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  1. #1
    CategoryTheory's Avatar Senior Member
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    Using Strained, Perfectly Strained and Cold Relations

    TLDR:

    • Cold Relations with Perfectly Strained probably is not better than regular Strained on another well-chosen SMG, especially if you put a Short Grip (+5% CHD) on that other SMG.
    • For reliable near-maximum damage per mag with Strained, fire 12 single rounds (20 with Perfectly Strained) at approx. 3 RPM before holding down the trigger for full-auto. You can maintain 3-4 RPM by tapping eighth notes while humming "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees.


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    Background:

    • With Strained and Perfectly Strained you "[g]ain 10% critical hit damage for every 0.5 seconds you are firing," stacking up to 5 and 8 times respectively. I just checked in the firing range and confirmed that the buff starts (at +10% level) with the first shot you fire and is lost as soon as you let more than 0.5 seconds elapse between two shots.
    • Cold Relations is a PP-19 with Perfectly Strained. It has 59705 base damage, 700 RPM, a 53 round mag, and just long optics rail and 9mm muzzle slot attachment points for weapon mods.

    From another thread:

    Originally Posted by Deltium Go to original post
    Try the Cold Relations SMG. The bonus CHD is incredibly powerful.
    I think that it is a highly under-rated SMG.
    This is interesting to examine. Sock_Monkey agrees:

    Originally Posted by Sock_Monkey Go to original post
    I agree. Assuming you start with a build that has decent CHD from the get-go, Cold Relations can be brutal.
    The thing here, of course, is that Cold Relations is competing with (non-Perfect) Strained on other weapons. As As1r0nimo points out:

    Originally Posted by As1r0nimo Go to original post
    It's underated for a reason. Max chd will be on the last few rounds, plus it has only 2 mod slots.
    The specific advantage pointed out by Sock_Monkey, "Two seconds in (shooting) and I'm running a 172% CHD," isn't alone a convincing argument for Cold Relations over another SMG with (non-perfect) Strained because after two seconds you're at the same five stacks you'd be at with Strained on any weapon. (Perfect Strained doesn't exceed Strained until after 2.5 seconds of fire.)

    But not having a long (or any) underbarrel rail on Cold Relations also denies you +5% CHD you could be getting from the Short Grip, which is not only equal to an extra half stack of Strained (making the top buff from Perfectly Strained only 45%, rather than 60%, more powerful than the standard version) but also provides that extra 5% during the first 2.5 seconds of firing. So in this situation Perfectly Strained starts out behind and it will not be until almost two seconds after regular Strained reaches its maximum buff that Perfectly Strained catches up in overall delivered damage.

    (The PP-19 also cannot take magazine mods; but while a Heavy Spring mag on another 9mm SMG could provide another +10% critical hit damage, a larger mag will provide more overall damage in sustained fire because you're getting the maximum Strained buff for much longer. So I assume here that anybody using Strained is always using an Extended mag.)

    The PP-19 fires 700 RPM, or just under 12 rounds per second. So if you hold down the trigger on a full mag, here are the CHD buffs you'll be getting. (I've rounded the fire rate up to 720 RPM for ease of calculation, which makes Perfectly Strained look very marginally worse, but I don't think that makes any significant difference to the calculated results.)

    Code:
    Rounds   Strained   Perfectly Strained
     1–6        10%            10%
     7–12       20%            20%
    13–18       30%            30%
    19–24       40%            40%
    25–30       50%            50%
    31–36        "             60%
    37–42        "             70%
    43–48        "             80%
    49–53        "              "
    In other words, over what you'd get with Strained, Perfectly Strained is giving you about +25% CHD over Strained for 22 rounds (40% of your 53 round mag) when you dump the entire mag, but is preventing you (because you can't mount a Short Grip) from getting +5% CHD for all 53 rounds. In ideal conditions (a full mag dump doing damage) this gives you only about a 5% overall advantage in the total CHD you do. And of course conditions are not always ideal: you're not always dumping entire mags for a variety of reasons, including the enemy dying before the mag is out. (I generally get up to only the 7th stack before my current imperfect all-red build kills a full-armour elite, and only 4-5 and 3 stacks for Veteran and Normal enemies.)

    So Cold Relations doesn't seem especially good in this case, especially if another SMG might be not just equal to but better than the PP-19.

    However, there's a trick you can use to get more out of Strained (at a cost to your long term DPS): use single shots to build up the Strained buff before you go full auto. (If you need to avoid exposing yourself for too long while not doing much damage, you can just blindfire these and only come up to aim once you're ready to go full auto.)

    It's very hard to fire reliably at just under 0.5 second intervals, and if you miss one you have to start building Strained again. But aiming to do single shots at around 3 RPM should let you reliably avoid unproc'ing Strained.

