Q: What are masterwork rolls?
A: Most legendary weapons are capable of being Masterworked. The masterwork system is a way for you to upgrade your favorite weapons to their maximum potential.
Q: What does it take to upgrade a weapon to a masterwork?
A: Upgrading your weapons, in broad terms, takes a small amount of glimmer, legendary shards, and, most importantly, Enhancement Cores.
Depending on what Tier your weapon is at, the requirements to raise it to the next tier increase the closer the weapon is to being fully masterworked (Tier 10).
Q: What benefits do I get for masterworking a weapon?
A: Each tier that you increase your weapon will grant a small buff to a single stat, chosen randomly when the item drops.
Beyond that, at Tier 5 you gain access to a kill tracker. At Tier 10, your multi-kills will generate orbs of light.
Q: So what are these "masterwork roll" stats?
A: These are the possible stats that upgrading your weapon will grant a bonus to. Depending on what tier you are at, you can grant anywhere from 1-10 additional points in any of the stats listed to your weapon.
Q: Any catch with this?
A: The Bungie API currently says that all weapons can potentially roll with all stats as their masterwork stat. This obviously isn't accurate, as Blast Radius isn't applicable to, say, Auto Rifles.
The list you see on this page is trimmed to only show stats that actually appear on the weapon. However, it is possible that Bungie has additional logic behind the scenes that further filters these
possibilities to, for example, prevent certain items from being able to have an Impact masterwork. Until Bungie modifies the API files to 100% accurately display which masterwork stats are possible on
each item, take what you see here with a pinch of salt.
I wanted to like this perk just based on the cool factor, but it is a broken, bewildering mess. It's a joke, to the extent that it's funnier when it DOES work correctly.
For Volta Bracket:
The rockets dud out at ~60M range if they don't find a target. So for any DPS phase that takes place beyond a stone's throw, this perk functionally does not exist, or at best gives you passive, theoretical, single-target ad damage while you do precision on the boss.
For Iterative Loop:
Rockets proc on trigger pull, not successive hits in a single volley. If you hit a whole crowd with one trigger pull, NTR sleeps. If you hit a yellow bar with every shot in the volley, it sleeps. You have to mag dump just to proc it, and even then I've found it sometimes doesn't trip, for no explainable reason. But let's say you do mag dump into an elite, and let's say the rocket miraculously does proc, and let's even be exceedingly generous here and say it actually hits the target. Does the damage scale to account for the fact that mag-dumping with a fusion rifle is far less sustainable than with an SMG? Nope! The perk's damage is flat across weapon types, so you exhaust 5-6 shots of fusion ammo to get a rocket that had to be balanced for an angry little bullet hose that can mag dump until the cows come home.
For Basso Ostinato:
Same problems as Iterative Loop. Not on pellet hits, but on successive hits from trigger pulls. I tested this exhaustively at the VoG entrance and found that while rockets claim to proc every 3 trigger pulls, realistically it might be only once every 5, because the time frame seems to be pretty unforgiving even for a 140RPM shotgun. So that's about 1 rocket per tube, 3 for your entire reserves unless you run reserve mods. The remaining shells in the tube won't be enough for a second proc, and naturally the lengthy reload time will wipe your progress due to the rapid hit requirement. Not that a second proc is worth chasing, but it's pretty disappointing that what is essentially a half-mag-expenditure perk can't trigger on BOTH halves of the mag.
For Dimensional Hypotrochoid:
The same problems as the shotgun and fusion rifle, only now you get to spend heavy ammo instead! But an extra fun thing about "upon scoring multiple HITS" is that, on a low velocity waveframe, there is a substantial window of time between trigger pull, the grenade hitting the floor, and the wave HITTING its targets. You can do a lot in that 0.2 second window, like be looking in another direction, or be looking at the cover you ducked back behind. Am I saying I've watched the rockets slam into the wall in front of me, repeatedly? I dunno, but what I'm definitely NOT saying is that I've watched it track and hit what I was shooting at.
Okay, let's set all those drawbacks aside. The common denominator you might notice in each complaint is how it behaves on restricted ammo weapons. So does it perform better on unlimited ammo guns like Spiral? Nope! This rocket's "tracking" ability is nothing short of flabbergasting. I've found that it works best when you have significant elevation, with no cover between you and your target. Which is to say that on flat terrain, I've watched it fly ten feet forward, vector up, and then slam into the ground. For reasons so unknowable they're downright Lovecraftian. I've watched it fly halfway to the target, do an actual, literal U-turn, and thud into the ground.
All in all, it's thoroughly unreliable. You have to jump through hoops of fire just to get it to work, and for what? To do less damage than even the most watered down of damage buffs, after accounting for ammo spent and result achieved. Guns like Volta and Dimensional were already struggling to perform in their respective roles without an origin perk that is arguably less helpful than One Quiet Moment.