and enemy EHP scales to the point that you need viral+slash procs and similar types of infinite/high scaling in your cell's bag of tricks to keep killing things.
Viral is ok, safe for opportunity cost. It gives you 1 high value attack per ennemy, then it's totally useless, and leaves you with a 50% HP enemy you have to deal with, with one proc on your tool shed becoming dead weight.
So you also don't understand how viral works, okay.
One viral proc reduces target current and max HP by 50%. Against something with 1k HP, that's not much. Against something with 5 million HP, you're effectively doing 2.5mil damage
with a single proc. That's why percentage-based stuff is good: it never stops scaling. General rule of thumb is that scaling damage and debuffs start mattering when you stop being able to kill things by breathing on them.
Furthermore, it ignores the most common types of damage mitigation (armor, shields, ability nullification). Viral is the single most efficient and reliable status proc in the game.
Slash was extremely good due to a bug that allowed every pellet to proc when fired from a shotgun with 100% status chance. So you fire a tigris loaded to the mouth with multifire, and there you go, everything dies. This has been patched out and caused the rise of the sea level. Slash by itself does, over time 30% (don't quote me on the number) of the damages of the attacked that proc'd it. When your base attack is reduced, so is the output of slash proc. In effect, it's a flat 30% damage increase, when it procs, and when it does proc it means it won't proc anything else, making it subpar to, for exemple, a 30% increase in attack speed, which does the same thing, except it keeps your combo bar growing and depending on your build, can have effects you're looking for. Not saying viral+slash is bad, plague arcane deals viral damage and my zaw deals mostly slash, but I do not rely on their procs to be effective.
You also don't understand how slash works. I know how the shotgun bug went, and that was not why people used slash.
First: it, like viral, ignores the most common types of damage mitigation. Let me give you the straight numbers: a Lv.150 corrupted bombard has ~5.17mil EHP. It only has ~96k actual HP. A viral proc will reduce that to ~48k. All it takes then is one or two good slash procs to kill it (or a bunch of small ones from Soma P or whatever). With a pure crit build you would run out of ammo before you killed that single enemy. Even with a corrosive build it'll take far longer to strip the majority of that armor.
This is why Dread has always been so heavily used relative to other bows: you can pretty easily set up a oneshot build that can kill enemies on that level of scaling with one pull (or two, if you get unlucky with your procs). This is also why the Atterax memeing strike build was so busted before they nerfed a bunch of aspects of it: you could sweep through maps hitting entire rooms with red crit slash procs; anything that didn't die outright just from the high combo counter red crits would die from the bleeds.
In my experience, crit weapons scale far, far, far better than status based weapons. Feel free to disagree. I'm not even saying my way of playing is the best, I'm saying it works wonders which is factually correct, and you'll pardon me for disliking being called names for that.
Then your experience is sharply limited to relatively easy content. Endgame has always been about a mix of crit, status, and CC. Crit isn't
bad, but
crit alone falls off hard. You use the higher raw damage from crit
in conjunction with the various forms of damage mitigation reduction/removal/avoidance to kill things efficiently.
And, past a certain point, you can't oneshot much of anything without highly specific builds. Yeah, sure, my rivened AS Opticor can hit six figure damage numbers, but that doesn't make it efficient in most use cases.
pre-e: re: screenshots:
#1. Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. My Rhino P has more armor than that and IS starts falling off by ~round 3 of High Index.
#2. "It works against bosses" is not "it stays efficient up to very high levels". This is my Eidolon hunter when I get bored of Vectis P:
Yeah, it can do 6-figure damage to rando mid-level enemies, but I wouldn't use it for anything serious because it's too situational.
#3. Aaand I can hit near-equivalent stats with a 1-forma no-Riven Guandao. Again, anything can be a low-level blender.
Man, this really isn't about "your stuff sucks", it's about you overstating how useful it is against difficult content combined with telling people to walk into the Rhino newb trap.