General Use Steel Path and Endurance viable Hybrid sunder + weapon platform [Gauss] build for utilising all base abilities with a focus on weapon use. Mach Rush provides fast map traversal, battery charge and light CC + AOE damage. Kinetic Plating gives complete knockdown/stagger immunity, near complete status immunity and up to 100% damage reduction to impact, puncture, slash, cold, heat and blast damage at max battery, as well as energy generation on taking damage. Thermal Sunder is an amazing ability that allows you to hard crowd control enemies with freeze (at full redline) or soft CC with cold procs/heat procs, do scaling nuking with heat sunder spam or at full redline perform full armor strip in AOE by combining one heat and one cold sunder into blast (any order). Redline gives multiple buffs to fire rate, melee speed, reload speed and holster speed in addition to several bonus synergies for the other abilities such as half cost of mach rush, melee damage bonus and stagger bonus to kinetic plating.

Variant Builds
Pure Thermal Sunder spam: https://overframe.gg/build/327521/
Pure Weapon spam (energized munitions): https://overframe.gg/build/327549/gauss/gauss-energized-munitions/
Max speed meme (molt) or high damage weapon platform (roar): https://overframe.gg/build/327555/gauss/gauss-molt-speed-meme/

VEILBREAKER UPDATE
Archon Vitality now doubles heat procs whch effectively doubles the output/scaling of Thermal Sunder (since the fused blast damage increases with number heat procs). For quick missions, you can add 2 crimson strength shards and replace augur secrets with archon vitality.

For long missions/endurance, you could drop both Umbral Intensify and Augur Secrets for Rank 0 Archon Vitality and streamline/[Rolling Guard], then run Molt Augmented over Molt Efficiency to return back to 100% strength after 250 kills.

PLAYSTYLE

  1. Activate 2 and 4 as soon as possible and keep refreshed at all times. You can cancel and reactivate when they are close to expiring in a safe location rather than letting them run out in the middle of enemies.
  2. Build up battery charge as quickly as possible by using 1 and 3 (tap 3 default for cold sunder) to generate +10% battery per cast until you hit 100% with Redline active. This will give you 100% damage reduction to IPS,cold,heat,blast on Kinetic Plating as well as allow for 100% armor strip on Thermal Sunder. Note, the time it takes to max out Redline is limited to 1/3 of total Redline duration i.e. takes approximately 29s out of 87s total duration to hit max.
  3. Absorb damage to generate energy while Kinetic Plating is active
  4. Spam 1 and run into enemies into walls to knock enemies around for light CC and to generate battery.
  5. When BELOW max battery: Tap 3 (default cold) to create zones of cold that can crowd control enemies (tap once for cold proc to slow, tap twice for full freeze or full freeze with one tap at 100% redline) and generate battery.
  6. When ABOVE max battery: Hold 3 to create heat procs, followed by tapping 3 to combine heat + cold to full strip enemies, suck them towards you and convert the heat procs into blast to nuke the full-stripped enemies. Note, stacking heat procs from another source prior to using cold sunder creates larger and larger blast damage in the order of 100k - 1 million or even damage cap if the enemy doesnt die first. For example, you could use a heat DPS beam like [Kuva Nukor], [Phage], [Phantasma] to stack 500 heat procs then 'detonate' it with a cold sunder.

Furthermore, 'heat inherit' is a mechanic where using a heat primer to apply an initial heat proc followed up by heat sunders allows thermal sunder's heat procs to inherit the +heat and +faction mods from the primer. For example you could use an AOE heat primer like [Epitaph], shoot ONCE, then spam a few heat sunders before detonating with cold sunder. This will boost the damage of both the heat procs and blast damage by approximately double.

BUILD SPECIFICS

Duration
Duration is the most important stat since it determines how long Kinetic Plating and Redline stay active as well as all redline buffs. Duration also affects the drain of Mach [Rush] but is not particularly important for Thermal Sunder. Having [Narrow Minded] + [Primed Continuity] + Molt Efficiency gives 290% duration which gives 87s on both Kinetic Plating and Redline.

Efficiency
We can keep efficiency neutral at 100% or add [Streamline] to get 130%, because you only need to recast 2 and 4 once every 1.5 minutes roughly and Mach [Rush] is extremely cheap to cast. Thermal Sunder spam is the only ability that has significant impact to energy economy, but [Gauss] also has innate energy regeneration from absorbing damage via kinetic plating. This combined with Arcane Energize means it is very easy to go back to max energy quickly. Emergence Dissipate is always a backup option.

Range
High range is used mainly to boost Thermal Sunders range so you can have high area crowd control as well as high area AOE armor strip + nuke. High range also slightly benefits Mach [Rush] impact radius which can deal minor damage but also cause knockback and light CC. [Overextended] + [Stretch] + [Augur Reach] are used to offset [Narrow Minded] to give a final range of 199%, giving a 24m initial thermal sunder radius, shrinking to 12m.

Strength
We need to keep strength at or above 100% so Kinetic Plating maintains 100% damage reduction at max redline. Strength otherwise is not extremely important as it only provides minor boosts to the damage of mach [Rush], Thermal Sunder and redline projectiles. To keep Strength above 100%, you must run a combination of Umbral Intensify + Augur Secets (rank 3 or higher) to offset Overextended.

Aura

Exilius

Arcanes

Flexible Options
[Augur Reach] or [Stretch] are flexible for [Augur Message], [Rolling Guard] or [Streamline].

Archon Shards2 cast speed shards2 strength shards allow you to drop augur secrets to still hit 100% str. This let's you run Archon Vitality or Rolling guard.

1 duration shard

HELMINTH

Roar - general weapon damage and ability damage increase (double dips DoT effects like heat) and boosts the damage of thermal sunder.
Energized Munitions - allows weapon spam

FOCUS

Vazarin is best for general use in steel path content. This is due to the new [Guardian] Break which gives 150% shield recharge rate and 90% reduction in shield regeneration delay when [Guardian] Shell Breaks. This stacks with [Gauss]'s passive (120% recharge rate and 80% reduction in [Regen] delay), so at max redline and [Guardian] break active, you can end up with 270% recharge rate with 98% reduction in recharge delay i.e. dropping a 4s delay to 0.08s, which is shorter than the 0.33s of i-frames you gain from partial shield breaks. This effectively means you can regenerate shields faster than shield gating i-frames wear out even without regenerating to full, making you immortal to all damage except toxin.

ARSENAL

Melee attacks build battery for redline so Gauss synergizes well with a good melee weapon.Certain corpus themed melee weapons:

Arca Titron: https://overframe.gg/build/383171/arca-titron/mjolnir-x12-heavy-electric-slam/


Tenet Agendus: https://overframe.gg/build/251031/tenet-agendus/tenet-agendus-pure-electric-hybrid-combo-x12-heavy-grouped-nuking/
Rumblejack: https://overframe.gg/build/280930/rumblejack/rumbling-thunder-rumblejack-armor-stip-nuke-for-use-with-aama-and-grouping/
Stropha: https://overframe.gg/build/249621/stropha/hybrid-x12-combo-heavy-red-crit-stropha/

Use a heat based status beam weapon such as [Kuva Nukor], [Gaze], [Phage], [Phantasma] to quickly stack heat procs which you can then explode with cold thermal sunder.

A heat inherit primer can also be used to directly increase the damage of heat sunder's heat ticks and ultimately the blast proc: https://overframe.gg/build/376162/epitaph/heat-inherit-primer-epitaph/