7.5-15% Weak Spot Damage. Weakspot Kills also ignore Enemy Hit Mass.
3.5-5% Strength for 3.5s on Hit. Stacks 5 times.
4.25-5% Strength for every Enemy you Stagger. Stacks 5 times.
Target receives 1-4 Stacks of 2.5% Brittleness on direct projectile hit. Debuff lasts for 5 seconds and can have a maximum of 16 stacks.
DISLAIMER:
Duelling Sword is a weapon so ridiculously busted, that it might actually build some bad habits. As such I went with Rashad. If you don't mind using DS and just want the best weapon available - feel free to switch.
Missions in Vermintide games, especially in V1, were very often lost through attrition. Your HP bars slowly depleted, your resources dwindled, until every single member of the team was 1 hit away from death. This can still be the case in Darktide, but I find that due to abundance of toughness and healing, Darktide runs usually suffer from "difficulty spikes" instead. Everything is relatively under control, until the game pushes you all a bit too far and it all crumbles like a house of cards.
The following is an all-rounder build capable of dealing with any threat in the game, with specific focus on getting the team alive through all the moments when you're soon about to be overwhelmed by enemies.
It achieves it's goal in two ways:
1. Chorus of Spiritual Fortitude, which is available to you very often thanks to high crit chance and Invocation of Death talent. It gives your team several seconds of peace, plenty of breathing room and loads of toughness. There are few situations in the game which are not solved by well-times Chorus.
2. Magdumping your Boltgun. AI Director just spawned 10+ ragers and your teammates can't handle them before it gets spicy? A huge stack of gunners is giving you trouble? You just realised there are way too many Maulers mixed into the horde? Pull the trigger and Let It Rip! Most things die almost instantly and whatever stays alive is heavily staggered. The difficulty spike is cut.
2 major things that allow the build to work the way it does:
Thanks to Blazing Piety it is very easy to crit with your melee weapon. Critting with your melee weapon does 4 things:
- Huge damage, thanks to Duellist.
- Applies Bleed, thanks to Scourge, although most things won't live long enough to bleed out. Scourge does still increase our Crit Chance even further, which is a welcomed bonus.
- Invocation of Death triggers on melee crits and reduces your Ability Cooldown (allowing you to stop the "oh shit!" moments more often).
- Enduring Faith triggers on melee crits and reduces toughness damage you receive by whopping 50%. Enduring Faith is also right next to Blades of Faith, which saves us some precious talent points.
As I mentioned above, we want Blades of Faith. The reason for that is simple - with this build you won't use your ranged weapon against most enemies throughout the mission. Your primary ranged tools are the Blades. Why?:
- Primo, we're saving ammo for magdumps. Boltgun is really hungry and we don't want to grab every ammo pack we encounter. We're not assholes.
- Secundo, switching to boltgun is way too slow to pull it out whenever you see a bomber or a trapper. If you play Auric Damnation/Maelstorm you need something faster or you will get overwhelmed. Hence - throwing knives.
Taking above into account you can propably already understand most choices made when creating this build. The only thing I did not explain doesn't really need an explanation - we can take Until Death and Holy Revenant, so we will. These talents are simply too useful to skip.
Your main tool is your melee weapon. Don't run around with your boltgun out, have some decency!
If an enemy is reachable on foot - dodge, sprint and weave, use your axe. Feed your Blades of Faith.
If you see an enemy special and it's not a mutant, hound or far-away sniper - headshot it with a throwing knife. Most of them are very stationary (bombers, flamers), so it should be rather easy to aim, even in frantic situations. Trappers tend to approach in straight lines, so we're just one button press away from disposing of them.
If you see a mutant - let it charge you, kill in melee.
If you see a far-away sniper - don't waste time throwing knives. Push, dodge, create space and aim your Boltgun. This is one exception to our ammunition-saving routine.
If you see a hound - you can throw knives or melee. I prefer to melee since dogs can move extremely erraticaly and I don't want to waste something with "of Faith" in its name. Emperor wouldn't approve.
Additionaly:
When things get spicy in a way which would be solved by removing everything in a cone in front of you - mag dump time, baby!
When things get spicy in any other way - take out your holy relic and chant your Chorus of Spiritual Fortitude.
1. Due to my deliberate choice to disregard Dueling Sword (for reasons mentioned in the disclaimer) and Combat Blade (cause I'm not a knife guy) we're not the most mobile person in the world.
2. The build can be quite hungry for ammo (but we can control that hunger by resorting to using the boltgun less often).
3. While this build can clutch it is not designed to do so. By going with Chorus of SF you lose access to Fury of the Faithful and Shroudfield, both of which are very useful when trying to rescue a captured teammate.
Sorry for awful bitrate. Full Auric Maelstorm run. Highlight at 16:30-17:30 (effective usage of Chorus and 2 Boltgun mag dumps, effectively turning a bad situation into an easily managable one).
