I’ve been using the Driver COM these days, and the Phasezerker before that, but before THAT I was running a full melee spec. I still have a very good Breaker, Unleash the Dragon, and decent melee guns. (although I never did get that anointed Butt Plug 
) In this new age of “gotta go fast,” is straight up punching enemies a strong enough alternative for the increased health/shields/armor of Mayhem 4?
Why not just figure it out Amara style by punching things?Once I am done with this Wotan crap I d like to try a real melee build as welll
The class mod is still working for me
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Yeah, I might just respec and give it a go. Like I said I pretty much have all the guns and items I’d need.
Sweet. Let us know how it goes.
I never melee’d but the Breaker still works with a close combat shotgun build.
How does it work for a brawler shield with guardian perks and/or mindfulness? Or do people just use a different shield?
I don’t use mindfulness or that perk but if you don’t mind losing out on 300% more damage when depleted the transformer is a great shield
So in short for more survivability use a different shield which I might go with if they plan on adding a mayhem 5 because eventually that extra damage won’t be all that great if you can’t survive
Yeah the issue is you can’t disable guardian rank perks at all and if they implement that in the future I’m not optimistic about them allowing you to disable perks a la carte.
Ugh, missing out on 300% damage would hurt
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Breaker is technically viable if you have a maxed Brawler Ward with 200% melee Anointment to go with it. The extra 100% melee damage on Find Your Center is all it really adds to a melee build by itself, aside from the 29% damage reduction at close range. Running a Face-Puncher with 300% weapon damage after Phaseslam would still end up being more powerful with a Driver class mod at the end of the day though. Personal Space doesn’t work with the Face-Puncher and Jab Cross only adds a small amount of gun damage, so unless they add more to the special affect besides the 29% damage reduction, I get the feeling it’ll fall off at M5 or Mayhem 2.0, whichever comes first.
Breaker has always been one of my favorites, and it still gets the job done. I threw together a face-puncher & melee build recently, and it consistently worked. It wasn’t ridiculous damage output or exploit-y, but it worked through badasses on M4.
I tend to get pretty deep into raiding builds, but that’s not all the game is about, and it’s good to scale back a bit and put together something different that’s just fun. Go for it.
I ended up using a pretty dope roll on an artifact - I think it was a radiation stone (or whatever the 80% bonus radiation melee one is called) Commander Planetoid, and a rough rider (didn’t even have a roid version at the time). Amara has 4 different ways to get damage reduction, including the breaker, but then there’s the RR’s reduction as well. I also had the damage reduction per terror stack anointment on my face-puncher. It was fun.
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