Plasma Gun Vet for Havoc 40
 Veteran Build - Warhammer 40k: Darktide 

What this build does

With this build, you can move very fast, more or less defend yourself and deal with any threat, but you excel at dealing with special and elite enemies, especially disablers. You also counter any ranged enemies with your smokes and provide huge team-wide bonuses to ammo regen (Survivalist), damage (Focus Target! and Redirect Fire!), survivability (Born Leader) and utility (Field Improvisation).

Duelling Sword

Your dump stat should be either mobility or cleave, so you either lose a bit of movement speed, or a bit of horde damage. I personally prefer high speed, so I dumped cleave

Movement tech: start sprinting, charge your heavy attack, and when releasing it, simultaneously slide. Chain this indefinitely. Releasing the heavy attack gives you a short speed boost, which lasts longer when you slide. Also, this preserves your stamina and counts toward Skirmisher. The only downside is that you have no control over the direction of your slide once you've started sliding, and you cannot really cancel it either. So be deliberate - sliding right into a crusher's overhead is no fun.

Use light attacks for horde and heavy attacks for everything else. Clearing horde is not really your job, but you can at least more or less defend yourself. Most specials and elite enemies die from one heavy attack to the head. Uncanny Strike allows you to deal more damage to Crusher and Scab Mauler. Killing them still takes a few hits tho. Thrust helps when approaching them from afar - you can fully charge the first attack while moving towards them. You don't need to fully charge subsequent heavy attacks - using regular heavy attacks results in better DPS.

I am not using Achlys Mk VI Power Sword because, even though it deals more damage, it makes you move too slow for my taste.

Plasma Gun

Ideally, you want 68 thermal resistance and 72 charge rate. A thermal resistance of 68 or higher gives you 8 shots from 0 to 100 heat, and charge rate affects your fire rate. So, you want no less than 68 thermal resistance, and all the rest goes in charge rate. Never use charged shots. You cannot explode yourself - when you attempt to fire a normal shot while overheating, it will simply refuse to fire and vent automatically. In case you don't know: you can manually vent by using this weapon's special attack.

Again, most enemies will reliably die in one hit - some will need a headshot, and for some the bodyshot will do. Only a few enemies will take two headshots. Generally, if an enemy takes more than two headshots to kill, you should not be using the Plasma Gun against them at all.

This weapon has insane pierce, and it can kill multiple enemies in one hit if they line up.

Gets Hot! and Rising Heat make the weapon deadlier the more heat you have. These effects, along with crits and the fact that some of your talents aren't active 100% of the time, may cause some enemies to usually die in two hits but occasionally require just one.

Curios

Toughness synergizes better with your talents, so you should either use 2 toughness + 1 health, or even 3 toughness. You should not use wound curios - these work as a crutch to compensate for a lack of skill, and they make healing stims less effective on you. If you are still learning how to play, you can take one wound curio, but do not take more than one. Stamina curios technically work best when you are not taking any damage at all, but in all seriousness - if you are capable of not taking any damage on havoc40, then you are probably not reading this guide. So do not take stamina curios, or at least do not take more than one.

Perks for curios are up to your personal preference. Those that are not mentioned are quite useless, imo.

• Combat Ability Regeneration reduces your ability cooldown by roughly a second each. Doesn't sound like much, but it can be really helpful in a clutch.
• Health or Toughness - moderately useful
• Revive Speed - quite useful even with Only In Death Does Duty End, because sometimes your ult is on CD when you need to res someone, and also your ult only affects knocked down allies - so if someone is hangling on the edge, or got netted - you will still need to help them by hand, and revive speed affects that.
• Damage Resistance (Gunners) - good to have one. I would not take more than one on vet, because it's your job to kill them, and you also have Smoke Grenade to counter them.
• Damage Resistance (Snipers) - I personally don't use this, but some people do.
• Stamina Regeneration - used to be almost mandatory when vet had long stamina regen delay. Less useful now, but I still like it.

