To get started, first you need a shield with a 50% after-skill-end (ASE) elemental damage anoint.
Then, you need a grenade with a 50% ASE elemental damage anoint. And they need to be different elements (because they do not stack).
Doesnât matter which shield or which grenade (can be blue or purple even), doesnât matter what damage the grenade does⌠itâs about the anoint. Getting better shields helps in surviving though (back-ham, transformer, stop-gap, etcâŚ).
As grenade, I prefer (at the moment) the âItâs Pissâ grenade. Because it can give another 20% damage boost to enemies (so the grenade actually does damage again :P). You can also throw it at your feet to get rid of elemental status effects on yourself (which helps in Mayhem10).
But again, the 50% ASE elemental anoints are more important.
As artifact, using the pearl-of-knowledge helps⌠but Iâm using some sort of Otto Idol which doesnât do much for my damage, but helps to survive.
As class mod I use the bounty-hunter types. (to give me my hunter-kill-skills without having to kill first). I donât care which skills it boosts, Iâm looking for the 3 bonus stats and one that has the 28% weapon damage.
Then for weapons⌠I do notice that the Kaoson, Reflux, Monarch and Sandhawk are my new go-toâs (and the âolderâ legacy guns are now in my bank).
But once again, a good anoint helps. A 50% ASE elemental damage helps (once again, it needs to be different than on your grenade + shield), the 100% ASE weapon damage still helps, and - as I use Rakk Attack - the 100%-damage-after-rakk-attack helps.
Specâd in the red-tree with all the damage and hunter-skill related things, and then either blue-tree with all the damage-related skills or the green tree with all the damage-related skills. I havenât made up my mind yet which works better, but the green tree has the âpets tries to revive youâ-skill which helps a lot if you are walking around solo. You donât have to go to the very last skill in the blue tree, but going to the bottom in red and green is recommended.
If you have guns with multiple pellets (x2, x4, x6 etcâŚ), putting points into âtwo fangâ skill (add a single pellet) doesnât really do too much, I would much rather put it into âchance to give bullets back in the magazineâ.
Having radiation on one of your bonus-elements seems to help a lot⌠and make sure you always do shock damage as well (either as gun-element or as bonus-element).
Remember that both corrosive and cryo work good for armor.
For example, I have a Reflux (corrosive) with bonus shock. I walk around with bonus radiation + bonus fire on my grenade + shield. So I use rakk-attack (doesnât matter what it hits) and I shoot at a group of enemies. The reflux chains to all the enemies in the group, and the chains do way more damage than the bullets. The red-tree gives me crits on the chains even, and I do corrosive + shock + radiation + fire damage at the same time (yes, the chain takes on all the bonus elements) so everything melts.
But the moment the shots donât chain to other enemies (too far away or itâs a single enemy), the reflux does pretty much nothing.
I have a good non-elemental single-barrel Kaoson (double-barrel would be nicer I guess) but with 100% damage-rakk-attack anoint. The moment the reflux stops working, I throw my rakks out and look which enemy they hit, and I empty my Kaoson on it and the enemy dies (even before the explosions) as long as I try somewhat to do crits.
If itâs a thougher Badass or Anointed enemy, I have a cryo-monarch with 100%-damage-after-rakk-attack which melts everything⌠as long as my rakks have hit it. But the gun only works nice on close range.
I have a cryo-sandhawk (full auto) with bonus fire-element which is a nice backup, but I also have a corrosive-sandhawk that has no ASE element, and it still shreds (after using rakks! It still gets bonus damage from using rakk-attack and the bonus elements from grenade + shield!!).
The green-tree has cooldown-reduction on kill, and the red-tree has cooldown reduction on crit (if it works). Maybe you can work with 2 rakk-charges, but for sure 3 rakk charges gives you enough cool down to be able to throw your rakks out every 4 to 5 seconds. And the bonus-elements stick around for 6 seconds.
The same build works well enough for Fade-away skill, and multi-pellet guns do massive damage while in fade-away⌠but I always feel at a loss when fade-away is on cooldown.
To be fair, with both cooldown-skills you can get it back very quickly⌠but I have to do a conscious effort to get the cooldown back⌠and with rakk-attack I can mindlessly walk around and not bother with it. Tricks to get the cooldown back quickly like the hunter-seeker grenade donât seem to work for me :).
So, in a nutshell: Put points in red-damage-related, choose between blue or green and put points in damage-related kills.
From world-drops, find some shield with ASE 50%-element-damage anoint, and some grenade with a similar anoint (but other element). Farm multiple elements together so you can pick and match later depending on situation and the gun anoints you find. With the âloot-the-universeâ event going on right now you should be able to hop into a planet that has extra drops for grenades and go nuts with collecting. The same with shields.
Maybe with class mods do your best to find a bounty-hunter with 28% weapon damage (my preferred, but there are others! the 28% weapon damage helps though). You can also get the one that âboosts hunter skills by 25%â (with the 28% weapon damage :P) or if you use rakk-attack with 100%-damage-after-rakk-attack anoint the specialty ârakk packâ-mod helps, but itâs hard to find and a pain to get one with 28% weapon damage.
By now, if you farm some new m6+ weapons, even if they donât have the perfect anoint, you should be fine to start ripping through m10 if you have a nice roll that you can live with. From there start searching to bit by bit increase the quality of your kit with nice anoints on nice guns.
Happy hunting.