Shadowstrike Veteran | Shredder Frag Grenade | Infiltrate | No Keystone | Auric Ready
Build for Darktide

Catachan Veteran

So there is a pretty popular build on this site called Double Rend Free Ammo. I tried it. It's strong, but it did not quite cater to my tastes.  Deadshot indeed massively increases your damage, but running out of stamina at the least opportune time put me off it. Skill issue? Probably. It's a fantastic build, so please don't misconstrue this as me throwing shade. Without that build, I never would have come up with my own variant. So I wanted to run a similar build, trading in that powerful attack up-time for the ability to aim down sights at will, relying instead on the 5% crit node in the tree and 5% crit on our ranged weapon itself. This bumps us up to a 15% base critical chance, enough to reliably activate both our infernus and Shock-Trooper enough to justify taking it. This is taken even further by instead picking up Reciprocity, a node that allows us that dopamine-inducing free ammo playstyle. If you go into the habit of dodging whilst shooting, you'll be mowing down everything in sight. 

Playstyle

Did you know that if you roll your shredder frag grenades whilst stealthed (hold down the right click button), you can release grenades without breaking your infiltrate? As you back out of combat with stealth, you can freely toss down grenades whilst you find a new position to fire from. This build incorporates this to become a mad bomber, throwing at least 2 grenades to clear an area. When things hit the hay, pop Infiltrate, roll 2 grenades to deal serious damage to the area whilst maintaining stealth, then make use of Low Profile to clear any stragglers. 

Our Accatran Mk VId Recon Lasgun is our main source of damage. Infernus procs very often with our crit chance, and with Onslaught, even Crushers can be brought to heel. This is not the most efficient use of our ammunition, however, and Krak Grenades should be favoured for bringing down these larger foes. You're still a veteran so try to take out specials and ranged enemies with the recon lasgun as a priority. When in ranged fights, and the enemy is not so far away that you need to aim down sights, try dodging. It is pretty easy to get dodges against ranged attacks which stack up your Reciprocity, allowing you to fire into hordes of enemies whilst gaining free shots. Every critical actually counts for 2-shots in a chain, so it goes a lot further than you might initially suspect. 

Our  Catachan Mk VI Combat Blade  is mostly used for mobility, but can deal some serious damage to all armour types with heavy weakspot hits. I actually prefer it over the Catachan Mk III Combat Blade on this build as it has slightly better Wave clear. The Mark 3 I prefer on Zealots for taking out large targets, but we have our ranged weapon here for that. We are not a true knife build, however, and so you should not be charging into melee constantly as a knife zealot would. Instead, we use it more reactively, to kill things that manage to break behind our lines and outside our ranged killzone. Oh and stack bleed to beefy targets when the opportunity arises. 

Build-Path

I really like taking the middle path for the majority of Veteran builds. Close Order Drill & Confirmed Kill are fantastic nodes useful in almost all build paths. The extra toughness regeneration from Close Order Drill combined with Iron Will makes you nigh on impossible to hurt from small attacks, provided your toughness remains above 75%.

I like Shredder Frag Grenades when trying to optimise points, as I do not think it is reliant on Grenade Tinkerer as the other options are, as it doesn't impact the damage of the bleed stacks, which is where the bulk of our damage is coming from. Remember that bleed stack damages scales in a logarithmic fashion. When you come across a room with a dense arrangement of enemies, throw 2-3 grenades to max out these bleed stacks and clear the room. This is such a low-investment grenade which absolutely makes this build the terror it is.

Catch a Breathe gives us some toughness regeneration when we are away from our team, and can come in clutch in...well....clutch situations. Survivalist is the best aura in the game, even after the nerf. I make sure to run it on every Veteran class as the resources and utility it offers on higher difficulties are simply too good to pass up. Likewise, Demolition Stockpile is another mandatory skill and lets you leave all grenade pickups to your zealots and Ogryns. Grenadier increases your grenades up to 3, and makes it far more likely that you will have these on standup when they are needed. 3 Krak grenades woven in between shots from your Accatran Mk VId Recon Lasgun can let you solo any monstrosity with ease.

Infiltrate is a great get-out-of-jail-free card. Whilst it has a longer cooldown than the Zealot's equivalent skill, it comes with the added benefit of topping up our toughness.  Low Profile is not a skill that is very well explained by the tooltip. -90% Threat means that for the first 10 seconds after using your ability, most enemies will ignore you and instead target your allies. This obviously does not work if you are clutching and the only player remaining. A lot of people don't like people using this skill because it drops aggro onto your teammates, which can be detrimental to your team as a whole. With great power comes great responsibility, and with the 10 seconds of relatively aggro free time, you need to use this opportunity to help your team, take out priority targets and really support them with the freedom you are afforded. I particularly like popping it when a hound pack comes, to ensure that I'm not attacked and can gree teammates if they get grabbed. 

