Tech-Adept for the season start

This is a guide for a season start, from zero to hero. Leveling, item progression, season journey, tips and tricks and miscellaneous musings included.

Intro + Links

I enjoy playing TA. Not the fastest class, but very powerful, and very friendly to my 43 year old gamer's hands.

This guide doesn't really have a target audience. Each section has the core principle first, then I elaborate on that, and - if I can come up with any - it finishes with basic information about it, the beginner-friendly stuff.

I have tried to keep nomenclature consistent, but this grew organically over the course of a good week of beta testing season five. If you have OCD, small differences in the guide trigger you, and you want to clean it up, hit me up on Discord!

Also, if you want to translate this guide into a different language, hit me up, I'll try to help you get it going.

The link to the endgame TA build I'm currently using is at the bottom of this section. It shows the full gear and passives.

Item stats are usually pulled from Mome's Enchant Viewer[mome-borogove.github.io]

Ancient Relic stats are pulled from Kykuy's Ancient Relic Viewer[40k-ancient-viewer.netlify.app]

Psalm Code Doctrines can be found on the Neocore Game Compendium[neocoregames.com]

This is what the build is capable of, once (almost) all gear pieces have been assembled. Do note that the char is not even level 100 yet. Youtube likes to spazz out with embedded videos, so here is just the link: +50 difficulty mission, with a level 97 TA

And to get it over with: Yes, you can probably make this build even stronger with zerk tokens. I don't play zerk, though. Too lazy to manage token generation. If you want a zerk build, go look elsewhere.

I finished 4th in the 5th Season, with a playtime shown on the char of around 36 hours. Some of that was however spent on writing this guide, with the game open in the background.

The build is shaping up nicely, here's a random +18 mission getting steamrolled on the 6th day after the season start. Single target damage can be lacking at times: Youtube video

Here's the link to the 'engine' of the build. It's mostly about using it for Spin2Win, but there's also a TA section: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2834123390

Mindset

We are playing for the long haul: Full season journey as fast as possible, and blasting +18 missions before we even hit level 100 - not small, short term improvements that will hinder us in the long run.

There are a couple of key pieces the endgame build revolves around. Until you obtain those key pieces (some are archeotech enchants, there is the odd Ancient Relic, half of them are just max level relics with five or six enchants), do not roll your items, and don’t try to replace them with small upgrades.
Rolling a new four enchant purple eye implant of your current level to replace your level 22, three enchant green one might look mighty tempting, but if the green one already has movespeed, base damage for your minions and +XP, a four enchant purple - at best - will increase your damage output by a couple percent.
Most of your gear pieces don’t have any possible enchants that would be a great leap forward, so just treat them as utility containers: A bit of extra life, maybe some resists, always +XP, and possibly movespeed.
My personal rule of thumb is that I allow myself the number of rolls the item already came with, and only if it would really be a substantial upgrade. During the run I did while writing this, the very first item roll was done to satisfy the needs of the tier 1 season journey, at level 58.
The one exception to this is if I have a very low +XP roll on an otherwise decent piece of gear, in that case I’ll give it a roll or two to bring that +xp roll higher.

We always try to finish missions quickly, and not to die. The item rewards are bad no matter what, and the majority of XP comes from finishing the mission. My personal feeling is also that tarots drop more on missions that are not too far above your level.

Tarot Cards

Drop more compared to previous seasons. You should get to level five Venom fairly comfortably.
To make the ‘influence in a subsector’ season goal a lot easier, I’d unlock ‘The Pure’ as well, a little after Venom. You could also argue about unlocking the Psalm-Code one early, to help with getting the red Psalm Codes you need more consistently.
Leveling Murder (+XP) is not needed or recommended, we get to level 100 easily enough by doing the rest of the seasonal goals.

The drill for unlocking the tarots is the same as every season: Do not 'unlock' (level up) any cards, just because you can. There is one seasonal goal to level a card to level five. That takes about 400 tarot card consumables. if you leave all other tarot cards at 10/10, level one finished, every single tarot you consume will go into the only one you leveled, and you will get to level five there eventually. If you unlock other cards, you can easily double the required amount, if you unlock ALL of them, you need about twenty times as many!

Morality

Not really needed. Some people are big fans of anti-DoT armor. I never use it. There’s a Puritan weapon enchant that could be strong in the lategame, but I have not had the chance to test it, and I HATE getting stunned and slowed down:

1% chance to instantly kill enemies on hit when Suppression Status is Suppressed and 5% chance when Overwhelmed

The drill for the season start is the same as always when making a new character: Stick to one choice, don't roleplay. It's nigh impossible to switch from one to the other, just getting one maxed after one bad choice can be really arduous.

