Kriegs Guard | Krak Grenade | Voice of Command | Marksman's Focus | Auric Ready
Build for Darktide

Kriegs Guard 

I know, I know. I should have a shovel. But I wanted something functional. I like to take this build specifically into Auric Maelstrom C-I-VI (Waves of Specialist Enemies. Only Scab faction. Mostly melee enemies. No Ammo Pickups). The Lucius Mk III Helbore Lasgun has a long pull-out time, and the bayonet attack on it's the weakest of the three. To make up for it, it hits like an absolute truck. The advantage it has over the plasma gun is its insane ammo economy, making use of Survivalist, Shock Tropper & Surgical. It is capable of 2-shotting Crushers with headshots, and 1-shotting Reapers with headshots. Having one member of the team that is capable of ranged combat in no ammo run is invaluable. You tend to come across packs of Crushers and Maulers, which are an absolute brick wall to progress, and move as fast as them too. This is the perfect situation where the pull-out time of the Hellbore can be mitigated. If all else fails, we bring a melee capable of answering armour and stunning enemies in the form of the Indignatus Mk III Shock Maul. And just for kicks, let's throw in Krak Grenades too. All the armour penetration!

Curios

After 500+ hours in Darktide, I have a simple rule of thumb when it comes to Curios. For melee classes (Ogryn and Zealot) Take 2x Toughness and 1x Health Curios. For ranged classes (Veteran and Psyker), take 3x Toughness curios. Veteran benefits massively from Toughness and Ogryn massively from health, with the other two classes falling somewhere in between. There are a few niche builds that might require Stamina Curios, but this is a pretty safe rule to stick to, and means that you have curios that are effective for the vast majority of your builds. Wound curios should only ever be used by Zealot Martyrdom builds. Even then, I consider Martyrdom builds a bit gimmicky and less effective than other Zealot builds, which is why I only ever run them for banter and memes.

For perks, I opt for raw stats. +20% Gunner Resistance is the most useful resistance node as it applies to Scab Gunners, Scab Shotgunners, Dreg Gunners, Dreg Shotgunners and Reapers. This is the largest collection of enemies out of any of the resistance perks. These enemies can absolutely shred you in seconds, and make up a significant portion of the enemies encountered in Auric Maelstroms. The difference between running 3 of these perks compared to running none is night and day, and arguably the single most useful perk you can apply to your curios. +5% Toughness and +5% Health provide us with raw stats that you can never go wrong with. If you have to pick between one of the two, go for Toughness. This is because the Health Curio provides 21% Health, and the Toughness Curio provides 17% Toughness, meaning that the Toughness Perk is a better value proposition. 

As Voice of Command is so pivotal to our survivability in melee, I like to take cooldown reduction instead of health here. This ability is your immortality button, and the overshield lasts for 15 seconds. With a 30-second cooldown, let's crunch the math. 12% cooldown reduction leads to a our ability being off cooldown in 26.4 seconds. This means that between consecutive shouts, there are now only 11.4 seconds where you are 'vulnerable' and not benefiting from the overshield. Bear in mind that overshield counts as you being above 75% toughness. Toughness reduction stacks in a multiplicative Iron Will combined with Close Order Drill means that your actual toughness reduction is a 33% increase of 50%, giving us a value of 0.67. So that's a 67% damage reduction, effectively giving that 50 toughness overheal 150 toughness in actuality, not accounting for any additional toughness damage reduction from teammate shields. Technically it's slightly higher because of the extra 5% damage reduction (68.175%) but you get the idea. You're virtually unkillable whilst this is up, so having this god-mode up more often is far more impactful not just to you, but to your team's survivability than the extra 15% health on the Veteran's quite pitiful base health pool.