Bullying swarms with Bodkin Points

by Mic. on 04/07/2024

Salutes 56

M1000 Classic

M1000 Classic icon
+40 Max Ammo
+10 Direct Damage
+25% Focus Speed
-30% Spread per Shot, x0.8 Max Bloom, x0.5 Recoil
+220% Armor Breaking
+25% Focused Shot Modifier
+6 Clip Size
+3 Penetrations
+20% Weakpoint Bonus
Focused shots Stun enemies for 3 seconds
Killing an enemy with a Focused Shot to a Weakpoint will inflict 2.5 Fear on enemies within 4m of the kill
Manually reloading within 1 second after a kill reduces reload time by 0.75 seconds
Active Stability System

Nishanka Boltshark X-80

Nishanka Boltshark X-80 icon
Special Bolt: 15 Direct Damage, 10 Area Damage, 9 bolts, 10 sec effect duration. If you hit an enemy, it will have its movespeed slowed by 30% and be hostile to other enemies for the duration of the effect.
Special Bolt: 15 Direct Damage, 12 Area Damage, 9 bolts, 14 sec effect duration. If you hit an enemy, it will take 10 Poison Damage per Second for the duration of the effect. If it dies while it still has that status effect active (or is killed by the status effect), then after a 1 sec delay it will explode for 165 Explosive Area Damage in a 4m radius. The explosion also Stuns for 1 second and inflicts 100% Base Fear Chance.
Special Bolt: 15 Direct Damage, 10 Area Damage, 12 bolts, 12 sec effect duration. If you hit an enemy, it will have its movespeed slowed by 50% and take an average of 16 Electric Damage per Second. If you shoot a second Taser bolt within 6m of the first one, an electric beam will arc between the two bolts that slows enemies by 80% and does 30 Electric DPS. Taser Bolts are not retrievable.
+25 Direct Damage, +15 Area Damage
+7 Max Ammo
x1.4 Special Ammo
-0.4 Reload Time, -0.4 Ammo Swap Time
x1.5 Projectile Velocity
After killing an enemy, gain +50% Movement Speed for 2.5 seconds
Hovering your crosshair over a retrievable arrow will pull it back into your inventory.
x1.25 Special Effect Duration
Bolts are magnetically pulled towards enemies that are affected by IFG or Electrocuted. Additionally, they do a bonus 25% Direct and Area Damage to those enemies.
When normal arrows impact terrain, they apply 50% Base Fear Chance to enemies within a 3m radius, pulsing once per second for 5 seconds.
Bodkin Points

Grappling Hook

Grappling Hook icon

Flare Gun

Flare Gun icon

Light Scouting Suit

Light Scouting Suit icon
Cryo Grenade
Cryo Grenade icon

Loadout Guide

Your Engi forgot to bring L.U.R.Es? No problem.

This is a very basic no-frills Scout build designed to keep you hella mobile and clear waves without breaking a sweat.

TL;DR

Use mobility and Pheremone to get enemies to cluster and then wipe them with Bodkin and Blowthrough M1000 charged shots. Use cryo nades on essential targets.

M1000 Classic

  • T1 - More ammo since the M1000 chews through it like no tomorrow.
  • T2 - Armour breaking. This is the most mod-efficient way to get to that 1-hit kill threshold on grunts in Haz 4+. Active Stability System comes built-in with a faster scope speed so you don't feel like you're missing out on too much when taking armour breaking. (It's also really nice for killing space lobsters)
  • T3 - This one is up to personal preference. I prefer taking Extended Clip since it allows me to clear waves faster and helps somewhat offset the reload penalty from Active Stability System. But if you feel like you're taking too long to kill Praetorians and other beefy targets, then take Killer Focus.
  • T4 - Blowthrough. The bread and butter of this M1000 build. The ability to wipe multiple grunts with one charged shot and also being able to dish out solid single-target damage on beefier targets is what makes this build so versatile. Your mobility makes it so easy to line up grunts and get super satisfying collateral kills.
  • T5 - Stun. Again this one is kinda up to personal preference but I found stun to be the most useful out of the three. The reload speed buff from Killing Machine is very minimal, but is still nice to have and is easy to activate. Fear is a bit antithetical to this build since you actively want enemies to clump up to get blowthrough and Bodkin kills.

Typical Active Stability System M1000 build. It's built to be able to 1-hit grunts on body shots which works wonders with Super Blowthrough Rounds. I played a lot with Hipster since (if you can hit heads) it has basically the same single-target damage with way more ammo. While you can still run that with this build if you find Active Stability System to be a bit too lean on ammo (and can hit weak spots reliably), I found the ability to kill a row of grunts with a single charged shots to be a lot more versatile and allows me to be a lot more independent from my team. Also, the lack of mobility penalty with Active Stability System is really nice.

Nishanka Boltshark X-80

  • T1 - Pheromone Dart. The premise of this build is to try and get enemies to cluster up so that you and the rest of your team can tear through them. Pheromone helps us with this since enemies will start targeting each other and stick together.
  • T2 - More damage. Allows us to break the 1-hit threshold with bodkin shots allowing for quick and easy swarm clearing.
  • T3 - Reload speed. The ability to not only reload faster but also swap ammo faster is invaluable on the Boltshark especially since we combo our special bolt with the standard one.
  • T4 - Speed boost. This is such a nice mobility buff and it's so easy to activate with Bodkin shots since your arrows will usually kill at least 1 enemy per arrow.
  • T5 - Special effect duration. This one is up to personal preference and depends on what your team is running (and whether you want to run IFGs but more on that in a bit). I found the extended special effect duration to be the most useful since I rarely get Magnetic Shafts to really work with this build, and the bodkin projectiles automatically hit nearby enemies if you hit the first shot so it's not as useful as what it would be normally. Fear is pretty good with Bodkin since it has a larger effective radius with the ricocheting arrows, but fear is still antithetical to the way this build works as I mentioned in the M1000 segment. Having enemies run in random directions when you actively want them to group up is annoying, to say the least.

The premise of this build is using Pheremone darts to get enemies to group up and then wiping them with the Bodkin shots. Taking increased damage in T2 allows us to 1-hit grunts with standard shots, meaning you can reliably get 3 kills every time you fire an arrow. If you really want to take IFGs instead of cryo nades then it might be worth to swap out T5 to magnetic shaft since it gives you bonus damage to electrified enemies. Magnetic shaft might also be nice if you have an Engi running Stubby or electrifying Lok-1 rounds.

Equipment

You can really take whatever you want with your equipment. With your Grappling Hook T4 you can take Momentum if you find the speed to be more useful than the shorter cooldown. For the flare gun it again comes down to personal preference, I chose to go for the increased mag in T2 since it gives you one more flare per resupply due to a weird rounding error.