Arbites
Block Breaks push Enemies, 15s cooldown. 15-30% Block Cost.
10-25% Rending vs Staggered Enemies.
14-20% Strength for 5s when every pellet in a shot hits the same enemy.
14-20% Damage on Second, Third and Fourth shots in a Salvo.
This build is aimed to maximize block & crowd control with Shock Maul & Shield and the Shock mine. We are not taking high voltage, the aim here is to maximize the use of the block capabilities and insanely good push attack of the MkVI. Lone Wolf nets us an extra Shock Mine, and also grants regeneration to our blitz. The added DPS and toughness damage reduction are just cherries on top.
The Mastiff can save your ass from a lot of things, namely Pox Hounds, and serve as a very good CC tool in and of itself, but this build has a theme, and it's not to use your Mastiff.
Another adaptation is to switch in the Arbites Grenades which can clear special hordes really quickly but the regeneration from Lone Wolf is not enough to use them reliably often.
We are taking 2x Stamina Curios due to the very good base Toughness of arbiter + the 2 mandatory 25 Toughness nodes Arbites has to path through anyway. We should have enough Toughness Regen Regen (Up Close, Force of Will + Concussive, Walk it Off, Commendation of Damnation, Will of the Lex) and damage reduction (Suppression Protocol, Lone Wolf, Forceful) to get by just fine.
We spend Stamina to regen Toughness (Walk it Off) to fuel ourselves while killing things for more Stamina (Rapid Movement). Staggering everything in a large area around us with the special attack from the Shock Maul & Shield. This is also why we need the massive Stamina pool from the Curios, spamming the Push Attack is more than just a viable strategy, if can instantly top off your Toughness again in dicey situations via Walk it Off.
Charge in using Break the Line and then fire off your Special Attack for a wide area CC that leaves everything debuffed for you & your team to destroy. We further regain tons of Toughness though all the other means mentioned in the Curios section, letting us focus on being the battering ram this build was designed to be. This build also has+150% Cleave with almost 100% uptime (Drive them back + Target Acquired), letting you mow regular down hordes easily.
Soulguilt Scan is a massive boost to everything, granting us 16% stacks with almost constant uptime. You want to go for Weakspots anyway for the stagger (Concussive), might as well take the free Strength with it.
Street Smarts is a flex-point, you can remove it and reassign anywhere you want. I just like to dodge a lot for positioning.
Forceful nets us 25% damage resistance and a 50% Impact buff, plus more making this even more of a no-brainer to pick:
How do we have almost 100% uptime on all of these? Because it is so easy for us to just stagger 10 enemies very quickly with all the tools at our disposal: Break the Line, Shockmaul & Shield Special Attack and just regular stagger from our very high impact attacks. And that's not counting the stacks we get from just blocking attacks with the shield. You can pretty much go from 0-10 in under a second in some situations.
Why not 100%? Because we want to spend our stacks to get the 25% strength from Arbites Vigilant.
MkVI Shock Maul and Shield is the obvious choice here. Personally, I find it to be the better shield. Push Attacks are your friend, the wide sweep is a great tool to keep hordes in Check and your Toughness/Stamina topped up. Opportunist for even more Rending, Last Guard for the CC and Block efficiency. Alternatively you could use All or Nothing (for example with Retaliatory Force to not lose too much Block Efficiency) if you like to empty out your Stamina pool before going ham on enemies.
https://darktide.gameslantern.com/builds/9f3f8781-134b-4d01-aef6-6f89cfdbbbfc/strap-a-shock-mine-to-your-mastiff
