Veteran
Hitting at least 3 enemies with an attack, increases your damage by 24-36% for 3 seconds.
Hitting at least 3 enemies with an attack, increases your cleave by 140-200% for 2 seconds.
30-60% Rending on Critical Hit.
10% Critical Chance for every 0.3-0.45 second while aiming. Stacks 10 times. Discharges all stacks upon firing.
This is an all-round veteran build for the highest difficulties, optimized for extremely high burst damage output with the revolver, which hits amazing breakpoints at its peak potential. While your ability is active, your critical headshots can one-shot every non-boss enemy in the game (YEEHAW). The rest of this build is set up to enable that as much as possible, or to provide general nice-to-have effects. Our game plan is to swing our melee weapon at trash, and whenever specials or Ogryn elites show up, we fall back behind our team, hit F, one-tap everything we don't like, reload when possible and get back into melee. Giddy up, cowboy.
The entire build revolves around the Hand-Cannon blessing, which makes the revolver cut through all armor types like a plasma gun through butter. Wait a minute...
Key stats on your revolver are Damage, Critical Bonus and Reload Speed, these three stats need to be at 80%. Penetration is cool but not as important, while Mobility is largely irrelevant. We also need IV Hand-Cannon and IV Surgical, these blessings are not optional. We want to crit as much as possible to save time and ammo.
We get 5% base crit chance from Veteran, another +25% from having 80% Crit Bonus stat, +25% from the Deadshot talent (please never hip fire with this build) for a total of 55% crit chance. This means that we need to keep Surgical going for about 1.2 seconds to hit 95% crit rate. You'll get a feeling for Surgical timing after a while.
Without your ability active, one critical headshot plus one non-crit headshot kills most enemies, most importantly Muties and Reapers. Always use your reload in the 2 second-ish window after an Elite kill to reload much faster.
The Chainsaw above is just what I personally use because it is fairly simple and allows me to focus more on positioning and special sniping, but you can get fancy with a Power Sword or some type of Bloodletter build. Keep in mind that we do not have any talents to spare for melee upgrades, so in terms of melee weapons, what you see is what you get.
If you feel that you do not need the amazing toughness regeneration from Confirmed Kill (top of the tree), you can go for either Exhilarating Takedown + Rending Strikes (more damage), or for Demolition Stockpile (one grenade every 60s). I could also see how the Focus keystone might be good, but it just doesn't feel right to me. You do you.
Whatever you like, honestly. I feel that with the many Toughness Damage Reduction bonuses that Veteran can get, Toughness is worth investing into, but you can run Health or more resistances or whatever else you want.
This guide was initially inspired by this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD3ewHuI1A4], although I have made some changes after Patch 15 messed up the entire class.
