Best F-Rend Veteran
Build for Darktide

Take on everything and anything with this flexible, survivable, and very damaging rending/brittleness build.

Shovel gives you good CC, horde clear, and surprisingly good damage vs everything due to stacking power, brittleness and rending buffs whereas the Columnus shreds anything close to midrange and still does well at longer range, if less ammo efficient. It also absolutely melts bosses in tandem with regenerating krak grenades, which also give you solid anti-crusher and bulwark damage - though columnus headshots on crushers are sufficient to kill them fairly quickly anyways.

With shout and good toughness damage reduction on top of the shovel CC, you will feel fairly tanky too. 

Solid options to customize this build involve swapping out Desperado, which I like to help the shovel hit some breakpoints with its headshot cleave damage but which is not necessary, for:

1. (RECOMMENDED if you have a good team/frontline): Want more ranged damage? Take Longshot. It greatly helps with damage fall off from range and when your close range blessing buffs are not active.
2. Want to be tankier? Take the extra 10% toughness damage reduction node on the left tree past extra Elite damage.
3. Want a keystone/some more tagged target and team damage? Take Focus Target.
4. Want more grenades? Take the 5% chance to regenerate talent.
5. Don't feel you need krak grenades? Taking shredders frees up another point to allow for any combination of the above.

The core of the build is solid enough that with savvy play, you can be topping damage charts with little overkill while still providing excellent support to your allies via shout, sharing some toughness regen, and stacking brittleness to help them do more damage too!