I was never much of a shotgun guy, so I had for a time completely missed out on the existence of Flechette and manstopper.
when I finally found out, I was lucky and found them in the shop. But I know they aren’t the only blessings that top out at mk2, and in my quest to collect blessings here in plasteel hell, I thought it might be worth asking what’s good under mk3? Or what’s bad but still tops out under mk3?
Things to watch out for since you don’t see them as often at high level, so snag when you can and all?
MK3? There is no shotgun with that Mark? Ah, you mean level of Blessings!
You can find available blessings per weapon here:
Agripinaa Mk VII Combat Shotgun: Flak, Maniac, Full Bore and No Respite. This works quite well on vet, max reload buffs, great at killing specials, shooters, gunners and some elites such as: Ragers, Rippers, Bulwarks.
Man Stopper, Flechette and Scattershot are decent on Kantrael and Lawbringer, but don’t expect crazy performance, even with Blazing Piety, Weapon Specialist or Deadshot / stamin regen talents.
For OP: What @JanZamoysky said. Iirc, at least personally I don’t think there’s anything useful on T2 or below besides Flechette, Man-Stopper, and Pierce for oggies. There are some T3 exclusives like Blaze Away though, but since you can farm them via crafting instead of relying on the stores, they’re probably not a problem.
Actually I have to disagree here. You’re right that they’re definitely less ‘generally’ useful than one would think, but after finally getting Man-Stopper just a few weeks ago, I did a ton of testing and builds running them both with various combos. And there are ways to make them really strong, even if niche. Both zellies and vets have a bunch of talents that afaik aren’t exactly popular, but enable some really fun stuff with them.
On vets an Agripinaa with Man-Stopper & Scattershot, Deadshot etc. and Marskman’s Focus is really strong. It was the first time I made something that actually shined with Marskman’s Focus and completely depended on it. It lets you do autocrit infinite cleave headshots easily and all the time, and that small but important spread on regular shots, especially hipfire really helps with the aiming while also adding tons of AoE at range.
For zellies, the same gun as above also works surprisingly well with Blazing Piety. Zellies also don’t have the option of Plasma for a similar job like vets do, so it adds a completely new gameplay option for them. With FoF’s 5s armor conversion buff ofc dramatically helping with crushers too.
But the most fun & unique choice for zellies by far imo, is a Kantrael with Flechette & Man-Stopper. And there’s many reasons for this, most of which I didn’t realize before actually testing it all:
Kantrael’s special does no damage, only burn. But it has infinite cleave even through crushers (which usually ignore it and stop the attack there).
Using the special with Flechette only applies the bleed to the first target hit, while the burn continues on through everything. But if you add Man-Stopper, now the bleed will cleave through everything except crushers (so even tho the burn goes through them, the bleed won’t).
The stealth ult has a ~1s minimum duration, even attacking during that time won’t disable it. So as long as you fire instantly after entering stealth, you can fire 2 autocrits before the stealth wears off.
I also just recently realized that the throwing knife blitz which I never liked at all, is actually super good IF you have a weapon that can reliably stagger / knockdown something long enough for you to easily hit it with those knives. Kantrael’s special has massive, insane stagger on top of its spread.
All of the above ofc comes together rather nicely. Since the special doesn’t do any dmg on its own, in most other builds it’s nearly useless outside anything but the biggest mixed hordes or specials you know others aren’t focusing on, so you can pop a few shots into them and take cover. But those 2 shots from stealth will basically lane 90% of everything in a huge area. A dagger bleed build’s talents obviously both benefit from the pre-existing bleeds, while stacking them even higher on its own & proccing crits to earn that ult back in moments. And that special even without crits is just seriously perfect for the throwing knives, since even the targets that wouldn’t die from 1 knife will just burn to death at that point.
I wouldn’t say that build is any more powerful than any of the other truly strong zelly builds however, and relying in DoTs while really strong solo, is ofc going to put you behind with particularly good teammates who just clean everything too fast for it. But it’s certainly strong, and the important thing is that it’s very different.
