Strong points high mobility easy to help teammates and also fun to use cause sincerely being so fast is fun. Good repositioning potential and with META Plasma you have a panic button to annihiliate anything
Decent boss dmg combined with VoC into Krak into Melee’ing
Weakpoints
Ok hordeclear you have to aim your crosshair all the time at head height and light spam can be annoying.
No Scav if you finish maelstrom/high int shock troop in a timely manner you won’t run out of ammo.
(You could take the 50% dmg krak bonus / extra grenade and put it somewhere else just a matter of prefrance.) I am just a krak enjoyer and love to stunlock any boss with them
Same with “keep their heads down” it feels like it makes a big difference in terms of just shooting 1x at any enemy to make them stop what their doing and the enermys nearby of it. You can also stop muties with it at range which can be handy.
(Scoreboard “Kaschperle” that’s the row you need to look at)
From having mained dagger for a long while I can say that bleed (flesh tearer if you have enough crit) is its strongest blessing even after trying that exact dagger set up you have.
Since you are have Reciprocity for the 25% crit when sh*t gets real if you build 5% crit on your dagger (you should, just try dropping flak its really not needed with bleed) you’ll be sitting at 55% crit (30% base).
You can then also put the Riposte on your dagger which will be pretty much up all the time while you are in the thick of melee meaning you can have up to 75% crit so 3 out of 4 of your hits will put up an 8 stack of bleed (9 if you want to remain specced into the bleed on the tree, but that seems redundant). Still great on bosses as well btw.
What does this mean? You can comfortably 2-3 swipe ragers, gunners, shotgunners, and horde clear is really good (not powersword good, but really good for a dagger).
As for the WS keystone with dagger? Eh. I don’t think dagger needs extra dodge distance, and the Weapon Specialist keystone feels much better with power sword which heavily benefits from actually becoming a mobile weapon as that’s one of its only downsides that you can completely negate.
I think Focus Target is much stronger with dagger for reaching breakpoints which doesn’t need a mobility boost, and its already fast attack speed generally will benefit from being burstier rather than faster with vets less than stellar staying power in comparison to zealot.
Krak with plasma feels redundant. The 2 points for grenades could be given to 30% weakspot damage as a passive boost that’s always there and will equate to far more damage than any kraks can provide even with regen in mind.
Dunno about toughness regen over stam regen tbh. I get that vet has a lot of toughness over time, but if the buffs tick off faster (if thats how it works) that feels like a double edged sword honestly. You spend a lot of time not taking damage then you’ll take a couple of hits.
Having left over stacks of Kill Confirmed is kind of nice. Vet doesn’t take consecutive hits anyways (because they can’t) so having faster toughness regen doesn’t seem good to me.
Carapace is just crusher which you murder very quickly with either plasma in this case, or just spamming crits into its head.
They’re a pretty consistent 3 shot. I guess 4 shot in this case since the dagger is being used against unyielding. There’s also kraks in this particular case as well.
Crushers take up too much of people’s talent points, and blessings. They aren’t all that.
Yeah trying things out and the keystone thing is just I swap a lot of my weapons and get the bonus.
I’d have to the try your suggestion but bleed overall feels redundant since anything dies already way to fast to make use of bleed stacks. The flak part atm gives me the 2 shot breakpoint/ 1shot with enough weakspot stacks.
Yes it might not make such a big difference for the knife but crit% for the plasma is always juicy. Also tagging keystone is fine but I feel like with WS keystone I have more active benefit for my playstyle.
But I get the break points thingy on the tagging keystone.
The krak are for boss domination and it’s not like frag is much of a game changer atm. It’s just my personal preferance. The 30% weakspot is delicious but atm with that setup it doesn’t give me any valuable breakpoints for the knife/plasma. (2 shot any flak)
Toughness reg for the sake of having it when your VoC is down and works good for the confirmed kill. I mean you snowball so hard so it doesn’t matter how long you keep the stacks aslong you can tank every gunner in the room and keep building up new stacks.
I didn’t mean you specifically with the crusher comment.
I mean there are so many vet builds with say an autogun, and they go out of their way to pick up onslaught because if they can’t shoot crushers clearly the build is crap.
They give up reload, or a whole other laundry list of good alternatives because onslaught is so important to them and really on an autogun its only really noticeable on crushers.
