Frightning
July 14, 2017, 10:38am
#7
To the OP, you might gain some insights from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NMONfzkpQw
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Hattie
July 14, 2017, 10:48am
#8
What level are you planning to play at? OP8 reduces options a little bit (though I have a Siren dedicated to NRT; Maya can murder with pretty much anything).
In terms of mods, Legendary Cat has some distinctly red engraving but standard Cats can be very useful. However, I tend to use either a Nurse or a Trickster most often (at OP8 the Nurse can be a very decent cushion, and you may well want to be quite generous in Harmony too).
SMGs; I find standard Hyperion SMGs quite frustrating and even my Hyperion Siren finds the initial accuracy sway a turnoff, so I usually prioritise Maliwan. I have to disagree with @Ronnie_Rayburn about Bandit plasma casters - they get a bad rep but in my own experience they can be brilliant with the right circumstances (confined spaces), Chain Reaction and a bit of practice. High damage and the ability to throw elemental fury across a room like paint. But Maliwan plasma casters are also fantastic, no arguments there.
Shotguns; Ravager is key to my NRT Siren. Try and get casual; I use a gemstone (Rock). Standard Hyperion shotguns can be really decent too, though I don’t like anything with a Torgue barrel (4x ammo per shot); and definitely Jakobs coach guns.
I generally stick to Maliwan snipers although a decent Jakobs can work well if you’re feeling restrained.
Re shields, I generally prioritise absorb, because NRT does require putting out a lot more bullets and that extra supply comes in really handy. Adaptive is a good choice too though. Tediore shields require quite a careful - and Harmony rich - build in my play, but if you’re using them spec Backdraft too, it synergises really well with lower capacity and quick recharge.
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@Frightning cheers for the link will check out bahroos video later and this has all be amazing cheers for all the ideas gonna try them out tonight and tomorrow as a fun way to play maya
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First of all: It’s not the skill boosts that make the Cat COM awesome. It’s the stat bonus you get on SMG’s. If it was the skill boosts… Then I’d guess we’d see a lot more people recommending a Scheming Warder COM, but that rarely happens. Not that it’s a bad COM. It’s just that there are better ones out there.
-Wreck (+10%/pt. Fire Rate and +6%/pt. Damage while phaselock is active, multiplicative with other damage buffs)
As I recall it, Wreck is an additive bonus. Am I totally off here, or has there been a change to this, that I’m unaware of?
Here’s how I see it! Wreck is obviously a really good skill! I never said it wasn’t! Poor choice of words, perhaps.
But… If, and they key word here is IF, this is only an additive skill, then it needs other skills to synergize with to get the most out of it. It’s definetly worth putting 5/5 in it on any build, but I prefer 11/5 in Reaper over 11/5 in Wreck every day of the week, and twice on saturdays, if I’m not relying on SMG’s as my main guns. Accelerate and Mind’s Eye are solid damage boosts, but I don’t see any of them as important skills that you just have to have. They come with the package, and that’s fine.
With the damage increase, and the fire rate increase you get from Wreck, it’s possible that you can get a higher dps output compared to what you get with Wreck. But how often will you be able to reap the full benefits of that? Most enemies will have died long before that even becomes an issue. If you had some sort of overkill bonus, like Sal’s NKLOK, then I’d be more willing to go along with it, but in most cases it’s as useful as boat in the desert.
the Leg. Cat is probably the best all-round DPS com for Maya
The three main dps skill on Maya are, in no particular order, Wreck, Chain Reaction and Reaper. Two of those are depending on Phaselock being active. Better cooldown = more dps. On a single PL, then Yes, the L Cat has the highest dps, but when there is a mob coming at you, you’ll want that PL back as fast as possible, in order to deal more damage, and keeping the rabble in their seats while you’re doing it. L Siren, anyone?
Leg. Cat adds:
I know how good this COM is, and so does the OP, I’m sure, but this discussion is about non-red text gear.
I should have know better than to say that Bandit PC’s suck! @hattieinduni has that special quality, that the rest of us can only wish for. And that is to find every gun to be a brilliant one. Even the ones that most of us would never be caught dead with. Actually, now that i think of it… Most of us WOULD be caught dead with them, because we wouldn’t have the means to defend ourselves with them. Because they SUCK!
What exactly do you mean by “confined spaces”? Five bullymongs jumping up and down on you, a pyrothresher wrapping his arms around you or perhaps getting stomped by Saturn.
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Hattie
July 14, 2017, 12:38pm
#11
I should have know better than to say that Bandit PC’s suck! @hattieinduni has that special quality, that the rest of us can only wish for. And that is to find every gun to be a brilliant one. Even the ones that most of us would never be caught dead with. Actually, now that i think of it… Most of us WOULD be caught dead with them, because we wouldn’t have the means to defend ourselves with them. Because they SUCK!