    As we know from medical studies about applying CPR, people (at least, Westerners) can usually reproduce 100–120 beats per minute by thinking of the quarter note beat of the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive," a 103 BPM song. The eighth note beat of that will then be about 200 BPM, which is 3.3 rounds per second. So I tried that and found I can reliably bring Perfectly Strained up to 8 stacks.

    However, I find it difficult when I'm in battle to watch the meter on the weapon to switch to full auto when fully stacked (and there's no meter to watch when blindfiring), so instead I just count shots; in my experience 12 rounds will fully proc Strained (or pretty close) and 20 will do the same for Perfectly Strained.

    So applying this to build the buff, rounds 13-53 (40 rounds) will be at +50% CHD with Strained, but Perfectly Strained will give you +60% for rounds 21-26, +70% for rounds 27-32, and +80% for rounds 33-53. This is an average 25% increase over Strained for 33 rounds (62% of your mag), or 15% increase over the entire mag, which is clearly a lot better than the 5% you could get from a Short Grip. But now this comes at a cost of a fairly noticeable reduction in your DPS across multiple mags. I suspect it's not worth it, but I'd be interested in hearing a more detailed analysis of this.

    Originally Posted by Sock_Monkey Go to original post
    Probably my only wish would be a higher rpm...
    That seems the opposite of what you'd want, at least in some respects, if you're simply holding down the trigger, even more so with Perfectly Strained than Strained.

    As we've seen in the analysis above, the faster you empty your mag, the less you get from the Strained buffs. Increasing the fire rate even to 800 RPM would empty the 53-round mag in 3.975 seconds on full auto, and no bullet would ever get the full Perfectly Strained bonus without using the "Bee Gees" technique I described above. (Increasing the rate to 1275 DPS would make Perfectly Strained never do better than Strained on complete mag fired full-auto.)

    What you really want, I think, is a lower fire rate. The T821 has the lowest rate in the game, 550 RPM, but it has only a short underbarrel rail (at least the crafting desk Replica does) and so can't mount the Short Grip. (That, perhaps ironically given the name, requires a long rail). So I tried out the next lowest RPM weapon, a Tactical UMP-45 Replica. With the extended mag this gives you 50 rounds at 600 RPM, and at full-auto procs the 5th stack of strained in 25 rounds instead of 29, kind of compensating for the 3-round smaller mag. (It also has much better accuracy, and slightly better range and stability.)

    The UMP-45 has about 5.5% less DPS than the PP-19, but that is partially compensated for by the +3% expected damage (60% CHC Χ 5% CHD) from the Short Grip. The reload time is exactly the same when using the extended mag: 2.20 seconds. So you'd expect that overall it would function more or less the same.

    And it was indeed very close in testing: average DPS (according to the firing range) for taking down ten elites was 3.25 MDPS, versus 3.35 for the Cold Relations. That said, in this test the weapons weren't quite perfectly matched: 15% vs. 12% SMG damage, 58.5% vs. 60% CHC, and 4% damage to armor vs. 13% swap speed. So especially when testing against armoured enemies the Cold Relations is probably slightly better than the comparison shows here.

    In testing against ten normal (red) enemies, I got 3.14 MDPS for the UMP-45 vs. 3.44 MDPS for Cold Relations, almost a 10% difference, which seems weird. The actual DPS rates (with the weapon damage buffs on this build) were 1.47 vs 1.54 MDPS, making the Cold Relations only 4.4% better in theory when no armour is involved.

    Anyway, it seems that that Cold Relations does not significantly out-perform other SMGs with the non-Perfect version of Strained even in circumstances where Perfectly Strained is proc'ing its three stacks beyond Strained, which doesn't always happen. But I look forward to comments, refutations, and so on.

    As a side note, I'd worked out some of the details of what the T821 would do if it had a Short Grip before I discovered it couldn't mount one, and the much faster reload time (about 15% faster even with the extended mag) and otherwise comparable performance seemed to make it a winner for sustained DPS over the Cold Relations. Maybe that's why the designers gave it a short rail.
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  2. #2
    What about if you use True Patriot or the Ammo Dump holster? Shouldn't extending the firing time extend the margin between the Cold Relations since it also has a slightly larger magazine size to begin with?

    This is interesting though. It's a hard weapon to truly get into though with so many other options.
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  3. #3
    CategoryTheory's Avatar Senior Member
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    Originally Posted by fs_slacker Go to original post
    What about if you use True Patriot or the Ammo Dump holster? Shouldn't extending the firing time extend the margin between the Cold Relations since it also has a slightly larger magazine size to begin with?
    Yes it should, and that's a good idea.

    This is interesting though. It's a hard weapon to truly get into though with so many other options.
    Yeah, tell me about it. Builds already take a lot of time for me, and there's so much to try that I feel like I could be years at this.
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  4. #4
    Cold relations with 4 piece true patriot with chd, memento backpack , ceska chest with obliterate, Nice and fun build
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