No. Dvs is not effective on vana mask. Its safer than blitz beacause of msd but Gunner Update will change it.

DVS is pretty neat for the mask, although I believe the best weapon for the job is Volcanic Pepperbox and the second to best is Blitz Needle. Still, I think its reasonable to make a DVS instead of WHB with that cutter. If you intend to keep it, that is. Bopp has a neat comparison in his guide.

Anyway, do you know of flash charging? It's a sadistic thing you can do by releasing an attack, preferably a charge (but things like the second swing of a heavy sword works too), when either stun or the boosts from Maskeraith's Deadly Cloak or Drakon's Frenzied Firestorm wear off. When you unleash the charge, you unleash two charges and no one knows why but it's really powerful for say, a Blitz Needle charge vs Vana's mask.

No, flash charges seem to work with everything. Or at least the last hits of combos and charges. I pulled off a double combo finisher on a lumber after it had stunned me this morning. 400 damage in T2 with one Acheron hit is pretty glorious.

I believe it was Sandwich Potato who shared an anecdote with me not so long ago. He said he had seen someone fight someone else in Downtown in Lockdown. One of them got stunned and the other one would've beaten him easily, had he not gotten a duplicated second hit with a DA, leading to the demise of the one who was not stunned.

You've got that wrong!

Blitz Needle is so much stronger than Volcanic Pepper that it's still better against the mask.

Of course, in the purely hypothetical event that there's a patch coming up buffing Pepper's damage, that would change.

I agree with Zeddy, possessing both pepperbox and blitz I can say blitz is superior to pepperbox in every way short of jellies and constructs, even when vanaduke's mask is weak to normal.

About Flash Charges, depending on timing, I realise I can either double damage with the initial swing of brandish (and cause no explosions), or I can choose to release it so my explosions deal double damage instead.

Hammer's dash seems to deal decent DPS to the mask too, now that I think about it. Though you should use AT for it lest you dash off into the fire orbs or something.

Blitz still remains the highest DPS against the mask, and from experience in a party of two the blitz charge will outdamage the health boost from a 2person party, and is actually more effective than soloing the mask in a 1 person party with a single blitz charge.

But I digress! When I get bored in FSC and start bringing all sorts of things the charge of DVS is not so bad on the mask, especially considering its weakness to normal damage. The poison also helps any party members with blitz charges. I never tried it, but you could attempt to flash charge with its charge attack, if you are able to charge it fast enough (DVS has a relatively fast charge in comparison to other weapons), though I figures using a combo might make more use out of the damage and speed bonus.

It's relative. You could say it's neutral to everything and weak to normal or resistant to everything but normal but in the end, it's the same because normal damage will be more effective against it than equivalent specialised damage will be.

I use DVS all the time. It works well.

However, I use Callahan instead against Vana when he's not a mask.