Need help/input to Gunship build

[Acany]

I could use a few hints and ideas to improve my Gunship setup in Ancients Rifts. I'm capable of doing 150 rifts - but that is it. 200 rifts - and I'm toast. I try to strafe as much as possible and face the baddies using my Front Shield. It should be noted that I only have the two legendaries in the screenshots.
Is my build completely fubar or is it a question of gear and/or skills?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2974380585
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2974380382
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2974380759

[Suzaku]

Personally, I'd replace Energized Boost with Teleporter with Scurry mastery. It's up more frequently, allowing you to use it to chase or flee as needed. I would also change Frontal Shield Generator's mastery to All Day, as I've found the reflected attacks to miss 99% of the time. Having infinite weapon energy in a ship that uses it twice as fast is lovely.

Your level 10 perk does nothing for you. You're not using any warfare devices. Use either of the other ones, but I personally use Downtime Warrior. For the final perk, choose Symphony of Destruction. The massive and powerful explosions it causes can wipe out entire waves of enemies.

I would dump the Pigeon's Stare and Thermo gun for stronger options. My main options would be something like a calibrated Gauss Cannon/Powerful Synchro Pulse and Powerful Autocannon. The high damage and fire rate of these weapons has them critting often, getting great value from your crit perks. And for secondaries, I tend to just use ones that give free missiles on crit, mainly destabilizers or normal homing missiles.

And for your ship passive, anything should work but I would try to get the coil turret and 15% increased boost speeds if possible.

[KnuckleHead]

I'm currently doing 500 rifts easily, and could probably do more, but here's my gunship setup:

Weapons

1) Atuo-cannon (great damage, fast fire rate, decent range)
2) Beam laser or coil gun (good range/damage fire power)
3) Flak cannon (good at tight group and for mining)

I mostly use auto-cannon for primary dps since it hits fast and does great damage and will synergrize with our skills best. Also, we use a perk that after our ult is done we get like 10-15 seconds of damage that goes through shields, so with auto-cannons that will absolutely tear through enemies.

Whatever you chose for your main damage dealing weapon you want something that fires/hits fast like beam/auto-cannon/etc since it synergizes with our perk granting 1% ULT charge per crit.

Secondary weapons

1) Corrosion missiles with chance to fire free missle when shooting your primary weapon
2) Rockets with perks that makes them stronger the longer you hold down the fire button

For the most part keep corrosion missiles equipped and make sure you actually target the enemies you are shooting at, you get a nice free auto missile fairly often. For the end boss of the rift switch to rockets and just hold down both primary and secondary weapon and the boss melts.

Utilities

1) EMP with master ability to grant you shields on hit (crucial and helps keep you alive and with our perk that grants 50% crit to effected enemies charges our ULT faster)
2) Nano Transmitter with master ability to regen shields and hull for 50% of damage recovered
3) Missile Defense System with master ability to increase duration by 1 sec for every missile destroyed (defense and synergies with Omni Manus legendary allowing it to remain active longer and add to our DPS)
4) Energized Boost (chance to get away and regen/heal if you start getting overwhelmed)

Perks

1) Defensive Massacre (another defensive layer)
2) Downtime warrior (we're constantly using devices so with this we basically never run out of weapon energy)
3) Relentless (more weapon energy and with 4 hardpoints allows you to do more killing)
4) Critical Faculty (Gunship ULT is amazing so want to use it often)
5) Exploitation (we use EMP a lot and synergizes with #4 perk, basically the more we crit the more we can use our ult)
6) Overkill (since we're trying to use ult a lot, we get this perk a lot which is great, although thinking of switching this one to Ride the Lightning)

Some of these can be adjusted but the main thing is we want to stay alive and get our ULT up and running as much as possible. Also the two weapon energy perks allows us to basically never run out of weapon energy. I can keep firing chaingun and the only reason I switch weapons is if I want a bit more range to kill snipers.

With these perks + chaingun we can use our ULT 2-3 times per ancient rift wave.

Legendaries

1) Omni Manus - great item that will synergize with our skills and add another auto-attack to our Gunship. Does decent damage and can pick off small ships in 2-3 hits which takes the heat off us.

2) Toxic avenger - this one can be probably swapped out if you want to with something else, but in rifts we're constantly getting our shield smashed so we gain charges of this easily and the damage is pretty substantial.

Basic strategy is to just engage and kill things, constantly using EMP in the middle of enemies to keep shields up, and if they get through and start causing armor damage use the armor repair. Spam ULT when you can and if you start getting overrun boost with the boost skill to get your shields up again and go back in to the fray.

Ship passives we should look out for:

1) Coil gun
2) Turret also kills mines
3) 30% damage to drones
4) 15% boost speed

As for stat passives I'd say the four key are:

1) Precision (we want to crit often to get our ULT up ASAP)
2) Utility (decreases ult cooldown and makes it stronger)
3) Firepower
4) Structure

Although I'm not sure how much you actually have to worry about passives...could be wrong but the difference between +/- 1000 points on a passive like precision is like 1% crit chance which isn't significant, so focus on better equipment regardless of the passives if you can.

