Introduction

The goal of this post is to provide new players a quick introduction to classes and builds in drg. The most challenging part for me is to find a balance between what I personally consider to be the best option and what players with a different playstyle or skill level may find attractive to play. So while there certainly are objectively better builds those often require specific playstyles that may just not work for some people. So instead of telling you what I personally think to be the best and "forcing" you to adapt the same playstyle, I'll try to give you a fundamental understanding of how to adapt builds to your own playstyle and what upgrades to choose for which scenario.

Fundamentals

Enemies in drg can be roughly classified into the following groups:

• bosses (dreadnaughts, caretaker, korlok weed, BET-C etc.) and tanks (mainly praetorians, oppressors, bulk detonators)
• trash/crowds (mainly grunts, slashers, guards, swarmers)
• stationaries (spitballers, brood nexus, naedocyte breeder)
• high value targets, a.k.a HVTs (mainly mactera, spitters, septic spreaders, stingtails, wardens, shellbacks, menaces)

Each weapon, build and overclock performs differently against each enemy type and the goal of a build should be choosing a combination of equipmnt that provides a good balance between all enemy types. Specific missions types (e.g. elimination and industrial sabotage) can shift the priority of enemy types, but I'd still recommend maintaining some balance. Playing in a coordinated team can allow each class to focus on certain areas and let teammates compensate other areas.

Common connotations:

• wave clear: the ability to kill all enemies featured in a swarm or wave
• crowd clear: the ability to kill trash enemies
• crowd control: the ability to influence singular and multiple enemies by slowing/ stunning/ fearing them
• single target dps: damger per second dealt against a single enemy
• AoE damage: area damage that can affect multiple enemies (this is not affected by weakpoint multipliers)
• direct damage: only affects a single enemy (does benefit from weakpoint multipliers)
• 23X21: 2nd option in tier 1, 3rd option in tier 2, any option in tier 3, and so on

Driller

Strengths:

• Crowd control/clear
• Team mobility
• Terrain manipulation

Weaknesses:

• Ranged dps
• Traversal of open space

Having a driller in the team is crucial for traversing caves as comfortable as possble. He also has the ability to manipulate terrain to the teams advantage, which can heavily impact any defensive objects or boss fights. In combat, his typical role is dealing with crowds, but some overclocks allow him to become quite competitve in other areas as well.

Flamethrower

Main Role:

• killing trash enemies

The flamethrower is arguably the best primary for dealing with crowds of lower hp enemies. Especially the sticky flames it leaves on surfaces are the most notorious tool in the game for time and ammo efficient crowd clearing, but require a more defensive playstyle. Heat Radiance is optimal for getting right in the face of enemies. The flamethrower is very bad against dreadnaughts due to their high fire resistance.

Recommended builds:

• 23221 A more defensive build that takes advantage of the sticky flames mechanic, but can also use T5 Heat Radiance when enemies get close. This video showcases why sticky flames is regarded so highly in the community. Be aware that it requires a very unique and proactive playstyle though. You need to be actively looking out for enemies and placing sticky flames on the ground before them.

• 21311 Not as strong as the sticky flames build in the right hands, but this build allows getting very close to enemies. T5 Heat Radiance kills every surrounding enemy and T4 fear keeps you relatively safe. _Heat Radiance isn't influenced by any damage or fire rate upgrades, so we use T3 ammo to have some more total Heat Radiance uptime.

Cryo Cannon

Main Role:

• Support Weapon against all enemy types

The cryo cannon itself doesn't do much damage but it boosts the damage from other weapons (only direct damage). The 3x damage boost to frozen enemies is very valuable for higher hp enemies, but clearing low hp crowds requries a lot more effort than with the flamethrower. Its main strength compared to the other driller primaries are tanks and stationaries, where taking full advantage of the frozen damage boost is possible. It can also be great against dreadnaughts, when teammates are capable of timing their damage into the short 1 second freeze windows of dreads.

