Search this site

Urad true melee build. Very engaging, very strong. Golden Swan SYNOPSIS Urad true melee build. Very engaging, very strong. INTRO This is the resurrection of a really old, outdated build , and it has changed (and improved) quite a bit. But the underlying principle is the same: Urad true melee. And it still uses the same unconventional shield. For the longest time I struggled to justify Urad on a true melee build, because to keep Urad active you have to either give up a powerful artifact suffix (by using Deathless) or a powerful shield, all the while it's competing with Terror Cryo at only 25% less of a bonus than Urad. It would take too long to explain the theorycrafting reasoning behind this build, but the biggest factor is that Urad plays well with Elemental Projector while Terror Cryo does not. Beware: As with any true melee build, this build can be tough to get the hang of. It will probably take a couple runs, especially because of its unique survivability strategy. Just watch the gameplay video, properly digest the Gameplay Loop section, and practice. You will be rewarded. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES There are some odd choices here, for sure. Both max health skills at 5/5? Well, our shield is the Front Loader, and the Front Loader translates max health into shield capacity. Yes this build survives with its shield, among other things. Dread in the red tree is picked only for the automatic reload utility, but that won't happen often. We need to get down to Ties That Bind anyway. The rest of the skills are fairly normal for a true melee build. ACTION SKILL Ties That Bind with Glamour. This is part of the survivability strat. Any enemy linked with Ties That Bind will be de-aggro'd via Glamour. A not-too tiny side benefit is the area clear TTB provides. But don't worry, this build still has good single target punching damage. The Shooting Star variant of Phaseflare is also used for raid bossing. That is, if you don't use the TTB / Remnant strategy. See the "Notes - Raid Bossing" toward the bottom. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Fire, shock, or corrosive depending on the content you are facing. Do not choose cryo. PUNCHING GUN Psycho Stabber with Urad anointment. Pretty straightforward. Urad will also get added to Groundbreaker damage. SWAP GUN Low level Sellout pistol with Urad anointment. This gun is for shooting your foot to place a dot on yourself in order to proc the Elemental Projector artifact, giving you a huge increase to both the elemental damage of your punch and the Urad bonus element that goes along with it. You only need to shoot once and then swap back to the Psycho Stabber. Each of the three projectiles from the Sellout has a 72% chance to dot you, so it's basically guaranteed. Urad will also start "ticking" on the dot you placed on yourself as a hidden damage instance. This bonus element ticking on a self-dot will stack Burn Both Ends for you, giving you even more elemental damage. To obtain an anointed low level Sellout, rush the story killing as few enemies as possible (having Guardian Rank enabled makes this pretty easy). You can complete the mission at as low a level as 21. When you do so, discard the Sellout mission reward and farm an anointed one from Earl's vendor in Sanctuary. Protip: turn dialog volume all the way down if you do not wish to hear Amara screaming from self-dots all of the time. ALTERNATIVE PUNCHING GUN Unforgiven with Urad anointment. This is to boost the crits from Static Charge, when they manage to crit. And that mostly only happens vs the creatures in the Guardian Takedown, because nearly all of them have forward facing crit spots. When the Static Charge crits while holding this gun, it's pretty much a guaranteed kill, giving you huge Groundbreaker damage for your next punch, especially if the Static Charge kill Hollowpointed another enemy. FFYL / FLYING ENEMY GUN Face Puncher with Urad anointment. This is a Body & Mind delivery system and is great for annoying flying enemies and getting up from FFYL. This build is strong enough to punch up from most situations, if enemies are kind enough to stick around. But the Face Puncher takes care of you when they don't. OPTIONAL SWAP GUN Guardian Angel with Urad anointment. This is only for swapping to after you've sent a beefed up Shooting Star into a raid boss. CLASS MOD Golden Rule, prioritizing points into Laid Bare and then points into Mindfulness. Laid Bare is great damage, and Mindfulness is incredible survivability with the movement speed it grants. Dotting yourself with various elements via the Sellout will also activate the Golden Rule's cooldown effect, giving you *very* short TTB cooldowns. Second, optional class