Same with revolver. I see so many building into carapace. If you can 3 shot them that’s good enough so you can still more comfortably kill the actual important targets such as any of the specials with either more crit chance (underrated on most weapons), or maniac damage.
It’s an overcommitment of assets for a singular type of unit that isn’t even that threatening.
It’s why I don’t like kraks either (though I understand that you likely took that for pathing reasons not fully by choice). Shredders are much more versatile, and generally make the game a whole lot safer than what kraks can provide.
I mean atm i hardly use flak/maniac on most melee weapon
My mk6 is carapace and unyielding and any other weapon always unyielding with most likely flak (melee)
Maniac is only worth it on ranged weapons where you’d kill flamers etc where you get a important breakpoint.
Grenades is a matter of playstyle i feel like with krak I can do much more in a bad boss/ accident daemonhost trigger cause of the 8 seconds where the enemy does nothing and I get free 16k dmg (2kraks) or 24k dmg (3kraks)with kraks.
VoC clears the field so i can melee them with the mk6 or just use a krak like a frag but less efficient.
I am just way to aggressive for anything to be needing a safe area cause i just use spots where theoretically you can’t lose control.
Also having weapon swap buff keystone is like as you said a game changer on the mk6 and you just kill hordes in mere seconds
Generally not worth using maniac on melee weapons imo. Since most of them take triple melee damage by default anyways, or have super low hp.
Def, agree here.
I can agree with daemonhosts, but I can insta gib bosses with just my MK V alone.
Still don’t think kraks are particularly useful, but removing that specific fail condition is nice.
Reason why I think shredders are better is because if you are facing a boss the real threat comes from the surrounding mobs, not the boss itself so if you isolate the boss through shredder spam they are still a non-threat.
Yeah, its nuts. That keystone was basically made for powersword.
Well i mean mileage may wary with the boss experience but basically my team just does horde and I annihilate the boss in 8 seconds ogryn/chaos spawn nurgle beast tho depends on the area.
You have a team so I can see specializing more. I generally don’t or just an ogryn friend at best so I try to build for something closer to true solo which is often what it comes down to.
Also:
Columnus has boss killing covered in spades. Just gotta build crit. People don’t build crit on it. They’re wrong. Plain and simple.
Only vs crushers really. The one weakness dagger has outside of zealot is its clear, and 20% crit during horde clear helps a ton.
I still recommend rocking uncanny strike on zealot so you can just m1 spam literally everything other than bosses.
But the ONE thing veteran has over zealot in melee is their crazy hit per hit damage with our weakspot bonuses, and crazy crit + crit damage.
With the 10% rending node alone if you build your dagger to kill crushers ie just a perk you can 3 shot them while still letting the dagger kill everything else it needs to extremely easily.
Only mandatory perk on dagger is 5% crit.
EDIT: ^ This is the one used in the clip above for the insta gib on the spawn. It’s better for even just duos because of reload speed, and suppression immunity. Higher reliance on teammates for horde safety though.
You can try those out if you’re interested at all.
I can link you a melee build as well if you’d like, but I’d have to make it in gameslantern.
There’s a video on the true solo viable one with me just showing proof of concept by doing solo for 12 ish minutes in Auric Maelstrom I II VEG.
Is it possible to build knife on Vet to one head shot poxwalkers with lights? Couldn’t find a setup to do so before but I don’t have a good knife collection.
It’s not specializing per se it’s just even with randos (i duoq 99% or more players) if you take the initiative to tank the boss they just deal with the other stuff.
Also it depends on if they see you being some ascended veteran who annihilate everything they quickly fall into their roll to fill.
So yeah could also be “Pappnasen” who don’t do anything at all but then you just carry it with your duoq
Not a breakpoint I’ve ever gone for tbh, but with bleeds they die instantly anyways.
You can also do a lacerate/flesh ripper build. Worse for horde clear, but excellent for killing one offs that might jostle your aim which is something I really miss about my current riposte/flesh ripper set up.
Either way the biggest benefit of knife is the mobility gives you ton of urgency.
So in the greater scheme it doesn’t matter that much unless you want to max xyz.
To be fair I don’t even have the energy to invest 15k plasteel and not get what i want atm.
I had a good emperor gift drop in 1030403 years and made something fun to play. And viable but once maybe in the blue moon i try your suggestion on the knife
So idk if you ever tried but i happily show you a example 