1-2 Extra Chained Energised Hits and 2.5-10% Impact on Energised Hits.
Increased Cleave and 5-20% Heavy Melee Attack Damage on Energised Attacks.
14-20% Damage on Second, Third and Fourth shots in a Salvo.
4.5-6% Close Range damage on Repeated Hit. Stacks 5 times.
This build aims at being as versatile as possible, bringing survivability to your team while doing tons of damage to specials and elites. You can hang back in the group playing rear-guard just laying down cover fire and tags or go guns blazing as a core, hunting down every enemy on screen. The skill tree makes this a midway support that sets up your team to kill everything you set your eyes on as fast as possible, while providing them resources as you take out enemies. We will be marking targets frequently to provide the team with toughness and stamina which will be fueling our own damage via Deadshot.
With Deadshot you can pick off snipers and gunners in the back of the map. Everything else from mid to close range gets completely shredded by you and your team due to this set up -- including Crushers and Monsters. This is a scaling build in the sense that it's mileage gets better and better with the higher the difficulty goes up due to the share amounts of Specials, Elites and enemies in general specifically gunners for this build.
This Veteran setup does a lot of damage really fast to both elites and bosses, given that we apply debuffs to enemies with our tags as well as all melee and ranged damage dealt to enemies. The damage that we will be doing happens in very short bursts but in high volume. The only requirement is that we have some stamina because it is the driving force to our front-loaded assault on any and everything.
We are super focused on stamina in this build. We want Bonus Stamina Bars, Stamina Regeneration, and Stamina Generation. This is because we will be using a lot of it and having more, more frequently, means we can do the one cool thing we're here for --- shredding Elites and Bosses. Sprinting and Shoving already takes away our resource that we will be needing for damage and that's why we want to make sure we have more of it more frequently.
Time to explain all the stamina usage in the build: Deadshot. This talent FEEDS off of stamina, and requires more bars to get more shots and time aiming down the barrel. Deadshot drains .75 Stamina while aiming down your sights to reduces your gun sway. When shooting while aiming it will consume another .25 Stamina per shot, this drains our bars because of our rpm. Naturally this means if we have the base 6 bars of Stamina we get with the weapon out we don't have much wiggle room to use Deadshot.
Because we are using an automatic gun the talent eats through our Stamina but causes the gun to do massive damage with a huge accuracy boost. With this set up we have a total of 16 Stamina Bars and roughly 6 seconds of +25% crit and next to no sway when firing the gun. The main use for the tag after we used stamina is for it to aid us in generating stamina via hip fire. Getting back the stamina also helps us with our melee too which makes the build feel really nice since it's focus is to aid our shooting but our melee benefits from it passively giving us stamina for shoves.
There is a pretty sizeable amount of damage in this build for our range in particular but not just for that.
Here is a list of our static damage nodes.
And then we have the dynamic damage buffs being
Lastly the damage from Blessings
Sustained Fire: the 2nd, 3rd and 4th shot get +20% damage per salvo
The playstyle for Columnus MK 5 with the Blessings will be more burst oriented since to get the most out of our ammo for damage we have to burst fire 4 shots at a time. All this really takes is a tiny pause and isn't required to do for 100% of the time if you don't want to or can't find the rhythm for it. The two Blessings pair really well for boss fights as it causes you to melt down monstrosities in your face.
For Defense, I didn't bother getting too much total toughness because it seemed a bit unnecessary and a bit stifling to have it challenging more stamina bars on the Curios. So for toughness and survivability we first should aim for +15% via the toughness refinement, only if you REALLY feel like you need it. Most of the survivability in this build comes from 'Iron Will' damage reduction and toughness regen from 'Confirmed Kill' procs. Voice of command is also you're "oh shit" button, or your "spam when off cooldown for more damage" button. Voice of command is probably one of the better CC tools in the game, and alongside our grenades provides a good amount of crowd control and damage to help kill enemies. Those 2 are your only options for Crowd Control so use them as you see fit, do so carefully however. Aside from that you should have a good amount of stamina to start shoving and mowing down hordes with melee.
*Sunder technically does help deal a bit of CC for hordes and this is why I take it. Each enemy that you hit with the power up special will be stunned, and mowing past Bulwarks and still being able to stun everything else is something I find valuable.
Munitorum MK VI Power Sword: This is going to be our secondary answer to approaching Specials and Elites only really needed for when we get rushed into close-range combat and have no space to reload. This weapon 2 taps crushers in the head even without Brutal Momentum
Power Cycler + Sunder: Power Cycler is the Bread and Butter choice for the quick kill combo to work as it allows for more than 1 powered hit. Sunder is my choice in 2nd blessing but you can also go Brutal Momentum if you don't value the cleave from Sunder. I personally don't like my attacks stopping in thick hordes of mixed infantry, and Sunder makes attacks feel like they have infinite cleave regardless of kills. It also powers up Charged attacks if you ever want to use them, I personally use a heavy melee at the end of the 2 hit string on Monsters in my face for a bit of extra damage. You can lean into heavy attacks vs Monsters, just make sure to hit the weakspot.
[With the new changes to armour on Armoured Ragers and the addition of Havoc I would value Sunder much higher than Brutal Momentum]
[Also something that isn't valued much on Sunder is how each enemy hit is staggered so it technically is crowd control as well]
Columnus Mk V Infantry Autogun: Our Primary weapon, you can practically go the entire mission without ever swapping off of this gun, and not only that it's actually just a broken weapon. You can take a Grey Columnus into Auric and never worry about killing anything with this skill tree. Maulers die in 1-2 seconds of shooting them and Crushers maybe survive 3 or 4 in mid to close range [Down to 2 with an actually build up weapon]. The blessings we are taking is just to supplement killing power on Monstrosities. I personally dump ammo in place of mobility because you realistically won't run out of ammo and mobility helps with moving hip fire accuracy and dodges.
For the Curios the list of perks is ordered in terms of priority. Health is always going to be nice but more Toughness means we are less likely to take Health damage if we can keep it up. To be honest Vets get carried by Iron Will so you can forgo Health as much as you want.
-You can and should replace Sunder with Brutal Momentum if you value that Blessing more. It is more damage for add clear, but less cleave for mixed hordes -- either way you aren't struggling too hard with hordes. Make sure to implement shoves during hordes to reduce some of the pressure on you as you will eventually find yourself needing to block because the dodge range of the Power Sword is abysmal.
