Due to the way they work, blast procs will randomly trigger weak point kills with high enough enemy densities, so this is actually a good strat!
sandriver
Scourge in general is a fantastic utility weapon! If you mod it for fire rate, cold and magnetic it gives you really wide coverage on useful status effects. Fractalised Reset as an arcane gets it back in your hands faster too.
I use a primary Gaze with Pax Seeker, although the trajectory on the seeker bolts means it doesn't work with low ceilings.
Does it have to be primary? As long as you're not using a big explosive pistol like Akarius Prime, and are willing to give up a primary, this is the exact use case for the Scourge, as it marks enemy heads with a bullet attractor.
Temple singlehandedly fighting Influence meta by washing electric procs out with an 8.5x heat multiplier.
Overall they're pretty well-rounded. Lizzie is a great utility weapon due to the ADS providing all the elements you would normally want. She hits like a truck too, and clears crowds easily. Rippers Wail is the kind of "healing" ability that restores shields once health is full, so it gives you a shield gate after the intangibility from the performance is done.
I think Equinox's other problem is that you're actively punished for swapping, too. Pacify & Provoke fall off when you swap, and you need Energy Storage otherwise Mend & Maim fall off when you swap. Which sucks extra hard on Equinox since she's one of the severe MAD frames: her strength softcap is 200%, she wants lots of range, and Night form requires intense energy economy due to uncapped energy drain per target on Pacify.
I love Equinox, I want DE to love Equinox too.
Actually, my context for "high KPM" is any number of Influence setups, like high-parkour Heavy Slam or Stealth Xata, or even meme setups like Stealth Xata Ichors. But yeah comparing any frame to Influence is pretty unfair.
I guess having to pop towers isn't bad, as long as I'm not being forced out of the room I'm camping. Just feels like forever since my KPM has been so low I've had to do that.
So the pillars are actually working against my KPM? I guess I'm thinking about the frame wrong, people describe him as high damage or high KPM, but it seems like he's actually the least offensive CC frame, at least in content where you can pick your weapons.
Yeah, I tried dropping down to just Flowquilibrium and Boreal and the energy economy is totally fine. I have a Xata Invocation grimoire for emergencies too.
Built for more aggressive strength and 235% range and his KPM is still lacking. Damage is nearly double now. What's the strategy for pillar placement? At the moment I pick a connector tile with close spawns, drop pillars at the ends, then shoot Crucible at enemies as they clump up. The Crucible and pillar blasts seem to tick very slowly, so I think that's my issue.
I'll give him one last spin on next week's EDA, assuming it doesn't roll Constricted for the fourth week in a row. After that I'm willing to accept that I just like Vaub's mobile and weapon buffing style more, and Mr Sits In Place is just too diametric to my playstyle.
You can shield gate the self-damage now! Recommend bringing Arcane Warmth to block cold procs from the Instigator drones too.
Honestly probably just bring something like Wukong, Lavos, Valk or Qorvex with triple umbral, parkour, and Arcane Warmth.
If you missed your chance, don't worry, Wolf beacons come around every so often. I believe I have some spares, send me a DM here if you'd like to organise some hunts.
Late answer, but Zephyr with a good melee beats basically everything in this game. You have to love her movement though.
Zephyr herself wants Funnel Clouds, and if you're doing a slam build, you want Nira mods as well. After that it's free, but she really likes range and duration, and strength is only necessary on Air Burst Rounds builds.
For a blast slam build, any arcane is fine, including no arcane. Retaliation is quite nice now that we have Primed Redirection, once you've acquired it. If you're running Nira, or an Incarnon, you can skip base damage. You want initial combo, attack speed, Seismic Slam. Crit mods on most weapons. Electric if you're running Melee Influence.
For survivability, I recommend getting your hands on some Ancient Protector spectres, either from Loka kill squads or from Loka directly. Investing in Protective Sling from Vazarin is huge as well, and I honestly recommend running Vaz in most cases, as it makes the game a lot more fun in my opinion. A Fortifier secondary is a huge asset as well: Grimoire, Akarius Prime, Lex Incarnon and Atomos Incarnon are all excellent choices.
She's pretty good! Recrystallize gives her a really interesting playstyle with some of the old low-CC-high-CD style weapons like the Nukor or Sporothrix. Or you can just run a blast influence Corufell and murder everything forever.
For most content, Preserving Shell and her passive work together to give her an excellent health pool for surviving toxin damage, above which she can run Arcane Aegis with Preserving Shell for a nigh unbreakable shield. Extremely survivable with minimal input.
For CC, the spreading Cold from Prismatic Gem and mass supply of energy orbs from Fractured Blast lets her run Arcane Eruption for extended knockdowns. I don't run the build, but like Nezha she's an excellent candidate for the gloomquake strat of combining Gloom with Eruption knockdowns to lock down a wide area. Citrine is an amazing priority killer and can quickly murder anything left standing.
I have a Circuit build that makes Citrine a high priority pick. Due to her high potential armour with Health Conversion, she can easily reach +1100% power strength with Fortified Will and Inner Absorption, and then Close Contagion and Shattering Frost work together to turn Prismatic Gem into a doom laser. Obviously this many decrees is very RNG, but on longer runs it's less of an issue. I run Pillage on this build, but I think Decoy with Vaz spam for personal survival is an option to make excavations less awful.