Goal: to get as much damage as possible from low mag, high damage Torgue weaponry.
Skill point allocation
Centrepiece:
Juliet’s Dazzle, with 160 splash annointment. 22mag.
This gun has two main central build features:
Mag refill on kill
Projectiles count as splash, on hit.
This will assist MoD and two points in redistribution to maintain 100% blastmaster bonus and aiming for crits will get the most out of our 1/5 short fuse procs, which are boosted in turn to 90% by our points in SRPMs and SSB.
The build is pretty gear-reliant, requiring AOE and Assault Rifle rolls on artifact, and weapon damage and grenade rolls on Class Mod, to be M4 capable, but it’s well rounded, and provides plenty of damage output both in and out of Iron Bear. As far as that’s concerned, we get the most out of the build by hopping in and out of bear to proc the annointment for burst damage, and the dual minigun setup provides additional MoD procs to keep our mags full, while providing extra DPS and sharing aggro. Be mindful to give bear good line of sight and think of deploying it as artillery. Elevation and overwatch are key. The big boom blaster shield keeps our shield topped off, allowing bear to cooldown faster to keep the gameplay loop going. Vampyr keeps our health and bears up, and the quick cooldown can be helpful if we need to retreat to reclaim the tactical advantage. The 5% health annointment is constantly in effect due to the hop in hop out nature of the build. The boosters also keep our heavy ammo up for scourge spam. Alternatively, a multivitamin Sitorak can be used to keep topped off even faster. If I can find either one of these shields with the Brimming roll (5% shield regen while full), and the 5% health annointment I’ll consider my farming complete. Survivability is further achieved by using a last stand artifact, allowing our shields to regen in the safety of 5 seconds of invulnerability. Mine’s purple, and if I could get a victory rush version to drop with rolls like this, I’ll be unstoppable. The suffix is irrelevant, because most of them are useless. It’s only last stand that we really need.
Both shields rolled with health boosts, meaning IB’s armour is up in the 80k range, allowing it to survive a serious pummelling. The combination of SRPMs and SSB points also mean it does more than reliable DPS, allowing it to be piloted directly when more than one rocket-launching punk needs offing.
We’re relying heavily on means and redistribution to do their jobs correctly, so we’ve built some failsafes into the skill trees. Cloud of Lead, for a free shot every four and a not insignificant boost to our incendiary and splash skills, then Matched set, combined with three more Torgue guns, giving a bigger bonus to mag size than iron bank, plus we need points to get up the tree. Some for the road, which we’ll be using to keep ammo up for the first five seconds of firing giving our slow projectiles time to reach their target (also letting us spam the scourge but I digress) and Why can’t I carry all these grenades, because MoD is unreliable and it’s a good idea to keep a couple extra up our sleeve. Those two points could potentially be used in deadlines, or grizzled, if piloting the bear for longer, or getting it back quicker are a priority. The point of this build however, is to be able to fire the Dazzle as long as there is something to kill. So having a couple of spare ‘nades to throw can be useful in the times where MoD becomes buggy. It’s all about redundancy.
All this should regenerate the mag enough to hit some crits, do some splash damage, and our mag will refill when the poor sucker on the business end dies. Magic.
Speaking of splash damage, we’ve grabbed all the incendiary skills in these two trees and they will double dip when short fuse procs and gives us a tasty third damage multiplier to apply before crit damage, and because the vast majority of the game is fleshy.
Side note: I’m currently farming a 125% NTM incendiary annointment for Juliet’s Dazzle, because I suspect that may improve the overall DPS of this build. I could be wrong, but I wanna try it.
Grenade: CMT. Preferably anointed 25% on throw, but will work fine without. That 25% is nearly overkill, even on Mayhem 4. Although once the Takedown scales back, I’ll probably eat those words.
We’re boosting this grenade with PTHP, it’s a no brainer. It’s part of the MoD Redist engine, those extra crits are pretty central to the build. Decent damage output with the class mod and artifact rolls.
I’ve tried a Ghast Call also because my artifact rolled with a corrosive bonus, it’s perfect for the DLC areas and boosts our mag size by 2, which isn’t much, but every bit counts. We can live without it though, because more MoD procs is really what we’re after.
I mentioned before that I’m using Blastmaster, most of the build’s damage comes from the 100% bonus, but it’s not the end of the world if we’re forced to reload. The Class mod I’m using has a point in redistribution, which is probably the only vital skill point, the other four points could be either but the extra survivability from this one is nice. Still if the points had dropped the other way, the bigger damage from the grenades would probably reduce the need for it, by killing everything first.
That said, this build will work with both the Mind Sweeper AND Rocketeer coms. The Mind Sweeper will get inconsistent but extreme damage peaks, I saw a 60M grenade chain on the test dummy and plenty of 100k plus grenades, but it’s not really my play style. The rocketeer does less damage, but never runs out of ammo and grenades due to the second source of MoD and let’s you play more defensively, using bear to pull aggro and provide cover while you flank enemies. This kind of teamwork will make short work of the slaughters. All three class mods are solid options. Here’s photos of all my gear:
Ooft! Almost forgot about that Torgue projectile speed roll. If that turns up on your mod, it makes bursting down heads even easier. Keep your eyes peeled, it makes this gun sing. Without it, well, it’s harder, but still not as bad as a cutsman.
So there you have it. It could still be optimised with some God Rolls, and requires some serious farming (and luck) but it’s a high damage, M4 capable build, that works just as well in or out of Iron Bear.
I’m keen to hear people’s thoughts, comments and advice. I think it’s a solid foundation and a contender for one of the highest DPS non cheese builds.
Here’s some video in the DLC spoilers
Here’s why I use 8/5 vampyr, attempting to solo Wotan:
Let me know down below! Cheers!
Edit: added video. Wotan footage coming soon.
