You’re looking at this one the wrong way. This is one of Vet’s greatest strengths because it also balances him out. His tree has awesome variety. In most of my vet builds, I fall maybe 2-4 points short of having my entire wishlist of nodes that I desire for stomping pub games. If they condensed it and kept the same power he’d be the GOAT of all classes easily IMO. However, I do make an exception for Weapon Specialist. It’s so bloated and I’m not sure why. Most of the value is in the Keystone.
I find it very weird you neglected to mention the 1 grenade / minute node. Everyone else would kill to have that node. It makes nades consistent and Vet is also the only class in the game that can force ammo crates to replenish grenades. The “underwhelming” aspect of what you’re talking about, IMO, is that in order to grenade spam people have to invest a few points here and there. But this is not underwhelming - this is the cost one has to pay to have a nade spamming build. Frag and Krak are amazing with investment, so I think this is already close to perfect as is.
Is there a typo here? Executioner Stance doesn’t have stacks; one just has to kill highlighted targets to keep it going. What you wrote sounds like a complaint about Marksman’s Focus rather than anything else. I don’t know what VoC has to do with this.
Executioner needs a small buff like +% Reload Speed but more than that is overkill. If it were competitive with VoC, which is literally the best career skill in the game, it’d be broken. I actually run Executioner myself with a Laspistol and have few complaints about it. The skill itself is very useful because of the wide variety of bonuses attached to it that make gunplay so much easier.
Totally disagree about Infiltrate btw. It’s not meant to be a boss killing skill at all and has some extremely powerful nodes attached to it. -90% Aggro and +1 Infiltrate are crazy. Leave No One Behind makes Stealth vet a mobility god in bad situations. I’ve run this with PS6 and Recon Lasgun, of all guns. It’s very good. I tend to win more than I lose with it.
Very situational, not much to say about this. I play aggressive with Executioner’s Stance sometimes using Ghost and have nothing to complain about; I run and gun. Cover specifically only matters in a “room full of shooters / gunners / reapers” situation which is rare enough.
I actually suggested a nice solution to this in Gameplay Feedback, which is to buff Smoke Grenades to cancel existing pox smoke clouds in their area of effect on use along with a movement speed bonus.
I’ve played Vet with “ranged build” focus more than melee most of my time playing Vet since the Talent Tree patch and I usually stomp my games just fine with him. I don’t want to personally blame you for your experiences, that’s silly. Still, I do wonder about the talent trees you’ve set up for your Veteran because I’ve generally had a very positive time with the class. The only exception for me would be Marksman’s Focus because I don’t enjoy standing still at all in this kind of game. Generally, I find Vet’s nodes to be so useful that I skip his Keystones to take more from the rest of the tree.