Recommended build

• 12132

Apart from T5 Cold Radiance the build is pretty flexible for personal choices. The only thing I wouldn't recommend is going for cold and fire rate upgrades, since a large part of the cryo cannons freezing power comes from Cold Radiance, which isn't influenced by any upgrades. The role of this build is primarly to freeze all incoming enemies and then either kill them yourself with your secondary or impact axes, or to leave to teammates to clean up.

Sludge Pump

Main Role:

• Crowd Control

The sludge does a reasonable job at dealing with both crowds and tanks but isn't as good as the flamethrower and cryo cannon at each respectively. It's a solid pick for every mission type and its high armor breaking can also come in handy against various enemies.

Recommended Build

• 3222X This build focuses on covering large areas with sludge and slowing down all incoming enemies while they suffer from damage over time.

Subata

Main Role:

• Ranged single target damage

The Subata isn't very strong, but it fills a niche that none of all the other driller weapons can cover, which is taking down high priority enemies at range. Be prepared for spamming the trigger and desperately trying to detect a change in the enemy's healthbar though.

Recommended Build

• 1211X

I honestly never play this weapon, so feel free to bash my mediocre Subata skills. Building it for precision and weakpoint damage is the most reasonable way of using this thing though. Unsurprisingly, use Volate Bullets with the flamethrower, Blowthrough with the cryo cannon and Neuro-Corrosive Toxic Catalyst for the sludge pumpin tier 5. If you really wanted to use it for clearing up frozen glyphids 22322 (weakpoints are nullified on frozen enemies) but the wave cooker will probably do a more reliable job for that.

EPC

Here I have a hard time describing its role in a single line. T5 Thin Containment Field is one of the most powerful upgrades in the entire game and makes the EPC very versatile against all kinds of enemies, but requires a lot of skill to use at the same time. I can highly recommend any dedicated player to keep practising it, since you likely won't want to use any of the other two secondaries ever again. The alternative is to simply improve the sludge pumps crowd clear capabilites.

Recommended Builds

• 21222 This build is focused on T5 Thin Containment Fiel and focuses on taking ammo upgrades, since TCF isn't influenced by damage upgrades. With it you can take down mactera clowds, do very sofisticated crowd clear for a secondary, deal some burst damage to tanks, mining minerals and manipulate terrain in your favor.

• 1X321 The only purpose of this build is igniting sludge puddles in order to increases their dps. This increases the loadouts overall crowd clearing potential but doesn't do anything noteworthy otherwise and is definitely not as powerful as a TCF build.

Wave Cooker

Main Task:

• Comboing with primary weapons

In a vacuum the wave cooker is pretty bad but it can combo well with any of the primary weapons depending on the mod choices. I honestly haven't used it much since I have been addicted to Thin Containment Field before it was released, but there's essentially two kinds of builds: ones that combo with fire and cryo and ones that combo with sludge.

Recommended Builds

• 2X2X3 This is one of the fastest ways for clearing burning and frozen crowds. T5 Exothermic Reactor can inflict 200 Temperature Shock damage, effectively killing all small to medium sized enemies.

• 2X1X1 The goal of this build is to gain some increased dps to all enemies walking through sludge puddles and further slowing down the targeted enemies. This can be helpful against bulk detonators for example but since the cooker dps is fairly mediocre this is far away from gamebreaking.

Grenades

• Impact Axes: they offer immediate burst damage and stun potential against tanks and HVTs, and also benefit from the 3x damage multiplier of the cryo cannon (to some extent). They're overall very versatile and great for any build that wants a little bit more single target damage

• HE grenades: They are fairly mediocre but can take down mactera groups with the right timing. If you are running an EPC TCF build there's even less reason for running it, since TCF already fulfills the same purpose much better.

• Neurotoxing Grenades: very powerful for some additional crowd control/clear, a bit limited in multiplayer though

• Ripper: it's a meme, use it if you want to kill your teammates in interesting ways, while harming bugs as little as possible.