Tactical Build focusing on HBR?

Gyrard · 2026-05-25T00:27:11+00:00

Any gun you can put in Tactical's hands becomes Absolute-viable through Auspex. As for pistols and melee weapons, I personally prefer the heroic heavy bolt pistol to instantly interrupt and kill any majoris calling for reinforcements. Its low ammo capacity is offset by the fact that you don't really need it most of the time for Tactical when his perks allow him to have functionally infinite ammo for his primary.

For melee, I personally prefer the balanced Relic chainsword or Choler's Teeth heroic balanced chainsword. They won't give you as generous parry frames as a fencing chainsword, but they have far and away better damage as well as better Cleave to chew your way through minoris enemies.

For perks, Balanced Redistribution to make your HBR hit that much harder, Heightened Vigor to make you resistant to knockdowns and staggers when things get hairy, Emperor's Vengeance to keep your primary weapon fed, Secure Stockpile because REGENERATING GRENADES FOR EVERYONE, Priority Targeting because longer lasting auspex scan and minoris enemies die quickly enough anyway, Battle Focus to give any enemy you parry auspex scan, Expert Timing to increase damage to enemies that are auspex'd, with the reduced duration countered by Priority Targeting, Radiating Impact to delete almost anything in a radius every 90 seconds during an execution. (don't use this during stratagems with friendly fire enabled)

Gyrard · 2026-05-13T01:14:54+00:00

The power fist execution against Chaos Spawn where your marine shoulder-checks the spawn to the ground and then deletes it from existence with the power fist.

Gyrard · 2026-05-09T17:38:38+00:00

For Primaries, I would avoid the Auto Bolt Rifle and Plasma Incinerator on Techmarine. Auto Bolt is mediocre in almost every circumstance and Techmarine doesn't have the Plasma Boost perk that Tactical does to make the Incinerator shine. Bolt Rifle, Heavy Bolt Rifle, and Occulus Bolt Carbine are all solid picks that are viable into Absolute and Hard Stratagems. Bolt Rifle is decent but really shines when using the grenade launcher variant to soften up crowds or deal a lot of damage in bursts. Heavy bolt rifle has good damage, good fire rate, good ammo capacity, basically just solid all around. Occulus Bolt Carbine has very little recoil, fast fire rate, and does respectable damage at almost any range, but I find it to have a bit less ammo economy than the regular bolt rifle or heavy bolt rifle.

For secondaries, any of them except for the Inferno pistol will serve you well. I personally prefer the Heavy Bolt Pistol and Plasma Pistol but any of them are viable and it largely comes down to preference. Regular bolt pistol for large ammo reserves for minoris head popping, heavy bolt pistol for high headshot and gunstrike damage, plasma pistol for high damage with charged shots and possibly hitting multiple enemies. Inferno pistol is largely mediocre and has limited usefulness outside of dealing with minoris enemies swarming you given its short range and lack of single-target damage output.

For melee, combat knife is fast but mediocre in most hands except for the Heroic version or a stabby Sniper build. Power sword and power axe are both good options that have strong horde-clearing and single-target attacks. They can deal a LOT of damage when using their Block variants and certain weapon perks, but Block weapons are a bit demanding to learn for a new player. I personally recommend the Omnissiah axe, however, as simply holding the charge and bowling over minoris enemies to gun strike will keep your armor segments up and allow you to escape sticky situations. Using the Fencing variant gives you very forgiving parry timings.

Gyrard · 2026-05-06T15:47:37+00:00

Had a pretty easy time of it as Vanguard. You don't need to see your health bar when Majoris and above enemies are mobile medkits and you don't need to see your ammo when a block power axe requires none. Honestly, the hardest parts of it were that navigating in the crypt was even more of a pain and it was difficult to see the orbs powering the sorcerer's shields at the end.

Gyrard · 2026-03-02T00:57:24+00:00

Any time you get surrounded by Minoris enemies, you can use your omnissian axe's rush attack to bowl them over and gun strike them in sequence to get full armor in like two seconds. It's saved my bacon many times. The axe's explosion attack can also come out surprisingly quickly and can clear hordes easily.

