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Warframeis known for having a strange arsenal of weapons for Tenno to choose from. Standard assault rifles and pistols are available to use, but there are just as many beam cannons, throwing stars, and mutated bio-weapons up for grabs. If you’re willing to experiemnt, this game rewards you heavily with some truly novel items that can scale into the endgame.
Few weapons showcase this better than the Catabolyst, an Infested sidearm that can turn its magazine into an explosive grenade. Today, we’ll be looking at how to get the Catabolyst and its Coda variant, explain its unique reload gimmick, and cover some builds that push this weapon to its limits.
How To Obtain The Catabolyst
The standard Catabolyst iscrafted through the Bio Lab in your clan’s dojo. If you aren’t part of a clan, you’ll need to join one or purchase the weapon with Platinum through the in-game market to obtain this weapon. The Bio Lab blueprint requires you to obtain some fairly rare materials to craft the Catabolyst,notably Scintillant.
If that upfront cost is too great,you’re able to always wait to get the Coda Catabolyst from a Technocyte CodaTechnocyte Codalater in your playthrough. You can start hunting these Infested Liches upon completing “The Hex” story quest. Defeat the Lich, then speak with Eleanor in Hollvania to purchase the weapon from her Coda weapon stock. If it’s not present, wait a few days for her options to refresh.
53
56
1,997
658 (x3)
1
12
11%
2.9x
43%
50%
31
37
1.7s
MR 11
MR 17
The Catabolyst is a secondary pistol that fires a toxic beam of energy. It has a fairly high fire rate with excellent status chance, making this a solid choice for status priming or inflicting status-based damage through Heat or Blast. Critical stats on this weapon are subpar, but you can make this weapon’s critical stats much higher through its Critical Mutation Nightwave augment.
What makes the Catabolyst truly shine is its reload gimmick.Reloading this weapon will throw an explosive projectile that detonates on contact, inflicting heavy Corrosive damage to targets caught in the blast radius.If you reload from empty, this explosion deals ten times as much damage and has vastly higher critical stats. The Coda variant releases three grenades in a fan instead of just one, trading raw damage for wider area coverage.
Catabolyst Builds
You can either opt to build the Catabolyst as a traditional sidearm or lean into its grenade gimmick. We’ll be showing builds that cover both specialties, although we generally recommend you stick with the former build for most content. Unless you synergize your entire loadout around the grenade mechanic, the standard beam mode will serve you better in most situations.
Variant
Coda Catabolyst
This build is focused on the primary fire of the Catabolyst, not the grenade effect. We’ll useGalvanized ShotwithCascadia Flareto greatly increase our base damage with this weapon. Galvanized Shot will ramp up through three damage types: Corrosive, Viral, and Heat. We mod for Viral and Heat on this weapon, usingPrimed Heated Chargefor Heat specifically to bias its proc chance.
Multishot is up next.Galvanized DiffusionwithLethal Torrentgives you more than enough multishot for the primary fire to seriously ramp up its damage. Your only damage scaling left comes from critical hits or status scaling. Either strategy will work here, but we’ve opted for critical hits.Galvanized CrosshairsandPrimed Target Crackershould give you a solid critical chance with a high multiplier. Pair this weapon withArcane Avenger, and you have a great workhorse for most content.
If you want to become a grenadier, this is the build for you. Direct damage scalars don’t work on the grenade, which makes effects like Galvanized Shot ineffective here. What you can do is runSynth Charge, granting you a three times damage multiplier on your final shot. For some reason, this affects the grenades you throw on an empty magazine, substantially increasing your damage.
Auto-Loading Tech
If you throw your grenade and immediately use your melee weapon, Synth Charge will auto-load a round into the Catabolyst’s magazine. Fire your secondary to reset your magazine, then reload again to throw another fan of grenades. you may repeat this as many times as you want.
Critical stats are also quite good on the grenade, so we’ll be usingCritical MutationandPrimed Target Crackerto greatly boost our critical stats. If you don’t own Critical Mutation, you’re able to run Primed Pistol Gambit instead. The rest of the build is the same as before, scaling multishot and elemental damage to make your explosions hit as hard as possible. Try to shotgun the Coda variant’s grenades onto the same target to maximize your damage.