We don't end up going for any Keystones and none of them benefit this build particularly well. Instead, we dip into all three branches and pick up the most useful nodes. Down the right side, we grab Duck and Dive to keep our stamina up as weave through enemies, knife in hand. Onslaught is the prize here. With the rapid-fire rate of the Accatran Mk VId Recon Lasgun, we can very quickly ramp up to 40% Brittlness, meaning that even crushers will succumb quickly to our ranged attacks. Reciprocity lets us increase our critical chance further, as we will be dodging almost all the time. The 8-second timer is very generous, and can help us keep our critical chance very high semi-consistently without having to drain our stamina like Deadshot Does. Is it harder to maintain? Yes, but it can also last longer without draining our stamina in ideal conditions. Desperado Is a fantastic node for knife builds and massively increases your damage when landing weakspots, something you will want to be doing regularly. 

You can honestly take any of the initial 3 nodes down the middle tree. None of them are particularly impactful with this build sadly. Tactical Awareness helps to reduce the cooldown of our hefty ability, but the creme of the crop is Iron Will. As mentioned earlier, this combined with Close Order Drill turns us into a venerable tank, and is the sole reason stacking toughness on Veteran is actually really effective. 

Down the left-hand tree, Precision Strikes is too good to pass up. Sadly Darktide seems unlikely to get the weapon mods that were promised pre-launch and landing headshots with the Accatran Mk VId Recon Lasgun iron sights is quite difficult. That said, headshots should still be prioritised when possible and you will be rewarded with insane damage if successful. Fully Loaded & Shock Trooper lets us better cope with our gun's insane rate of fire without running out of ammo. Rapid-fire weapons have an interesting perk that means critical hits come in short strings rather than one-off hits. This means that Shock Trooper procs more often than one might expect and means that our clip size is effectively larger, allowing us to fire more rounds down range before needing to reload. Superiority Complex is a straight increase to elite targets, of which there are many in auric missions. It is good. Take it. 

Weapons

After extensive testing, the Accatran Mk VId Recon Lasgun Stands out as the best recon lasgun. The bullet hose nature allows us to quickly rack up both Onslaught and Infernus stacks. Most mid-sized enemies will die too quickly for the burn dot to have much of an effect, but against larger targets like reapers and Monstrosities, the burn dot can quickly add a hefty additional amount of damage. DumDum provides a flat damage increase in close-range situations. We pick up the increase to critical strike chance to increase our damage, whilst also proccing Onslaught & Infernus more prominently. What other damage perk you chose is personal preference, but I find the time to kill everything already very high. 

The Catachan Mk VI Combat Blade allows extra mobility due to the increased distance on lunge attacks, which has a natural synergy with a stealth style of play. Overall I think it works better on Zealot, but it is still very good on Veteran.  I also find this build fantastic for clutching, with the knife providing extra mobility and dodge distance to get where you need to go quickly. 

It is our job to break away from the group and kill snipers and other ranged threats giving our team aggro before slinking back into the shadows. Don't be 'that guy' and go off by yourself, however. Only disengage long enough to deal with the threat. When shit hits the proverbial fan, go into stealth. If you hold down the right click with your grenades out, you can roll your grenades. Doing this does not end your stealth, meaning you become a stealth bomber, dealing damage whilst remaining perfectly safe. Two grenades are usually enough to clear most threats by stacking up two lots of bleeding stacks. With this build, you will have 4 grenades and regenerate 1 every 60 seconds. In an average-length game, you can usually get away with doing this a dozen times or so. You can swap Overwatch with Demolition Team if you favour the extra carnage over double stealth. 

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 we will be running a knife, I like to take +3 stamina. It's another rule of thumb I have. Weapons/playstyles which benefit from high mobility and/or have naturally low stamina bars really benefit from the extra stamina. So if I ever run a knife or a duelling sword, I like to make sure I have at least 1 stamina curio. I see some people run 3 stamina curious for a total of +9 stamina bars. I really don't see the value of this. Toughness helps protect us from becoming a pin cushion from enemy shooters. It's arguably useful with the zealot who can get toughness back from dodging, but it is much harder to get toughness back on the Veteran. As such, I think just the one is necessary. I like to replace the health perk here for stamina regen so we can more quickly zip around the map.

Strengths

Undoubtedly the biggest strength is pretending that we are running a Hellgun. Lasgun go Brrrrrrrrr. But in all seriousness, I find this build has a lot going for it, despite being unconventional. The Accatran Mk VId Recon Lasgun sacrifices some of the raw DPS something like the Columnus Infantry Autogun brings, to instead become far more accurate over longer ranges. It stacks Onslaught insanely fast, so even Crushers don't last long. When fighting bosses, you can double dip into damage over time, stacking burn stacks with your ranged, and bleed stacks with your melee and grenades. Every form of damage you do inflicts some kind of DOT, and these extra damage values can quickly stack up. Being able to clutch with Infiltrate, and being able to clear out a pack of elites with stealth grenades means we have a huge array of tools for the astute Veteran.

Weaknesses

Whilst we can mitigate it thanks to Survivalist, Reciprocity & Shock Trooper, ammo economy is something that the Recon lasguns can struggle with. Provided you don't start mag-dumping into hordes, you should be fine, but it is something to consider. Also whilst we can assist when shit hits the fan, some might argue that keeping your team alive through the Veteran shout is more useful, Prevention is better than cure and all. It's perfectly possible to go for the shout route with this build should you so choose, and both have pros and cons.