Cascadia Empowered: Functionality and Use Cases (U31.6.1)

Cascadia Empowered is one of the new Secondary Arcanes introduced in U31.5 Angels of the Zariman. It offers an unusual damaging effect compared to the more traditional weapon Arcanes, deserving of closer inspection and analysis.

NOTE: There are very slight spoilers for Angels of the Zariman due to the acquisition method of Cascadia Empowered.

Acquisition

Cascadia Empowered can be purchased from the Zariman's weapon vendor. You must be Rank 3 (Guardian) with the local Syndicate.

It is also a possible drop from Void Angels and Thrax enemies in the Zariman.

Game Effect

Cascadia Empowered triggers every time the equipped Secondary inflicts a Status proc, dealing up to 750 additional damage to the affected enemy of the corresponding damage type.

This is an example screenshot with my Rank 4 CascEmp attached to my unmodded Magnetic Kuva Nukor. Unmodded, it inflicts extremely low damage so its regular damage ticks are distinct from those from CascEmp. The 650 damage ticks are Magnetic damage from Magnetic procs, which is neutral to the Runner's "Infested" Health. The 325 is from Radiation damage from Radiation procs, which deal only half damage to "Infested" Health.

In the event that a hit inflicts multiple Status procs due to >100% Status Chance, the CascEmp damage from both procs will be rolled into a single damage tick.

At first this amount of damage seems very impressive, however there are a large number of caveats attached to it. The damage from CascEmp is not affected by +Damage or +Elemental/Physical Damage mods, it cannot Crit and is thus unaffected by Crit mods, and it cannot inflict Status procs itself. It also does not deal additional damage to weakspots (e.g. heads) even if the originating shot hit a weakspot.

As such, the number of weapons for which CascEmp is as good as or better than the usual Secondary Merciless/Deadhead/Dexterity is actually very small - but more on that in the next section.

Use Cases

Given it triggers on procs and does not scale with most mods, Cascadia Empowered is thus most effective on weapons with high Status Chance and low base Damage. Its main competitor is the Secondary Damage arcanes, Merciless/Deadhead/Dexterity and the new Cascadia Flare, which all offer +360% base Damage. Therefore, for CascEmp to be worth considering, a weapon needs to meet the following inequation:

where Damage per pellet includes Crit, but excludes base Damage mods. The lower this ratio is, the more damage a weapon will get out of CascEmp.

LATE ADDITION: U31.6 introduced Cascadia Flare, which gives up to +480% Damage, stacking from inflicting Heat procs. The Damage/Status ratio for CascEmp to match CascFlare's damage output is thus 156.25.

If we assume that in such a build, every elemental mod will be a 60/60 to maximise Status Chance (not always the case since Primed Heated Charge exists), we can ignore the elemental mod component as it will cancel out. However if you install any elemental/physical mod where +Elemental/Physical damage and +Status Chance are not equal, then you will need to take both effects into account on their respective stats.

Going through just about every Secondary in the game using the Warframe Wiki weapon table and putting them into this formula yields the following table:

For simplicity, every weapon has had both Primed Crit mods applied to it. This of course isn't perfect, but it makes table setup easier. Any weapon highlighted Red has a strictly superior variant, so will be ignored. Orange highlighted weapons are those that sit outside of the ratio threshold, but have multiple damage instances that are not properly accounted for in this table.

Given this erroneous installation of Crit mods, it is worth a quick look at all of the weapons slightly above the target 208.33 ratio. The Spectra Vandal, Kuva Twin Stubbas and Twin Grakatas are all very much Crit-viable. Both the Secura Dual Cestra and Velox are on the borderline of Crit viability (viable only with both Primed Crit mods), while the Furis is not Crit viable and drops below the threshold with Crit mods removed. Including the Furis, Cyanex and Zakti Prime, and ignoring any weapon with a strictly superior variant gives 17 Secondaries for which CascEmp may be worth considering.

For these weapons, CascEmp offers a larger direct damage boost than a regular Damage Arcane - the lower the ratio, the higher the damage boost. Of note, the list includes two highly popular weapons - the Kuva Nukor and Tenet Cycron.

As it was the weapon with the highest ratio that I'd installed an Arcane Adapter into, I first took my Kuva Nukor, switched its usual Merciless for a Rank 4 CascEmp, and took it for a run in Steel Path Void. This quickly highlighted by far the biggest problem with CascEmp.

Against enemies who survive long enough for the bonus damage to actually matter and for Status procs to actually stack up (e.g. the above pictured Corrupted Heavy Gunners), CascEmp is far inferior to a regular Damage Arcane. Damage Arcanes increase the damage dealt by damage-over-time procs like Heat, as they are an extra +Damage effect that increases the overall damage of the shot. CascEmp is a separate damage instance entirely and itself cannot proc Status, so does not enhance damage-over-time procs. As a result, a CascEmp build's procs will be much weaker than a build with a Damage Arcane.

