The Blender
 Hive Scum Build - Warhammer 40k: Darktide 

Playstyle

This build blends through hordes, flak armor, and carapace with frequent heavy attack one shot breakpoints on most enemies. It has a surprising amount of durability and very high toughness regeneration. You'll want to get up in the enemies face as much as possible and dodge often to stay up in the frontline for as long as possible. Watch out for Crushers and Maulers. You can kill them as fast as they can kill you. Successful dodges up your damage and can push even higher HP breakpoints. Hit your stim on cooldown to keep stacks of Chemical Dependency and hit Rampage! whenever you see armor or bosses. With everything up simultaneously, you can one shot mutants, maulers, all ragers, reapers, captains, anything in flak armor and shred through bosses. Toss your Blackout grenade into groups to keep stacks of Chem Toxin up to further increase your damage and survivability. Kill these enemies to get your stim off cooldown faster, or leave them alive to buff you further so you can take down a much tougher enemy easier. Soon, all your enemies will be finely blended smoothie.

Melee Weapon

The Improvised Shivs are integral to the build. Light attacks clear hordes and deal great boss damage. Heavy attacks deal great armored damage. Either mark works fine here. Perks go into crit chance and crit damage to keep Channelled Devastation as high as possible and compound with Chem Enhanced. Blessings are Flesh Tearer, to further increase your damage over time alongside Chem Toxin and to activate your other melee blessing, Mercy Killer, which stacks along with all the raw damage buffs the build gets in addition to the weak spot damage buffs from The Sweet Spot and Precision Violence. These two Blessings are essential to hit the one shot heavy attack breakpoints.

Ranged Weapon

Use any ranged weapon you like. I wouldn't recommend anything that takes too much of your time, as you'll need to be using your melee weapon for the vast majority of play. I do recommend the Bolt Pistol for the extra explosive radius and occasional long ranged special takedown when your backline is overwhelmed.

Blitz

Take Blackout as your Blitz. You'll have a large supply of grenades from the start, tossing them in between melee attacks is easy and involves no downtime at all and you'll constantly be generating more grenades from your kills. This is one of the best ways to quickly get some stacks of Chem Toxin up on enemies when you're first rushing into a fight and those stacks will be maintained by your melee kills.

Aura

Take Ruffian for your Aura. Most of this build has raw damage increases and Ruffian further compounds that. This can be flexed for Anarchist but it has diminishing returns as you'll already be sitting at max stacks of Chanelled Devastation from Chem Enhanced.

Ability

Rampage! is the crux of this build. Take Chanelled Aggression, Boiling Blood and Pulverizing Strikes. What this will do is everytime you activate Rampage! you'll gain +50% melee power, +25% rending, +20% attack speed, +50% cleave and 25% damage reduction. Attacks landed increase the duration, and attacks against Elites and Monstrosities further increase it's duration. Damage can be increased the longer you remain in Rampage! up to +25% melee attack power after 10 seconds. I don't recommend Forge's Bellow because this can accidentally negatively affect your ability to keep Rampage! active and the talent point is more usefully spent on keeping your melee damage high in other places. If you find it helps you get out of a dangerous situation when Rampage! wears off, you could swap Burst of Energy for Forge's Bellow as they are both a "get out of jail free card".

Keystone

Take Chemical Dependency and it's upgrade Chem Enhanced. This will allow you to use Rampage! more often and after two stacks of Chem Enchanced you will be at max stacks of Chanelled Devastation, keeping your melee damage as high as possible.

Curios

This build runs with two toughness curios and one stamina. Each curio has ability cooldown, toughness, and gunner damage reduction. The high investment into toughness pays off from all the toughness regeneration this build creates. Ability cooldown is to maximize your melee prowess through Rampage!. Three stacks of gunner resistance brings down the skill ceiling, helping tremendously with survivability. One stamina curio is enough to keep you dodging, blocking, and sliding.

Stimm Lab

Fully max out Barrage into Tank, further maximizing toughness regen and survivability, and fully max out Wildfire into Fury for damage and rending. As long as you're killing targets affected by Chem Toxin, you'll have no trouble keeping max stacks of Chemical Dependency and you'll get the most out of your stim. It's possible to spend most of a mission under the effects of your stim even with the long cooldown.

Author's Notes

I've been playing Warhammer 40,000: Darktide since it released as early access on Steam and have many years experience in Warhammer: Vermintide 2 before that. This is my first build I've posted to Games Lantern and I'm quite proud of how it has turned out. It's a lot of fun just blending my way through all the crazy stuff Auric throws at me and I hope you all have as much fun with this build as I have had!