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The Thunder Cage is arguably the best primary weapon for speedrunning and casual farming inThe First Descendant.Kills from this SMG unleash lightning blasts that deal moderate damage, allowing you to clear packs of enemies with a single kill. Paired with the gun’s fast RPM, the Thunder Cage is a devastating option for clearing dungeons and easier Void Intercept boss fights.
Most of this weapon’s power comes from modules, as with most weapons in The First Descendant. Critical modules and base damage scaling skyrocket the Thunder Cage’s DPS and viability in tough endgame activities. Let’s go over how to get your hands on the Thunder Cage and showcase some of the strongest builds you can use on this weapon.
How To Craft The Thunder Cage
Unlike most Ultimate weapons,you are guaranteed to acquire the Thunder Cage during the campaign.All four components drop from the Sterile Lands region. Your first clear of these missions has a 100% chance of dropping a Thunder Cage component, ensuring you can craft this weapon early in your playthrough.
You also receive a free Thunder Cage in one of Albion’s tutorial quests. You only need three spare Thunder Cages to maximize its Ultimate perk.
To maximize the gun’s perk, you’ll need tofarm [Normal] Sterile Land missionswith Thunder Cage components.Each component has a 20% drop chance:
Intrinsics
Critical Chance, Critical Damage, Weak Point Damage, Preference
The Thunder Cage comes pre-installed with two polarities (M and C), giving you quite a bit of mod flexibility when starting out.We have an Energy Activator installed on this buildand highly recommend doing so. If you don’t have one, progress through the campaignor farm Amorphous Materialsthat contain Energy Activator blueprints.
As for the build, it’s a simple damage and critical chance configuration. We useRifle ReinforcementwithAction and Reactionto drastically buff Thunder Cage’s base damage. This offsets the damage penalty from Edging Shot, the strongest critical chance mod for this weapon. Pair that withBetter Insightfor a solid critical hit rate of 36%. We then useBetter Concentrationto buff our critical damage.
Critical mods aremultiplicativewith your base stats, not additive.
Thunder Cage has a 20% base critical chance. With 82% more critical chance via mods, our final critical chance is 36%,not102%.
The open C slot is compatible withChill Enhancement,a straight multiplier for all outgoing damage. Some enemies are more cold-resistant than others, but this is the most cost-efficient DPS mod we can equip for our remaining module capacity. This build should get you through the campaignand early endgame activities.Be sure to level your modules; that’s where most of your damage comes from.
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The fundamentals of this build remain the same as our starting configuration, but we have enough module capacity this time to squeeze in every mod.Rifling Reinforcementpaired withAction and Reactiondrastically increases your base damage, which we can then scale through critical and elemental mods.
Most of our mods scale critical hit chance and damage.Better InsightandEdging Shotbring up your critical chance to 36%. We can then buff our critical hit damage to a whopping 6x multiplier withBetter ConcentrationandConcentration Priority.We can also throw inFire Rate UPfor a massive boost to our gun’s fire rate, further improving our burst DPS.
We find that Thunder Cage’s base magazine capacity is a little low, so we recommend usingExpand Weapon Chargein your C polarity. When paired with a mag size implicit, you can have a 40-round magazine. If you want even more damage, you can always polarize another symbol in this slot and equip Mental Focus or Sweeping Squad instead.
For your last two slots, we recommendWeak Point Sightto scale the gun’s precision damage. This will greatly buff Thunder Cage’s damage against boss units like Colossi. The final slot shouldalwaysbe some type ofelemental damage module—the blue ones that add elemental damage,notthe purple ones that scale elemental damage.
If you want more damage, install every symbol type in the elemental module slot. This lets you run max-rank elemental damage mods with no opportunity cost.
