The Bottom-Line Support Veteran - Your Team's Fountain of Toughness
 Veteran Build - Warhammer 40k: Darktide 

Playstyle and Goals

This build is made with a playstyle with a few things in mind:

• A mostly-melee frontline playstyle that takes on hordes with a strike-and-dodge approach.

• The Combat Blade offers peak mobility and a reliance on dodging, availing attacks rather than blocking and pushing. Side-Dodging becomes a valid option when choosing to escape hordes to pursue priority targets. It is faster when recovering from hitstun when compared to beginning a sprint.

• Selective revolver fire offers sparing use of ammo, availing resources to one's teammates.

• Target priority targets such as Gunners, Shotgunners, Snipers, Bombers, Ragers, and Trappers with said ammo, or engage them in melee combat to preserve ammo when not in horde combat.

• Stick to Coherency and provide Toughness and Over-Toughness/Gold Toughness to squadmates.

The Zarona Mk IIa Quickdraw Stub Revolver

    The Hand-Cannon and Surgical blessings are needed to provide one-shot potential on priority targets. Tier III or II Surgical are passible blessing tiers, but tier IV Hand-Cannon is absolutely ideal. 

    The Zarona Revolver is preferred over the Agripinaa Revolver for its further range, higher damage, and high Cleave values, making it viable for quickly swapping it out to cut through a horde while simultaneously activating Weapons Specialist to upkeep optimal melee combat.

    Its lengthy reload time is offset with Always Prepared, but it never hurts to reload when you have some space, especially when you create space by dodging. A high mobility stat on this weapon is optional but encouraged if one wishes to take advantage of this technique.

    There aren't really any ideal perks, so the matter of choosing perks is up to one's preferences and concerns.

The Catachan Mk VI Combat Blade

   It comes down to preference, but one would usually prefer the Mk VI Combat Blade over the Mk V Combat Blade for its first two horizontal heavy attacks. Weaving horizontal heavy attacks in with light attack spamming can offer space for yourself.

   The blessings also come down to preference. However, the Lacerate and Flesh Tearer blessings can contribute to large damage towards Bosses and units of high health. One could forgo Lacerate for the Precognition blessing in order to activate the Exploit Weakness talent.

   To contrast preference, having an extra +5% Critical Hit Chance on your blade is recommended to activate Exploit Weakness and amplify overall horde clear by decreasing rates of butterknifing (not one-shotting basic enemies.)

    It is not confirmed by the author, but it is suspected that dodging while heavy attacking with the Mk VI can catch more enemies in a horde with its hitbox. This can lead to being able to handle packs of elites or specials by dodge-dancing around them while spamming light combos while weaving in horizontal heavy attacks.

    The mobility offered by this blade includes longer dodge distance, higher amounts of quickly-paced dodges, and a sprinting heavy attack.

Curios and Toughness

The goal is to maximize the amount of Toughness your Veteran can have as long as your preferences permit. 2 Toughness blessings as well as Toughness perks on all of your curios leads to an amount of 170 Toughness.

Grabbing two additional nodes further down the tree leads to 200 Toughness.

This is all to take advantage of the Iron Will talent, as well as your expected playstyle of priority target takedowns, leading to a constant regeneration of toughness with Confirmed Kill.

Take other perks as preferred. One often does not know what particular enemies they may come up against, so Health perks are a worthy consideration for a neutral individual.

Featured Nodes 

• Kill elites and specialists. Regenerate Toughness for yo homies with Born Leader and Confirmed Kill.

• Use Voice of Command + Duty and Honour to top off your homies, knock back high-stagger enemies like Crushers and Ragers, or other emergencies.

• Close Order Drill and Iron Will provides great durability as long as you keep within Coherency.

• Weapons Specialist + Always Prepared supports a mostly melee playstyle that allows you to not worry about reloading when it comes to eliminating priority targets. Always Prepared can be optional if you are used to reloading in the thick of battle, but a bullet loaded is time saved.

• Trench Fighter Drill + Exploit Weakness + Desperado + Reciprocity are necessary nodes to access Weapons Specialist, but these talent nodes support a melee playstyle that focuses less on blocking and pushing, but more dodging and sliding. Stamina is rarely something of concern with a strike and dodge dance.

