The alchemist, master of the elements, “HUNTER! Try another ability!” the frame - Lavos!
Release date: 2020-12-18
Passive: Purifying himself from all ailments, Lavos cleanses all active negative Status Effects and gains status immunity for 10 seconds upon collecting an Energy or Universal Orb.
Ophidian Bite - Lash out with a toxic serpentine strike, consuming the target to heal Lavos.
Vial Rush - Dash forward, crashing through enemies and leaving an icy trail of broken vials.
Transmutation Probe - Launch a probe that converts Health and Energy Orbs into Universal Orbs that provide both, and ammo pickups into Universal Ammo Pickups. The probe shocks enemies in close proximity. Each electrocuted foe reduces other ability cooldowns by one second.
Catalyze - Catalyst Probes erupt from Lavos and douse combatants in a fiery gel. Damage is doubled for each element afflicting an enemy.
Acquisition: Main and component blueprints are available from Father with Entrati standing.
I really like Lavos in concept. A frame utilizing cooldowns in place of the traditional resource like energy or shields other frames use is really interesting. But his CD numbers are just too high for what you get out of them. That and the requirement to prime enemies with status before being able to nuke just makes him really clunky to actually play. His 4 also has a very awkward hitbox, being a circular AoE but not really as only the probes actually hit enemies, leaving a ton of gaps between themselves as they expand.
When I started again on Switch, Lavos carried me through whatever I couldn’t do on Zephyr. He’s got a little bit of everything a new player needs: good survivability, bypasses energy economy, extremely high damage potential, decent CC. He remains good in non-scaling Steel Path too, although you’ll have a much smoother time using more specialised or versatile frames.
Ironically, as enemies scale in damage, Lavos transitions to a glass cannon, but what a glass cannon he is! Secondary Encumber heat primers like Hystrix, Epitaph, or Incarnon Furis can push Catalyze into the millions of damage per tick.
Catalyze also has some nice options for primers nowadays. Previously you were stuck with Cedo, which somewhat limited your maximum damage range to a mostly frontal range, but Melee Influence means that a primer Xoris can easily spread Electric, Radiation and your choice of a secondary element in a wide area, although I would recommend still using a Furis, Epitaph or Cedo for focused intensive priming on hard targets.
Valence Formation is an incredible augment. Being able to extend his priming capabilities with another secondary element, or force Heat when it comes time to dump damage into a target, is incredibly powerful.
Overall, I’d say Lavos is easy to play, easy to build, and welcoming to new players. He has some of the highest damage potential in the game, and can take a beating. He has scaling issues on higher level content, but by that very late stage you should have options available to you.
I really like Lavos but I’ve been waiting for years now for DE to make it so it remembers your last cast element instead of making you re-select it over and over again before every cast.
I also haven’t tried him in EDA so not sure how reliable is his health/armor tanking there, but in regular SP it was always more than enough.
Had no idea Valence Formation augment exists (red veil and loka are red for me 😥) but that one looks amazing for the profit taker, right? I should try it one of these days