Anyways I switched to gunship around level 15 and once I did that and implemented some things listed I never died again and blew through the story. The biggest game changers were the utilities, with #1/2/4 being absolutely crucial. You basically can just wade right in and tank/blow ♥♥♥♥ up and constantly keep your shields/armor recharged fine.

*edit*

As far as feedback for your build maybe you can get it to work with the right setup, but I personally think it's fubar. Gunships are slow so trying to use front shield is a losing battle since you're going to get surrounded pretty easily. You're driving a tank (both in terms of toughness, speed, and damage output) so focus on being able to take down enemies quickly and mitigating/healing damage.

With the setup I detailed above I'm able to wade right into the fray and not only stay alive but tear through enemies.

[mirko]

I use 2 thermo guns so I can switch up between them without having to aim at the target and you basicly get infinite thermo gun energy because one is shooting while the other one is recharging.

edit: I also have a coil gun turret which is really useful.

[Acany]

@KnuckleHead Hm I do not see any chainguns - do you by any chance mean gauss cannon?

[KnuckleHead]

Originally posted by Acany:

@KnuckleHead Hm I do not see any chainguns - do you by any chance mean gauss cannon?

Sorry not chainguns I meant auto-cannons.

[SuperJ]

I use umbra, penumbra and flak cannon(or the legendary flak cannon). Whenever you change primary weapons you get a 30% damage bonus. keep shooting and keep your distance. Works for me

[Dephase]

I copied this from another thread where we discussed builds altough I modified it since I used omni manus which you don't have yet.

Weapons: Penumbra, Prime Zapper and Gauss Cannon (sometimes the 3rd is replaced with umbra for the set bonus).
Destabilizer missiles and rockets to quickly obliterate the final boss ship.

Core: energized SP (better than standard power core), with tuned catalyst

Shield: Cassiel's protection

Armor: The one you have is fine. If you manage to find omni manus, use that instead.

Sensor: it's irrelevant at this point I only look at the stat bonus. I got a starforged observer with 527 Firepower, Precision and Expertise (optimized catalyst on this too).

Booster: recharge booster with eco catalyst

Cargo unit: optimized cargo unit

Devices: Shield surge EMP, scurry teleporter, all day front shield generator OR resurgence temporal nano recompensator, carefree package nano transmitter

It's fairly simple:

Keep the boost on all the time, if runs out it recharges in <2s (thanks to recharge booster and energized sp core). That makes you harder to hit. If you see a cluster of ships, harass them with penumbra and then charge right into it, strafing as much as you can (which is why core and booster are geared toward duration rather than speed).
If Cassiel's protection gets depleted, fire the emp (if there are no enemies use teleporter to quickly go into another cluster of ships so you'll make the most of it, bypassing the 14s delay while still having those decoys that will keep some enemy fire away from you).
If you're unlucky and the shield depletes again while emp is on cooldown or you get a lot of armor/hull dmg use the temporal nano recompensator first and it depletes again, use nano transmitter as a last resource.
If all the aforementioned modules are on cooldown and you need to escape quicky, there's the teleport (which you can also use to quickly eliminate sniper drones or, as I mentioned before, going straight into enemy ships clusters).

Use your ship ult to have that burst of extra dmg while nano transmitter is active and then disable it immediately after you're back to full.

For last, the perks:

lvl 5: close call since it prevents you from getting oneshot once (but exit strategy might be good too since you're always boosting).

lvl 10: downtime warrior (or if you prefer percussive maintenance but the goal here is to try and keep the shield up and minimize hull/armor dmg so I chose the first)

lvl 15: i use relentless with gunships (with 3 support devices is a +60% weapon energy reserve and those weapons are quite power hugry)

lvl 20: critical faculty (the other that might be worth is unyielding assault which could make sense if you're taking too armor damage but with at least 2 devices geared for your surivivability, you might not need this).

lvl 25: retaliation (you'll take a lot of dmg so return it back)

lvl 30: ride the lightning (cassiel's protection is an ST shield and this uses its 20/30% capacity to deal kinetic and energy dmg). Also, the damage bypasses the front shields that some ships might have and damages them directly. If you manage to get 5 stacks, unlimited boost + higher firerate and you're a killing machine.

[Khal'cynee]

flak and gauss canon (powerful catalyst), use front shield with weapon regen on damage blocked, spam flak on everything and switch to gauss canon on boss
exit strategy and percussive maintenance so your shield device recharge in no time, you are not supposed to be shy to fight without shield with gunship

[Acany]

Ok, so I changed quite a few things based on the given input - and it did indeed improve things (did a 250 rift this morning). The 'Omni Manus' dropped for me so that got a spot in my build and I replaced Cassiel's Protection with Toxic Revenger. I now use the Umbra/Penumbra combo (for the extra 30% damage on swap) as well as a Coil gun. A new legendary dropped for this morning - 'Final Reckoning' - an autocannon. Looks nice, but to fit it, I'd have to swap out either the Toxic Revenger or the OmniManus. :s Still unsure if I want to do that tbh.

[Suzaku]

I'd get rid of Toxic Revenger and stick with the Final Reckoning. It's a strong autocannon with no charge up time, and the passive it has charges super fast, especially for the gunship since it fires twice as much. Use a damaging missile type that fires for free on crit to deal serious damage.