The Vandal variant of Opticor is known as the Opticor Vandal. It has better critical chance, status chance, critical multiplier, reload speed, magazine size, and quicker charge rate than classic Opticor.
This improved weapon mainly gives Puncture damage. You can get it by earning 100 points doing the recurring Thermia Fractures event.
This event was first introduced in Operation: Buried Debts. It comes with a pre-installed Orokin Catalyst as well as a free weapon slot.
Comparing Opticor Vandal with Opticor
- Lower attack damage (400 versus 1000)
- Higher critical multiplier (2.6x versus 2.5x)
- Bigger magazine (8 rounds versus 5 rounds)
- Lower disposition (1 versus 1.05)
- Faster reload speed (1.4s versus 2s)
- Lower secondary attack damage (200 versus 500)
- Higher critical chance (24% versus 20%)
- Higher status chance (30% versus 20%)
- Quicker charge time (0.6s versus 2s)
- Lower area attack damage (200 versus 400)
What Are the Advantages of Opticor Vandal?
This weapon has high puncture damage and works well against armor. It has pinpoint accuracy, since Heavy Caliber’s penalty for accuracy is very slight on Opticor Vandal.
It offers a very high status chance, critical chance and critical multiplier, and is very ammo-efficient.
Opticor Vandal has an innate punch-through of a meter and every shot will stagger enemies. You can fire it with about half a charge although that won’t cause as much damage. The quick charge speed allows you to charge it faster.
The Opticor Vandal beam is half a meter wide and the sides of it can hit any enemies that happen to be near enough.
Enemy and surface impacts result in a 4.6 meter explosion which will inflict Magnetic damage. The innate Magnetic damage is effective against both Shielded and Proto shields.
Slain enemies will get their corpses vaporized which is handy for Stealth gameplay when silenced because you aren’t leaving bodies behind.
Finally, Opticor Vandal offers innate polarity and can benefit from the Cautious Shot mod.
What Are the Disadvantages of Opticor Vandal?
Although Opticor Vandal offers plenty of advantages, you also need to know what isn’t so good.
First, both Slash and Impact damage are less effective against health and shields.
Explosion inflicts self-stagger and has innate Magnetic damage which isn’t so effective against Alloy Armor.
Explosion range can’t be increased using Mod Firestorm and Mod Furax Body Count, and linear damage falloff from an explosion goes down from 100 to 40%.
As soon as Opticor Vandal reaches full charge it fires, which can result in premature firing.
Useful Opticor Vandal Facts
- Everyone completing the Thermia Fractures event gets this weapon despite it having a Mastery Rank requirement of 14. You can even get it if you’re ranked at zero.
- Some actions, like reloading, can cancel the charge process, as is the case with many charge-based weapons. If enemies are too far away for a good shot, you can use this so you don’t have to waste a shot.
- If you transition into a slide when charging from a jump, the charge will be kept rather than canceled.
- Opticor Vandal emits a light beam when charging that’s the same as its energy color. Other players can see this beam. Firing a projective doesn’t mean it will follow the beam’s path however. A fully charged shot being fired will leave a particle effect behind it with striations of energy. Although these look good they can obscure your vision of the target.
Tips For Using Opticor Vandal
- A good start is to fit Mod Serration in Opticor Vandal’s Madurai slot. This will enhance the AoE potential as well as damage output. Another good option would be Heavy Caliber for its marginal accuracy drop.
- The critical damage and/or critical chance with Opticor Vandal can mean a huge damage increase if critically hit. Even by increasing the critical change with the Point Strike mod to 60% will be enough.
- This weapon works particularly well with Nova’s Antimatter Drop since the weapon has excellent accuracy as well as huge damage. This lets Antimatter Drop to inflict a lot of damage with just one shot.
- Shield Lancer’s shield is treated as a solid environment by this weapon which sets off the AoE damage effect. Grineer can be a sound alternative shooting at Shield Lancers in the midst of the enemy, instead of shooting the ground for splash damage.
- Opticor Vandal’s 60% Critical Chance with Point Strike means it can make good use of the Hunter Munitions mod to get extra Slash procs.
- This weapon rarely deals Slash procs though since it has low base Slash damage. You can still mod it for status chance and Viral damage though.
- Impacting an Artic Eximus Snow Globe with a fully charged shot means explosion damage to everything inside the Snow Globe. You can mod the Opticor Vandal and destroy a whole enemy squadron in a Slow Globe using just one shot.
- The Ballistic Battery of Mesa considers the explosion damage a different shot when charging up the Ballistics Battery. This means you can get a full charge with one shot from Opticor Vancal. Also it seems that the Ballistic Battery damage bonus spreads across the explosion of the shot.
- There are some differences visually between fully-charged and partially-charged shots. The fully-charged ones are wider and they leave a trail of light for a few seconds after the main shot dissipates.
Opticor Vandal In-Game Bugs
When you hit Volt’s Electric Shield, the shield is considered to be a solid surface so the bean explodes. This only prevents the AoE blast and not the actual shot.
Enemies who are hit by the explosion are alerted. Other enemies are only alerted when a target hit by your explosion can see you.
If the last Lephantis head in Phase 1 gets killed by Opticor Vandal, it will vaporize and not allow you into Phase 2. This forces the mission to be aborted.
Some bosses, including General Sargas Ruk, Lephantis and Eidolons, take reduced damage from Opticor Vandal because of the parameters of the fired beam.
The beam’s AoE will damage their weak spot before the main beam does, so the damage is nullified and only the AoE damage counts.
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