[Havoc 40 Meta] Hyper Carry Dog Build
 Arbites Build - Warhammer 40k: Darktide 

This guide will not go through combos and movesets of the weapons, as it is an advanced guide aimed for high Havoc players.

There are many ways to build Arb in high Havoc. However, if you are looking for a build that can handle all situations with no discernible weakness, this is for you. This build focuses on picking all the best talents the Arbites has, maximizing his damage output and survivability. Here is a rundown on how you should approach different threats in Havoc.

Melee Threats:

By using the Arb Maul and using many of the right-side talents, you are able to dispatch all melee enemies with ease in three hits or fewer. With the True Grit talent, you are provided extra safety, allowing you to survive multiple overheads, which are one of the only ways you can die in melee high havoc. You should not use Castigator in melee unless you feel heavily pressured by a lot of ragers and crushers. 

Ranged Threats:

When not under heavy melee pressure, you can order your dog to harass gunner lines. Since you have Go Get Em, your dog is likely going to stay at the gunner line and keep killing ranged enemies (including small range enemies who you cannot ping, but are no less dangerous). This allows you to keep fighting what's in front of you, while your dog thins out ranged enemies. 

Your shotgun is extremely powerful at close to mid-range. The spread pattern allows it to kill clumped-up enemies at once. Remember to use your special shells as much as possible, as they do the same damage as normal ammo, but refill all shells upon ammo pickup. This is insane ammo value in Havoc. 

Castigator stance can be used offensively to route gunner lines. No other abilities, save for Chorus Zealot, can simply walk up to a fully stacked gunner line and press a button to win. But the trick is to have the game sense of knowing when to do it.  Even though you are invincible for 10 seconds, if you cant kill all the shooters by yourself and your team cannot follow up, you will get shot down when stance is over. You want to get as close as possible without stance using covers, and activate stance to maximize the time you are at closed range with the shooters, where your shotguns do massive damage and you have melee option. There are also many situations where you want to pop stance to kill some shooters, but save some of the stance time to get back to cover with your team. Stance is on a short enough cooldown that you can do this in short bursts to clean up ranged threats.

Monstrosities and Captains

Against all unyielding, order your dog to pounce on the boss. Do not underestimate the DPS your dog does to a boss. With this build, you can easily top boss DPS and half of it comes from the dog. When your team is not focusing the boss, your dog can still generate DPS provided you currently do not have other threats you want to eliminate. Remember to use remote det when dog is clinching the boss. Otherwise, your arb maul with relentless strikes does high damage, and you can mag-dump Beast or Plogryn in their weak spot if you have the opening, as your shotgun does very high unyielding damage.

Against captains, same deal. Keep in mind they can be staggered by your remote det even when their shield is up. Otherwise keep beating them up with your arb maul and sic the dog on them.

Specialists

Dog is extremly effective against specialists. They usually have low enough hp that you can order your dog to pounce on a different target as soon as it lands on the specialist, and the special will die to the DOT as it gets up. However, there are many situations where you want to stop the special from doing their attack, in which case you will need to use your shotgun. Even though sometimes the gun will not kill due to distance, it will stagger the special enough and allows the dog to follow up and kill it.

DOG MICRO

Dog management has a high skill ceiling. A lot of it comes down to game senese, knowing when to send your dog away or keep the dog close to tag team. When you are fighting a mixed horde, try to order your dog to pounce on different humanoid enemies in rapid succession, as it maximizes the CC time and damage spread. Pouncing on a humanoid also makes landing remote det easier. In general, during mix horde, you don't want to let your dog pounce on ogryns and put the dog on a 3 second cooldown unless you are looking to open a bulwark. If you have the Healthbar mod, you also dont want dog to pounce on low hp target most of the time, but it can be a handy way to summon your dog back from its gunner killing mission. 

When diving a gun line, dog micro is equally as important. Lets say you have Gunners A, B, and C standing from three different points. Order you dog to pounce on A, you shoot at B and C to surpress them. As soon as A is pounced, tell your dog to go for B as you send your next shot on C for the kill. Then you shift your focus back to A and kill it as it gets up, while your dog kills B. This is an arbitrary example, but this kind of micro is what allows you to kill spread-out ranged enemies with minimal retaliation.