Table of Contents
Class
Weapons
Curios
Talent Tree
Description
This is a jack-of-all-trades melee build that's pretty comfy to play. It's reasonably effective against everything and has nice utility talents like Medicae Servo-Skull for team support and Gunsmith to ensure your sidearm is always loaded.
Redline Capacitors, Advanced Power Management, Moebian Conductor, Voltaic Restoration, Surge-Extension, and Satiated Steel all feed into the playstyle of using Chordclaw Strike on a regular basis for general damage buffs and toughness recovery. Spamming ability is fine when the situation calls for it, but ideally you want to wait 5 seconds between uses to get full value from Satiated Steel and Surge-Extension, and to have more consistent uptime on the damage buffs. Press the ability button without holding to execute the cleaving Axial Slash. Briefly hold the ability button before releasing to execute the normal Chordclaw Strike, which is better for single-target damage.
Branx Mk VI Mechanicus Power Sword doesn't have the greatest selection of blessings, but Superiority is the best available; it gives a significant strength bonus with decent uptime on Auric/Havoc missions. If you're playing a lower difficulty, you might not get enough specialist/elite spawns to maintain Superiority, so you could take Devastating Strike or whatever you want instead. For the second blessing, I recommend Chained Deathblow because it will be active most of the time for a modest DPS boost and helps you proc Power Redistribution Uplink more often.
Branx Mk XI Phosphor Blast Pistol is used for specialist sniping as well as softening up crushers and bosses/monstrosities with +15% brittleness. Man-Stopper allows it to punch through hordes to hit priority targets in the back, and also apply the phosphor debuff to more targets per shot. Surgical increases the rate of Man-Stopper procs and improves average damage. The pistol has faster sprint speed than the sword, so swap to your pistol for increased mobility when not actively meleeing or blocking.
Thanks to Gunsmith, you will rarely if ever have to manually reload your pistol. Gunsmith rounds up when determining how much ammo to auto-reload each second after its initial 5 second delay, so it will load 1 round per second on the Branx Mk XI Phosphor Blast Pistol. This is more than twice the advertised rate of 7.5% max ammo reloaded per second. Your gun will be fully reloaded from an empty magazine in 11 seconds, assuming you don't shoot during that time.
Shockline Breach Protocol works well in this build because Branx Mk VI Mechanicus Power Sword starts its horde-clear combo with a push attack.
You can path through Servo-Core Recharge Engine instead of Sureshot Cogitator Sync for more toughness sustain.
Surge-Extension,Shockline Breach Protocol, and Galvanized Coating are flex points. Any of these can be swapped for different things you might want, such as Ammunition-Restoration Pod, Purgator Servo-Skull, Noospheric Command, Adaptive Combat Calibration, Adaptive Combat Engram, Hydraulic Impact, and/or Capacitor Reclamation Loop.
I opted for cooldown reduction perks instead of revive speed on curios, since the build has Medicae Servo-Skull for emergency revives. You can take revive speed, health, gunner resist, or whatever you want instead.
Suggested attack combos for the Branx Mk VI Mechanicus Power Sword:
Horde clear: push-attack into (light > heavy > repeat), reset with push-attack as needed for stagger
Single target: heavy > light x2 > heavy > repeat OR heavy > block-cancel > repeat OR spam heavy