Varangian Guard | Shredder Frag Grenade | Voice of Command | Weapon Specialist | Auric Ready
Build for Darktide

Varangian Guard

So everyone kept talking about how good the Rashad axe was. I tried it. It sucked. Then one day I got a god-roll Axe and tried again. Oh my goodness. The Rashad Mk II Combat Axe is unique in that a bad one is one of the worst weapons in the game, whilst a good one is one of the best weapons in the game. Bear this in mind when making your build as tipping that scale is heavily reliant on blessings and stats. I certainly would not recommend this as your first build. The recent patch gave us some new toys to play with, and one which has been receiving mixed reviews is the Godwyn-Branx Pattern Bolt Pistol. No, it cannot match the Zarona Revolver beat for beat, but one aspect that seems to be slept on is its stagger. This build aims to make the best use of Weapon Specialist. Whilst hacking in melee we can switch to our Bolt Pistol and fire off a shot to reset our keystone whilst staggering enemies in a wide range, before switching back to Viking mode. Between this and Voice of Command, we have a huge amount of stagger to control melee encounters. The pistol is also surprisingly accurate over long ranges and deals good damage. You need to pace your shots, however, as the recoil is brutal. 

Playstyle

This is through and through a close combat, melee-focused build. Whilst Zealot and Ogryn are known as the melee classes, Veteran has a huge number of skills that make them deadly in close-quarters fighting. Whilst fighting in melee, periodically swap to your ranged weapon to fire off a shot. This will stagger enemies, give you breathing room, give you toughness and refresh the uptime of your attack speed buff with Weapon Specialist. In theory, if you only fire one shot at a time in these prolonged melee engagements, you never have to worry about reloading your weapon thanks to Always Prepared. We rely heavily on maintaining uptime of yellow Toughness by making use of Voice of Command. This combined with Iron Will and Close Order Drill, makes us virtually invincible, allowing us to tank hit after hit without suffering any health Damage. Compared to Zealots and Ogryns, our health pool is comparatively low. As a result, we rely on avoiding health damage altogether by buffing our toughness to ludicrous levels, and maintaining our yellow Toughness for as long as possible with cooldown reduction. Our Rashad Mk II Combat Axe deals with most threats in melee. 

Build Path

Close order Drill, into Confirmed Kill is my preferred start for most Veteran builds, as it provides a great heaping of survivability, something absolutely needed on higher difficulties. The left-hand tree I only like taking on dedicated ranged builds (something this most certainly is not), and the right tree... I still struggle to see the value in. We opt for Shredder Frag Grenade as it saves more points than going for Krak Grenades.

Grenade Tinkerer helps you deal more damage to monstrosities. A normal Krak Grenade does enough damage to kill any Ogryn outright, so this is the only situation This is one of the very few Veteran builds that I actually do not opt for Survivilst with. It does feel bad not buffing your team with free ammo, but we need to save the points to get the most out of this build. With Fully Loaded with your Godwyn-Branx Pattern Bolt Pistol, you will have over 100 rounds of ammunition, so ammo should not be an issue even without picking up ammo boxes. Fire Team is actually a pretty bad aura. The extra 5% rarely helps you or your team to reach any critical breakpoints, but is taken purely for pathing. The extra points we save allow us to pick up both the +10% melee damage node and Agile Engagement. We will be switching back and forth between our weapons and the extra 25% damage helps us to 1-shot body shot elites more reliably.

Likewise, Demolition Stockpile is another mandatory node. Free resources are so strong, especially the higher the difficulty and the more limited your options. The average game for an auric Maelstrom mission is about 30 minutes (Less for assassinations, more for other maps). 30 Grenades is the equivalent of 10 grenade pickups. You will seldom come across that many pickups in an entire run. Not only does this allow you to use your grenades more, but also frees this resource up for Ogryn Frag bombs or Zealot Immolation grenades, both of which usually have far more impact on a use-by-use basis than the veterans. Be a team player and leave these pickups for your allies. 

Voice of Command with Duty and Honour is the best ability for Veteran, even more so with a melee-focused build. Not only does this provide a hefty overshield for you and your allies, but can also be used tactically to benefit from its stagger. See a Crusher about to flatten you into a pancake? Shout at him to knock him on his arse and give you breathing room to get some hits in. Oh no, a teammate is suffering from brain rot and woke up a Deamonhost. But oh wait, the daemon is next to a ledge. Shout at them to knock them into the abyss. A poxburster about to leap at you and you have no stamina left? Shout at him. Put him in his place. Even if it doesn't knock him back far enough, the overshield should protect you from most of the giblets. 

From here we branch into all three paths. Down the left path, we pick up what I consider the 'essentials'. Precision Strikes affect both melee and ranged attacks. We must be hitting weakspots with our axe to be able to cleave through, so a 30% damage boost helps us hit those breakpoints and more easily carve through a horde. Fully Loaded is not super needed, but an extra 25% ammo just makes sure we never run dry. Superiority Complex is just a straight 15% damage increase to elites. Considering the sheer number of these on higher difficulties, it's difficult to justify not picking it up. 

