TANK / SPEEDRUN GAUSS - 100% DAMAGE REDUCTION | ALL ABILITIES USABLE | STEEL PATH / ARBITRATION VIABLE

• You can use another aura - Sprint Boost for faster movement, Corrosive Projection for vs. Grineer / Corrupted, Energy Siphon for general use.

• Coaction Drift is another possible Exilus.

Why max duration?

• This build aims to improve your Kinetic Plating and Redline duration. With both abilities active, and battery charged to 100%, you will have 100% damage reduction to Impact, Puncture, Slash, Heat, Cold and Blast damage. This accounts for the majority of enemies you face, essentially making you unkillable against most foes.

• Having a high duration will help keep Redline active for long enough that you can build up your battery to 100% and benefit the most from Kinetic Plating's damage reduction.

• Duration also improves Redline in other ways! More on that later.

Do we really need efficiency if we are only casting abilities once every 90 seconds?

• YES! Because, we are spamming Mach Rush to traverse the map at a ridiculous speed, AND fill our battery at the same time!

• We also don't want to be caught without energy to cast Kinetic Plating. This could be very dangerous if we are vs. strong enemies who can deal heavy damage if we don't have our damage reduction in place.

Why no range?

• We don't care about knockdown radius on Mach Rush - we are mainly using this ability to move around and charge our battery. Ability range does not affect the distance we can travel with this ability.

• Thermal Sunder is a great ability, but by sacrificing a bit of range on this ability we are gaining a massive amount of duration. It's worth it!

Why 100% strength?

• If we go below 100% strength, then Kinetic Plating can NOT grant us 100% damage resistance any more!

• We can increase strength over 100%, and this will help us get 100% damage resistance at a lower battery value. However, by placing [Intensify] or another mod for power strength, we miss out on the opportunity to put another mod there. As we will eventually [Reach] 100% damage resistance with a full battery, we will simply aim to fill the battery as quickly as possible by spamming Mach Rush (and using Thermal Sunder where required)

• With only 100% strength, Thermal Sunder may not deal a lot of damage, but that's OK! Thermal Sunder is a great CC tool, but it doesn't need to deal loads of damage to be effective. It can apply Heat, Cold and even Blast status effect to enemies to keep them CC'd while we kill them >:)

• What about the Redline buffs to Fire Rate, Attack Speed, Reload Speed, and Holster Speed? Surely we need power strength to improve these? Well, weirdly enough, these buffs are actually improved by ability duration, NOT strength ! So improving our duration before, is actually giving us all these extra buffs too - neat :)

Redirection? But, isn't Health better than Shields?

• True, normally we like health more than shields because we can reduce damage to health with armor.

• However, in the case of our boy Gauss, shields are really effective! Why? Fair warning - boring maths ahead, but it's all because of his passive, from the description on the wiki:

[Gauss] passively gains bonus Shield recharge rate and shield recharge delay reduction for every point of battery stored in his gauge, up to a maximum of 120% for recharge rate and 80% for recharge delay when the battery is full.

What does this mean? At full battery, our shield will recharge up to 120% faster, and with an 80% smaller delay! This reduces the delay for partially damaged shields from 1 second to 0.2 seconds, and the delay for fully depleted shields from 4 seconds to 0.8 seconds. Bear in mind, taking damage during this window will reset the delay.

It also increases the rate our shields [Regen], which we can calculate with the following formula:

(15+0.05(Maximum Shields) ) * (1 + Shield Recharge Bonus)

With 0% battery, and our shields buffed up to 1110 with [Redirection], this would be the normal rate of 70.5 shields per second, taking a total of 15.7 seconds to fill from depleted. That is way too long for me, so let's increase that with a 100% battery to get our shield recharge rate of:

70.5 * (1+1.2) = 155.1

155.1 shield per second means we will recharge our full 1110 shield in a much faster 7.1 seconds, allowing us to sustain our defences far easier.

Okay, maths is out of the way for now - let's talk about the final mod we haven't discussed yet - [Adaptation].

I know this build aims to have 100% damage reduction, but the fact is we can't have that all the time. It takes a while after activating Redline to build our battery all the way to 100%, plus we have to worry about Nullifiers, falling off the map, etc. We can't afford to rely on having 100% damage reduction as our only method of survivability, because otherwise when we don't have it up we are very vulnerable. [Adaptation] helps with this. It makes our shields more durable, and allows us to sustain against some damage our Kinetic Plating can't - such as Electricity procs.

Speaking of damage our Kinetic Plating can't sustain against, this feels like the perfect time to bring up the Arcane choice. So, Kinetic Plating gives us 100% resistance to all Physical damage types, as well as Cold and Heat. We've got our shield along with [Adaptation] to [Protect] against Electricity damage, but what about Toxin? I discovered this one by mistake when, after staying in an endless Arbitration for a good while without taking any real damage, I was oneshot by a stray Toxic proc from a Mutalist Osprey. The fact is, toxic procs can and will oneshot you, completely bypassing your damage resistances from Kinetic Plating, [Adaptation], and your shields. Therefore, we take Arcane Resistance. If you really don't want to take Arcane Resistance, you may want to swap in [Rolling Guard]. Or take your chances. It's your game ;)

For the final Arcane choice, I have opted for Arcane Energise. This helps keep our energy up in extended missions and provides us and our team enough to cast our abilities as required. Alternative choices include Arcane Barrier, Arcane Grace, or Arcane Aegis.

Finally, you can swap [Flow] for [Primed Flow] if you feel you need it. I never seem to run out of energy with this, so I didn't bother with the additional format.

So, there it is. Everything you need to be an unkillable zoomy boi. Have fun :)