Damage: Storm
Emergency status : Hail

Storm driver's shock is good for crowded groups of monsters and with groups of friends.
- Works great with vortex, since it pulls everything together
- For Vanaduke, it may stop him from moving mid-tackle. This is often unpredictable though.

Hail driver's freeze status is great if you're a swordsman. I've been doing Troika runs recently (Sudaruska, Triglav, Hail Driver, and Electron Vortex) and it's nice for these situations:
- I don't have VH gun damage using that loadout, so freezing turrets gets me a second, free charge attack.
- If I need a free set of hits on a trojan or slag guard, I can freeze them and either: gamble for a re-freeze with another charge or use another charge attack.
- Doing a no-shiver run, if everyone else is dead, I can freeze Vanaduke while I run to revive a teammate.
- In the mask phase, if you freeze the mask before the timer runs out, it will stay in place until the freeze status naturally breaks off.

Of course, keep in mind that it's no replacement for shivermist, in terms of freezing ability. Freeze is a very 'solo' kind of status outside of shivermist: it buys you time to do other things and deal with other monsters, but as soon as teammates come into play (ex: hordes of poorly-timed blitz bullets), you can't count on it.

I love storm driver and all, but Hail has far more utility :v

Hail Driver is not spammable. If you fire regular shots everywhere, then even on those rare occasions when a freeze happens, your next shot or ricochet will just break the freeze. So, in order to get any advantage out of Hail Driver, you have to play with discipline (really just charging).

In contrast, Storm Driver has nice regular attacks that sometimes shock, disrupting the monsters and doing some extra damage. I greatly prefer Storm Driver. I also like Nova Driver a lot.

hail if solo, storm if not

DPS you'd get from the raw damage you'd get from Nova driver - basically every Nova driver shot does more than the combined damage from a status alchemer's status bite + original shot damage.

Wanna put some numbers to that claim? From every test I've done I find the exact opposite. The 15~20% damage bonus is gets only counts for about 20~40 damage, which can often be outdone by shock alone (esp if clustered) and fire certainly. I've not found any situation where I'd rather lose statuses that help interrupt, group afflict and otherwise make my life easier for some extra raw damage; damage which can often be outdone by said statuses.

Not to mention that due to a hits/kill counter due to enemies hp, most enemies can be killed in nearly, if not the same number of shots of Nova/Storm even if no statuses are inflicted at all.

I can understand the decision for things like Blitz vs Plague where the difference is some 100% higher for the sake of a status that deals no direct damage, and when the base damage is so high to begin with (potential 4k damage) but when shots are only hitting 200 damage and the percentage increase is so low, it counts for very little.

Max damage gunner at D26 vs undead:
Storm: 212 + 29 (241) if shocked
Nova: 253, no status

I'm not much of a charge user, but if I remember d25 correctly, I might have done about 50-60 more damage with charge on the main hit.
In total, that's overall potential gain of over 500 raw damage (charge is worth 13 potential hits) or much less, if you factor in shock.

In a 2 person party, there was no difference in # of regular shots to kill zombies (7 shots?).

So...
- My original claim of the Nova shot doing more damage than a bite+raw damage is true, but I overestimated the difference. They are actually kinda comparable (10-40 damage difference).
- You still would do higher DPS with Nova than you would with Storm, due to just being able to attack faster than the status bite, but most normal monsters don't have enough HP for that to matter. It may be more noticeable in a 4-person party though.

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Anyway, my main gripe with storm driver in FSC is that it slows monsters down. In general, if I'm trying to get ricochets, I need my monsters to be moving towards me, not stopping sporadically. I've also found that trying to aim at shocked vana/trojans is kind of terrible when they use their tackle moves. The shock is pretty nice if you do get them together.

Final conclusion:
- Storm-only is pretty much equal to Nova-only if you're in a party with 1-2 people.
- Storm+Nova is better than Storm-only and Nova-only.

I think Storm is the best looking Driver.