with multishot and fire rate and either choice allows you to cap viral in 2s or less. Capping viral faster means you gain overall higher potential DPS as each subsequent slash proc becomes multiplied by 4.25x.
Fanged Fusilade - keeps slash weighting higher allowing us to rank up viral status mods
Primary Deadhead - Mainly chosen for headshot multiplier and recoil bonus. You can easily get direct headshot kills on weaker enemies. Can swap to merciless on very high levels where it becomes harder to get direct headshot kills.
Flexible Options
If you don't own one of the above mods, can sub for:
- Hammer shot - slightly more status chance
- Amalgam Serration - additive +dmg to aptitude and deadhead but also gives bonus sprint speed
- Riven - look for +ms, +slash, +dmg, +fire rate, +tox, +reload speed with negative crit chance.
- Vigilante Armaments - slight boost to multishot
