New player looking for help

[Ary]

Hi. I just started playing this game and I gotta say I'm really enjoying it. Is there a step by step guide for dummies, with an ultimate beginner build preferably for crusader heavy bolter, although it doesn't matter. Need the kind of build holding my hand throughout every stage of the game.
Sorry if it sounds too noobish. Much appreciate your response.

[bluetrazyn]

Hey man, there are plenty of great guides out there for builds (especially the Crusader since he’s very new player friendly).

Good news is, no character you pick is locked out of anything (heavy bolter Crusader will still get the same perks and unlocks as assault crusaders, just later on in levels). No armor restrictions, once you’re high enough level all three armor types can drop as loot.

Don’t be afraid to experiment. There’s no way to accidentally hamstring yourself into a bad character with no way out. You can buy an item to reset skill points. Attribute points can be redistributed anytime at no cost.

My only advice that I’d give to a new player that you wouldn’t be able to easily know on your own:

- Turn auto loot on. Looting each individual item in this game is a pain so just turn autoloot on via the gameplay settings, set filters if you want, and scrap anything you don’t like after missions.

- Try to speedrun the heroic deeds. This is how you unlock different skill trees to distribute your passive points. So if you’re a heavy bolter guy but you want some things in the melee tree, try to do melee damage when you can because you’ll unlock the melee skill tree sooner.

[Ary]

Thank you.

[bluetrazyn]

Sure thing! Check out Cheeser on Youtube, he has a ton of great Crusader builds on his channel. Heavy Bolter Crusader might actually be one of (if not the) most powerful characters in the game for the effort.

[Schalimah]

While Cheeser offers great variety in his builds, their execution is usually sloppy.

Heavy Bolter is one of the crusaders weakest ranged weapon choices.
It is slow and its only AoE skill has a long cooldown.

If you want an easy and beginner friendly weapon, take the heavy flamer.
Once you get access to the tech priest on your bridge, check out the enchants tab and filter for "enrage".
The heavy flamer is made for enrage token builds.

[Ary]

Thank you for your opinions. Also, thank you, @Schalimah for your guide on how to fix blurry textures. Could you please link a beginner friendly guide for heavy flamer? Or should I just follow Cheeser's?

[CaoLex]

Originally posted by Schalimah:

While Cheeser offers great variety in his builds, their execution is usually sloppy.

Heavy Bolter is one of the crusaders weakest ranged weapon choices.
It is slow and its only AoE skill has a long cooldown.

I disagree. Not everyone need to play throught dot burning.
And weakest is probably any 1h weapon + shield.

[Schalimah]

Originally posted by CaoLex:

Originally posted by Schalimah:

While Cheeser offers great variety in his builds, their execution is usually sloppy.

Heavy Bolter is one of the crusaders weakest ranged weapon choices.
It is slow and its only AoE skill has a long cooldown.

I disagree. Not everyone need to play throught dot burning.
And weakest is probably any 1h weapon + shield.

I didn't say everyone should play through DoT Burning.
I even strongly recommend not to play with DoTs as your main damage source because DoTs don't scale very well.
What I said was that the heavy flamer is a good choice for beginners.
It provides larg AoE in the form of channeled skills and persistant ground effects, which is ideal for enrage token builds.
In addition you get heavy suppression damage, which enables more debuffs and CC in the form of flee.

That being said, heavy flamer is not even remotely the crusaders best weapon.
It simply is easy to use and gear for.

Your point with pistol + shield is fair enough.
Runnning single pistols or different pistols is just asking for trouble and didn't even cross my mind.

Still the heavy bolter is severly lacking in the AoE department.
And AoE is king in pretty much every ARPG, this one included.
Its only AoE skill has a rather long CD, keeps you stationary and turns like a snail.
I would take the normal boltgun over the heavy bolter every day.

