Arbites
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.
3.5-5% Critical Chance for every 10% of magazine spent during continuous fire. Stacks 5 times.
Ranged hits add 1-4 stacks of bleed to enemies.
This evolved from a boss killer build that would have good horde clear. I gave up maces because they have major cleave issues in havoc. This is where fire axe comes in. With brutal momentum, you don't really need cleave, and high finesse goes well with extra crit chance from left side of arbites tree.
Rashad Mk III Combat Axe and Antax Mk V Combat Axe are almost identical. They have identical combos, only special attack differs, which I have found no use for. The difference comes to stats. Rashad has finesse slider, and Antax has cleave. Most people go for Rashad, which is justified. I can't tell if extra cleave from Antax helps, but I tried it in maelstroms and it works just fine, you don't sacrifice too much damage, but sometimes crushers will take an extra hit.
Horde clear: spam light attacks
Carapace and shielded bosses (twins): spam heavy attacks
Bulwark: use light or heavy attacks depending on what will give you a better arc to bypass the shield.
Blessings:
Locke Mk IIb Spearhead Boltgun is an undisputed champion of boss killing. It also performs very well against specialists, snipers, ranged grunts. It can even wipe a small group of crushers or maulers, though I would not do that unless I have too much ammo on my hands.
Blessings are standard for this role, I don't have anything to say about it. You don't need brittleness on unyielding and you don't need blessings that will buff your damage on kills or buff a single shot when you hold aim. You unload your entire mag at one enemy.
Because setup is too complex. If you have teammates that know what to do and will not kite a monstrosity away from you, then your teammates also probably run skullcrusher and will apply the debuff for you.
True Grit is good but there's not many talents in this build that can be skipped. With castigators stance, you'd rather take cooldown reduction and use it more often and take even less health damage, including effects that bypass your toughness. If you want to fit it in, you will probably have to give up Ammo Belt or Priority Endowment
Castigator's Stance offers more value at single point than Break the Line, in my opinion. Especially if you can fit cooldown reduction.
Forceful is a better keystone for pure melee builds, but Execution Order gives us more crit and monstrosity damage.
Retaliatory Force is more useful than Weight of the Lex for combat axe, because you rarely use heavy attacks (only for carapace and captains). If you, for whatever reason, decide to use this tree with a different weapon, you can swap Retaliatory Force for Weight of the Lex.
Concussive is overrated and most of the time doesn't do anything.
Not Far Behind works independently from Execution Order and will trigger from any enemies, even if they aren't highlighted. So I feel like it's better value than Target the Weak. We don't melee monstrosities, and we would need Concussive to make them count as staggered, so it would be 2 wasted talent points on nodes that are not very useful. Target the Weak will still let you sometimes kill Crusher faster if you get unlucky with crits.
This technique deserves it's own paragraph because it makes Arbites dog detonation actually useful. Since we already have a bolter with bleed blessing in our build, no harm in applying it. Switch to your Locke Mk IIb Spearhead Boltgun , then activate Remote Detonation , and the shock will quickly max out bleed stacks on all enemies in range. You can use this to quickly kill a dense pack of specialists or help your teammates who's far away. Just remember to give your dog an order to pounce a target and get in range.
