Up to 5-20% Strength based on the charge time of your heavy attacks. Stacks 3 times.
12-24% Rending on Enemy Weak Spot Hit for 3.5s. Stacks 5 times.
Critical hit chance scales by your current heat level up to 27.5-50%. Also increases critical ranged attacks damage by 4-10%.
Up to 7.5-20% Strength scaling with Heat Level.
This is my favorite variation of the Plasma Gun Veteran build. It's great at killing groups of elites, specials, and hordes at the same time while providing amazing boss damage.
Pros: Jack of all trades, great overall damage package in ranged, melee, and with its blitz.
Cons: Not as ammo efficient as the Recon Lasgun, not as much uncapped AoE damage as a Psyker, not as much melee damage as a Zealot. You have to master all of your tools to be able to do as much damage as a good Psyker or Zealot.
Weapons
In this build you may use any weapon with the Uncanny Strike blessing. This can be either the Duelling Sword or the Combat Blade. I primarily run the Mk IV Duelling Sword with the build because of its access to the Thrust blessing and its convenient thrusting heavy attack combo.
Note: On the Duelling Sword I like to ignore Carapace damage because Thrust makes Crushers and Maulers extremely easy to deal with. I instead go for Unyielding for more boss damage and Flak in order to hit a bleed breakpoint on Scab Ragers. The breakpoint is 2 Shredder Frag Grenades w/ a consistent 3-5 stacks of Uncanny Strike. You can also easily hit this breakpoint with other passives that increase DoT damage, but we don't take any of those in this build.
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, Gunner Damage Resist, 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. Stacking toughness curios allows you to mitigate more damage in the long run.
Talents
For your starter you can either go for Close Order Drill and Confirmed Kill or One Motion and Out For Blood. Each option is going to be good, but if you go for Confirmed Kill your toughness regeneration is going to be based on killing Specials and Elites rather than immediate. Out For Blood works really well with this setup because we're going to be doing tons of cleaving and AoE, you will almost always get kills with every Plasma Gun shot in Havoc difficulty. Even so, I prefer the Confirmed Kill route because you're always killing so many elites and specialists in those higher difficulties.
Our Blitz is going to be the Shredder Frag Grenade, often seen as one of the strongest grenades in the game and rightfully so. It provides immediate crowd control, a generous amount of AoE bleed, and you carry just the right number of them. Additionally we don't have to take a point tax as we move into our aura.
Next up we have three of the most powerful talents in the game: Demolition Stockpile, Voice of Command, and Duty and Honor. Demolition Stockpile allows you to run through a map without ever having to loot any grenades, leaving them for your team to pick up. Voice of Command and Duty and Honor will crowd control anything in the game, restore your team's toughness, and overcap your toughness, allowing you to absorb a ton of extra damage without losing health.
Right under that we have two more nodes that synergize with using our ability: Tactical Awareness and For the Emperor! These talents will allow us to spam Voice of Command more often (and you should definitely be spamming it) and it will give our team 10% more melee and ranged weapon damage. Right under that, Iron Will also benefits people who are using Voice of Command with Duty and Honor because it gives you massive toughness damage resistance when you are over a certain toughness threshhold - including while your toughness is overcapped. The synergy in this set of talents is nuts.
Demolition Team is like Demolition Stockpile but it sees much more value in higher difficulty content since there are infinitely more elites and specials.
On the left side of the tree we take Precision Strikes, Fully Loaded, and Superiority Complex to be able to increase our overall damage and ammo efficiency.
Over on the right side of the tree Reciprocity, Desperado, and Trench Fighter Drill make our melee weapon an absolute beast. We skip out on Exploit Weakness because it doesn't really have high value.
Weapons Specialist with Always Prepared and On Your Toes gives us so much value for killing literally anything and just swapping weapons. You'll always be swapping weapons anyways, so you are always benefiting from this. Honestly both Weapons Specialist and Focus Target are amazing keystones that just passively improve your gameplay.