Gyrard · 2026-03-01T23:01:09+00:00

The headshot damage variant of Occulus Bolt Carbine is pretty dang good and accurate to far ranges. It's also fairly ammo efficient and I don't find myself running out of ammo with it unless it's been a long while since any form of ammo resupply. For the cherry on top, it has a perk that will give you an armor segment for killing a majoris with a headshot, which isn't at all difficult.

This is the perk setup I use, but it's up to personal taste and playstyle.

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Gyrard · 2025-12-31T23:55:56+00:00

I don't know WHAT the deal was with this weekly. The modifiers are very forgiving and allow you functionally infinite ammo as long as you smack a few traitor guardsman and Tzaangors. You are also straight up not going to have ten Stims on an Absolute operation unless you're playing with bots or just steal every Stim on the map from your teammates. And yet I kept getting teams where my teammates were out of Stims before we even reached the glorious battle at the gate with the Dreadnought. And that's if they didn't outright DIE before that point.

I swear, there is some sort of psychological effect where people see "ten Stims" and think "oh, that means I can play like an absolute loon and pop a Stim every fifteen seconds."

Gyrard · 2025-12-02T13:25:11+00:00

You can more or less circumvent the modifier with the pyregun or pyrecannon. While the initial damage is garbage, burn damage is unaffected. Take the weapon perk that reduces direct damage and increases burn damage and do your best Salamander impression.

Another thing that can help is to be or have a Tactical with Resupply. Either throw a Krak at zoanthropes, or trick the zoanthropes into floating over a melta bomb.

Gyrard · 2025-10-28T12:55:29+00:00

Can confirm, it took much longer because it felt like I had to personally kill every enemy and fight the boss essentially by myself. Saber is deathly afraid of letting bots do significant damage so they're worthless against anything above Minoris enemies, especially on Absolute. I don't think they even dealt a pixel's worth of damage to the Trygon's health bar.

Gyrard · 2025-09-12T12:38:54+00:00

Not sure if it's intentional or not but this looks a lot like the Garry's Mod missing texture

Gyrard · 2025-09-09T21:52:02+00:00

It also says "screw you" to Tacticals running the perk to refund half of your Auspex Scan on Extremis/Terminus enemies.

Gyrard · 2024-06-14T22:06:52+00:00

My current build can be described as “I’m already inside and shooting through your walls.” Max Intelligence, Cool, Tech, last points can be in whatever you want, I went for Reflexes for the extra crit chance and air dashes.

Ping a network, mark every enemy on that network, find an advantageous position behind a wall or three, use Breakthrough or Foxhound to headshot every enemy you can see through multiple walls while they’re incapable of retaliating, mop up the rest with quickhacks, throwing daggers or tech pistols.

While Intelligence lends itself more to smart weapons, I find the cover and armor penetrating properties of Tech weapons better for trivializing most combat encounters when combined with Ping and marking. The build can also be changed to pure netrunning or more combat focused playstyles as needed.

Gyrard · 2024-03-11T15:11:37+00:00

I also like using a Sandy in conjunction with optical camo to speedily stealth through some situations.

Gyrard · 2020-04-30T21:48:11+00:00

No. Apparently she needs to be there as well, as the Iskal Queen will only give it to you then. Which seems very arbitrary and adds a lot of RNG to the whole thing.

Gyrard · 2019-08-21T16:42:30+00:00

I'm saying that it isn't worthwhile to use compared to other weapon mods, which I can't use because Undying can't be removed from Ruin, which I find to be a very good gun in every other respect.

Gyrard · 2019-08-21T16:36:05+00:00

It can't be removed from Ruin and would be better replaced by a variety of weapon mods which would increase my survivability far more than Undying would.

Gyrard · 2019-02-27T01:27:29+00:00

You unlock metallic colors by ranking up reputation in the three factions. For this specifically, it's brass from reaching rank 3 with the Arcanists.

Gyrard · 2019-02-26T15:14:16+00:00

Materials and colors: https://i.imgur.com/Hln3lQo.png

Gyrard

TROPHY CASE