I just took anything synergizing with cold damage and put it on Frost and it works pretty well!
Frost
- Biting Frost augment
- Arcane Ice Storm
- Freeze Force augment
- Icy Avalanche ofc
Tenet Glaxion
- Shivering Contagion
- Primary Frostbite arcane
- Photon Overcharge (still missing this one but soon I’m adding it too)
Glaxion melts everything in front of you, spreads cold like crazy which also adds ability strength and duration due to arcane ice storm, you have huge crit chance and dmg, you have excellent armor strip and can easily generate overguard.
Since no merciless on glaxion you have to run serration but if I had max rank arachne I’d maybe try that instead of arcane grace once I have photon overcharge from NW. Am I missing anything else thats fun and that could be added to the mix?
Not sure if I should go with vile acceleration on glaxion or maybe add something like hunter munitions or bladed rounds instead.
In any case, it takes a bit to set up the whole build but it feels very thematic and flexible, Frost really becomes even more of a powerhouse with it, I only ever used him for his bubble until now.
edit: I’m also thinking about what to subsume over his #2 since it seems kinda useless, it is low damage and you have plenty of cold procs even without it. Nourish might be the boring but safe option?
HM is basically not worth it anymore, unless the weapon has very high crit and very low procs per second, which is definitely not the Glax family. (Candidates would be for example: crit snipers like Rubico and Vectis, radial weapons like Tenet Tetra or Kuva Tonkor… you get the idea.) Even under the ideal conditions of Biting Frost, HM is only a 10.5% damage increase, so its value before Jade Shadows came from that 10.5% increase being bigger than anything else you could put on your weapon whenever the enemy had more than 98% armour.
If you’re using Galvanized Aptitude, base damage still beats adding another element, so it’s still a valid choice if you don’t want to run faction mods. Radiated Reload is a good option as it distracts any enemies with status caps, and reload is underappreciated as a way of increasing sustained DPS.
I previously suggested Corrosive, which was not a good suggestion for Frost, but it is your best bet if you want the gun for other frames.
Tenet Glax falls under the category of chain beams that can chain off punchthrough, so Primed Shred is basically locked in on the build.
I think Shivering Contagion may be a bit redundant on Frost, given he has Avalanche.
Currently my Tenet Glax build looks like:
Rad Reload is the smallest loss if you want to keep Shivering Contagion. Faction would be better than Amalgam Serration.
For Frost, since I run Overextended and Blind Rage, and since I usually use him on endless missions with low mobility requirements, I run Equilibrium and Dispensary. (I also have a Sibear-centric build that runs Lycath over his snow globe, and keeps his Ice Wave for the Impedance augment.)-
Good to know about HM, I thought it might be good due to frost’s biting force but I was never a fan of it. I should try punch though, I didn’t know it works with beams like that. In that case primed shred is superior to vile acceleration in every way and it will probably make shivering contagion obsolete too, thanks!
No Vital Sense? Does it not stack well with Photon Overcharge, I thought they’d go hand in hand and stack crit dmg to ludicrous amounts?
I only have cold and magnetic on the glax, hound is doing most of the priming but i’ve been eyeing radiated reload if i have spare mod slots one day… but I will probably put a faction mod instead.
I’m using a basic stretch over overextended since strength affects the added cold modifier of Freeze Force too, and I don’t want to be freezing enemies too far from objectives anyway. With just BR+OE the armor strip on #4 is below 100% too so I’d need more mods, archon shards or molt augmented to get it back to over 100%.
I’ll probably go Nourish+Equilibrium once I have photon overcharge but for now I’m slotting in a regular streamline+arcane grace.
I actually forgot, but critical stats define a curved surface (a hyperbolic paraboloid if you’re curious), so they’re actually a bit better than the linear growth seen in base damage and elemental damage. When you’re considering ratios of mod configs, they’re a bit more than the linear growth class, but much less than the exponential growth class (like adding on a Faction mod).
edit: I missed something and worded the above in a misleading way as a consequence. You get quadratic growth along the combined axis CC and CD, but you get linear growth just adding one. Crit has the unique property from that curved growth pattern that the complementary crit stat props up the other. Depending on the weapon’s base stats, the linear growth in one or the other crit stat can outpace other kinds of linear scaling like base damage or more elements.
This is a Desmos 3D graph of the Tenet Glaxion’s critical growth that should hopefully help tie what I’m saying to something concrete. It’s vertically flattened by a factor of 10, but if you rotate the graph side on you can see the curve still. https://www.desmos.com/3d/czqqgsg13l
And yeah I forgor that I put 40% ability strength shards in Frost basically as soon as I was able, lol.