Veteran
Hitting at least 3 enemies with an attack, increases your cleave by 140-200% for 2 seconds.
Hitting at least 3 enemies with an attack, increases your damage by 24-36% for 3 seconds.
Immune to Ranged Attacks for 0.6-1.2s on Weak Spot Hit.
14-20% Strength on Salvo's First shot.
This build is designed for a ranged focus with some hybridization into horde clear via frag grenades and bleed damage to make sure you're dealing with elites as quickly as possible. Your primary focus is taking out rooms of ranged enemies and elites before moving onto clear chaff. Ideally you would approach rooms with a frag first to wipe out bulk and quickly switch to 'Executioner's Stance' to start pinging heads.
Due to the nature of Veteran's left side talent options, you aren't really going to want to go fully into ranged builds. You have to take a lot of terrible talents that punish you for being in melee—something that is totally antithetical to the design of the Tide series.
Taking 'Serrated Blade' guarantees you are outputting constant tick damage to Ogryns and Monstrosities if you are not able to use your ranged weapon, and additionally give you extra power in horde clear. 'Demolition Stockpile' I consider to be a staple/tax for Veteran that guarantees you always have grenades available for situations, as Vet has some of the strongest grenades in the game.
Things like 'Exhilarating Takedown' and 'Volley Adept' don't have to be taken if you don't want more focus on being a ranged teammate. They are good sustainability while using your ability, however, and give you staying power as you clear shooters from rooms.
There is a lot of flex here where you can take different things to tweak your playstyle due to not committing to a Keystone, especially with your ranged weapon options.
The Mk4 Chainsword is a solid all-rounder with great cleave and damage output as of Patch #13, making it an awesome hybrid build weapon. The blessings are primarily for you to be able to deal with hordes when using a marksman weapon, but I personally like taking 'Bloodletter' in order to do maximal damage to monstrosities and ogryns with bleed tick.
The Mk7 Headhunter Autogun is a solid marksman weapon that has a very high finesse multiplier for weakspots and critical damage. It's one of the few ranged options in the game that does >100% damage to flak enemies. It can also be used efficiently while hipfired in addition to its high-stagger bash, giving it some flexibility in tense situations where you don't want to swap out of your weapon during ability usage.