[Ary]

Okay, the recent responses provided a lot of details, and to finally clear up my doubts, I need to ask for clarification. I’ll try to phrase my questions as simply as possible. Imagine someone who has never played this game at all. They chose the Crusader as their first class to play through the game.

What weapons and build would provide the most comfortable experience for completing the early content?
What are the optimal options for steady progression between completing the campaign and transitioning into endgame content?
There’s no need to explain about the endgame, as this stage offers a wide range of opportunities for experimentation, and there are plenty of guides on this topic.

Thank you in advance for your response and assistance.

[mcb0ny]

First of all, I don't know how people understand "Endgame" in this title, cause you can do the Void Crusades from lvl 35 and most other things from lvl 1. And campaign is just an extended turtorial that you can skip after doing it once.

So what is "Endgame"? Same thing as before, but with lvl 100?

As for campaign itself, and assuming you leave the difficulty at "Normal"... You can't really go wrong. You can switch weapon types every mission and still do fine. In fact i'd say that's what you should do until you find the one that feels right for you, and only then start to think how to make your crusader stronger based on what you picked. Cause honestly, you can make every weapon work well if you build around it.

And respecing is very easy, so don't worry, you can't really screw this up to a point where you character is "broken" and you need to make a fresh one. The only thing that's hard to change is morality, but it's not a deal breaker either.

[CaoLex]

Originally posted by mcb0ny:

First of all, I don't know how people understand "Endgame" in this title, cause you can do the Void Crusades from lvl 35 and most other things from lvl 1. And campaign is just an extended turtorial that you can skip after doing it once.

So what is "Endgame"? Same thing as before, but with lvl 100?

Many class features only unlocks near the level 50, thought Crusader suffers much less with it than other classes. Then there is also socked items drops (that is impossible on low level). Sure Void Crusades and even Ordos can be unlocked earlier (more so, Ordos shall be done as early as they are available because they are limited to 3 a week so it's better to start farming rep earlier) and Void Crusades auto-scale but the difficulty increase of, let's say, 5 levels is very different between mid levels and high levels because your perks, psaloms/shards, and character stats-related bonuses (point of which are unlocked mostly throught levels and heroic deeds) negates good deal of difficulty difference.

The strongest argument however is that you get new level much faster on lower and mid levels, even if you left abuse of Taro and "meme" boostes for later levels (which you shouldn't but such hording is understandble). Which means that unless you are willing to invest insane amount of credits and rarer crafting resources into several peaces of equipment that you get lucky with in crates from Void Crusade, then very soon they will be outperformed even by Green level equipment. And credits drop in much bigger ammounts on higher levels too.

[Safarel]

Originally posted by mcb0ny:

Fl
So what is "Endgame"

Endgame is literally every activity that happens after beating main campaign

[kschang77]

Due to the way loot gains randomized enchantment, there's no "one way" to get a great build, but generally, there are four ways to get a TON of damage

* compounded critical hits (high crit chance, high crit strength)
* compounded debuffs and vulnerabilities
* enrage tokens PLUS compounded damages based on token count
* berserk tokens PLUS compounded damages based on token count

In general, you need to have a mix of up to 3 of them to achieve good Damage per second, AND you still need to balance it with enough regen / protection to make sure you survive the trip.

And to do this, you need to know what skills you have (from each of the passive categories), categorize what signums, implants, weapons (one or two handed), shields, armor, and what enchants you got, and pick the best combos (playing the min-max game), and enhance them with socketed psalm doctrines and/or shards to enhance that even further.

Yes, it's a complicated process.

[CaoLex]

Originally posted by kschang77:

Due to the way loot gains randomized enchantment, there's no "one way" to get a great build, but generally, there are four ways to get a TON of damage

It's huge credits and crafting resources sink but you can rerolling quite a while until you get something close to what you want. Enchancing crafting capacity is a thing too.

Getting regen isn't really complicated if you aren't against using couple of slots on innoculator or something like this for it.

But sure, it's cheaper to reset perk trees that not fit for whatever rare equipment you got.