• It could be considered optional, but Demolition Team offers a faster rate of grenade regeneration on top of Demolition Stockpile that allows more uptime with Shredder Grenades, enabling more crowd control and heavy unit stagger.

Optional Talents and Nodes include:

• Grenade Tinkerer - The larger radius is the goal of this node to offer crowd stagger and catch outlying enemies with its effects. You can forgo this to access the Survivalist aura to offer ammo to your teammates. 

• Twinned Blast - With the relatively high rate of grenades offered with Demolition Team and Demolition Stockpile, Twinned Blast becomes an attractive, but not a necessary feature. It offers the chance to melt crowds faster and could even let you leave to have them bleed out. You can survive without this however if you find yourself not spamming grenades as ideally often.

• For the Emperor! and Close Quarters Killzone are complimentary nodes to your melee + elite pick playstyle. Tactical Awareness gives these nodes more value with how more often you are able to activate your Combat Ability, Voice of Command, as long as you take charge with priority target.

• Onslaught is a mainly supportive pick; providing Brittleness for your teammates to take advantage of when engaging with Bosses and Crushers. One already has access to Exploit Weakness if they are concerned with personal damage and supportive Brittleness. Freeing up nodes leading up to this Talent can provide 2-3 Talent points to work with.

• If you are confident, you can forgo the Always Prepared talent, but it leaves you vulnerable to Gunner packs while in the open if you need to reload.

Alternative Talents and Nodes

• Rending Strikes can amplify overall damage, which leads to better horde clear and less shots needed to deal with beefy enemies such as Ragers, Maulers, and Crushers.

• Determined provides immunity to enemy Suppression in order to take Gunners head-on.

• Toughness nodes can be taken to further increase your durability to a powerful extent, especially the 25

•  Toughness nodes that are found further into the tree. Without them, the already established build provides 170 Toughness.

• Grenadier can help with a grenade-chucking playstyle. The +5% Critical Hit Chance node needed to take it also compliments your build.

• Only In Death Does Duty End is good for emergencies. However, the ideal team's goal is to not take damage and go down. Take it for mission situations in which helping teammates up is vital.

• Leave No One Behind is a good alternative for Only in Death Does Duty End as it does not impose a longer cooldown and reduced range to Voice of Command. However, it takes at least 1 more talent point to access.

• Longshot and Exhilarating Takedown are great additions to this build, further increasing one's power as a font of Toughness while ensuring kills with as little ammo consumed as possible. 
• Precision Strikes also contributes to the previous idea.

• Survivalist is the most valuable aura for a veteran, but takes more talent points to access. If you are confident in you and your team's ammo management, the team can survive without it barring Maelstrom missions.

• Agile Engagement is a natural addition to the Weapons Specialist keystone playstyle, alongside the +10% melee damage node needed to access it. 

• Should the length of Covering Fire be buffed in future patches, it could become a worthy talent to use so long as your team coordination is well and good.

• Competitive Urge is a great talent to access to amplify your horde clear capability, especially in combination with other general damage increases.

• In keeping with the support theme, Field Improvisation is good in situations of sparse resources.

Weaknesses

    Survivalist is considered the best aura amongst the Veteran community, but is often overlooked in this build as the intended playstyle negates the need for Survivalist to a selfish extent.

    Determined is often taken with the revolver to negate Suppression. Lack of this talent can have one vulnerable to Gunner fire and leave your aim to chance. However, throwing grenades, finding cover, and seeking alternate angles of attack can counteract this weakness.

    The horde clear of this build is not optimal, but serves well enough in a setting of consistent Coherency.

    This build is susceptible to situations where you are confronted with a Monstrosity while teammates are unavailable or lacking in power. The chosen talents and weapon choice is to encourage opening the Monstrosity up to taking more damage from your teammates. 

    If boss damage is a concern, one may instead opt for Krak Grenades to not only deal with Crushers efficiently, but deal significant damage to Monstrosities. 

    However, Shredder Grenades provide crowd control and can affect other enemies surrounding the Monstrosity, providing breathing room for you and your teammates. The Bleed effect is also substantial as it will prove good ramping damage to the Monstrosity.

Closing Thoughts

I don't have any. It's hard enough working off 8 INT, a fried brain, and a passing dream. Just keep together with squadmates and mail your prayers to the sinners in the form of a .500 round to the head. (I don't goon over guns nor am I a tankfucker so sorry if I got that wrong.)