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

Shadowstrike 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, and roll 2 grenades to deal serious damage to the area whilst maintaining stealth. Between Stockpile & Demolition Team, we can make use of this move dozens of times throughout a mission, and is fantastic for clearing out a horde or room. 

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 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.  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 you need to use this opportunity to help your team by helping them with grenades and better positioning yourself to take out priority targets. 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. 

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. 

Down the middle tree, the first three options are not great to be honest, but here Keep their Heads down to actually provide a decent level of benefit due to the torrent nature of our weapon. Tactical Awareness is a fantastic node that heavily reduces the cooldown of our ability, and provides greater benefit the higher the difficulty.  Finally, we grab Demolition Team. This helps us keep supplied on grenades and allows us to reliably throw two almost every time we use our stealth, turning us into a mad bomber.

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, and has the quickest time to kill on carapace enemies as a result. 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. If you do decide to use a different recon Lasgun, then replace Infernus with Headhunter. Infernus I find only really works on the Accatran Mk VId Recon Lasgun due to its insane rate of fire, stacking up critical hits fast enough to hit max stacks. On the other options, it is not reliable enough to really get enough benefit out of it. If you feel confident with your headshots, or if you are using either of the other two recon lasguns, I would recommend running Headhunter over Infernus.

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.

Curios

After 800+ hours in Darktide, I have a few simple rules when it comes to Curios. Melee classes (Ogryns and Zealot) should take 2x Toughness and 1x Health Curios to give a good mix of defensive stats. Veterans should take 3 Toughness Curios, as they benefit more from Toughness than other classes, owing to their larger toughness pools and skills such as Iron Will. Psykers should run 2x Toughness and 1x Stamina curio to make up for low Base stamina, and to benefit from their faster stamina regeneration. Obviously, there are some caveats to that. A melee centric Veteran might want to run 1x Health Curio and certain knife and stealth builds might want to run a stamina curio. But for the most part, I find this a good rule to stick to to ensure you have curios that are effective for the vast majority of your builds, especially when starting out when it is difficult to find any curios, much less good ones. Oh and Wound Curios should only ever be used on Zealot Martydom builds. Having Wound Curios actually means that health stims will now heal less on you. I know some people like to take a wound curio 'just in case they go down', but in higher difficulties, there is no guarantee your team can pick you up. It's far better to invest in defensive abilities which prevent downs as much as possible. 

For Perks, Always take Extra toughness and gunner resistance. 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 ability is multiplicative, so does have some diminishing returns. 0.80×0.80×0.80=0.512 meaning that we end up with a total gunner resistance of 0.488, just below 50%. I can certainly see the argument to only running two gunner resistance curios (with an overall damage resistance of 36 %) and opting for something else (potentially sniper OR Flamer), but I still value that extra 12.8%. 

For the final perk, it depends on your build. If you are using a build which relies heavily on your ability, then run cooldown reduction to more frequently make use of said ability. I find this to be especially powerful on builds which make use of Voice of Command for instance. If your build is not too heavily reliant on your ability, then run for extra health. Again you can tweak this to suit individual playstyle (and the mercy of the RNG-gods as Hadrons bricks yet another piece of equipment), but this is a pretty good rule to aim for. 

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. Ammo economy used to be a bit of an issue, but with the recent buffs to Recon lasguns, you really have to be trying to run out of ammo. You have over 1000 rounds of ammunition, which ostensibly is even more with both Survivilst & Shock Trooper. Just don't mag-dump the sky and you will be fine.

Weaknesses

A lot of players struggle to make use of Veteran builds that don't use Voice of Command. Whilst we are certainly still quite tough with Close Order Drill & Iron Will, we do not have access to an overshield and AOE stagger on demand. It takes some getting used to. Your ranged weapon does a lot more damage with headshots, which can be difficult the Accatran Mk VId Recon Lasgun rather lacklustre iron sights. Mods can fix this, but I know not everyone likes running mods. Overall it's a strong build, but does require skill to bring out its best qualities. 

Questions & Answers

Question: Why do the stats/weapons/abilities in the video posted not reflect what is written in this guide?

Answer: I am constantly changing, updating and working on my builds. As patch notes come, certain weapons and abilities become more or less powerful. As my skill and knowledge increase (hopefully) and what I think is the best version of a build changes. I try to make sure there is always a video showing me completing a damnation level, Auric run as proof of concept to all my builds. Sometimes they will be outdated. I try to keep everything I do updated, but Darktide is my hobby, and I'm not always able to keep everything up to date. What I put in these guides is the most up-to-date version of my current mindset, and should be taken over whatever is posted in my videos.