LOL! It’s true I have unusual tastes, much of which I wouldn’t foister on others… however, I will stick up for Bandit plasma casters, they deserve more mainstream recognition as powerful (though certainly contingent) weapons. I would tag @Adabiviak here to defend this but I know his feelings towards the Landscaper probably gives him the same credibility issue
Oh, and confined space, I guess I meant very close range, and/or when a lot of enemies are about (I had a great time recently by the red chest in the Hyperion Friendship Gulag, so many bots and all of them got some Bandit love)
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Frightning
July 14, 2017, 12:47pm
#12
Maybe Wreck’s damage is additive…in game, it doesn’t use the word Gun, which is usually an indicator of multiplicative damage, but Reaper does, yet it definitely is multiplicative (wiki even notes it). Wiki says nothing about whether Wreck’s damage is multiplicative or not, and uses the word Gun in describing the skill’s effects, so maybe it is additive, however, even if that is true, you still also get a nice, fat, fire rate buff from it as well. As for the conditionality, that’s a relevant consideration, sometimes trading raw DPS, for the utility of Phaselock (as well better uptime for phaselock dependent skills) can be worthwhile. Sometimes the best build isn’t the highest DPS one, but rather the one which has fewer (and less significant) weaknesses. I would certainly give more serious consideration to Cooldown Rate effects if I was going to non-Leg. Cat to keep Wreck up more often (also Subsequence would go well with that).
Edit: One other point: most of her other coms don’t have very strong DPS related buffs if any at all, so while the Cat’s biggest DPS boost is the SMG Gun Damage effect, there’s nothing comparable available for any of the other gun types.
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Hattie
July 14, 2017, 1:04pm
#13
a nice, fat, fire rate buff from it as well.
This is the key advantage of Wreck for me. Not only does it work well with SMGs, it also works excellently with guns like the Ravager. Plus for Life Tap, which my NRT Siren uses a lot, sustaining damage output (ie putting it out faster) is more important than the actual damage, especially at OP8. I’d say it depends a bit on what guns you’re using though - a Jakobs heavy build can probably do better with more Reaper.
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Adabiviak
July 14, 2017, 1:14pm
#14
If we weren’t successfully using all this “lousy” gear (deep into UVHM I might add, where I have no expectation that it does work), I might call it a credibility issue. If someone told you that the DPUH sucked because it doesn’t work at point blank range, consumed too much ammo, and had lousy accuracy, whose credibility is in question? The person who isn’t using it properly and doesn’t take the time to learn, or the person trying to convince this person that it works when they otherwise don’t get it?
These non-top-10 pieces of gear that we employ are certainly outclassed by some others, but they definitely work with a few singular exceptions. If other people don’t want to use them, I don’t have a problem with that, but saying that they don’t work is disingenuous (about which I still don’t care, but it lends itself to fostering this culture of “only these 10 pieces of gear (and only with these parts) out of the hundred bazillion in the game are worth touching”).
It’s like going to a supermarket for the first time, and there’s this huge variety of produce, meat, frozen food, cleaning supplies, whatever, and everybody’s saying, “don’t waste your time buying anything but the bananas”.
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Frightning
July 14, 2017, 1:15pm
#15
Yea, this is something I’ve been meaning to write into some form of guide for a while, the determination of whether FR of Wreck or pure damage of Reaper is better for a given weapon has to do with it’s ‘fire cycle balance’. That is, what portion of the time it spends shooting versus reloading. This can be seen pretty easily from the math for computing a weapon’s base DPS:
Notice that the denominator is [time it takes to empty the magazine]+[time it takes to reload]. Hence the effect of fire rate and reload speed buffs on a weapon depend on how much of that sum is made up by each part. Weapons where most of the time is spent firing (such as bandit SMGs/LMGs for extreme examples) benefit far more from fire rate buffs than they do from reload speed buffs, conversely, weapons that need to reload frequently and/or take a long time to do so benefit far more from reload speed buffs. Furthermore, one can see that magazine size buffs go hand-in-hand with weapons that like fire rate buffs because they balance the weapon further in the ‘spends more time firing’ direction, all other things being equal. This also means that fire rate buffs and magazine size buffs have synergy with each other.
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Hattie
July 14, 2017, 1:19pm
#16
Agreement here - I was just teasing about the credibility idea
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What on earth would make you think that? this theme plays in your head.
Sometimes the best build isn’t the highest DPS one, but rather the one which has fewer (and less significant) weaknesses.
