Up to +5-20% Strength based on the charge time of your heavy attacks. Stacks 3 times.
+7.5-15% Weak Spot Damage. Weakspot Kills also ignore Enemy Hit Mass.
+5-8% Strength for every shot fired during continuous fire. Stacks 5 times.
+1-4% Toughness for every shot fired during continuous fire. Stacks 5 times.
"Boss says I hit 'em so hard with the shovel they shits themselves"
Using Shovel V, use short heavy sweeps against hordes. Use activated heavy (fold up) against single target elites. Occasionally use charged sweeps (with thrust and/or crunch) against spread-out weaker elites and brutes for stagger and finishing blows. One method is a quick wide sweep followed by a fully charged sweep to kill multiple at once. Against bosses, acquire aggro then do thrust-charged folded attacks. Save taunt for big threats, not hordes.
Thrust + Brutal Momentum + Crunch + Carapace perk allows the Shovel special to 1-shot a crusher or multiple maulers at once. You don't need Heavy Hitter to do that. To get the full 40% from Crunch!, you have to wait the full duration where the attack happens automatically. Holding it just long enough to get 3 stacks of Thrust isn't enough for Crunch!. Crunch is a dps decrease, only wait for it if you need it for a 1-shot.
Activated heavy strike will also 1-shot Muties without charging it.
The activated light attack is still useful against unarmored high HP enemies because it has a much shorter recovery time after being used. Very nice for waves of muties or quickly taking out a light elite if you can keep heavy hitter up afterwards.
NOTE: Both Heavy Hitter and Feel No Pain work for Shovel V. More detail below.
XIX has strikedown heavies that are slightly faster, deal more damage and swing almost straight down, so you'll kill Specials and Elites more easily without having to activate your special. Unfortunately, you'll be weaker in a horde and will have to rely on your ranged weapon and push attacks.
V has relentless unactivated heavies that cleave horizontally in a perfectly straight line, potentially killing a whole slew of trash. Regular heavies are enough for basic enemies, but you'll generally want to charge the heavies fully when against Brutes or when Elites are mixed into a horde. If you choose to use Slam instead of Soften Them Up, fully charged heavies will reliably stagger multiple dreg ragers. If you're not running Slam, it's situational whether you should do wide heavies or take them out one at a time with folded attacks.
The activated Heavy is effectively identical for both shovels.
If you want an alternate weapon, Branx Pickaxe is fine on this build as well.
Stat priority:
First Target > Penetration = Damage >> Crowd Control = Defenses
First Target has insane synergy with Brutal Momentum because if the first target dies, the second target also benefits from the First Target bonus, and so on until 4 enemies are dead. 80% First target is 1.15x damage, 60% first target is only 1.05x damage (9.5% difference).
Penetration determines carapace and flak armor penetration (nothing else). 80% stat equates to ~60.9% damage against armor. 57% stat equates to ~53.3% damage against armor (14% difference)
Damage is the base damage. It's still important because everything multiplies off it, but the scaling for this variable isn't wide. 80% stat is 165 base heavy damage. 60% stat is 155 (6.5% damage difference).
Defenses affects your sprinting stamina consumption, dodge distance, and push cost. Really bad Defenses will even have a lower dodge limit. Because you're so slow already, with a defenses stat below 50% you'll be out of stamina a lot which makes it hard to block and push when you need to. Even though you're not using a shield, it's fine to just block against ragers sometimes while you wait for a window to attack.
Crowd Control: affects stagger duration and amount, as well as cleave damage. Even with a 50% Crowd Control stat you'll cleave through an entire crowd with brutal momentum. The biggest place it matters is when swinging at spread out elites and especially ragers. Test your shovel with and without Slam to see if you stagger ragers.
Perks: Carapace is good for most Shovels and lets you get the 1-shot reliably. Flak, Maniac, and Unyielding are all good for the second slot but none are necessary for the weapon to work well. Without +Flak, Bruisers will be a slight annoyance, but most will die to either the bleed or a second hit, depending on your weapon's stats, and you can always take the extra second to do a charged hit. Even with +Flak you won't 1-shot bruisers unless you got a lot of enemies with your last heavy attack anyway. +Maniacs is strong. It can let you 2-shot Dreg Ragers with unactivated Crunch heavies without HH stacks, so if you do roll with Maniac on one I recommend using Rock and Slam. It also lets you kill muties with a light special instead of a heavy one. Unyielding only really matters against bosses but it makes big number feel good.
Thrust (IV): necessary to make good use of the shovel's special. It's non-negotiable on the weapon right now.
Brutal Momentum (I-IV): This is what lets you dome multiple non-ogryn elites in a single swing and gives it great horde clear despite its slow speed. The 15% weakspot damage bonus at max is actually a lot less than it seems. It only increases the difference between base damage and weakspot damage, and the difference on this weapon isn't particualrly high so instead of doing 15% more damage, you're doing like 1% more damage. This blessing also makes the crowd control stat less important.
The biggest weakness of the Shovel is that while it's great against Armor or a horde, it's not particularly good when you have both at the same time or the threats are spread out. One answer to this is frag bomb, but without enhanced blitz it's not always an option and without rocks you need a weapon that can handle range. Your ranged weapon should compensate for this somehow.
