Honestly if you're playing Amara and you're not leaning into elemental damage you're kinda missing the whole point of the character tbh, like she's literally the Siren whose entire identity revolves around chaining elemental status effects and melting everything on screen before they even get a chance to shoot back, and ngl after testing basically every build variation over the past few months I can confidently say the elemental Phasegrasp build is her absolute peak on Mayhem 10/11, nothing else comes close for both mobbing and bossing simultaneously, I mean sure there's the melee build and the phasecast build but those are way more niche and require way more specific gear to function at the same level, so anyway this guide covers the complete setup from action skill all the way down to the artifact and by the end of it you should be able to solo literally any content in the game without breaking a sweat
Core Build: Phasegrasp + Ties That Bind
The entire build revolves around Phasegrasp as your action skill augmented with Ties That Bind, which links all grabbed enemies together so that any damage dealt to one target gets shared across the entire linked group, and I mean the math on this is honestly ridiculous because if you grasp one enemy and link it to 5 others then every point of damage you do gets multiplied by however many links are active, and when you combine that with elemental damage over time effects the screen just fills with numbers and everything dies in like 2 seconds flat
Skill Tree: Fist of the Elements Breakdown
Your primary tree is Fist of the Elements and you're going deep enough to grab every major damage node along the way, the three skills that make this entire build work at its core are Anima Tempest and Sustainment and honestly without these three you're just an Amara with some fancy colored bullets and not much else
Anima (5/5)
Increases elemental effect damage and duration, and tbh this is the foundation that makes all your DoTs actually hurt, without it your status effects tickle enemies instead of melting them
Tempest (5/5)
Boosts all elemental damage by a flat percentage and I mean this is just a straight multiplier to everything you do, shock fire and corrosive all get the same bonus so it works with every weapon in your loadout
Sustainment (5/5)
Lifesteal based on elemental damage dealt, and ngl this is what keeps you alive through literally everything, as long as you're dealing elemental damage which you always are you're constantly healing
Deep Well (5/5)
Magazine size for elemental guns, sounds boring I know but when you're using weapons like the Flipper that chew through ammo this becomes a huge DPS increase just from less time reloading
You also want to grab Indiscriminate from the green tree because its bullets ricochet off Phasegrasped targets and each ricochet carries the original elemental damage type which basically doubles your effective DPS against linked groups, and then from the blue tree you take Wildfire so your status effects spread to nearby enemies creating this beautiful chain reaction where one status proc cascades into an entire room going up in flames or whatever element you're using, it's pretty satisfying honestly
Weapon Loadout: Best Elemental Guns
- Plasma Coil (Shock) — The undisputed best SMG in the game and honestly it's not even close, continuous plasma beam that chains between enemies and the damage ramps up the longer you hold it on target, perfect for stripping shields and it procs Sustainment constantly so you're basically unkillable while firing it, farms from Arms Race so it's annoying to get but absolutely mandatory for this build
- Flipper (Fire/Corrosive) — 9 projectiles per shot at the cost of 1 ammo and each one can apply elemental status effects independently, so you're stacking DoTs faster than anything else in the game, run one in fire for flesh enemies and one in corrosive for armored targets and you cover literally every enemy type in the game
- Hellwalker (Fire) — Fixed parts double-barrel shotgun that plays a guitar riff every shot and one-taps most non-boss enemies even on Mayhem 10, the fire damage synergizes perfectly with Anima and Tempest and because every Hellwalker is identical you only need to farm it once which is a massive quality of life thing frankly
- Complex Root (Corrosive) — This sniper fires a projectile that spawns smaller homing projectiles on impact and those also deal elemental damage, so each shot triggers like 6 different damage instances and with Indiscriminate active those all ricochet and multiply, it's honestly broken against armored bosses and the damage is so high that people thought it was a bug for the first few weeks after launch
Class Mod & Artifact
Phasezerker Class Mod
This is the only class mod you should be using for this build and tbh I've tested Spiritual Driver and Dragon and a few others but nothing comes close to Phasezerker's +125% action skill damage bonus, it also boosts Anima and Tempest by up to +5 each which pushes your elemental damage into genuinely absurd territory, the unique effect extends action skill duration with every gun kill wich means Phasegrasp can last through an entire encounter if you keep killing and that means permanent Ties That Bind uptime
Elemental Projector Victory Rush
For the artifact slot you want an Elemental Projector prefix on a Victory Rush base, the Elemental Projector gives you +183% elemental damage while you're suffering from the matching status effect and I mean you just walk into your own puddle or let an enemy hit you once and suddenly your damage triples, and Victory Rush gives you +18% movement speed and damage after every badass kill wich makes farming and boss runs way faster, if you can find one with action skill cooldown rate on the bonus stats even better because it lets you chain Phasegrasp with basically zero downtime
Mayhem 10/11 Performance
This build is S-tier on Mayhem 10/11 across literally all content, and I'm not exaggerating when I say it can solo the Guardian Takedown and the Maliwan Takedown with zero issues, the combination of Ties That Bind linking entire rooms together plus Tempest and Anima scaling your DoTs plus Sustainment keeping you alive through basically anything means you can stand in the middle of an arena and just hold down the trigger and watch everything die, boss fights are slightly slower than dedicated boss-killer builds like FL4K crit stacking but the trade-off is that you never die and you don't need to aim particularly well just grasp the boss and dump all your elemental damage into the linked adds and the shared damage kills the boss through the link, ngl the only thing that's ever killed me with this build is my own stupidity like standing in a barrel or walking off a cliff or whatever
For mobbing specifically this is probably the best build in the entire game period, Phasegrasp one enemy Ties That Bind links everything nearby you fire a single Plasma Coil burst and the entire room evaporates, it's honestly almost boring how efficient it is but like in the best possible way you know what I mean, and for farming bosses you swap to the Complex Root or the Backburner depending on the boss's hitbox and the elemental matching and just melt them in seconds