Exactly![quote=“Adabiviak, post:14, topic:1576270”]
Of course they work, with as you say… “a few exceptions”. But that doesn’t mean that some of them doesn’t suck. If a gun isn’t at least reasonably powerful and/or has at least reasonable accuracy, then what’s the point? I fought Pyro Pete once on OP 8 using white gear only. It was so boring, that I never wanna do it again. The reason in that case was, ofc, that the guns were too weak. That’s one way a gun can really suck. If you have a gun that’s almost impossible to hit anything with, then that’s another way it can suck. Just because someone has figured out a very specific situation where one of these guns actually performs really well, doesn’t all of a sudden automatically turn it into the best gun ever. And in most cases, there are quite a few guns, not only top tier ones, that will outperform these guns in this specific situation and in every other situation.
It’s funny that you mention the DPUH… Because I seem to recall that those comments you specifically point out were in fact flying around quite a bit when the game was new. It wasn’t until after a while that everyone realized how to powerful it actually was. It’s been almost 5 years since then, and I suppose I could remember it all wrong. But if I’m correct, then i guess it’s safe to say that even the DPUH sucked once!
There are more than one items in the game that have gone from meh to wow once the veil was lifted. But until that veil is lifted on Bandit PC’s, I reserve the right to say: “Yeah, they suck!”
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Hattie
July 14, 2017, 2:50pm
#18
Just because someone has figured out a very specific situation where one of these guns actually performs really well, doesn’t all of a sudden automatically turn it into the best gun ever.
It’s a moot point really as I think we’re basically all singing from the same hymn sheet, but I guess my position is that there’s a very long way between ‘the best gun ever’ and ‘suck’ (which I’m taking to mean almost wholly useless). Most guns, even really powerful ones, have favourable and less favourable circumstances - part of the game’s fun for me is working out what they are. Granted there are some that have a much broader reach than others, but that doesn’t mean the others suck. A bandit plasma caster will never be a replacement for a sniper and I’m not going to argue that a grenadier is up to killing Terra but it’s a really long way between ‘specific uses’ and ‘just boring / why bother’. There are a few guns that have quite drastic limitations, but not many.
It does depend what you do of course - if it’s mostly raids (which I rarely go for) a Chopper will probably have to languish in the back of a cupboard. But a no red text run kind of requires stepping beyond what I might call the top gear mindset and into the - I would argue extensive - grey area of weapons ranging from dead-raid-boss to bullymong-enjoys-gentle-tickle.
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A gun that can’t hit anything, unless you’re locked into a Dook Hut with King Mong, is not exactly what I’d recommend to a player who asks me if I can recommend something good. Unless I hate the guy, ofc… A gun like that has such a small window of usefulness, and on top of that, doesn’t do anything that a whole lot of other guns could do just as good or better, then I don’t see how that doesn’t qualify that gun as one that truly sucks compared to the rest. It’s like riding a bicycle with only one pedal. Sure, half of the turn will be easy, but the other half will be a nightmare. Would you argue that such a bicycle doesn’t suck, since it’s not impossible to use it?
As a side note, I’d like to point out that the bicycle mentioned previously refers to a real bicycle with wheels. Not one of those shiny meat thingies that some of the clientel here are in such favor of, and keep ranting about all the time. Are we clear on that? Good! Let’s move on…
True! But for Bandit PC’s, I’d narrow that extensive range down to dead-vault-hunter and having-a-Goliath-rip-you-a-third-one.
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Hattie
July 14, 2017, 7:44pm
#20
Honestly it’s like I’m writing about a different game to other people sometimes
That bicycle analogy cracked me up, but I really see gear choices like this as using a different tool, not a broken version of the ‘best’ one. Put in a screw with a hammer and you’ll have a hard time, but the hammer doesn’t suck. Bandit plasma casters have high damage and unique projectile behaviour that can be very dangerous at close range. The main problem is ammo consumption, not doing damage with them, but that can be offset with an absorb shield (which I would recommend for NRT play).
I’d accept the bicycle analogy with using white gear versions of top gear but not different gear, which is my main point (as much as I love bandit PCs I don’t mind at all whether anyone uses them!). We should probably agree to disagree here, but I’m simply advocating an open mind. There are some guns which I just don’t like, and others which don’t scale well at OP8, which is one of the reasons I moved down to OP3 on Ad’s advice… it allows overlevelling certain gear, though I don’t buff much Bandit stuff. I can see how without doing that certain guns are less usable (that poor Retcher) but a surprisingly broad range of NRT gear is definitely still viable at OP8.
Anyway I won’t persist in expounding this worldview any longer and will retire chuckling about meat bicycles
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You get a lot out of an SMG + Cat COM, but other types of guns benefit very little from this. Any COM that boosts Reaper is the way to go for those guns, if high dps output is your goal. In the end, it all comes down to what your intentions are, and which guns you have access to.