[Lavos] is the master of status effect spam with abilities that are on set cooldowns. This build attempts to abuse the status effects given by each of the abilities to boost your melee weapons or anything that scales off of said status effects. We don't subsume an ability in the recommended build as it takes away several of your element choices. Use the Helminth abilities with great caution.

Quiver is a decent options to stall out enemies while you heal yourself. Dispensary allows you to abuse mods like [Health Conversion] and [Energy Conversion]. Other choices work but are losses of synergy that you should take with caution.

Replacing an ability isn't easy on [Lavos]. Even his more questionable abilities like Ophidian [Bite] and Vial [Rush] grant you Toxin and Cold to your abilities respectively. Catalyze has a very long cooldown and is fairly weak on most enemies without significant stat/status investment, but you lose out on Heat.

Duration is curious on [Lavos] because it shows absolutely no effects in the arsenal but it's actually heavily influencing your status effect duration on the abilities. This build runs nearly maxed Duration so that your status effects will last dozens of seconds on enemies. This allows you to either use Catalyze to nuke them or burst them down with a [Condition Overload] melee weapon.

Range is nearly as high as possible while still using [Narrow Minded]. It can be lowered but [Lavos] heavily relies on Range to hit any enemies with his abilities.

Efficiency is useless on [Lavos]. Even though it increases the amount of cooldown reduction you receive from Transmutation Probe, it does nothing to the probe itself so you're still forced to wait 10 seconds after every rotation no matter how good it is. You can swap out [Blind Rage] but your Range is high enough that it shouldn't be necessary.

Strength is pumped back up a bit so that your Catalyze and other abilities are still impactful. You technically don't have to run any Strength but it forces you to rely entirely on your melee weapon.

[Natural Talent] is extremely important. [Lavos] has to do heavy ability spam in order to set up his following abilities.

[Enemy Radar] mods help your team to track down enemies. It can be replaced at your discretion.

[Rolling Guard] can be swapped in over a flex mod like [Constitution] or [Augur Reach] if you're having problems with enemy damage. The second option may require you to lower other mod ranks or swap out your exilus mod for a cheaper one.

Arcane Aegis grants you great survivability when it procs but can be replaced if you don't like the RNG. Arcane Strike synergizes well with powerful [Condition Overload] melee weapons but can also be swapped out if you're choosing to use another playstyle.