Rad Melee attack chain questions

[leeowensoas]

Heyo, fellow scrappers!

 

TL;DR: anyone want to share their chains on Rad Melee and their experiences with Contamination/Rad Siphon?

 

 

I’m looking to build my first Rad Melee toon (paired with shield) and i have a few questions about attack chains.

 

numerically I think the best chain I’ve come up with is:

 

Rad Siphon (critical strikes proc)->
Snipe->Devastating Blow->Cross Punch

 

this chain maximizes uptime on the snipe, works in 3 purple procs and 2 -res procs, and sets up critical hits for your 2 highest damage powers, while healing frequently.

 

Will this chain run into problems with keeping Contamination on a hard target for Rad Siphon? I figure since DB had a 50% chance plus the aura has a 10% it wouldn’t be an issue, especially because every time you don’t have contamination RS itself has like another 30% chance to grant it. Haven’t played the set yet so idk how consistent the heal feels. Any input from the experts?

 

also, could swap cross punch for Proton Sweep for a VERY slight reduction is DPS and lower odds on the FotG and Purple procs, but another chance of granting contamination, idk in practice if that would be preferable?

 

I also see people complaining about the animation time on DB. None of the other attacks have particularly good damage other than this one, especially to try to spam critical s with, have people had success removing it from the chain or is it too essential to DPS?

 

Finally, Rad. siphon: the heal is amazing so long as targets are consistently contaminated, and it’s the best attack in the set to slot the CS proc in to “setup” the snipe and DB for giant critical damage, but it’s dps is preeetty mediocre. Worse than the first 2 attacks, as well as either PRot sweep or crosspunch if they have the purple proc. Has anyone tried removing it from the chain and just keeping it as an on-demand heal? Certainly would make slotting it easier

 

(though I’m quite happy with my Rad Siphon’s theoretical slotting with Musculature (Core):

Nucleolus 53

Inv: Damage 50+5 (hecatomb is taken)

Inv: Heal 50+5

Touch of the Nictus: Heal/Acc 50+5

Theft of Essence Proc

Critical Strikes Proc

 

This slotting gives it a 69%chance to trigger Critical Strikes, and makes up for the lack of End. slotting with the ToE proc popping 60% of the time making the power effectively free

 

 

 

[Sovera]

My simplest Rad rotation has been Devastating, Smash, Siphon, Smash. It's not hard to achieve.

 

I've tried replacing Devastating by Contaminated (Siphon, Contaminated, Smash) and though the math seemed good when in an actual pylon test the damage was weaker than the Devastating rotation. But it still 'felt' better in leveleing and exemplaring, and even regular gameplay, by not leaning on Devastating's very slow animation and the healing output from Siphon doubling. But tests don't lie and the damage was pretty mediocre.

[nihilii]

You don't want either Cross Punch or Proton Sweep on a Radiation Melee. The FotG proc will work much better in Irradiated Ground. For what it's worth, if you're not doing that already, slotting IG with 6 procs (arma + 3 damage procs + Achilles' Heel + Fury) gives you stellar passive AoE DPS and great -RES uptime.

I'm fairly confident the optimal chain is Deva -> Snipe -> Radiation Siphon -> Radioactive Smash, with Critical Strikes in Deva. If you have no/low local recharge on Deva, this is a near guaranteed Critical Strikes proc, which gives you very high crit rate on the Snipe and Siphon. Your chain becomes 3 extreme damage hits and 1 medium damage hit - against a still target, while in more regular gameplay, you'll likely skip Radioactive Smash to move from target to target, or skip both Smash and Siphon to do Deva -> Snipe crit -> Atom Smasher crit.