AI Stability Engine GK2 (post-season 3) by MusNothus

First of all, here are the main things that changed with the GK2 in Season 3 (which were basically all buffs): • Base weapon damage was increased from 15 to 16. • Base weakpoint damage was reduced from 10% to 0%. • Base magazine size was increased from 25 to 30. • The base rate of fire was increased by 1 and the tier 1 rate of fire upgrade was reduced by 1. • A reload speed upgrade was added to tier 1. • The tier 2 ammo upgrade was increased from 100 to 120. • The tier 2 damage upgrade was increased from 2 to 3, and the tier 3 damage upgrade was removed, which basically means the +1 damage from the tier 3 mod was added to the tier 2 mod. • The tier 4 rate of fire upgrade was moved to tier 5. • The base weakpoint stun chance was increased from 10% to 15%, and the tier 5 stun bonus was increased from 30% to 35%, so now your max possible stun chance is increased from 40% to 50%. • Battle frenzy and battle cool were combined.

And here’s how AI Stability Engine changed with Season 3: • The damage penalty was reduced from 2 to 1, which means that you’ll still meet the 15 damage breakpoint for hazard 5 swarmers even without any weapon upgrades. • The weakpoint damage bonus was increased from 40% to 50%, and since the base weapons had its weakpoint damage reduced from 10% to 0%, this essentially means that your weakpoint damage bonus will be the same as before with AI Stability Engine but 10% worse for every other overclock.

The main features of AI Stability Engine, namely 0% recoil and instant spread recovery, have not changed. This means that Floating Barrel in tier 3 is completely redundant because we already have zero recoil. The improved spread recovery from Battle Frenzy in tier 5 is also redundant because we already have instant spread recovery, so the only bonus of Battle Frenzy is the 50% movement speed bonus for 2.5 seconds after killing an enemy (which is still a pretty nice quality of life bonus).

With all of this in mind, here’s what I would take in each tier:

In tier 1, I would take the rate of fire bonus, even though it’s only +1, because the reduced rate of fire with AI Stability Engine is pretty noticeable without taking the rate of fire mods. Gyro Stabilization gives you 0% base spread, but with AI Stability Engine's 0% recoil and instant spread recovery, the difference in accuracy with or without Gyro Stabilization is barely noticeable at all, so I wouldn't take it. As for Quickfire Ejector, the GK2’s reload speed is already pretty fast and now we have a larger magazine size and therefore won’t be reloading as often as before, so I don’t think the half second reload speed bonus is that necessary. Furthermore, as scout, it's very easy to create space between you and the bugs with your grappling hook, so you can just grapple to safety and reload when you're out of bugs' range, making reload speed even less of an issue.

In tier 2, I would take the +3 damage boost. That is a huge bonus, and personally I find that I rarely run out of ammo with the GK2. That might be in part because I use Cryo Minelets on the Zhukovs for my secondary and load them out to have as much ammo as possible, but still, +3 damage is just so big that it’s hard to pass up. If you do find yourself running out of ammo, then taking this ammo boost is certainly reasonable since it’s a lot of extra ammo and you’ll still be reaching the 15 damage breakpoint for hazard 5 swarmers even without this damage bonus. With increased ammo, your theoretical total damage is 7800 compared to 7200 with the increased damage, but with the increased damage your DPS is 115 compared to 96 with increased ammo. But yeah, if you do take the damage boost instead of the ammo, I would definitely try to pair this with a secondary that has plenty of ammo (e.g., not the crossbow).

In tier 3, taking the +10 magazine size is the only thing that makes any sense because we already have zero recoil. Previously I took +1 damage in this tier, but that mod got added to the tier 2 mod so now we basically get to have both the extra damage and the extra magazine size instead of having to choose between them.

In tier 4, I have recently converted to taking armor breaking thanks to a recommendation from Reddit user u/Snoo61755, and I would highly recommend it over the weakpoint bonus. My thought process for previously taking the 20% weakpoint bonus was that I was trying to really prioritize hitting weakpoints with the improved aim from AISE and thus basically min-maxed with that goal. With AI Stability Engine, we are already getting a 50% weakpoint damage bonus, though, and adding 20% on top of that honestly isn't that noticeable of a change. The armor breaking mod adds 500% armor breaking, on the other hand, and that is an insanely noticeable change. With that mod, you can absolutely tear through guards when they block with their front legs, brundles, Q'ronar, etc., whereas without that mod the GK2 can't do much to combat armored enemies at all. So now I'm definitely a convert because I think this makes the gun way more well-rounded without really sacrificing much weakpoint damage at all (you can still take out praetorians quite quickly by unloading bullets into their weakpoint). In season 2, I took the +1 rate of fire in this tier, but that’s been moved to tier 5 now so I don’t have to decide between the two.