mod would be the Dragon with at least 1 point into Remnant. This is only for a raid bossing strat. Recommended passives: melee damage, action skill cooldown rate, splash or grenade radius (for your grenade), action skill damage, reload speed, shield capacity. SHIELD Front Loader with Apply Terror on Action Skill End. Highly, highly recommend getting at least one Shield Booster augment, and it can come with up to two. The Front Loader takes away your health gate (and activates Urad). This leaves your shield capacity as your main survivability stat. Luckily, Amara can boost that through her max health skills and the Front Loader's health-to-shield effect. But your shield will constantly be slowly draining because you're going to be self-dotting with the Sellout. It won't have the opportunity to recharge. Shield Booster augments greatly enhance the longevity of that shield bar, and they can keep you alive indefinitely if you're really good at dodging damage. ARTIFACT Elemental Projector Static Charge. The Elemental Projector will be procced by your Sellout pistol, granting you lots of damage for both your main punching element and the Urad bonus element. The Static Charge is not only a nice bonus element for your punches, but the chains will be very strong. Urad will also get applied to the Static Charge chains. Recommended passives: melee damage, area damage (in 2nd or 3rd slot), elemental damage (except cryo), action skill cooldown, max shield, reload speed, move speed. GRENADE *inhales* Hyperion Longbow Tran-fusion, in any element, with the Terror Dmg/Fire Rate anointment. Here's where the real fun begins. (And yes, I also learned while making this build that it's "Tran-fusion", not "Trans-fusion".) When this grenade damages shields (blue HP), it sends blue healing orbs to you that refill your shield. When it damages health (red HP), it does the same for your health. We only care about the shield part. You know how Shield Boosters are important for the Front Loader? Well this is doubly important. This picks up the slack when the Shield Boosters can't keep up, when you've sustained a decent amount of damage and your shield is mid to low. More on how to use this in the "Gameplay Loop" section below. Before you get all 5Head on me and exclaim, "But Stone/Swan! The Fish Slap can roll Generator parts, why not use that?!", first of all, don't call me "Stone slash Swan", call me either "Stone" or "Swan". Thanks. Second of all, Generator parts don't work on the Fish Slap. Yeah. Third, even if they did work, the Fish Slap is slow when you need healing fast. That's why we want a Hyperion Tran-fusion instead of an Atlas or Tediore. Last, the Fish Slap would just be doing all of the killing on its own anyway, and that's extremely boring. GAMEPLAY LOOP The basic gameplay loop is very simple; the devil is in the details. This is a long one. Buckle in. Let's start with the basics: shoot your foot with the Sellout, swap to your Psycho Stabber, grasp something, start punching. Rinse and repeat. Use the Face Puncher vs flying enemies if you can't take them out via a Ties That Bind link. You need to be constantly dotted by the Sellout both for damage and cooldown. That means basically any break between enemies, or when damage is suddenly not there vs an enemy, you need to step back, swap, and re-dot before re-engaging. When your action skill element is fire or shock, set your Sellout to corrosive. If your action skill element is corrosive, set your Sellout to fire. This way, you get one dot from your action skill element via Infusion, and a second dot from the element of the Sellout. This means faster stacking Burn Both Ends, faster stacking Mindfulness, and more cooldown from Golden Rule. Taking care of your Front Loader is where most of your focus should go. There are three equally important ways you do this. First, grasp an enemy whenever grasp is available. This is not only for damage (even on single targets - there's some sort of shenanigans with Glamour and the Static Charge, a la the Reflux), but also for aggro control. When you grasp a group, you have some breathing room (provided there aren't a ton of enemies outside that group). They stop attacking you, and you can use a small portion of that time to dot yourself and/or throw your grenade... The second form of care for your Front Loader is the Tran-fusion grenade. Sure, it sucks that it will only refill your shield if it damages shields, but shields are everywhere. If you swing your crosshair around the battlefield it's actually very easy to see blue HP bars and know where to send the grenade. Maliwan enemies always have shields so any area where you know there are fresh Maliwan troops is a good area to chuck this thing. Plenty of