With this build, Zane is the jack of all trades, master of some! This build provides High and consistent DPS by nabbing effectively all the gun damage increasing skills without trading much, if anything in the way of group-utility or survivability. While this build still rewards running and gunning, it’s also perfectly happy to dig into cover. Without as much kill-skill reliance, this build does well in any encounter.
Additionally, this build isn’t tied to any specific gear or weapons (though there are some recommendations below), making it suitable for many preferences and playstyles.
Type: DPS / Survival + Support
Level of Build: 50
Specific Gear Needed: No
The Action Skills:
Barrier and Digi-Clone: Short cooldown, high uptime, high survivability and more. Generally, you’ll want to stagger these, though in some cases dropping both to stack DPS is a good idea.
Recommended Augments:
Barrier: Nanites or Some ■■■■■ (always) and Charged Relay (more speed to synergize with Violent Momentum and faster reloads means more DPS uptime). If you’re in a getting hit on all sides, swap Relay for All-Rounder.
Digi-Clone: Binary-System and Digital Distribution. Binary rewards swapping places with the clone, which you’ll be doing to trigger the Double Barrel DPS increase and regen shields from Quick Breather. Digital Distribution because sometimes, ■■■■■ gets hairy out there. NOTE: Apparently, Schadenfreude isn’t working correctly at the moment. If and when it is, I recommend swapping Binary-System with it.
The Skills:
Under Cover:
5/5 Adrenaline: We want to deploy your skills early and often.
5/5 Ready for Action: We want our shields up as much as possible for Confident Confidence. More important than the recharge delay is the recharge rate we gain here.
1/1 Confident Confidence: Passive damage and accuracy.
Doubled Agent:
5/5 Synchronicity: When a skill is up, so is your damage. More skills = more damage. Weee!
3/3 Praemunitus: Larger mags = more DPS uptime.
5/5 Borrowed Time: The longer our skills are out, the more many of our skills benefit us. Additionally, this combines with Adrenaline to allow us to maintain almost constant staggered skill uptime.
5/5 Donnybrook: More Gun Damage and health regen. What’s not to like?
1/1 Fractal Frags: Zane has an awful lot of grenades that he never uses. Let’s use some. This will sometime chain off kills and the clone goes HAM with grenades, to boot.
1/1 Quick Breather: As explained in Ready for Action, we want our shields topped off as often as possible.
1/1 Old-U: A get out of jail free card, especially on Mayhem 3.
3/3 Supersonic Man: Synergy with Violent Momentum, plus faster is always better.
1/1 Boom, Enhance: Make all things Digi-Clone better, and put our grenades to work.
1/1 Double Barrel: Yes, the clone can be a little stupid about shooting some guns. But this also nets us another +20% damage when we swap position with him!
(OPTIONAL: 1/3 Pocket full of Grenades: If Boom, Enhance and Fractal Frags are tapping you out of grenades too often, pull a point from Praemunitus and throw it here. With Death Follows Close, this’ll regen all the grenades you ever need to keep your clone fat and happy.)
Hitman:
5/5 Violent Momentum: It’s a free bonus of 20%+ damage just for moving about, which we’ll almost always be doing.
5/5 Cool Hand: Faster reloads = more DPS uptime. Don’t sleep on this.
1/1 Death Follows Close: You may have noticed we have a couple of pretty decent kill skills (Donnybrook, Cool Hand, Fractal Frags, and whatever we pick up from your class mods). Let’s make them better.
Gear Recommendations:
Weapons:
Whatever you like! I’ll update this with more specific recommendations as the community figures out the cream of the crop is. Personally, I like the Night Hawkin, Maggie, Doc, Flakker, Laser-Sploder, and Lyuda quite a bit.
Class Mods:
Anything with + Weapon Damage and points in useful skills. As for legendary mods, I’ve been liking the Executor as it provides a suite of useful kill-skills, including the one unique to it. A good roll on a Shockerator mod is fine, though I find the skills it buffs less impactful.
Artifacts:
Anything with useful damage boosts, skill cooldown, or health regen is useful here. I’ve liked the Last Stand Otto Idol.
Grenade: Anything that the clone, being somewhat stupid, can throw effectively. Quasar grenades have been very good to me!
Shield: So far, no particular shield has really stood out to me. I tend to uses The Transformer, since it’s electric absorption can be handy (LOL Killavolt), and sometimes I’ll go stand in my own Quasars to gain infini-shield.