5-8 Bleed Stacks on Critical Hit.
12.5-20% Critical Chance for 6s on successful Dodge.
Up to 7.5-20% Strength scaling with Heat Level.
Critical hit chance scales by your current heat level up to 27.5-50%. Also increases critical ranged attacks damage by 4-10%.
This is one of my favorite variants of the Plasma Gun Veteran Build, but my current absolute favorite is this one:
https://darktide.gameslantern.com/builds/9e7528bc-0042-4c72-a21e-ac1e05fe3871/veteran-plasma-gun-current
https://youtube.com/shorts/lEf94e924T8?feature=shared
Pros: Great single target DPS, Special Sniping, AoE Damage, Survivability.
Cons: Not as ammo efficient as other builds, weaker melee than a specialized melee build.
Weapons
In this build you may use whatever melee weapon you want. I recommend the Combat Blade because it provides you with very high mobility, great horde clear, and great burst damage.
Your ranged weapon is going to be the M35 Magnacore Mk II Plasma Gun which is going to be doing all of your damage. It excels at damage versus every enemy and armor type in the game. Take Rising Heat and Gets Hot as your blessings so that you can deal more damage the more that you fire the weapon. For your perks I highly recommend Carapace and Unyielding because our talent tree should provide us with enough damage to meet important Break Points for every other type of enemy.
Curios
For Curios I run a balanced setup with 2 toughness and 1 stamina. Grab Ability Cooldown, Stamina Regeneration, Toughness, Sprint Efficiency, and Block Efficiency. You're going to be using your ability whenever it's up so you really want as much cooldown reduction as you can get and stacking stamina benefits makes surviving much easier.
Talents
The Veteran talent tree is very bottom heavy meaning that we need to get to the bottom of the tree to be able to get the most benefits out of it.
For this reason we go straight down the middle into Close Order Drill and Confirmed Kill as they provide the most value at the top of the tree.
Our Blitz is Shredder Frag Grenade because of the crowd control and bleed that it applies on enemies. I don't recommend Krak Grenades because you already have very high single target boss damage and Smoke Grenades are simply too far to the right of the tree to be of any value, it would cost you too many talent points to invest in.
Catch a Breath and Survivalist (Aura) are phenomenal sustainment talents that allow us to stay in the fight longer by providing us with more toughness regeneration and ammo.
Demolition Stockpile is almost a must have on any Veteran because of its ability to give us more grenades. Running this with Demolition Team allows you to do absolutely insane AoE damage using Shredder Frag Grenades.
Voice of Command paired with Duty and Honor is one of, if not the most powerful ability in the game. It combines crowd control with toughness regeneration and an extra 50 toughness (which comes with insane survivability benefits) for yourself and anyone in your coherency.
Precision Strikes, Fully Loaded, and Superiority Complex make our Plasma Gun do more damage and they make us more ammo efficient.
For The Emperor, Tactical Awareness, Iron Will, and Competitive Urge all synergize very nicely with Voice of Command as it provides you and your team with much more survivability and a small damage increase. But if you want to take Bring it Down instead of Competitive Urge, that's fine too!
Focus Target is our keystone and the modifiers we take are Redirect Fire and Focused Fire to allow us give a consistent damage buff to the whole team and build our stacks up to 8 for additional boss damage.
Lastly you have three flex points with this build. I take Reciprocity and Desperado because they make the Combat Blade very good. If you're not using the Combat Blade then you may opt to take talents like Field Improvisation and Target Down for the insane utility that they provide for your team.