CoV enemies also have shields, and it's not hard to find them or know which enemies are most likely to have them. IMPORTANT NOTE: Glamour'd enemies are intangible to grenades. Chuck a grenade at a grasped enemy or any linked enemy with this build and it will pass right through them. Instead, throw it at a floor or wall near them. This is why splash radius passives are recommended. If enemies are lacking shields, that usually means they're weakened, and a Glamour'd Ties That Bind (plus a punch) is probably going to finish the fight. There are two exceptions to this general rule. The first is Guardians in the Guardian Takedown. Here, either fresh enemies (before they've gained an armor bar) or weakened enemies (after the armor bar is depleted) will have exposed shields. Just do a quick scan and you'll find them. If you don't see any, get a Ties That Bind going ASAP. The second exception is creatures in the Guardian Takedown, where there are no shields at all. This leads to the third form of Front Loader care, and that is movement. Smart movement is extremely important in true melee builds, and in this build even more so. You need to be strafing enemy attacks and placing yourself briefly behind cover or backing away while you do things like self-dotting or reloading the Sellout. Don't ever just stand still unless you're engaging an enemy you know you're going to kill. Know your enemies, keep an eye on the mini-map. Those creatures in the Guardian Takedown? Easily survived by just your Shield Boosters if you know how and when they attack and can dodge them. The many points in Mindfulness this build has makes quick movements very easy. Pay attention to my movement in the gameplay video and note how I'm always throwing in little strafes and such. Strafing causes enemies to miss and also forces them to spend time turning toward you, which is very effective at close range. Note that the strats with the grenade are only in play if you see your shield at mid to low levels. If you've got the movement down and you're doing really well at avoiding damage, then Shield Boosters will last you a long time. But always be keeping an eye on your shield capacity and have an idea of where blue HP bars might be on field. NOTES - RAID BOSSING This build doesn't have the same sort of raid boss punching ability that Sulphur Swan and Steel Swan have. Instead, you have three different options: Shooting Star, Remnant, and plain ole Fish Slap. Shooting Star: when you initially summon the ball and punch it out, recall it once and punch it only once with the Psycho Stabber and you're good to go. Punching it a second time will end it prematurely, because of the extra damage instances provided by Urad and Static Charge. You can swap to the Guardian Angel and back away if you want even more damage from the ball, but my favorite thing to do is follow the ball and start punching along with it to keep delivering Groundbreaker. It also feels cooler and more interactive this way. Remnant: Swap to a Dragon class mod with at least one point in Remnant. Wait for a mob to get near the boss, grasp the boss so the mob is linked, punch the boss, then watch Remnant float in like the Angel of Death and delete the boss. Fish Slap: Hold either the Psycho Stabber or Guardian Angel and chuck fish. It's boring but it works. Of course, for any of these strats, always be self-dotted for lots more damage. NOTES - ANATHEMA This fight can be frustrating. When Anathema's radiation bubble goes off, some of the other guardians in the arena survive and are irradiated. Their radiation aura will damage you if you get near them, and because you don't have health gate, it will be instant FFYL. Just do your best to avoid them. NOTES - CRYSTAL PHASES IN GTD These sections can be pretty easy. Ties That Bind and Glamour mean you can get away with hardly attacking any of the enemies, if you play it right and get lucky. Make sure you're still dotted, though, to keep the Golden Rule cooldown going and get grasp back. Sometimes TTB + Glamour won't be perfect, though, because we aren't specced Ascendant for more Glamour time and because Burn Both Ends makes enemies *really* angry. If things get out of hand, don't be afraid to use the Face Puncher liberally. What I like to do during crystals with any true melee build is use cheesy strats for the first two crystals, then switch back to punching when I get to the third crystal, where I can take my time. NOTES - GEARBOX This build hosts a few bugs/quirks courtesy of Gearbox that may lead to some frustration: grasp bugs, Blitz bugs, and the Psycho Stabber animation lockout. Just know that getting up from FFYL is usually never a problem, and this build is rewarding enough to overcome these frustrations.