Yeah, this is how I arrived with that Agripa build above, I prefer consistency over building around Deadshot. You lose occasionally useful cleave, but most enemies die so quickly that extra crit doesnt matter and you dont need to think about stamina.
I’d be interested to see your build @Elodie for the manstopper shotgun.
IDK. Maybe I’ve just gotten jaded a bit, but it feels like the key gaming mechanic right now is dealing with elites and specials very quickly. Hordes just aren’t dangerous. It’s not how I remembered them coming up from T3-T4; a horde was a pita and you had to quickly adapt/change your build. Now they’re just melee fodder, and you pull your secondary for bigger targets (purgatus staff aside).
Ah! Normally I’d agree, but that’s precisely what that Agri changes there.
I was really tired and just heading for bed when I wrote that last one so I can see I didn’t point out the Deadshot part well enough. Let me elaborate: Deadshot adds agency for extra crit on the first shots, and the shots against just 1-2 individual priority targets. But once Scatter & Reciprocity have built up and I’m shooting those priorities while cleaving through groups of enemies, that hipfire is much better for the extra spread. And all of the above synergizes perfectly with MarksFocus what with its massive extra dmg on headshots & crits both.
So where on most other weapons Deadshot just drains stamina perpetually and you need to rely on it all the time, in this case its main role is in the start of the combat. I have so much stamina on that build that in practice I wouldn’t likely even need stamina curios. I do use one just in case though.
Here’s that vet build of mine:
And here’s the zelly:
Edit:
Sry you posted just as I was making this reply.
But yes! Man-Stopper, specifically, is really good but it does require building around it, and those builds themselves can be a bit of niche. The ones I posted above are likely the best ones I’ve made with it so far. But I change my builds all the time. To list a few examples where it works well enough to really well though:
Scattershot & Man-Stopper pair well enough for anything to both build up the cleave and benefit from MS. Lawbringer special makes for some decent CC with this.
No Respite description is wrong, it actually adds +20% of your first shot’s dmg cumulatively for every each shot for as long as the enemy is staggered (the effect resets when the enemy recovers from stagger, which means you need a constant stagger lock until they get knocked down, from which they will always recover and reset). This requires a whole novel of explanation to go into details, but the point is that No Respite is crazy strong. If you combine it with Man-Stopper, you can apply that crazy cumulative bonus dmg & stagger both to a whole group of enemies. So especially Kantrael & Agripinaa shotties with both on builds that support it and circumstances where they work are insane.
Regarding Flechette, while Soulblaze & Burn & Bleed have a very similar dmg curve, their DoTs last for 10s, 8s and ~4s respectively. So it’s easy to dismiss bleed as weak because the stacks go down so fast. But anything that can reliably stack bleed up & keep it there can in practice be almost exponentially stronger than usual, making Flechette & bleed as a whole deceptive and often very binary of “meh” vs. “omg insane”.
Deadshot can (and should) be used very differently with shotties vs. other weapons, since basically all shotties need both ADS and hipfire for different uses and ofc Scattershot changes the crit% you need dynamically throughout the fights. Shotties also need the special rounds & have long reload timers which depend on how many shots you fire at once, meaning they have more time to naturally recover stamina than other guns tend to have, and you have agency & control over how long you want to make that reload time by firing more shots at once.
There’s tons of talents that are particularly effective with shotties, like the reload boosters (which also work for special) in general. Opening Salvo is fantastic with Agripinaa / Lawbringer since it applies to first 2 shots, so you can fire special + regular + reload. Reciprocity’s max 25% crit is a great counter or addition to Deadshot, and since it usually stacks up fast in a fight can let you either reach +50% total crits, or simply work as a trade-off where in the start of the fight you use Deadshot for crits, and later you rely on Reciprocity while you recover stamina. Duck and Dive is 1-talent removed from Reciprocity and helps tons with stamina if you need it. And as said earlier, Marksman’s Focus has really good synergy with WS / crit shotties since they both support each other.
