John-Darktide | Krak Grenade | Infiltrate | Weapons Specialist (OUTDATED)
 Veteran Build - Warhammer 40k: Darktide 

John's Darktide

This build is a modified offshoot of @ripthejack3r 's Invincible Vet build with more focus on getting teammates back up from immobilizers or downs as well as maxing out as much toughness DR to stay as tanky as possible. you will be focusing primarily on Melee with your Catachan Mk VI Combat Blade and swapping to your Agripinaa Mk IX Vigilant Autogun for priority specialists or gunners

Playstyle

your ability Infiltrate is an extremely important ability as it lets you easily recover a teammate with little to no resistance while also fully recovering all your toughness just like Voice of Command. infiltrate also has the ability to suppress any and all enemies nearby when you exit stealth giving your teammates precious time needed to escape from swarms of enemies. This suppress effect can be purposely used on swarms of gunners or in packs of Ragers to quickly stun them, giving your team some much needed breathing room. You Ideally want to have a "rubber band" playstyle where you will use infiltrate (outside of team down situations) to quickly move towards enemies such as gunner nests to quickly suppress and spread bleed stacks or outright kill. then make your way back towards your group and use your range weapon to remove any still living ranged enemies or approaching specialists.

Passive Tree

for our passive tree we start by taking the middle path for Close Order Kill for a massive 11% toughness DR for each ally in Coherency and Confirmed Kill for huge chunks of toughness regen. Taking Krak Grenade gives us a good Burst damage option for monstrosities and can also interrupt their grabs getting your ally back in the fight faster. they are also great for maps where crushers and maulers are abundant providing an instant kill and a slight stagger to nearby enemies. 

We then path to the right towards the Close and Kill aura so that we can take the Agile Engagement node which gives a massive 25% damage boost for melees on range kill and vice versa. this pairs extremely well with the keystone we will be selecting. we will stay on the right branch and take Leave no one Behind which gives us faster assist speeds, faster movement speed when moving towards incapacitated allies, and also provides any teammates we revive with a 33% DR after we revive them to ensure they can return to cover. when taking our Infiltrate Ability we will take the Hunter's Resolve Support passive to give us a massive 50% toughness DR for 10 seconds after exiting stealth. 

Finishing up our tree, we will take both Reciprocity and Close Quarters Killzone for some much welcomed bonus crit chance on successful dodge and some extra close damage after exiting infiltrate to quickly dispatch any nearby enemies. Taking Desperado gives a big 10% melee crit chance to push our base crit chance to roughly 40% on top of giving us a 25% Finesse bonus which boosts both our critical damage and weak spot damage for our knife. from here you can either take the Exploit Weakness passive to make crushers more vulnerable for your team or the +25 Toughness as this is a stretch branch. After your choice, we are taking Trench fighting drill for some extra melee attack speed. Finally, Our keystone is the Weapons Specialist. This keystone extremely well with Agile Engagement as mentioned earlier since getting a kill with one weapon will provide stacks which will buff your other weapon when swapping to them. This gives us a massive 33% crit chance for our range weapons for up to 10 shots. and our melee with get 15% attack speed and 10% dodge speed and distance letting us dance in and around hordes of enemies with little to no problem. for support nodes we are taking Always Prepared for situations where you don't have time to reload your weapon and On your Toes for a 20% toughness regen when you swap to a weapon with any stack of weapons specialist. 

Using our last few points we head over to the middle branch and take Born Leader. this passive is great for team survivability since any toughness you personally earn (exception of Infiltrate toughness and on your toes toughness) will be shared to your allies in coherency letting them soak up more damage if needed. Continuing down, Tactical Awareness is our ability regen passive since our job is to try and eliminate any and all specialists before they have time to close the gap on our team. Finishing up on the middle branch we take Iron Will for another 50% toughness DR as long as our toughness is above 75%. Finally we take Bring them down to deal 20% more damage to all Ogryn type enemies and monstrosities. By now you should have 2 remaining passive points that are entirely flex points. I personally took Precision strikes on the left branch for 30% weak spot damage but you can take some of the grenade regen passives if that's more your playstyle.

Weapons

we are using the Catachan Mk VI Combat Blade with it's sweeping heavy slashes and pairing it with flesh tearer for bleed stacks to quickly stack damage on unyielding type enemies and for some horde control. The combat knives are also great at maneuverability since charging the heavy attack gives a big movement speed bonus. if you pair this with Infiltrates 25% bonus and Leave no one Behind's 20% when moving towards incapacitated allies you can fly across an entire arena and push that dog or remove that net with minimal damage done to your teammate.

As for our Ranged weapon, this option is entirely up to personal preference. I decided to go with a Vigilant Autogun, specifically the Agripinaa Mk IX Vigilant Autogun as critical hits with a burst weapon has a very useful interaction. On trigger pull with a burst fire weapon, if the shot lands as a critical, all the shots in that burst will be critical hits. this is great since our blessing Headhunter gives us a massive 20% per weakspot hit. if your first burst does not crit you will have a 50% critical hit chance for your next shot. Paired with your keystone and you have quick swap after a couple melee kills for a bonus 33% critical chance per stack of Weapons Specialist and 5s of 25% bonus damage from Agile Engagement. 

Curios

As many people with hundreds or even thousands of hours will tell you, Vets should take triple toughness Curios since they not only have the highest base toughness out of the 4 classes meaning they will gain more use out of the % bonuses. they are also able to stack multiple different toughness DR passives from their skill tree to absolutely tank hits. for the curios perks, I decided with 2 10% revive speed nodes and 2 4% combat regen nodes to have more Infiltrate uptime and spend less time in the revive animation. all nodes are slotted with a 5% toughness node for obvious reasons. then for the last 2 perk nodes I personally decided on 5% health since the extra health is helpful for when a sniper gets a lucky shot on you or a pox burster got to you when you were out of stamina. though you can also pick 1 of the many 20% DR against whichever type of enemy seems to be giving you the most problems.

Strengths

From my hundreds of hours of playing this specific build I noticed that it excels at situations where a teammate might of gotten caught up by a surprise horde and got nabbed by either a hound and trapper. being able to quickly close distances on priority targets or incapacitated teammates can make a huge difference between leaving an encounter with only a wound's worth of health missing or having a full team wipe. This build is also extremely strong in monstrosity Maelstroms since the extremely high Crit/Weak spot multipliers and the stacking bleed damage will have you cutting though nurgle beasts, chaos spawns, and especially plague Ogryns with ease. This build also excels at clutch moments since Infiltrate gives a free 8 seconds of breathing room to completely reposition or make great strides towards your captured teammates

Weaknesses

Even though the combat blade can cut though a horde with little to no resistance due to bleed, you have to build those stacks up first. this extra time it takes to cut down a walker horde gives enemy gunners or immobilizer specialists extra time to close distance and sneak up on you. Bulwark or crusher ogryns that are hiding inside a pack can also throw a wrench into your horde clear capabilities since their shield or carapace armor will cause your attack to stop on hit reducing the amount of enemies you can hit with a single swipe which could mean half the horde you could of stacked bleed on are still healthy and swinging back.