A spicy Spiritual Driver gun dot build that rewards accuracy via the Elemental Crit anointment. Amara Dot Crit SYNOPSIS A spicy Spiritual Driver gun dot build that rewards accuracy via the Elemental Crit anointment. INTRO The anointment, "Elemental critical hits can cause status effects of that element to explode..." (EleCrit) has been a favorite of mine for a long time. It's most common usage is on a gun you swap to to detonate a status effect (dot) applied by Fish Slap/UTD or a strong, one-shotting gun like the Kickcharger. But I've always wanted to find a way to use it as a main gun anointment. I've, also, always wanted to make a gun dot build with the Spiritual Driver. This build accomplishes both. As a cool side effect, it allows usage of some really underused and otherwise weak guns. Inspiration to try working with the EleCrit anointment came from Ancient Rune's Alchemical Agent Zane dot build. GAMEPLAY VIDEO SKILL TREE SKILL TREE NOTES Yep, no capstones. The EleCrit nova is based on the strength of the dot you apply, and then it gets its own damage formula. This is a form of double dipping. Therefore, we need to grab damage boosts in our skill tree that will apply to both your initial dot and the EleCrit nova: Tempest, Laid Bare, Burn Both Ends. Just for fun, let's follow the rest of the logic for creating this skill tree. Because this is a Driver build, we also want points into Mindfulness. And we also need to spec Sustainment for survivability. We need Sustainment because other forms of healing won't work here: Samsara doesn't apply to Ties That Bind, Ebb & Flow is for melee builds (although we take it here because sometimes you punch for Groundbreaker and we need to dump some skill points somewhere to reach Burn Both Ends), and Clarity is not enough on its own. We choose Ties That Bind as our action skill because it has a much shorter cooldown than a Phasecast or Slam action skill. A shorter cooldown matters because the Driver self-dot will deactivate Topped Off, making us lose a lot of action skill cooldown rate. Cast/slam also won't be able to help us with their huge gun damage anointments, because we're using the EleCrit anoint. Ties can also give us lots of Expedite stacks, further facilitating its cooldown. Following the chain of logic back, we need Sustainment because we're using Ties because we're using Driver. We've chosen our action skill and the end points of each of our four trees. The rest of the skill points cover regular gun benefits, dot skills, and some splash for the EleCrit nova. This is one of the few builds that could actually use more skill points: 1 more for Burn Both Ends and 1 more for Mindfulness. ACTION SKILL Ties That Bind. For some boss fights, base Phasegrasp can be used for faster action skill cycling - it has a shorter cooldown and no duration when grasping a target that cannot be lifted. Hemo is a good fight for base Phasegrasp. ACTION SKILL ELEMENT Fire, shock, or corrosive. Whichever one matches your fire, shock, or corrosive gun. No cryo, because this is a Driver (and dot) build. GUNS Anything with at least a decent damage over time stat, with the EleCrit anointment. I'd say around 50K-ish status effect damage per second or greater. We get to use quite a few overlooked weapons here. My favorites: Hellfire, Fearmonger, Recursion, Free Radical, Plasma Coil, Beacon, Hellshock, Kyb's Worth, Trevonator, Chandelier, Slow Hand, Soulrender, Insider, Satisfaction, Back Burner, Plaguebearer, Hive, King's/Queen's Call, Unkempt Harold, and Boogeyman. I've also had minor success with the Convergence and the Flipper. There might even be some non-unique purple weapons with acceptable dot values. Note, though, that a max damage per-pellet version of a gun may not have the max status effect damage. You want the version of every gun that has the highest status effect damage. You also want the version of a gun that has the fewest projectiles per shot, if it has such variants. The lower the pellet count, the higher the status effect damage. UTILITY GUN Guardian Angel, with EleCrit anointment. Its usage here is like the typical usage of the EleCrit anointment: apply a dot with your guns, then swap to the Guardian Angel and detonate the dot with a grenade (that can crit) of the same element as the dot. This gun can also