The Madness - Heavy Sword & Needle Pistol
 Hive Scum Build - Warhammer 40k: Darktide 

THE MADNESS is a crit-focused Hive Scum build. Wielding the Crowbar and leveraging Chem Toxin's insane damage into all enemy armour types, we batter our way through our foes, bludgeoning and poisoning our way to victory. We also take the Stimm Pack ability, opening up a variety of ways for us to provide impactful team-wide buffs. 

RECOMMENDED WEAPONS:

Melee: Crowbar, Tactical Axe, Shivs, Combat Knife, Heavy Sword

Ranged: Needle Pistols, Bolt Pistols

This variant of THE MADNESS takes the Heavy Sword Mk VI with Chained Deathblow & Perfect Strike blessings. This build is driven by the Perfect Strike blessing, essentially giving us infinite cleave on crits (yes, even you Bulwark Shields and Crushers). Perfect Strike, in combination with our  Chem Toxin nodes (Coated Weaponry, Splash Damage, Virulent Strain) allows us to proliferate enemy packs with both blade and poison. As this build is crit-hungry, we take Chained Deathblow for a significant +20% boost to our crit chance on weakspot kills. Aim for the head brothers & sisters. 

BLITZ: BOOM BRINGER

Boom bringer is our point-and-click armour-deletion tool. This ability is cracked. Have fun :) 

Tip: If playing in a coordinated group, communicating when you use this may help your teammates (read: Vet) avoid throwing nades needlessly into a pack that's about to turn to mist. It hurts their feelings, even if they don't show it. 

ABILITY: STIMM PACK 

Stimm pack brings valuable team utility with innate anti-corruption, combined with team-wide buffs (and you can pick the flavour!). We take Fast Acting Stimms and modifiers here, adding strong offensive capabilities to the ability through Booby Trap, effectively turning the stimm pack into a regenerating Chem Toxin bomb. 

The Stimm Lab set up is really down to preference and should be adjusted to suit the team comp and/or map modifiers. I think strength & rending is likely the most universally useful team buff giving you more punch vs. the enemies that are hardest to take down (expect the undying love and gratitude of any soulblaze psyker in your group). 

Tip: On blight maps, general wisdom is to stop nodes (often just taking one minor buff) for a faster stimm cooldown, leaning into the corruption immunity to help mitigate how shite the modifier is :>

KEYSTONE: CHEM DEPENDENCY (CD)

CD provides crit chance, toughness damage reduction and ability cooldown (this is less useful for us on this build due to Practiced Deployment). With a max. 45s stimm, maintaining 3 stacks is a breeze and enables us to be more strategic with our Stimm Pack usage & placement. 

ALTERNATE TALENTS: 

This talent tree is 30/30 and is my preferred way of running this build.

To free up talent point(s), I'd suggest dropping: Hyper-Critical 

CURIOS: 

The curios listed above are my preference for this build however this is based on how I like to play. 

Use whatever best fits your play style however I find the most value in the set ups below, YMMV:

2 x Toughness / 1 x Stamina

2 x Toughness / 1 x HP

3 x Toughness