Against enemies like the aforementioned Corrupted Heavy Gunner for whom damage-over-time procs are the best scaling solution, this is a major disadvantage. With the level ~130 Steel Path Corrupted Heavy Gunners like above, I was seeing a roughly 50% increase in time-to-kill for my Kuva Nukor with CascEmp vs Merciless, and this would only be exacerbated at even higher levels. Considering the KNukor is the fourth-best candidate for CascEmp according to the (flawed and simplistic) table, this is not at all promising.

An argument could be made that there is a window of content for which the boosted damage-over-time procs of Damage Arcanes are unnecessary, in which CascEmp would shine with its higher up-front damage. While this is certainly true, enemies at this level will typically die so quickly to either build that the difference in time-to-kill is likely negligible to the ordinary player.

Even with this downside, there remains a select few weapons for which CascEmp is worth another look - those with multiple damage/proc instances per shot and thus more chances to trigger the CascEmp damage instance. Both the Tysis and Kompressa fall within the ratio threshold even before considering their extra hits.

The Cyanex sits slightly out based on its direct impact damage, but its explosions deal slightly less damage, with which it sits just inside the threshold. The Zakti Prime is well out based on its higher explosion damage, but its weaker direct hits sit well within. However, I don't believe either is worth further consideration here. The Cyanex sits on the borderline considering both its damage instances, which as discussed just above is not good enough to match a Damage Arcane's damage-over-time procs. While the ZaktiP is well within threshold on direct hits, the majority of its damage is in its much stronger explosion, which will prefer a Damage Arcane.

The Tysis has two components to its attack. The first is a simple direct hit, with 49 base Damage as in the table. The second is three ticks of 27 Corrosive damage that follow a hit, all with the same amazing 50% base Status Chance as the direct hit. On paper, this would make CascEmp an incredibly powerful option. After testing however, I found it has the same issue that the KNukor does - CascEmp does not enhance damage-over-time procs. Even with the Tysis' very high proc-per-shot ratio, the extra damage to damage-over-time procs makes a regular Damage arcane far stronger in very high level content.

This leaves just the Kompressa.

Alongside the Kompressa's 42 Viral damage explosion which is already within threshold, its direct hits deal a measly 2 Viral damage with the same high Status Chance. Additionally, there is a peculiar bug (or feature) that limits the number of bubbles in each shot that can explode to 4 - which is exactly its base Multishot. As such, Multishot mods do very little damage-wise for the Kompressa as the extra pellets will only do the base 2 Viral damage on direct hits - except that these extra pellets can still inflict Status procs and thus trigger CascEmp. Where Multishot will scale regular Damage Arcanes only from the pathetic direct hit damage, CascEmp will inflicts exactly the same damage as it does from a strong hit.

The Kompressa is the one Secondary in the game where Cascadia Empowered is actually worth consideration over a regular Damage Arcane in moderately high level content. With added Multishot, it inflicts so many extra procs with so little extra base Damage that CascEmp's superior direct damage can beat out a Damage Arcane's much stronger damage-over-time procs. Of course, at a very high level this would switch around again, but I don't go anywhere near that level of content.

This will all become outdated if DE fix the Multishot bug on the Kompressa, and make all its bubbles detonate correctly. If that occurs, I am almost certain that a regular Damage Arcane will retake the lead in just about all content for the reasons mentioned above for the other weapons.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Cascadia Empowered is not really worth pursuing. In the content where equipment choice and min-maxing really matters (ie Steel Path onwards), it is clearly suboptimal on most of the weapons it would otherwise see use on. Its inability to contribute to damage-over-time procs makes it inferior at very high levels to the regular Damage Arcanes, even when its direct damage is superior. Additionally, many of those Arcanes offer various other stat benefits (e.g. +Reload Speed, +Headshot Damage) that CascEmp does not.

CascEmp only offers notable damage output on one weapon, the Kompressa, and only because of a bug with its Multishot. If not for that bug, even the Kompressa would always prefer a regular Damage Arcane.

That's not to say CascEmp is completely useless compared to the Damage Arcanes however. Most notably, it does not need to be stacked up to deal full damage. Deadhead/Merciless/Dexterity all require several kills to build up damage and decay over time, while CascEmp is always immediately and fully active. Additionally, CascEmp is available at a much weaker content than the Damage Arcanes (Zariman vs Steel Path), granted it still uses the same Arcane slot which is only unlocked through playing Steel Path anyway.

However, Cascadia Flare also throws a wrench into those plans. It stacks up just from inflicting Heat procs, not kills, so can be stacked up effortlessly on a super-high-status weapon like the Kompressa. It can also be acquired from the Zariman, and offers even more damage than the ordinary Damage Arcanes. Between all of that and the fact that Cascadia Flare is useful on far more weapons makes that one the clear choice to invest in if you want a Secondary Zariman Arcane.