Kickback is still very strong and will help you protect your teammates, but you will want Rock for distant bombers. Weapon special counts as heavy melee. Blaze Away is the best blessing and the buffs apply to the shot that makes it so even if you don't chain hipfire shots it's still an 8% power buff, but if you chain hipfire it gets quite powerful. I like to combo it with Inspiring Barrage here to refill toughness while chaining shots and will help you stay alive and make an escape path when surrounded. Run and Gun is nice for an extra power buff and the better accuracy at short and medium range, but it's also a drawback at long range due to hitting fewer enemies and thus dealing less total damage due to minimum pellet count mechanics. You also have to remember to tap sprint right before every shot as you can't reload while sprinting (blaze away can still be maintained while doing this). Expansive is also useful, but it's annoying to maintain the buff as kickback is slow to switch to and reload so it's hard to make good use of it.
Rumbler: Great option if you want a panic mode. 1 grenade can disrupt a pack of enemies so you can sweep up or save a teammate from afar. Mostly held back by low ammo supply and its inconsistency. If its ammo supply is buffed it'll be a good choice. Its main use in this build is spam when completely surrounded so go with Blaze Away and Blast Zone.
Grenadier Gauntlet: basically a reloadable rock, as long as you have Pinpointing Target and +Maniacs on it. I recommend Gauntlet if you want to run this build with Nuke or Box of Hurt. The weapon special is a pretty useful (but buggy) panic button as it has much higher explosion radius and will knock down and damage enemies all around you. Melee damage is dump stat. For the second blessing, Glory Hunter is my personal pick and can restore toughness in a pinch when harassed by many gunners. The special attack is especially effective against scab rager packs and mixed hordes, and counts as a heavy attack (super useful if using Heavy Hitter). Combining all that can let a single special 1-shot multiple scab ragers. Explosive Offensive is also usable if you really like using the special attack several times in a row.
Single Shot Stubber WIP, but probably build around it similarly to gauntlet and ditch the bottom right nodes.
Stubber: Good if you take rock. Long Gorgonum equip time to equip makes it unusable for surprise specialists and Achylys accuracy is rough, but they're great at clearing non-carapace elites within a horde. Gorgonum is the stubber of choice for any build that doesn't use Point Blank Barrage. Lucky Bullet is usable with this build.
Ripper: a great all-around weapon, but it doesn't synergize well with Shovel V's weaknesses. It won't do much in a panic situation where there's both armor and a horde at the same time.
Concentation: Always pick it up if you see it. Taunt will save the team in a pinch. Wall shield psykers and Chastise Zealots may need it more though.
Med: always good. Use it to save lilun, or hand it to lilun so you can get Concentation.
Damage: mostly only useful for you against bosses or in a mixed horde.
Celerity: basically worthless for your melee. Increases speed of horizontal heavies by less than 10% and doesn't increase speed of fully charged heavies significantly at all. Use on a teammate or when spamming ranged attacks.
Your weapon has great cleave and your special can kill multiple enemies if they're grouped. LP helps group enemies and gives a very useful stagger at the right time.
Just Getting Started (cooldown reduction on stagger) and Valuable Distraction (enemies take +25% damage) are both useful but it's harder to proc JGS in this build because it only activates when you stagger an enemy but don't kill them and only once per attack. The point of this build is killing what you hit so it won't proc often. VD is mostly only useful for extra boss damage or helping the team kill things when there's a lot going on, and a lot of players mistakenly think it also affects taunt from push attacks with Attention Seeker but it does not apply the debuff to push taunts.
The range node is optional, generally I find that the vanilla skill is plenty useful to briefly stagger enemies near you, opening Bulwark shields, debuffing bosses, and stopping a disabler from attacking at a bad time, and the range isn't really needed for that and the talent point is more usefully applied elsewhere. Even with the range node, it's not wide enough to make much of a difference. The range node is quite helpful when there's a line of bursters but the upgrade's main use is getting more basic enemies in a horde to target you instead of your team and that's not a good use of Loyal Protector most of the time. Your main goal is staggering, debuffing, and keeping the attention of big enemies so your allies can focus on offense and not take a stray crusher overhead.
If you want to pick something up, you can easily drop the bottom right nodes.
About Bleed / Batter
When doing fully charged activated hits, bleed stacks will fade about as fast as you attack so it'll never do significant damage unless you're doing quick heavies on a boss. You can still get to high stacks on a boss by chaining 4 heavies before you switch over to special heavies which will more or less maintain the stacks. So offensively it's not very useful. However, bleed is still VERY useful in a mixed horde for the damage resistance if you run that.
I recommend trying both Heavy Hitter and Feel No Pain to see which you prefer.
Feel No Pain is a very slight reduction in offensive power but you can still hit most of the important breakpoints most of the time. The problem is the keystone is total garbage right now and desperately needs a buff.
Feel No Pain is so bad that actually the Heavy Hitter version of the build is pretty much just as tanky (by merit of more base TDR) and offers extra goodies as well. When Feel No Pain finally gets a much-needed buff or re-work this recommendation will change.
Heavy Hitter has better synergy with Grenade Gauntlet and lets you reach those breakpoints without always waiting for Crunch!, and increases boss and mixed horde damage. But it's annoying to try to keep the stacks up all the time with a weapon as unwieldy and slow as the folding shovel. Furthermore, most of the extra damage is overkill and the shovel V receives very little bonus from attack speed modifiers (which is also why I recommend Loyal Protector over Indomitable). Thus the only keystone modifier worth anything is Unstoppable but I don't use it in favor of more TDR.
Lucky Bullet (BLO) is usable in this setup if you go with a stubber, and it's probably the only decent way to use BLO without using PBB.