Talent Tree

Smoke Grenade allows you to counter all sorts of ranged enemies by blocking their line of sight - they will still finish their current salvo but won't start a new one. Ranged enemies are very deadly in high havocs, so it helps a lot, and this even affects humanoid bosses that have ranged weapons on them. Due to Demolition Stockpile and Demolition Team you will restore grenades quite often, and Grenade Tinkerer makes smoke clouds last twice as long. Try to keep in mind where your team is likely to move over the next half a minute, and throw smoke there to maximize its usefulness. Do not pick up grenades from the map; instead, leave them for teammates who have no means of regenerating grenades.

Field Improvisation helps your whole team and is one of the reasons to pick vet in the first place. Each ammo crate will allow Ogryns with Frag Bomb to potentially throw up to 4 of them in a short period of time, which might help in a clutch. Since your grenades replenish themselves, try not to take ammo from ammo crates unless absolutely necessary. If you are taking ammo from the crate, keep in mind that you will also get 2 grenades from it, so you can safely throw excess ones before taking ammo.

Survivalist is still good even after its nerf.

Voice of Command and Duty and Honour are mandatory. Now that Only In Death Does Duty End no longer increases your cooldown, we can take it as well. The ult is really good and can be used in many situations:

• A teammate died - res them
• Tough enemies have surrounded your team - create some space
• Mutant is about to slam your teammate into the ground, or Chaos Spawn grabbed you ally - stugger the enemy to free your teammate
• You or your teammates have just taken a few hits or are about to take some - use your ult to recover toughness or gain gold toughness
• Poxwalker is approaching, and your team cannot push it away with melee - your ult can do that instead

So Voice of Command is quite strong and is another reason to pick vet in the first place.

Born Leader helps your teammates by providing a consistent source of toughness regeneration. Might be less useful with good teammates, but nice to have anyway.

Focus Target! is really nice, but to make proper use of it, you should probably install the Auto Mark mod, because marking every enemy manually is tedious. Focused Fire increases max stacks to 6, which does not make much sense on its own, but it also affects Redirect Fire! by increasing its max stacks to 6, and this is very useful. Focus Target! marks do not stack, but Redirect Fire! buff does. So, if you kill 6 enemies in quick succession, and each of them had just 1 stack of Focus Target! , then you and your whole team will get 6 stacks of Redirect Fire!. I used Uptime2 mod, and it shows that in practice for me average Redirect Fire! stacks are around 5.8-5.9 throughout the game, so this is a consistent team-wide 15% damage buff.

Duck and Dive and Fully Loaded aren't mandatory and can be swapped for something else if you wish. I am deliberately not taking Reciprocity, because its uptime for me is not that great.

Tips

• One heavy headshot can kill a Mutant. But depending on your active buffs, you may need to charge your heavy a bit for Thrust to activate, otherwise it will not be enough damage. Using your ranged against mutants feels like a waste - 2 or even 3 shots are usually needed to kill.
• Pox Hound has a 300% melee damage taken modifier, and thus easily dies from 1 heavy. From Plasma Gun you might need more than 1 headshot tho, again depending on active buffs, so I prefer killing them in melee when possible.
• Crusher falls on the ground if you hit them in the head with Plasma Gun. It takes too many shots to actually kill them with Plasma Gun tho, so only use it for knocking them on the ground, and for dealing damage use your melee.
• Scab Mauler, Scab Rager and Dreg Rager can be killed from both melee and ranged. You should preserve ammo and kill them in melee, if not under pressure.
• Reaper should be killed with your Plasma Gun, cause he takes more than one melee headshot to kill, and will just melt you while you are trying to melee him.
• Your team is expected to deal with hordes and bosses, and you are expected to protect them from elites, specials and ranged enemies. When boss appears, you should mark it for your allies to deal more damage. Your damage against bosses is decent, but not that great, so you can land some hits on the boss, but always keep an eye on other priority targets, and be ready to retreat from boss and deal with them instead.