Down the middle tree, we grab Forr the Emperor! We will be using our ability frequently, so the extra damage to both us and our allies is a welcome boon. Tactical Awareness is so good I'm amazed it has not gotten the same Nerf treatment as Survilalist. You only need to kill 5 specialist enemies to get your ability off of cooldown. If you are playing, for example, a hunting grounds mission, that's one grenade into the pack. Demolition Team when combined with Demolition Stockpile allows us to become a mad bomber. Toss 2 grenades into a room, and it will clear out anything shy of Ogryns with the bleed damage. 5% might seem low, but on average, that's an extra grenade for every 20 specialists or elites.  In higher intensity missions, this will provide you with almost as many grenades as Demolition Stockpile. However, if you find you're not using your grenades all that often, there is a hefty +25 Toughness node here you can opt for instead. When paired with your Curios, this becomes more like a +40 Toughness node, which is an insane amount of value for 1 point. Finally, Iron Will synergises amazingly with Close Order Drill, turning you into a nigh unkillable machine, provided you can keep your toughness up.

Reciprocity will boost our critical chance up to very high levels, as we will always be dodging in melee. Desperado is similar to Precision Strikes in that it more generously allows us to hit breakpoints to continue our cleave. I opt for the toughness node because, well +25 toughness is massive, and I find it more useful than Explot Weakness as we are already running weapons which can deal well with armour. Trench fighter drill allows us to cut through enemies quicker and further synergises with Weapon Specialist, giving us a hefty attack speed buff. We round it out with two keystone modifiers, Always Prepared and On Your Toes. When fighting in melee, you can quickly swap to your ranged weapon, fire off a shot to kill a trash mob (or distant special), and switch back to keep the uptime of your melee attack speed. This will not only replenish 40% toughness every 3 seconds, but also means you never have to reload your weapon, as that 3.3% Ammo reload rounds up. Provided you have one melee kill, this will also reload a full clip. The double-barrel shotgun would also work in this situation, but I'm not the biggest fan of how limited it's range is. 

Weapons

The Rashad Mk II Combat Axe needs Brutal Momentum to be useful. If you recall back to your level 1 days, the axe struggles to deal with hordes as each hit will get stuck in the enemy's flesh. Brutal Momentum allows you to have an effectively infinite cleave, provided you are killing enemies with headshots. This is what I meant at the start of this guide with a bad axe being almost unusable, whilst a good one is a headtaking machine. Speaking of head-taking, Headtaker is the best secondary blessing for your keeping your power high. We take extra damage to unarmoured and Flak to make sure we can hit breakpoints on Scab Bruisers and Dreg Bruisers respectively. With this set-up, anything short of an elite of special will get one shot. If you roll a perfect axe, it might be possible to hit the breakpoint on Scab bruisers without this, allowing you to swap unarmoured for carapace. I have not done enough testing, nor yet been blessed by the RNG gods to be able to test this. 

The Godwyn-Branx Pattern Bolt Pistol is a versatile weapon. It can be used at ranged, provided we take the time to reset after each shot to account for recoil, whilst being ammo efficient enough to use on lesser ranged enemies without fear of running out of ammo. Some people like to run Deadly Accurate & Surgical to ensure one shot on most enemies. I'll be honest, given the gun's iron sights and recoil, my aim is not good enough to consistently hit head shots and I'll wager unless your name is Telopots, neither is yours. Instead, we focus on the unique strengths it brings. Lethal Proximity provides a hefty stagger in close ranges and helps create breathing room when face-to-face with enemies. This is a melee build after all, and I value that stagger more than a conditional increase to ranged lethality. Puncture synergises well with our shredder frag grenades, to help reapply and add stacks of bleed damage. For damage increases, I take Flak and Maniac as these are the ranged threats you most imminently need to deal with. 

Curios

After 1,000+ 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 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. 

Voice of Command 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 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 node (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. 

Strengths

The Varangian guard is a powerhouse in melee, able to cleave through hordes and elites alike, without having to worry about the charge-up time of the power sword. All of our weapons have great armour penetration, meaning we have an answer to every enemy type. We have a lot of options to stagger enemies, and Bulwarks can be opened up either with a grenade, or with a shout. We provide a lot of survivability to our team, whilst also cleaving through high-priority enemy targets, and being virtually unkillable whilst we do. 

Weaknesses

Ranged fights are not our speciality. Whilst we can contribute to firefights, we will not be eliminating chaff-ranged enemies as quickly as a more dedicated build would. Also, our monstrosity damage is not stellar, and relies on melee finesse hits to deal good damage, something which can be tricky against certain monstrosities in certain situations (i.e., a beast of Nurgle that we can't get to the back of).

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.