Short Fuse is an unassuming skill at first glance. It appears to be a rather underwhelming capstone with limited potential. This notion however has proven to be quite false. Short Fuse is Moze’s best capstone, but it’s also the most nuanced. Today we’ll be exploring some of the intricacies.
Contents
- Math and the Numbers that Count
- Luck, Chance and Why it’s All Rigged
- Burst Fire, Shotguns and when More Bullets aren’t Desirable
Math and the Numbers that Count
Before we get started it’s worth keeping in mind Short Fuse is a totally separate instance of damage to your gun. It acts as an explosion. This second explosion interacts separately with skills like Means of Destruction.
Short Fuse Damage = Trigger Damage x 0.75 x V1 x V2 x Splash x Debuffs x Kinetic Element Multiplier
Note: As of the 25th of June 2020 Patch Iron Bear damage no longer affects Short Fuse. The following example was written before this and as such includes IB damage.
Note 2: Short Fuse Damage Scales with Mayhem levels and this improves all result by a large margin.
These are mostly standard multipliers so I won’t dwell on them much, we’ll do an example instead. The only noteworthy aspect to calculations here is that Short Fuse will not receive weapon type damage and that Iron Bear Damage does not include Specialist Bear.
Trigger Damage is however not a standard multiplier, so let’s discuss it first. Trigger Damage is the damage done by the shot that triggered Short Fuse. Trigger Damage thus scales with absolutely everything that buffs your gun damage. The important part about Short Fuse being based off the final damage of the Trigger Shot is that Short Fuse can now go and take buffs that applied to your triggering shot and reapply them (double dip). In the formula, I have bolded the modifiers that Short Fuse can double dip on. There are 4!
Reminder: Short Fuse is a totally separate explosion, it is not just a multiplier to gun damage. More generally
Total Damage = Gun’s Damage + Short Fuse Damage
So in Practical terms what does this mean for our damage? The short answer is a lot.
Taking advantage of modifiers that double dip are our keys to maximizing damage. These are options that we can invest in without making our damage reliant on Short Fuse. Moze has access to V1, V2 and Splash. Maximizing our damage in these not only helps our guns damage but as a bonus lead to better Short Fuse damage.
Theory without application however serves no one, so let’s experiment. As a baseline with just Short Fuse:
Short Fuse Damage = Trigger Damage x 0.75
This is fairly simple 75% of our initial damage. Or as a dps increase it’ll come to about 15% due to proccing on average 1 in 5 shots. This is our baseline that we can now put a build on top of.
Moze only has 2 skills that directly affect Short Fuse. Scorching RPM’s and Stainless Steel Bear. For demonstration purposes I’ll assume these skills are maxed at 5/5. Before adding gear lets take a look at what this does to our damage so we have a starting point before adding gear.
Short Fuse Damage = Trigger Damage x 0.75 x 1.45 = Trigger Damage x 1.0875
The damage has improved and we’ve reached a roughly 22% dps increase from Short Fuse. Now onto adding gear, first up we’ll equip Blast Master and grab an on throw grenade anoint. These are common enough and for a Short Fuse set up are generally no brainers. Where does this leave us?
Short Fuse Damage = Trigger Damage x 0.75 x 1.45 x 1.25 x 2 = Trigger Damage x 2.718
Now we’re making progress! 271.8% of our guns damage or 54% more dps from Short Fuse. This all from boosts that can be easily maintained the whole time. The next step is to explore the primary boosts that are not necessarily always on but can give you a damage spike. The Victory Rush is a pretty standard artifact to most builds and will be adding 18% V1 damage. We’ll also grab the 160% Splash damage anoint.
Short Fuse Damage = Trigger Damage x 0.75 x 1.45 x 1.18 x 1.25 x 3.6 = Trigger Damage x 5.77
We’ve reached 577% of our Trigger damage, or a ~115% increase to our dps.
Luck, Chance and Why it’s all Rigged
We’ve now talked about damage and explored the impact that gear can have on it. Lets now talk about Short Fuses’ chance to trigger. The card states it as 20% chance, and I’ve used this as a simplifying assumption when mentioning the average dps we would gain. This however all functions on the idea Short Fuse is random, which it is not.
Short Fuse in reality has a set pattern it follows. The game uses a predetermined proc pool to determine if Short Fuse should proc.
What does this mean in more laymen terms?
