30-45% damage more on your primary is a hell of a lot more valuable than 80-120% more HP on your frame, IMO, if you're talking about which to max first. Dead enemies don't shoot back and that health isn't going to be more than 100-150 on most frames. Speed, mobility, and effective ability use are the cornerstones of staying alive, whether that's sitting inside an unbreakable Frost shield for 50 rounds of defense or moving around like a goddamn pinball to avoid fire. Doesn't matter if you've got maxed Vitality, Redirection, Fast Deflection, Steel Fiber, and Vigor all on, if you're letting yourself get shot by level 100+ enemies you're going to melt fast,
and your important abilities are going to be crap because you don't have the mods you need for them.
Yeah, get that vitality maxed eventually. But R6 is cheap while giving you a bit under 2/3rds of the benefit of R10 without sucking up tens of thousands of endo.
I don't get all the hate for Mag.
Polarize, with Shield Transfer mod, is basically god-mode, giving her massive overshields. Against shielded enemies it also does a lot of damage with a huge radius.
Magnetize + a fully auto shotgun, or any high-dps gun with a large clip, will devastate any bosses or elites without specific hotboxes.
Crush serves as a wide-area stun, which creates an opening for reviving allies, and is better than nothing if you accidentally bring Mag against Infested.
Overall Mag is one of my favorite frames.
caveat: 1amish ramblingMag's... a sad story, honestly. She used to be goddamn
good, but got nerfed into the ground.
Polarize with Shield Transference caps at 1,200(? IIRC)pts of overshield. For low-level speedrunning that's overkill. For serious work that's barely enough to eat a couple shots, and it doesn't even get the benefit of armor. The general "but at least she's still okay against Corpus" is a sad state to be in, considering that you can completely trivialize shields in the same way with a weapon, leaving your frame open to be something that contributes more generally. Not only her 1, but also her 4, which is supposed to be a high-damage AoE nuke.... it's frankly underwhelming.
Like, compare Crush to (say) Avalanche. 3000 base damage of one of the most narrowly useful types and a knockdown that has a cast+cooldown of over 3 seconds versus 1500 damage up front + hard CC for base 8s + 40% armor reduction(!!!) which is increased by power strength(!!!!!), followed by 400 damage nukes and guaranteed slow procs for anything left alive... with a slightly
lower cast time.
Or compare Magnetize to Molecular Prime. Granted, the former is a 2 and the latter is a 4, but
still, MP hits an area with ~8x the radius for twice as long
and applies a heavy slow to all targets
and has higher finisher nukes.
That's the problem with Mag right now. They fucked her up enough that she's mediocre at best even at what she does and can be replaced with a weapon. One of the best uses for her (stripping shields in conjunction with a MP, ironically) can be accomplished almost as easily by the Nova taking a Magnetic-specced Amprex. She's good against the least dangerous enemy type, but not even particularly great versus them.
Here's an example: Magnetize strips armor. Great. We love armor stripping, it's the most important thing in the game. Problem is, it strips
flat armor rather than percentages, and only if they've already lost their shields. 400 base max damage. So assume Grineer, no shields. A level 50 Bombard. 500 base armor becomes a bit under 2,800. Now go to level 100 and you're at a bit under 8,300. Avalanche is stripping ~3,300. Maxed Corrosive Projection on one person is stripping 2,480. A single corrosive proc is stripping 2,066. Magnetize is still stripping 400.
Basically her CC was nerfed to shit (because it was pretty damn good, at one point she was queen of CC spam thanks to Pull), and her damage can't scale even into the baby levels covered by sorties, and even for low-level stuff you can just run Ember or whatever to instagib everything. She has decent single-target damage amp... in a gamestate where other frames have as good or better buffs
and other good stuff going for them.
Excal, Frost, &c. got reworks and are generally in good places now. Mag just kept getting nerfed. It's tragic. :|
Also underlines very handily what I've been saying, though. To be effective you need some combination of mobility, CC, and damage, and whatever you have
must scale well if you're going to use it for anything other than milk runs. Corrosive is king of Damage 2.0 because it has a permanent percentage-based debuff to the most powerful enemy stat in the game, which is powerful in turn because it scales like motherfucker in terms of piling on effective HP. Shields are trivial because they aren't affected by armor. Thus, magnetic damage is incredibly niche and not entirely necessary; notably, Corpus have a number of units which have armor, so corrosive is also the most important elemental proc against
them at high levels.
It's not a healthy situation, but that's how it is. Mag is kinda bad right now and probably needs a rework, and the game is mostly babymode easy stuff that you can easily clear even with absolute rubbish gear, except for the handful of remnants of challenging content where you need equipment for highly specific purposes if you're not going to climb into someone else's backpack for the duration.
And yeah, this is in no way a "don't play what you like" post, because it's pretty easy to play literally anything and do decently right now (again, partly because staying mobile is the most important part of staying alive, unless you're Frost or Inaros or something). It's just that it does Mag a disservice to pass this off as a good state for her when it's gotten to the point where there are cracks about how she's Warframe's Irelia. And to be fair, there's a world of difference between "kinda bad" and the garbage trap weapons that exist only to waste your time and effort.