2.5-4% Bonus Critical Chance on Chained Hit. Stacks 5 times.
Hitting at least 3 enemies with an attack, increases your damage by 24-36% for 3 seconds.
Gain Ranged Attack Immunity while sprinting with over 50-80% Stamina.
Gain 7-10% Close Damage for 3.5 seconds after killing an enemy at close range, stacking 5 times.
MISSION COMPLETE!This build revolves around the `Stripped Down` blessing that gives us immunity to ranged attacks while sprinting. Going all in on stamina curios, stamina regen, and sprint efficiency, our ability to ignore gunfire on command is unsurpassed. Mind you, you'll take damage the second you stop sprinting, so getting a muscle memory for sliding while shooting / reloading will give you opportunities to take out shooters. Another technique I use is dodging in one direction while firing. While doing this does make an already inaccurate gun even harder to aim, the suppression it yields against enemy gunners is extremely valuable while trying to avoid a random chaff enemy trying to hit you,
I went with the Vraks Mk II Braced Autogun as it's low accuracy / high damage profile complements the aggressively mobile play style of this build. For perks, I added +2 Stamina for maximizing our uptime for `Stripped Down` and I added +25% damage to Flak since our main targets are gunners which usually have this property. For the other blessing I chose Fire Frenzy, since close quarters gunning is our bread and butter and more damage is nice. You can also use Death Spitter, as I'm not sure which is better overall but damage is damage.Since we aren't easily suppressed with gunfire, I like to push on ahead of the team to take out gunners while constantly staying on the move. Keep in mind that you can't get too far away from the team, as our ability to avoid gunfire goes out the window if we are forced into melee combat by a pox / mixed horde. In these situations, its best to fall back to the team or if that's not possible get behind cover to deal with the melee threat first. If you are struggling to avoid gunfire still, you can replace one of the stamina curios with a toughness one AND swap the `Anticipation` node in the skill tree for `Empathic Evasion`, which will allow you to ignore gunfire as long as you activate Scrier's Gaze and hit your shots on enemies. Either node works, but my reasoning behind the preference for `Anticipation` is to cover our main weakness of being forced into melee while under fire. With the extra dodge we give ourselves a bit more wiggle room to avoid both incoming melee / ranged attacks, lowering the likelihood of having to put our gun away to block a small chaff enemy. Anything that can't be easily killed with a burst fire of the rifle can be taken out with Brain Burst (BB). I took `Kinetic Resonance` so that we can reliably take out a Crusher or two if necessary, as this build would struggle against heavily armored targets without this burst damage. With normal peril generating modifiers, you can get off three Brain Bursts before reaching max peril. If you've reached max peril and still need to take out heavy targets, you can quell for a second and fire off a Brain Burst without blowing yourself up (as long as you commit to a target and NOT charge BB by itself without a target already locked on). With this technique in mind, you can get off 5 brain blasts in total before Kinetic Resonance wears off and each BB becomes painfully slow again.Any melee weapon that can be pulled out quickly works with this build, but I went with a Devils Claw sword as it fits well with the Metal Slug theme and I like it's move set / parry ability. I prefer the Catachan Mk VII "Devil's Claw" Sword since it's got nice combos for both hordes and single targets AND the light follow up attack for the parry goes right for the head. Additionally, I like to spam push attacks and lights as a defensive way of approaching enemies I'll need to parry like Ragers.
Combos:
Horde - [Heavy, Light]Single Target - [Light, Heavy, Light]
Defensive Attack (Trying to parry an attack) - [Push Attack, Light]Core Gameplay Loop
Spot gunner positions and assess whether horde density is low enough to push toward them.
Stay with team, using melee to dispatch the chaff blocking your way.
(If mixed horde, use BB to take out heavily armored targets, such as Crushers and Bulwarks)
Equip gun and rush down gunner positions, sliding / dodging to fire bursts into each target while avoid incoming bullets.
(If enemy fire is suppressing you to the point that the second you stop running you'll die, fall back to team / cover and use BB to take out enemy heavy gunners)
