My thoughts on the Corrosive Sludge Pump

[Skyneth]

Greetings,

After testing the Corrosive Sludge Pump (CSP) both in experimental and since they update came out (played driller most of the time using it) I feel like writing my thoughts about this weapon current state. My experience comes from playing only Hazard 5 4p.

The weapon basically has 3 functions: direct damage, DoT and slowdown, and 2 ways of shooting: normal shots and charged shots. I’m going to compare how each driller primary weapon works for each situation:

Direct damage: normal shots are basically useless, the only situation you might want to use this is for an occasional grunt coming at you, but for that you can simply use your pickaxe or drills. It overall feels like an extremely poor version of Autocannon Neuro Toxin build.

The “Sludge Blast” OC is actually nice, it does a good amount of damage to Praetorians and Oppressors, and can be used on Elimination missions too, but freezing build with Cryo still is a better option.

Cryo and Flamer are simply better here: with Cryo you can use “Ice storm” OC mixed with cold radiance and you will erase every grunt/slasher/guard close to you in seconds (freeze and kill), and still able to freeze larger enemies to quickly finish them with the rest of your equipment. With flamer you have multiple options, like Face Melter, with any you will perform better than the CSP for direct damage on swarms.

DoT/Slowdown: you can only compare it here to Flamer’s Sticky Flames build, and the CSP doesn’t even come close to it. First of all, covering an area is much easier, faster and with total control using sticky flames, you can cover ground, walls and ceiling with no problem at all. With CSP you can only cover good enough the ground, unless you are in a super tight tunnel, and you do It basically spamming charged shots without real control of where all the fragments are going to fall.

With Sticky flames you can just set up lines of fire and everything but large enemies will die really fast. On the other hand, to get the most out of the CSP you have to stack 2 effects: the goo puddle and the direct damage, meaning that you have to cover the ground and then use more charged shots to hit the enemies, so you have to keep shooting charged shots every time new enemies arrives if you want to stack both. The damage from puddles alone is not even close to sticky flames.


There are also few things worth to be said about mods/OC placement: on sticky flames (the build more similar to CSP) it allows you to pick all damage/slowdown mods together, while on CSP you have to pick either stronger DoT or slowdown on T5 mod. Flamer T5 mod don’t have anything to do with sticky flames, so even with full SF build you can use one of those really strong mods, for example, “Heat Radiance” is really handy at the moment in case you find any of the prospector events to ignite and destroy robots really fast. It I’s also surprising that CSP doesn’t have an OC that significantly increases DoT/Slowdown/Fragments together, decreasing for example normal shots, charged shots and fragments direct damage. Instead, we only have “Hydrogen Ion Additive” which is a small increase on DoT and slowdown but only for direct damage hits, it doesn’t apply to puddles at all.

About the nerfs, on the first experimental build, while the weapon felt nice, it was still weaker than the other 2, and the weapon changes from that were:
- Remove the ability to electrify puddles (you could do it by yourself, using regular EPC shots). I don’t know if this is bugged or intended, since I don’t recall reading it on experimental build notes.
- Nerf slowdown effect of both direct hits and puddles.
- Nerf puddle size bonus on T1 mod: while this might seem a small thing, it is very painful because when you shot a charged shot, the fragments a lot of times leave enough distance between them for bugs to walk through there without taking any damage.
- Nerf DoT on T5 mod: again, can look small, but for example is enough to not kill a basic grunt with a direct hit anymore unless you use supersaturation or HIA OC.
- Buff normal shot damage bonus on T3 mod (literally the most useless thing on this weapon).

In summary, there’s not a single situation, mission type, mutator, etc that I can see the CSP strong enough to compete with the other primary weapons, the only thing that CSP has better is range, since when you are used to it you can shoot pretty far with charged shots, but that’s it. I’m honestly surprised about the nerfs, all the feedback about this weapon I did read was that it was pretty well balanced but needed some buffs to match Cryo and Flamer, I honestly don’t recall a single thread saying this weapon was too powerful or OP, yet the devs keep nerfing it.

[Nosteru]

I am one of those who awaited this weapon the most from the 4. It is fun stuff and with it own agonizing death animations make it supersatisfy to use, BUT after this last nerf I swapped back to my Flamethrower. I hope sooner or later this weapon get some love and also the Devs figure out what they want to do with this weapon. At this state it is only fun in Haz3, sometimes in Haz4.

[marcusaddamsson]

I'm not gonna say it's the best. But as a guy that's been runnin' Sticky Flames for ages, it's kinda nice to have another area-based cc. Once you get used to jump/firing for added arc on charge shots, I find it pretty darned fun to use and fairly effective (at least compared to Sticky). I kinda like the new role: artillery support; nice change from the front-line no-range Flamer. I like bein' able to put several small charge shot puddle explosions in very different places, instead of the Stick flames "paint the ground and hope things run over it" approach.

(btw, tuned cryo is just boring, even if it still is most effective driller build)

[Barser]

Yup we all know it is not as good as the cryo and flamer. A fun weapon I hope will get a buff

[junimai233]

I dunno man, I clear this week's EDD with CSP no problem.
Got the Goo Bomber Special, kite them around, supplement the damage with the subata and all is good.

[marcusaddamsson]

I've mostly been using OC for better charge shots (can't recall name), w the mod for armor breaking. Again mostly in the 'fun' category I guess... it's kinda nice to strip armor away to the point where a guard is just white... Not at all sure if it's effective, comparatively tho.

[junimai233]

Originally posted by Skyneth:

Originally posted by junimai233:

I dunno man, I clear this week's EDD with CSP no problem.
Got the Goo Bomber Special, kite them around, supplement the damage with the subata and all is good.

Then you agree with what I wrote after all, you can do that with sticky flames without kiting around and without help from your secondary weapon. I didn't say the weapon is terrible or useless, you can complete haz5 missions with it, Im just saying that it is not as strong as other driller primary weapons.

Well that's fine and all, I just want to say that it is still viable.
But why are you saying that the normal shot is useless? it adds separate DoT to the puddle.

[junimai233]

Originally posted by Skyneth:

Originally posted by junimai233:

Well that's fine and all, I just want to say that it is still viable.
But why are you saying that the normal shot is useless? it adds separate DoT to the puddle.

On swarm situations when there's a lot of enemies it's just a waste of ammo to use normal shots to each of them when you can just land a charged shot that takes 5 or 4 ammo. The only way I understand you could use it is for big enemies coming alone to refresh the DoT, but still I'd use charged shots, it takes a bit more ammo but does more direct damage and creates puddles where it will keep walking on.

Hmm, maybe I just like how my puddles have now basically twice the duration of max sticky flame duration. And so I can just set and forget for longer duration at a time.