What's the best area ranged weapon

[Toast]

Best area ranged weapon and which magos gives the mission?

[Chester Rico]

I like the phosphor blaster on a dominus with EE's. Huge AoE and it reveals stats.

The flamers are also cool, but they do physical so you need some weird hybrid build (dominus & explorator) to use them efficiently and at full range.

The missions to get weapons are 100% random.

[Daedalus Cain]

There's actually not that many to choose from anyway - phosphor blaster, heavy phosphor blaster, cognis flamer, incendine combustor, heavy grav cannon, torsion cannon. That's really it.

Cognis is 8 range and a 30 degree arc, hits for 4-6 damage and a burn effect. Your first AoE weapon, and not all that crazy.

Phosphor Blaster is 12 range and a 60 degree arc, don't recall the damage offhand, but close to the Cognis, and scans targets.

Incendine Combustor is 5 range and a 90 degree arc, damage is around 8 (I'm at work so I have to do these from memory), and a burn effect.

Heavy Phosphor Blaster is 12 range and a 120 degree arc, damage is around 9 and a scan effect.

So of those, the Heavy Phosphor Blaster is the craziest, because a 120 degree arc is a third of a circle, that's huuuuge, and it's easy to manage.

Torsion Cannon and Heavy Grav Cannon are both long range blast radius weapons, with one having slightly lower damage and longer range, and both having a blast that goes through walls. Thing is, the blast is a 10 metre radius, which makes it really dangerous for hitting your own guys.

Only the two flamers are physical damage the rest are energy damage. Plus, the Dominus range bonus adds to the reach of the arc, so that makes flamers and phosphor blasters crazy overpowered.

As for where those weapons drop, as Whelp stated, it's random. Well, it's semi-random, with high-tier weapons tending to drop toward the end of the game, so at you don't end up with a Torsion Cannon on the first map. But so far as mission rewards and drops from glyphs, they're sorted to drop low tier items in the beginning and high tier items toward the end.

[Valnak]

Arc pistol and arc rifle. Pistol is aoe and doesn't require CP, rifle does require CP but you can use it freely with your abilities.

[Daedalus Cain]

Oh, true. Forgot about those. The Arc weapons only deal 1 point of damage to targets within the radius (although I think the rifle might've been buffed to deal 1-2 in the area?) but they benefit from damage boosting abilities which allow them to scale out of control with a little effort in character buidling. Plus, they're cheaper on CP, and more likely to show up as loot earlier in the game.

[Ruger]

Solar atomizer is the best and underrated. Torsion/grav cannons take too much effort to not friendly fire IMO.

[aerinyes]

Torsion/Grav Cannons might take more effort, but it's so satisfying to clear a mission round 1 activation 1.

I'm a big fan of the Eradication Ray, simply for the good damage and the 1 cp cost on machine spirit.

The flamers work nice, even without crossbuilding into Exp[lorator - really the only reason to do that would be to stack the field generator cost reducers and i can't remember if they stack on the power field generator (they do stack on the Energeia Enhancer). Only other reason would be the gloves, I guess...but end game +20% crit is much nicer than +1 damage, since crits ignore armor and can clear the mob from the field in one hit.

Probably the easiest ones to use are the phosphor blasters, big arcs, good damage. I do not recommend taking at least the Heavy phosphor blaster in against big single target bosses with high mobility/teleport, though - it's fairly easy to get into a situation where to hit the boss you might catch 1 or three of your priests in the arc.

[Glorious Tachikoma Overlord]

Originally posted by Daedalus Cain:

Oh, true. Forgot about those. The Arc weapons only deal 1 point of damage to targets within the radius (although I think the rifle might've been buffed to deal 1-2 in the area?) but they benefit from damage boosting abilities which allow them to scale out of control with a little effort in character buidling. Plus, they're cheaper on CP, and more likely to show up as loot earlier in the game.

Especially the Arc pistol doesn't look like much, but it's actually pretty great now that it costs no cognition to use, because 1 damage is all you need to remove corpses and prevent reanimation. It's great for Cognition conservation and has a pretty big, almost 360 degrees AoE.

One flayed one standing in the middle of 3 corpses? One hit with the Arc pistol, problem solved. Extremely helpful if a mission takes longer and enemies start to reanimate after only one turn, especially on those missions swamping you with weak targets.

[mass]

Originally posted by aerinyes:

Torsion/Grav Cannons might take more effort, but it's so satisfying to clear a mission round 1 activation 1.

In some mission the huge AoE radius of those weapons make it literally impossible to avoid friendly fire. And since you don't know the layout of the mission beforehand, bringing either of those weapons is hit or miss. Either you can use them and you can clear everything round 1, or else you can't use them and they were just a waste to bring.

[aerinyes]

...By the time you're doing round 1 activation 1 whole mission clears with heavy grav/torsion cannons, it should only take 3 activations without the grav cannon to complete the mission. I think the only ones that take longer are the ones with impassable force fields or turn 2 scripting. Even the end bosses are only a 4 activation fight. >.>