be shot in FFYL, and if there's multiple enemies around, there's a good chance it'll get you back up via an Indiscriminate projectile. CLASS MOD Spiritual Driver, with as many points into Mindfulness as possible. Phasezerker usually overshadows the Driver when building for gun dots; it can get you up to 10 Anima and it applies dots more reliably through better Violent Tapestry stacking. However, there's still a reason to use Driver for dots: moving fast gives you a lot of gun damage, and dots from your guns are strengthened if you have more gun damage. To make up for less reliable dots, you simply shoot your gun more. This results in a go-fast-pew-pew-style dot build, as opposed to Amara Dot Gun , which is a methodical, single-shot dot build. Recommended passives: splash damage radius, splash damage, action skill cooldown rate, mag size, weapon charge speed, weapon damage, weapon critical damage. Protip: turn dialog volume all the way down if you do not wish to hear Amara screaming from self-dots all of the time. SHIELD Re-Volter, with Action Skill Start anointment. The fire rate from this shield is great all on its own, but also because it will give you more stacks of the Guardian Rank perk C-C-Combo, which is a damage increase that will double dip with the EleCrit novas. Also, the shock damage will give you a shock dot at 200% power - which is all-around great. If you're using a shock weapon, your EleCrit will detonate based on that stronger dot from the Re-Volter. ARTIFACT Elemental Projector Victory Rush. The Elemental Projector is the more important part. But both parts of this artifact will provide damage boosts that the EleCrit nova can double dip. Recommended passives: action skill cooldown, movement speed, AoE damage, fire/shock/corrosive damage. GRENADE Hex, Lightspeed, or Hunter-Seeker, with ASE 50% bonus radiation damage anointment. All three of these grenades can crit, and therefore can proc the EleCrit anointment on your gun. Because this is a dot build, adding a radiation bonus element will create and strengthen radsplosions and overall spread a lot of damage around. GAMEPLAY LOOP Your Re-Volter will cover shock, and your grenade anoint will cover radiation. So your guns will mostly be fire or corrosive, depending on the base health of the enemies you're facing. Shock can be used for Guardians in the Guardian Takedown or just in general with a very high shock dot weapon like the Plasma Coil or Free Radical. Choose the element of your gun to suit the content you're facing, and grasp and shoot and aim for crits. Believe it or not, this build can be very forgiving if you don't have good aim. Dots are not increased by landing a critical hit. So you can do a drive-by at high speed with your Driver and land some body shots just to apply a large dot (remember dots are increased by gun damage), and then stop and carefully hit a crit to proc EleCrit. If you can hit crits at high speed, all the better. If the enemy doesn't have an easily accessible crit spot, don't fret: this is a Driver build. It's still going to have good damage simply by moving fast and shooting a strong gun. The EleCrit anoint has a cooldown. However, the cooldown is reset if you swap to a different gun. A fun way to play this build is to have 2-4 guns of the same element and rapid-fire swap between them, getting an EleCrit with each before moving on to the next one. Weapons with charge times slow this strategy down a little bit, so choose your guns wisely. NOTES - IMMUNE MALIWAN HEAVIES When facing a Maliwan Heavy that's immune to your gun's element, your damage will drop significantly (and you won't lifesteal). The solution here is to use a radiation Hex. Your main gun element won't do any damage, but the radiation dot created by the bonus element anoint on the Hex will still get applied. Then the Hex can be thrown and used to proc EleCrit in radiation. The Hex will also keep your lifesteal going. NOTES - ALTERNATIVE BOSSING STRATEGY Similar to the strategy above regarding Maliwan Heavies, and alluded to throughout this guide, an alternate strategy to shooting and getting crits is to apply your gun's dot at high speed, then swap to the Guardian Angel and proc EleCrit with a grenade that element-matches the dot that you applied. See the Hemo fight in the gameplay video.