Thermal lance as normal weapon viable post wave 100?

[Abomination72]

Trying to make a good build with thermal lance. Up to wave 100, it's quite doable. When using the carrier, the vulnerability of the drones seems to be working a liittle. But after that, there doesn't seem much in regards to damage scaling.

Besides Candescence, Purification, Solar Heart and - something I don't dare to try yet with this build - Burning Star, is there anything else that can boost its damage output (not charge rate)?

[Dingo]

I like lance/halo/firefly for three sources of burn damage. Trying a run out now with wingmen interceptors, it seems pretty sick.

I have gotten decent size to the lance but I swear I saw it an absurd size in one of the trailers.

[yivrneyakumo]

pure self-fire lance has a lot of maluses going for it but you can definitely get it past wave 100

[Halfshell]

The secret to Thermal Lance is burst fire, I know counter intuitive. But it strangely adds size to the lance, and the sparks are lowkey OP. Never take -size or they disintegrate.

Edit: Also no Singular Strike or you may as well not have sparks.

Edit: Also never got around to it, but the perma-hyper Ataraxia sounds promising!

[No One]

Halfshell cat님이 먼저 게시:

The secret to Thermal Lance is burst fire

Oh yeah, now you've pointed it out, I see it.

[Halfshell]

Its a really weird weapon to build. I sat down 1 day just testing combinations, the sparks vulnerability stacking is actually intense. Adding a single Twinstrike in test mode though and its just clear as day. Btw SS is like.. 40% dps loss or something like that.

I had really wanted to get a build that turns the lance into a side weapon but with another source of damage.. sadly Hidden Power disables your gun instead of just reducing weapon damage output. Like best I found was Discharge, didn't work as well as I hoped.

It also helps that I'm a Torrent player, not that much difference to use them.

[Botji]

Halfshell cat님이 먼저 게시:

Its a really weird weapon to build. I sat down 1 day just testing combinations, the sparks vulnerability stacking is actually intense. Adding a single Twinstrike in test mode though and its just clear as day. Btw SS is like.. 40% dps loss or something like that.

I had really wanted to get a build that turns the lance into a side weapon but with another source of damage.. sadly Hidden Power disables your gun instead of just reducing weapon damage output. Like best I found was Discharge, didn't work as well as I hoped.

It also helps that I'm a Torrent player, not that much difference to use them.

SS yes/no is more a case of it being two different types of builds, the SS buffs are nice for the beam itself, while the sparks DO increase the damage quite a lot I find they very quickly fall off in how useful they are when you get to like wave 200-250 just because of how short range they have so you either go chasing everything hit them point blank or end up killing everything with mainly the beam anyway.

And just to make sure nothing had changed since I last tried it I did one of my weird Viper builds just now:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2919932574

[Abomination72]

Halfshell cat님이 먼저 게시:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2919932574

Very interesting build. Had to use debug mode to add about 120 rerolls in order to replicate it, but yeah, it's quite resilient.

When did you start working on spare upgrades for ataraxia? Cause this mod seems to be very important here. I guess quite early on, and surely before wave 200?

[Botji]

Abomination72님이 먼저 게시:

Halfshell cat님이 먼저 게시:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2919932574

Very interesting build. Had to use debug mode to add about 120 rerolls in order to replicate it, but yeah, it's quite resilient.

When did you start working on spare upgrades for ataraxia? Cause this mod seems to be very important here. I guess quite early on, and surely before wave 200?

Yeah its important but the reason I typically get it as one of the first mods is simply because its much easier to store up like 7-8 levels from the start, then pick your shield and ship and still have enough spare levels to be able to get Ataraxia as a very early pick rather than have to kinda gamble the entire run on actually finding it much later when you are getting levels very slowly and barely any rerolls.

Lance also scale well with the bonuses from Ataraxia since both the weapon damage gets boosted and then the lingering burn is also boosted, making it a kinda double whammy deal so you dont even need to bank a lot of levels before you notice it power up.

Its just unfortunate that while Lance is able to get decently far I still dont think the drawbacks that it has are really compensated for with some advantage or increased power. The fact that you have to stare at the enemy for several seconds to beam them down is just a bit too much of a drawback in this game, even if the vulnerability stack was buffed by like 10x I am not sure it would be worth it compared to just using another weapon instead.

[Halfshell]

Botji님이 먼저 게시:

Halfshell cat님이 먼저 게시:

It also helps that I'm a Torrent player, not that much difference to use them.

when you get to like wave 200-250 just because of how short range they have so you either go chasing everything hit them point blank or end up killing everything with mainly the beam anyway.

Well like I said, gotta be able to play Torrent (without a screenwide range build) to take advantage of the sparks. Inertial control and how that affects your range is huge. Sparks are just completely disgusting once you get a couple Twinstrike. Yeah the beam is what kills, but its like 20% of the damage comparing SS.. and thats within killing time.

This build kills the test dummy the fastest out of any build I've personally tested.