The UI mods add a ton of extra too. When I got into modding, I placed a special hotbar next to my crosshair so I could add 1-2 priority buffs for easy tracking, like True Aim. When I got into shotties 2 weeks ago I added Scattershot & Reciprocity there too. There’s also a mod that literally shows you the current crit chance on your UI, I don’t have it but it would likely be fantastic for this.
You’re using the Agri (and Kantrael on zealot) shotgun. Is that just for versatility? Because I’d assumed the lawbringer would be the one to go with for this idea? *edit - we were in parallel time universes there - replying to each other *
I’ve been meaning to try manstopper + flechette on lawbringer with weapon specialist to guarantee a crit after 3 melee kills to pair with a more single target weapon like knife, using special shells after every few melee kills as a horde clear option. Unfortunately after who knows how many consecrations the game refuses to give me manstopper.
You experimented with a setup like that at all? I have a feeling it will be pretty mid but seems like a novel use of weapon specialist at least.
(I really need to clean up my notes bc rn it’s all spread out all over and hard to find…)
But with the vet: Agripinaa does +54% dmg on crit / WS, and +90% on both, Lawbringer and Kantrael do 30%/50% respectively. Plus ofc Agri has its special for that ultimate sniper dmg & cleave for oggies like crushers. All in all, it’s far better as a precision weapon and gains much more from MarksFocus.
The zelly build with Kantrael meanwhile is all about that massive spread and stacking both burn & bleed in a huge area. It also has a crazy high dmg and spread otherwise too making it better for high dmg chots in close range.
Lawbringer is a pretty pog weapon too but not for those two builds.
I don’t think I did. I did try a WSpecialist with the same Kantrael idea as the zelly tho. My thinking was that since you 1) need time to restack WSpecialist for each crit, 2) Kantrael’s DoTs need time to do their work and ofc need to be refreshed in a few seconds anyway, and 3) since that special & both DoT’s have far more range & do more dmg at range than Lawbringer special… that Kantrael would make for a better pairing than Lawbringer. I don’t remember why, but it didn’t meet my expectations in practice. I think it was mainly that WSpecialist melee on its own is so strong that the big huge cleave DoT didn’t add much, and a precision weapon would’ve been much better overall? Not sure tbh.
Your idea could be great though! I might give something like that a try later!
Ohhh right! Well no it’s something inbetween. With the vet the idea is to turn the shotgun into a quasi-plasma, but faster, stronger (against some targets) and with better ammo economy. That’s a part of what I meant with niche, because the build plays very differently from most other builds ofc, but in practice feels just like a more responsive version of plasma that requires a lot more effort than plasma would. Ofc it does have more spread than plasma range, but that precision is still at the core of what it does. So cleave, not spread, is the main focus.
But I really do want to stress that I tried so many times to make use of MarksFocus with other weapons before, and I just seriously don’t have the aim what with the enemies animating randomly and all. But even that small spread with Agripinaa, and because unlike plasma it fires instantly, was enough to change that! So I can easily get headshots all the time, turning MarksFocus into something I don’t really even need to care about since the 3s timer where moving doesn’t consume stacks is basically on all the time. So there are important nuances!
With the Kantrael however yes, spread and range both are absolutely the point. It has a ton of synergies ofc what with the bleeds & talents & dagger etc. But the simple version is that it’s like your basic stealth knife zelly, but with the ability to spend 2s to add so much DoTs to everything in a particular direction that you can just forget about them and they’ll die 5-10s later. And ofc can just magdump for massive dmg against anything in close range.
Edit: Also I must remind you all that those builds aren’t some game breaking levels of strong, and they do require weird and different gameplay to make the best use of them. If you want some undiscovered super builds, these aren’t it. For me what matters is that they’re strong enough to be more than viable, even stand on equal footing vs. meta, while also being different, fun and interesting. Because I love stuff like that!
Yeah, I get your point. I have a semi decent Agri with Scattershot and Man-Stopper, Maniac (sadly no flak because Fatshark is unable to design good itemisation / crafting). I just really dont like stamina drain on Deadshot with silent dogs and bursters.
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Ofc it does have more spread than plasma range, but that precision is still at the core of what it does. So cleave, not spread, is the main focus.
Because I love stuff like that!