Tier 5 seems like a tough choice between rate of fire and stun, but after testing it out, I would say that the rate of fire increase feels way better. Again, the reduced rate of fire with AI stability engine is pretty noticeable without it and taking this increased rate of fire improves your DPS from 95 to 115. The +35% weakpoint stun chance seems like it's pretty big, too, especially since it means you’ll have a 50% weakpoint stun chance with it and that’ll probably proc very frequently since we’ll be prioritizing weakpoint hits, but there are a few reasons why it's not actually that great. With the damage increases from Season 3, we’ll be killing smaller bugs so fast with weakpoint hits now that the stun would really only matter on larger enemies anyway, whereas rate of fire helps with every enemy. When I tried out the stun bonus in game, I found that it was brief enough (1.5 seconds) that it didn’t even help that much with praetorians (which have 80% stun duration so only stun for 1.2 seconds and then also become immune to stun for 2 seconds after that as LazyMaybe points out). With praetorians, I found that I usually managed to stun them one time while shooting at their weakpoint even without the stun mod, and having the stun mod could only proc once before I killed them because of this stun cooldown. Counterintuitively, I also found that stunning a praetorian was often detrimental, because with AI Stability Engine you can wait for a praetorian to start spraying acid, move behind it, and then kill it with weakpoint hits before it finishes spraying, but if you stun it then it stops spraying and turns around after the stun wears off, which means they actually don't stand still as long as they would if they didn't get stunned. The stun was kind of useful for preventing trijaws from shooting, but on mactera spawn we can already kill them in 3 weakpoint shots so it didn’t matter much for them either. And the reduced rate of fire was definitely bothersome, so this reinforced my decision to go with rate of fire in this tier. Battle Frenzy is a nice quality of life bonus that I used to take before Season 3 and still might take over stun, but I wouldn’t take it over rate of fire. Keep in mind that the spread recovery bonus from Battle Frenzy doesn't matter since we're using AI Stability Engine, so all that Battle Frenzy really gives you is the movement speed bonus, which does feel nice, but definitely isn't worth sacrificing the rate of fire.

Comparing all this with the AI Stability Engine GK2 loadout I was using in Season 2, here are the changes: • Damage increased from 16 to 18 • DPS increased from 87.38 to 115.30 • Magazine size increased from 25 to 40 • Weakpoint stun chance increased from 10% to 15% • Weakpoint damage bonus increased from 50% to 70% • The only thing this loadout loses compared to Season 2 is the movement speed bonus from Battle Frenzy

So as you can see, the GK2 with AI Stability Engine got way better with Season 3. For example, you can now kill a basic grunt with two shots to the mouth on hazard 5, which took three shots in Season 2. As another example, we're also now getting roughly the same DPS as the M1000 Hipster loadout I use (23111), but with an automatic weapon instead of a semi-automatic weapon so we don’t have to get carpal tunnel in the process. Slashers go down quite easily with AI Stability Engine, too, but guards are tougher because they can protect their weakpoint with their armored legs and we're not taking armor break. One technique I really like for guards is to power attack them once which doesn't kill them in one hit even with Serrated Endge, but it has a chance to stun them which makes it really easy to hit their weakpoint and finish them off. One other technique to mention is that when a warden appears, you can throw a boomerang to stun it and the bugs around it, and then it's super easy to finish off the warden with AI Stability Engine because its weakpoint will remain stationary instead of bouncing around like it normally does with the warden walking around. Just in general, the boomerange synergizes quite well with AI Stability engine because it makes hitting weakpoints even easier and arguably synergizes as well with AI Stability Engine as with Bullets of Mercy for this reason.

Notably Bullets of Mercy was changed in Season 3, too, and many people consider Bullets of Mercy to be the best GK2 overclock. I used to agree that Bullets of Mercy was probably better on paper than AI Stability Engine, but I still just enjoyed AI Stability Engine more. Now, though, I think AI Stability Engine is probably objectively better than Bullets of Mercy.

Here's why: Bullets of Mercy's damage bonus against status-effected enemies increased from 33% to 50%, but the magazine size penalty was increased from a flat -5 to a 40% reduction, which is a full 16 bullets if you take the tier 3 magazine size mod. This is especially problematic because taking reduced recoil in tier 3 is really helpful with Bullets of Mercy because otherwise the recoil is pretty annoying, but if you take that instead of the magazine size bonus, then you’ll only have 18 bullets per magazine. With Bullets of Mercy I think I’d probably take 21123 or 21222 (LazyMaybe makes a good case against taking the stun mod even with Bullets of Mercy in his video), which gives us 19 damage per shot compared to 18 with AI Stability Engine, 90 DPS compared to 115 DPS with AI Stability Engine (I think because Karl.gg incorporates reload time or something like that, because our damage is higher and rate of fire is the same), no weakpoint bonus compared to 70% with AI Stability Engine (though we will get +500% armor break), a magazine size of 18 compared to 40 with AI Stability Engine, and significantly worse accuracy. And all of these downsides are just to get 50% extra damage against status-effected enemies, but I’d argue that we can probably hit weakspots more often than we can ensure that the enemies we’re shooting have a status effect on them (though admittedly now more status effects proc Bullets of Mercy). My AI Stability Engine loadout gives 70% weakpoint bonus, which is then compounded by the weakpoint multiplier, so this seems much more beneficial to me than a 50% bonus again status-effected enemies. And as before season 3, I personally find it more fun to prioritize being accurate and hitting weakpoints rather than prioritizing causing status effects before using my primary weapon.