Edit: Kinda wondering at this point.. if a backburner build would be better than the lance. So strafe by with sparks, Firefly/ couple Scorching Wake with a Rampage on by. I tested this idea before of discarding the lance but didn't think about backburners at the time..

Botji님이 먼저 게시:

Its just unfortunate that while Lance is able to get decently far I still dont think the drawbacks that it has are really compensated for with some advantage or increased power.

Edit: And I do agree despite saying its viable, any short ranged weapon just isn't worth using over a long ranged weapon. Killing slightly faster isn't worth firing from any position. Doing non-meta/ off the wall builds is the only way I have fun anymore in this. Outside of being very stubborn, I would never have practiced enough to be able to play them.

Honestly.. feel like any short ranged weapon should come with a huge survivability boost just from picking it up. Would do wonders to balance non-meta guns if they came with misc stats like health, shield, thrust, etc. Railgun for instance should give like +50% global thrust and it would instantly become super interesting to play with!

[No One]

Halfshell cat님이 먼저 게시:

Killing slightly faster isn't worth firing from any position.

Stuff dies quick enough even with low-damage weapons. If lower-damage weapons were nerfed so their damage could be legitimately described as "low" it would be a lot more valuable.

Probably have to rebalance the enemies to make that viable, though.

I want to see a weapon with -orb pickup, in exchange for stat boosts. Deliberately make it about chasing score orbs and then give it the stats necessary to make this a viable gameplay mode.
Maybe make the weapon itself kinda boring and generic so the gameplay relies heavily on what mods you pick.
E.g. have it normally medium range but get double or triple effect from velocity, but have negative railgun scaling with velocity.

[Halfshell]

No One님이 먼저 게시:

Halfshell cat님이 먼저 게시:

Killing slightly faster isn't worth firing from any position.

Stuff dies quick enough even with low-damage weapons. If lower-damage weapons were nerfed so their damage could be legitimately described as "low" it would be a lot more valuable.

While you're probably right this is the way to balance it, it kinda sounds "anti-fun". I'd rather buff random stuff to make these other weapons funner. They don't have to be as good, just give us more reasons to play them! For example, what if Flak got a crash damage boost after firing/ brief near collision damage immunity? Lore wise Flak could be a simple lightweight weapon thus it would make sense that it could bring along extra equipment (shown visually). Edit Like how Firefly, Viper and Snek get bonus stuff to make them fun.

While something like Salvo is clearly bulky in comparison!

I like the idea of an exp weapon in itself, especially after Ataraxia was buffed. Though.. unless the weapon disables weapon swapping/ Hidden Power it would just be another Research hull. Maybe have the Orb powerup/ grow from collecting exp. Also disable "normal" exp pickup/ disable exp decay.

Maybe get bonus scaling from bonus levels to boot. Oh misread, thought the orb pickup was also an Orb gun. I'll leave it though because Orbs are neat.

[Botji]

One issue with the weapons in general is actually Warp Strike.... and some other mods.
Railgun for example is not that amazing as a weapon, it does high damage but it really struggles with wave clear, add Warp Strike though and its like a S++ tier weapon because you just instantly fixed its weakness AND buffed its single target damage.

Most weapons have something like this where they have a weakness but with mods you can fix it and usually get a massive increase in general.

Thermal Lance does not have this.. well, arguably Charged Mines but basically everything is better with charge mines. No matter what you do with Lance its always going to require time on target and its always going to struggle and have barely enough range.

You have to go pretty insane with Solar Heart and Dying Star to get Thermal Lance to cut through things at a decent rate at higher waves and I mean insane as in 70-90 constant self damage but at that point Dart or something would still probably be better as it scales really well with Solars too.


Its just that the competition in weapons is really rough when a lot of them gain crazy amounts of damage/wave clear just by slapping on Warp Strike for example or how about Twin Strike that might literally double the DPS? Ricochet? Outrage module? Phantom Strike? Thats just a few that can do absolute wonders for a lot of weapons but does not do much for Lance or might even nerf it like Phantom Strike.

[Halfshell]

I don't think all the weapons have to be top tier, as long as the lower tiers are fun still. Though with how Thermal and Torrent are already niche they could probably stand a small buff at the least like removing the -turnrate when firing. Heck I would even say just give them bonus turnrate when firing. Sure it removes some technical skill thats kinda fun in and of itself but the weapons don't really perform well enough to warrant arbitrary tech.

And a Supermod that specifically empowers short ranged weapons would go along ways. I think thats supposed to be the Skirmish tree but face tapping an enemy to proc it is pretty annoying and doesn't lend to survivability.

Maybe something like Leaf on the Wind, ramping up in damage. Also negates next hit when fully charged. But only charges when relatively close range to an enemy. Drawback is it gives you a fixed max range of ~2/5ths the default screen regardless of weapon. It could then give some pretty strong buffs in exchange for that kinda drawback.

[No One]

Torrent's -30% thrust while firing is clearly from a very different version of the game.

Though I suppose it's also to try to keep the wave intact.

[xXwutsupXx]

I've seen pictures of people shooting 5 different Lance's .how do I get more?