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.
The most damage & DPS is going to be Envious Assassin + Bipod (note that EnvAssassin is now nerfed to overflow the mag to 6), though that requires some work to get to the max overflowed mag size -- more work than just getting 6 stacks of Explosive Light. For this weapon, six consecutive under-powered rockets (no reloads) will do a bit more damage than 3 super-charged rockets. Using D2Foundry and my own experience, that's 6 * 62285.38 versus 3 * 103808.96.
The EASIEST damage will be Recon + Explosive Light, followed by Slideshot+EL and CC+EL. I never got the EA+Bipod roll, but I had Slideshot+[whatever], Recon+Bipod and EA+Surrounded, at some point this year, plus my original CC+Bipod, and now all of my rolls are replaced by Recon+EL and CC+EL (I use the latter on a flow-state Arcstrider). Both rolls have Impact Casing and non-redundant masterworks. Chase the EA+Bipod or Recon+EL rolls. Don't bother with EA+EL or CC+EL.
I don't recommend Surrounded unless you gear up for self-blast and enemy close-range damage reduction. Also, there are some boss/miniboss encounters where not enough adds spawn to activate Surrounded, or it's just advantageous to clear those adds (but they may not be within the blast radius of the rocket).
I do recommend Slideshot, but no amount of sliding is going to compare to the time compounding offered by Reconstruction or Envious Assassin.
Bc of all of this and my og review, plus the current state of [Arc] Rockets in the game, I must amend this review to be 5/5 stars for PvE. I was deliberately conservative over a year ago, but I can unabashedly say this is a darn good rocket and especially bc it's a world drop with a mere six perks per trait column.
ORIGINAL REVIEW FOR POSTERITY:
This weapon rolls nasty DPS combos of clown cartridge or envious assassin in column#3 and bipod in col 4. As I have never managed to keep or use a RL that rolled clown, I am only now realizing it adds just one rocket to your mag every time you reload. AFAIK envious adds quite a few more with bipod. You can pop off minimum of two rockets and repeat for another salvo relatively quickly. Envious Assassin is still quite good on slow-reload weapons, whereas Clown Cartridge is only reliant on a reload, no kills required; potentially better for a long DPS phase if you did not make it to max with Envious.
Bipod ALSO adds one to your mag, so you have THREE in the chamber w/ Clown activated or SEVEN w/ Envious! Bipod also reduces firing delay (-25%) and adds a whopping 5 more rockets to your reserves, for a total of 12 base (you can still increase that further with chest armour mods).
However, there are drawbacks with bipod: a massive -20 decrease to reload speed and -25% to dmg.
Re: Reloading --
Crux base reload is nutty (57), and can further be increased with Alloy Casing (+30) or High-Velocity Rounds (+10) in col 2; with Bipod, the former mag perk results in a net INCREASED reload speed of 67, the same yield as the latter mag perk's if not using bipod. There ARE RLs with higher base reload, in the same element and/or the same aggressive frame archetype in particular, but it seems some of those roll with perks that render reload speeds irrelevant (ex: envious assassin, ALH, reconstruction), or they might be outdated in some way. Bipod also reduces blast radius; irrelevant for boss damage phases for which one would want the increased mags, rocket velocity and firing speeds.
Re: Damage --
Compared to another aggressive RL, or any Crux rolls without bipod, you are doing about 1000-1100 less per rocket. In general, Hothead and the other adaptive rockets have the much bigger base damage gain per rocket by any comparison (1.5x afaik). A fairer comparison would be with Cold Comfort, which if you are lucky can roll Envious Assassin; by playing to Cold's origin trait, you can rejigger that RL to fire four rockets in a row without even needing bipod on it -- though one would be better off farming for a damage perk in that column for even better DPS.
Also factor in accessibility: Crux Termination IV has the edge in being a world drop weapon with only six perks per column, whereas Cold Comfort requires farming "Ghost of the Deep" dungeon (i.e. buy the annual pass or a dungeon key, sheesh), which is now in rotation.
I also had one roll with Permeability, which useful to take advantage of the current seasonal artifact perks for easier building around legendary RL/GLs.
Have not used in PvP, but why would I, even though this has pvp perks?
My current roll: {Hard Launch, Alloy Casing, CC, Bipod}, velocity MW.
TLDR, nice combo for an easier overall boss DPS.
Also note:
This is my first review after perusing this website as a reader for so long. Editing comments is a pain. lol.