I’ve recently noticed some melee builds that revolve around heavy slams, I was wondering if you folks can share your experience with them and help me decide whether they are fun and worth investing into them.
I guess the top contenders are Samptones and Sancti Magistar incarnon, but there’s also mention of Fragor and Arca Titron. Any of you got experience with these builds, is it a gimmick or not?
I’ve mostly been using Okina recently and Azothane before that so I want to spice it up a bit with something different for a change. They’d be for general use in any missions, from relic cracking to 1999 bounties, etc.
I’ve been experimenting with the various slam weapons and settled on using tenet exec as the heavy slams shoot out waves that also do good damage
Arca titron is probably nearly the best. No it is not a gimmick.
Other than excellent damage scaling on heavy slams, the arca titron has innate electric damage on the slams with no range falloff. So it works with melee influence and just nukes entire rooms every hit.
Heavy Slam builds got a recent massive upgrade with Galvanized Reflex bumping them to at least 5X combo.
Arca Titron is basically Sancti Magistar. Jat Kittag is great too due to Vulcan Blitz. Sibear also has an Influence-less (unless you’re Volt or Frost with their respective augments) slam build which is quite performant. Arca Titron can hit in the millions on armoured foes, so the builds are definitely legit.
Highly recommend trying them with Volt, as he has both attack speed to get out of the slam animation faster (without committing to a roll), Speed cancelling, and the massive damage boost from Shock Trooper.
My one complaint with slam builds is that clicking M3 makes my wrist hurt on long missions.
My one complaint with slam builds is that clicking M3 makes my wrist hurt on long missions.
I swap it to a thumb button on my mouse.
Along with crouch, actually. My little finger kept getting tired so I just made my thumb do it.
I haven’t used Arca T. in a long time so I decided to give it a try since it was already upgraded a bit and this shit is just ridiculous in the simulacrum! Basically just galvanized reflex, seismic wave and crit mods, even without any capacitor charges, basically wipe out any battle group in one or two slams!
I bound the heavy attack on a mouse side button so it’s not as bad, but there’s still the drawback that it doesn’t pull the melee weapon out if you’re in mid air like regular E does, you have to swing it once before jumping and then heavy attack.
You could look at Sibear and the uhh Ruvox fists too. Both have mechanics based around slams
Wukong slam build can work with any slam setup, you basically just cloudwalk into slams, got nerfed a bit but not super bad imo. Fragor prime has a passive that goes well with slamjammin’ along with cheaper rivens then other stuff. Magistar is a great statstick so always a nice pick. dunno if i’d rock any if them to 9999 survivals, but for anything else its easy peasy
Ruvox, my beloved
I want to like incarnon melees but they are always so tricky to maintain for me. I like to rely on guns most of the time, only pulling out the melee when needed and that doesn’t work well when you need to maintain the combo counter and worry about the time limited incarnon mode.
The only one that I liked was Okina because it has the “freeze combo decay when stowed” ability
Ruvox has an incarnon upgrade that builds combo when you do normal slams for each enemy hit, and another that makes it require only a 3x combo. With galv reflex giving you a base 5x combo with a few kills it becomes essentially effortless.
builds convo when you do normal slams for each enemy hit
That might be good but it means you’re missing out on +60% radius… hmm, so many options
There are a few more incarnons with combo storage: Furax (also has 90% slam efficiency), Ack & Brunt and Anku too. Praedos has a gimmick where it resets combo duration if you pick up ammo, in addition to its mobility buffing, so just mod it for combo duration and bring a weapon that uses a lot of ammo like the Akarius and it nearly never runs out.
