The Split Flights Mod

On 27th March 2020, Baro Ki’Teer appeared with a brand new mod that cost 300 Ducats. This mod had been seen before, accidentally leaked via Transmuting. But it remained without a proper release for a very long time until people could get it normally. The mod in question is Split Flights, a mod specifically for Bows.

Now, we get mods for specific weapon types all the time, but why is am I writing an article about this one?

Well, I feel like it’s fundamentally flawed.

Split Flights is simple at first. Whenever you hit an enemy, you get +100% Multishot but -180% Accuracy for 2 seconds. This stacks up to 4 times. This means you get a +400% Multishot and a -720% accuracy debuff if you land 4 hits. Each hit will reapply the buff, so if you keep on hitting things, you can keep that 400% multishot going.

But Split Flights can only be applied to certain bows. It doesn’t apply to Crossbows, nor does it apply to explosive Bows like the Lenz and Kuva Bramma. You can’t equip it on Ivara’s Artemis Bow either.

So you’re left with the following bows that can use the mod: Paris (and Paris MK1/Prime), the Cernos family, the Daikyu and the Dread. A total of 9 weapons. Nearly half of which are Cernos.

“The Kuva Bramma would be OP with it though!”

Well yes, it really would be. The Kuva Bramma is an absolutely insane weapon. In fact, it’s probably still too strong even with the 90% damage fall off nerf that it got. The Bramma is a room-clearer of the highest degree. It even beats out the Lenz in efficiency, since the Lenz has a delay to its explosions.

That’s not the problem though. The problem is that there’s no real reason crossbows shouldn’t be able to use the mod. And the Split Flights buff is hard to use on weapons that are supposed to be accurate. Which means that the Paris family, the Dread, Daikyu and the normal and Rakta Cernos don’t really… benefit from this.

Only Cernos Prime, with its innate multishot, and the Mutalist Cernos with its toxic clouds do, because they can much more easily keep the buff going. Split Flights procs on any hit, including the gas clouds of the Mutalist Cernos. Sure, you could put Thunderbolt on your bows, but that takes up a mod slot and is only 30% of the time. That’s bad on slow-firing weapons like bows.

Oh and you can’t use it with Split Chamber either.

Split Chamber and Split Flights count as the same mod. So the same way you can’t equip Intensify and Umbral Intensify, you can’t equip both Split mods.

But considering the weapons that you can equip this mod on, I don’t see why not! None of these bows are used much outside of mastery fodder. The ONLY weapon that Split Flights works really well on is the Mutalist Cernos, and that was always a niche weapon anyway. But even with Split Flights, the Mutalist Cernos falls far behind the Kuva Bramma and Lenz, as well as most primary weapons in general.

So why NOT let these bows use the extra multishot?

While I agree that explosive bows shouldn’t have Split Flights, the mod alone, with all its drawbacks, isn’t really enough to bring bows up to standard alongside all other guns in the game. The Mutalist Cernos will claw out a small niche for itself, but most bows will still just sit in your inventory, not even used in Bow Only sorties…