This is a Secondary Fire AoE spam build, although the weapon still does great damage with its Primary Fire with this build.
Tenet Element:
Heat is the element of choice in order to increase our Heat weighting as much as possible for Cascadia Flare. [Tenet Plinx]'s Primary Fire has innate Fire damage, and the Secondary Fire has innate Radiation damage, so Heat ensures that we can have Viral on both without any issues.
Mod Breakdown:
- Galvanized Diffusion: More projectiles = more damage (and status procs), simple as that.
- [Primed Pistol Gambit]: [Tenet Plinx]'s beefy 40% Crit Chance on its Secondary Fire (44% on its Primary Fire) means that it is built very nicely as a crit weapon.
- [Primed Target Cracker]: For the same reasons above, Tenet Plinx does great with crit builds, so might as well increase the crit multiplier even more.
- [Primed Slip Magazine]: The [Tenet Plinx]'s Secondary Fire gets a 10% multiplicative base damage bonus for each ammo in the magazine, so you'll want as much Magazine Capacity as possible. Has a ~10.4% damage increase over [Hornet Strike] when Cascadia Flare is fully stacked. Feel free to substitute in Hornet Strike if you're having trouble keeping up Cascadia Flare stacks.
- Ice Storm: This is used over Frostbite because again, we are trying to maximize our Magazine Capacity.
- Pistol Pestilence: Here to provide the ever-meta Status Effect, Viral, whilst also giving some better proc chance on our Status Effects.
- [Primed Heated Charge]: Taking advantage of pistol's wonderful 165% Heat mod, this will add some beefy raw damage to the AoE as well as give our Heat status great weighting for Cascadia Flare.
- [Primed Quickdraw]: Although it's not listed on the wiki for some reason, [Tenet Plinx]'s recharge delay is actually reduced with Reload Speed modifiers. Highly recommended unless you are playing someone with a good Reload Speed modifier like Yareli, then feel free to use one of the alternatives below.
Alternatives:
- [Hornet Strike]: If you don't mind the reload or use something else to remedy it, this will be your biggest increase in raw AoE damage.
- Galvanized Shot: Will add more single-target damage on repeated shots (you have to direct-impact with the Secondary Fire, [Galvanized Shot] does not proc on AoE), as well as make stacking Cascadia Flare considerably easier with an ~10% increase in Status Chance.
- [Primed Fulmination]: Increase the radius of the explosion, but not the radius of the pull sadly (especially recommended if you don't have a frame with good grouping abilities).
- [Stunning Speed]: Useful if you want to both help the recharge delay a tad, as well as make it easier to stack Cascadia Flare.
Arcane:
- Cascadia Flare: Since we're going purely for AoE, it's quite hard to proc Secondary Deadhead, and the very slow fire rate of the Secondary Fire means it can be difficult at times to keep up Secondary Merciless stacks. Cascadia Flare gives an okay 10 seconds for the stacks, as well as stacks up to a whopping 480% additive damage boost. With the decent 20% Status Chance, AoE, and high Heat weighting, it shouldn't be too much of a problem keeping Cascadia Flare fully stacked.
Alternatives:
- Secondary Deadhead: Yeah I know I said it's hard to proc, but if you are really struggling with keeping Cascadia Flare fully stacked, then it might be a lot easier for you to just get some headshot kills every 20 seconds for the 360% damage increase. Secondary Deadhead is only a 360% damage bonus as opposed to Cascadia Flare's 480% damage bonus, so you will see less damage with optimal gameplay.
Exilus:
- Lethal Momentum: Because the Tenet Plinx doesn't use any ammo, all of the ammo-related Exilus mods are useless, leaving really just Lethal Momentum. Although the Primary Fire is hit-scan, the Secondary Fire has a pretty low base Projectile Speed of only 100 m/s, so the bonus to Projectile Speed is actually quite nice, especially on longer-range shots.
