Build it. 200 Platinum, Mastery Rank 5, no Lich grind involved. It won’t out-damage a fully built Kuva Nukor at single targets, but the Incarnon Genesis closes most of that gap for a fraction of the investment.
21 weakpoint hits fill the Incarnon Transmutation meter. Alt Fire then transmutes the Atomos into a semi-automatic grenade launcher: less fire rate, slower travel speed, but a big jump in base damage, crit chance, crit multiplier, and status chance.
Atomos is a Grineer secondary, a beam pistol that chains to nearby targets and primes them for status or crit stacking depending on how you mod it. It’s not a Lich or Sister weapon. No Kuva or Tenet variant exists, so there’s no progenitor element to fuss over and no valence fusion step.
Its main competition is Kuva Nukor. That gun holds the top spot among chaining secondaries. Atomos plays the budget alternative: cheaper to get, easier to build, and once the Incarnon Genesis goes in, it stops being just mastery fodder.
How to get the Atomos
Buying and building the base weapon takes one in-game day. No farming required.
- Buy the Atomos blueprint from Market. Cost: 200 Platinum. Requires Mastery Rank 5.
- Build it at the Foundry. Cost: 60,000 Credits, 1,500 Salvage, 1,300 Polymer Bundle, 800 Rubedo, 2 Argon Crystal. Build time: 1 day, or rush with Platinum.
The Incarnon Genesis is the part that actually takes effort. It doesn’t just sit on a shop shelf.
- Unlock the prerequisites: The Duviri Paradox, Angels of the Zariman, and Steel Path.
- Run The Circuit on Steel Path until Atomos comes up in the weapon rotation. It’s grouped with Torid, Dual Toxocyst, Dual Ichor, and Miter, and only shows up on one rotation out of the eight-week cycle, so it’s easy to miss for weeks if you’re not running Circuit that week.
- Install the Incarnon Genesis at Cavalero in the Chrysalith. Cost: 20 Pathos Clamps, 70 Yao Shrubs, 80 Lamentus. Or skip steps 1 and 2 and buy it outright from Cavalero for 120 Platinum, installation included.
Stats
| Class | Secondary |
|---|---|
| Mastery Rank | 5 |
| Trigger | HELD |
| Noise | Alarming |
| Fire Rate | 8 |
| Accuracy | 12.5 |
| Magazine | 70 |
| Reload | 2 s |
| Critical Chance | 15% |
| Critical Multiplier | 1.7x |
| Status Chance | 21% |
| Riven Disposition | (0.95) |
| Damage | 29 total |
|---|---|
| Heat | 29 |
Riven disposition sits at 0.95x. Three of five dots, solidly middling. It’s not a mod worth chasing on its own, but a mediocre crit riven reportedly still holds up here since the modded base crit chance climbs so high after the Hotfix 33.0.3 fix.
Builds
This is the crit build, the current consensus pick since Hotfix 33.0.3 fixed the Paladin Virtue Evolution’s crit multiplier bug. There’s a competing status-stacking build too, some guides call it “Incarnoff.” It’s built around Galvanized Shot, Scorch, Primed Heated Charge, and Cascadia Flare for Heat damage-over-time stacking instead of crit.
Neither is wrong. Pick based on if you’d rather scale crit or scale status.
The Evolution picks below are for the crit build. Evo 3 is the one guides disagree on.
- Evo 1: Incarnon Form. Unlocks automatically, no choice.
- Evo 2: Paladin Virtue or Hoplite Virtue. Take Paladin Virtue. It needs a large energy pool to run, but it reportedly pushes the Incarnon form’s base crit multiplier to roughly 4x since the Hotfix 33.0.3 fix.
- Evo 3: Moonrise Velocity, Mercenary Chamber, or Resonant Restore. Guides split between Moonrise Velocity and Mercenary Chamber. Both are valid picks, not an error in either direction.
- Evo 4: Elemental Balance, Commodore’s Fortune, or Survivor’s Edge.
Pistol
Pistol
Pistol
Pistol
Pistol
Pistol
Pistol
Pistol| Mod | Effect |
|---|---|
| Hornet Strike | +220% Damage |
| Primed Pistol Gambit | +187% Critical Chance |
| Primed Target Cracker | +110% Critical Damage |
| Galvanized Diffusion | +110% Multishot. On kill: +30% Multishot for 20s, stacks up to 4x. |
| Lethal Torrent | +60% Fire Rate, +60% Multishot |
| Pathogen Rounds | +90% Toxin. Combines with Convulsion’s Electricity for Corrosive, which strips armor. |
| Convulsion | +90% Electricity |
| Primed Expel Grineer | x1.55 damage to Grineer at max rank. Swap for the matching Primed Expel or Bane mod when farming a different faction. |
Run Secondary Enervate as the arcane for this build. It adds critical chance on hit and resets after a set number of “Big” critical hits. Running the status build instead? Take Secondary Encumber: on a status proc it adds a 24% chance to trigger a second, random status effect.
Reviewed September 2026.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Cheap and RNG-free. A 200 Platinum Market buy at Mastery Rank 5 beats hunting a Grineer Lich for Kuva Nukor.
- The beam chains to 3 additional nearby enemies per shot (100%, 75%, 56.25%, 42.1875% falloff), so one trigger pull spreads status and crit across a group.
- The Hotfix 33.0.3 crit fix made Paladin Virtue genuinely good, reportedly around 4x base crit multiplier on the Incarnon form.
- Forgiving riven requirement. Even a mediocre crit riven reportedly performs well here despite the 0.95x disposition.
- Multiple September 2026 guides rank it among the better budget Acolyte-killers in Steel Path once it’s Incarnon’d.
Cons
- Still sits below Kuva Nukor. A-tier per Sportskeeda, B-tier “budget” per timesaver.gg, not top-tier by either ranking.
- Weak single-target DPS, called out directly by Sportskeeda’s tier list.
- The Incarnon Genesis only shows up on one rotation out of eight on the Circuit’s Steel Path cycle. Miss that week and you wait for the next pass.
- Build advice is genuinely split between crit and status stacking. There’s no single agreed-on “best” loadout.
- 0.95x riven disposition caps how far riven investment pushes it compared to higher-disposition weapons.
Atomos is for MR5+ players who want a chaining secondary without a Lich grind attached to it, and for anyone leveling toward a real Steel Path secondary on a budget. Already got a well-built Kuva Nukor with a good riven? Skip this one, the upgrade here is real but not huge.
Get the Incarnon Genesis before you invest much modding time. Skip it and the base weapon is just a fine Star Chart gun. Nothing more.