Short Fuse is predictable. So predictable that every time you load into the game your first 2 shots will trigger Short Fuse. Predetermined is the general term used for such skills. We can discuss pre determined skills more generally and in greater detail another time.
For now, I’ve listed the first 100 shots below
Terminology
Proc Pool: This is the ordered list of numbers which the game checks to see if the effect must activate. We’ll notate the proc pool as a string of 1’s and 0’s. A 1 indicates the effect will activate, a 0 indicates it will not.
Iterates: The games moves through the proc pool keeping track of where it is in the chain and if the next action will trigger the effect., iterating on the pool moves to the next number in the proc pool.
Short Fuse Proc Pool
1100.0000.1000.0010.1110 - 0000.0000.0000.0001.0000 - 1001.1000.0100.0100.1011 - 0000.1001.0100.0000.0100 - 0000.0001.1110.0100.0011
The logical next question to ask is if this information is useful. In general, knowledge like this has little to no use, you won’t be counting shots on your Kyb’s 10 minutes into a Shaft run.
The most useful application of this theory is for Boss killing. Once loaded into a map you can prep your opening such that key shots proc Short Fuse every single run. The guaranteed consistency of it makes it easier to factor in for environments that are as repeatable as a boss battle.
Burst Fire, Shotguns and when More Bullets aren’t Desirable
A downside to Short Fuse is that it scales badly with multi pellet weapons. If multiple bullets hit at the same time you can get a max of 1 Short Fuse proc. So the total dps increase that Short Fuse adds to a build diminishes with higher pellet count weapons.
If multiple shots hit at the same time - generally indicated by their damage display being combined, the Short Fuse proc pool will iterate the same number of times to account for all bullets. The catch however is that you’ll only get max 1 Short Fuse proc from it and any further procs that may have triggered will not happen. Thus you’ll lose out on potential damage.
For Example: Say that you fire a Hellwalker and 7 bullets hit the enemy. The Short Fuse proc pool will iterate 7 times, and if any of the seven numbers is a 1 then you’ll get a Short Fuse proc. However the Short Fuse damage will use only a single one of the Hellwalker’s bullets as the Trigger Damage. If there are however multiple 1’s that it iterates over the rest will be ignored.
A burst fire pattern will not suffer from this problem, neither will guns that fire with a delay between pellets like the Trevonator. These work as you’d want them to, each shot individually moves forward in the proc pool and can each proc Short Fuse individually. The internal timer between successful procs is 0.1 seconds. This makes the breakpoint fire rate for a weapon 10.0 before the weapon begins firing twice within the cooldown window and hence potentially losing the occasional proc to the internal timer.
Mayhem Scaling
The patch on June 25th, 2020 added Mayhem scaling to Short Fuse. This improves the damage of Short Fuse the higher your Mayhem level. The full explanation of this scaling, and what other skills benefit from it, can be found in this excellent thread by @DocStrangelove on How Phase 2 action skill/melee damage scaling works . It covers the general rules and will give context on how Short Fuse compares to other skills that scale.
This thread will break down how Short Fuse is affected.
The Math
The non-Mayhem Short Fuse damage formula is the same, the Mayhem scaling is added to it.
Short Fuse Damage = Trigger Damage x 0.75 x V1 x V2 x Splash x Debuffs x Kinetic Element Multiplier x Mayhem Scale
This Mayhem scaling is based on the HP Bonus that enemies receives from Mayhem levels.
Mayhem Scale = 2 + ( HPBonus × 0.05 )
For example, on Mayhem 10 enemies get a 10,000% HP Bonus. Adding that to the formula gets:
Mayhem Scale = 2 + ( 100 x 0.05 ) = 2 + 5 = 7
The Effect
The math is all well and good but what does it mean practically for builds?
The first effect is that it makes Short Fuse one of, if not the, best damage skills that Moze’s has. We’ve discussed how Short Fuse doesn’t scale well with high pellet count guns but this new scaling makes that nearly irrelevant. Even on guns that waste a ton of possible procs, from the internal cooldown, gain more damage from Short Fuse than other skills.
The second effect is that it marginalizes any anointments that Short Fuse doesn’t benefit from. Since Short Fuse is such a high percent of Moze’s damage on Mayhem 10 anoints like Next 2 Mags, which do not buff Short Fuse, contributes nearly nothing to Moze’s total damage.
