Pogris
Why Pogris?
What Pogris brings to the table is briefly described and demonstrated earlier in Creating Builds when going over potential pylon weapons, but the gist is as follows:
Nightwatch napalm is an Ogris augment mod that leaves a damage-over-time effect where the rockets land which can damage pylons. By using this to our advantage, it is possible to destroy pylons as they land, massively speeding up solo pylons and dethroning a long-standing pillar of Profit-Taker speedrunning, the Zenith. To understand why, let's look at the advantages and disadvantages of using Pogris, and what can be done about the disadvantages.
Advantages:
In solos, Pogris is several seconds faster than the fastest solo Zenith time and allows one person using Pogris to do the work of an entire squad using Zenith. It is also significantly more comfortable and forgiving than Zenith.
Disadvantages:
Kuva Ogris cannot deal enough damage to Profit-Taker’s shields with a Pogris build, however, this isn’t a major problem when using the On Call strats mentioned later, as they can cover all of Zenith’s elements without any time loss from having to swap weapons. Swapping weapons loses over half a second, and this is extremely bad in shield phases that ideally take under a second once damage starts being dealt. All in all, this is a disadvantage that is already mitigated.
However, there is another major drawback to Pogris: there is very little build variety for Kuva Ogris and Frame at the high end. This is elaborated upon more in Builds (see below), but TL;DR: Volt needs a very specific riven, multiple red archon shards, no QoL mods and there is only one viable ogris build that can one-tick the pylons. Chroma doesn't suffer frorm these disadantages as much as he can reach the breakpoint to one-tick the pylons much more easily while running QoL mods and having very low stat requirements riven wise.
Builds
Reference builds can be found in the Volt/Chroma sections.
Here’s what you can do on Frame and elsewhere to boost your Pogris damage beyond power strength mods:
- Madurai Void Strike gives +1000% damage and is a good option for consistently oneshotting all pylons in the second pylon phase
- Primary Overcharge gives 189% multishot when paired with Itzal built for energy max and with Preparation/Yellow Archon Shards for energy on spawn in order to reach the energy threshold to activate the arcane.
- Arcane Rise gives a 150% damage mod, with reload on holster effects reliably triggering its 60% proc chance due to the gradual reload.
- Railjack intrinsic “Vengeful Archwing” (Gunnery 8) gives you an additional 25% damage while in archwing. Will not apply to projectiles that hit after leaving archwing
- Red archon shards can give you up to 50% power strength. 75% with Tauforged.
- Sling Strength from the Madurai focus school can give you up to 40% power strength.
- Vigorous Swap gives you a 165% damage mod, massively lowering power strength requirements/allowing you to run some better mods. This triggers when leaving archwing, so it synergizes well with the “Vengeful Archwing” intrinsic.
- Rifle Amp gives you a 27% bonus, offsetting mods like vile acceleration and decreasing power strength requirements.
- Molt Vigor gives you a 45% power strength bonus, however, you have to be careful to cast Eclipse afterward.
During the Fight
When it comes time for pylon phases, recast your abilities as normal, then fly up. As always, attempt to minimize how much time you spend moving, the time you spend moving is time you spend not shooting pylon landing spots.
The higher you are, the easier it is to consistently see where all the pylons are going, so while it is important to not go so high that it takes forever to reach the ground, it’s better to be too high than too low.
Pylon Locations
Pylon landing locations are fairly predictable, and it’s just a matter of knowing where they can land. They only have a few set spots they can land, so there isn’t much guesswork to it.
Here are most of the common pylon spawn locations marked on shrooms and lake spawns:
Once you’ve shot all the pylon landing locations, return to where you took off from to avoid turning Profit-Taker. If you’ve done it right, you’ll have a small amount of time to prepare for the next phase. Make sure you swap to secondary before trying to do shield phases.
Positioning
Tying in with the previous section, Profit-Taker’s movement and attacks are largely based on your position. Some things directly, others indirectly. With proper positioning, Profit-Taker will sit and stare at you without attacking or moving. A proper landing is the first step of good positioning as the first shield phase is when Profit-Taker is most mobile and likely to turn.
Speedrun Strats
Advanced techniques that require special thought toward certain areas of the fight and involve more than your basic level of skill.