Don't do what I did in season four: Make a TA to test combustors, decide that you didn't like them, and on the 2nd TA - which became the main for that season - skip the intro missions. There's a morality choice in the intro, and you will not get to max morality through the campaign if you miss it. And I got really unlucky with morality choices in priority assignments afterwards.

Resource management - being poor in style

• Don’t roll your items
  
• Only socket your items for very good reasons
  
• Don’t upgrade your items’ levels. The difference in the numerical values is tiny, and it's very expensive to do
  
• We can sell intels. Around level 80, I had 45 unused ones
  
• The moment we have crafted the level three shard for the season journey, we can (and should) sell all the level one, two and three shards, with the possible exception of the seasonal ones, which are really rare. Note that the seasonal only start dropping after you finish the respective tier of the season journey
  This also helps with storage space woes

Any relic or better you find, goes to the stash (once we unlock full salvaging, they get salvaged), every other gear piece you find gets vendored.
Depending on your drop luck (and what chests you get in your first void crusade), you might need to salvage a couple of red or ancient items to get the red crafting material for adding sockets later on. The rest can and should be sold for credits and fate.

All fate goes into the tech tree. Once the tech tree is maxed, we buy the stat point and passive points at the special mission ‘Merciful Agony’, then we save all the fate up to level 90, to buy ancient loot packs. Reason being the season journey goal to have five level 90 fully unlocked ancient relic items, and this is our best shot at getting those (and arguably the best use of fate points).

The order of unlocking doesn't really matter, as we simply refuse to re-roll, socket, enhance or craft at all until so late in the leveling process that we have the full tree unlocked.

Season missions - Boss missions

The loot on non-boss missions is complete and utter trash.
The loot on boss-missions is usually pretty good.
I would recommend never running non-boss. If the difficulty gets too high for your current character, just ask in Discord. Because of the good loot, someone should be usually keen to run it with you.

Season journey

Remember that you only need to fulfill/meet the criteria once. Red psalms, you can pass around with your buddies, same with unlocked ancients.
Some goals don’t unlock until you close the inventory window.
Just apply those passive points, and then do some mind resets.

Equip that worthless red armor, _then_ vendor it.

Tier 2 season journey asks you to destroy skull traps. Either run the indoor campaign mission, or random Mechanicus Indoor missions. I like to rotate my screen a bit for this, so that I’m looking at a 45° angle in the direction of movement. Makes it a lot easier for me to spot the red laser beams and the skulls behind doors.
The Viridian void crusade also has the odd skull trap.

Ancients also unlock in your 2nd item slot, use that for the goals that are related to Ancient Relics.

Seals

Use them, specifically on Supreme missions. Anything that increases your chance of getting that precious ‘Shock when Enraged’ stat is needed. That one single stat increases your damage many times over, and makes you pretty much immortal. So apply the seal for extra implants drops, or archeotech gear if you don’t have any of the former, instead of a third tarot card.

Turrets

Turrets are what kills you as TA. The rocket ones are not so dangerous, but flamers will kill you, and the ones that drop on some doors in void crusades will also kill you if you activate the cogitator while your destroyers are still engaged somewhere else. Always let the destroyers clear everything and gather around you before you interact and trigger the turret-drop.

Flamers have to be outmaneuvered. They hardly do any damage or don't shoot at all if you do a fancy wavy-spiral path around them. Basically, you confuse their targeting mechanism, by switching direction. Here, I run up a little, then down and with a little distance between it and me, and once past, start turning inwards, towards it.

Youtube video of such a feat

Heroic Deeds

Be aware of your heroic deeds: If the game wants you to use healing or booster components, make sure your inoculator has the right color, and then use it every time it’s on cooldown.
The same goes for opening chests.

World Skills? Run Unholy Cathedral, all those minefields, call astartes and tarantula turrets seem to count, same for Valorous Heart, there are a bunch of turrets to set up. You can also select the ‘call in X’ in Priority Assignment to progress this.

There’s one heroic deed to spend data flux. So re-summon your minions all the time while you can. The goal of 200k however is so outrageously high that the one way to get it is by switching your build to vivisector blasting, and then blasting away. Just playing the season journey, you will end up well below 50k data flux spent. I usually don't bother.

For security doors (gas trap), on the nurgle mission to the top right of the start, with the info fragment, if you take the long detour towards the right, there's one of those. Just invest the extra couple of seconds each time, and you will get the deed a bit sooner.

Build Concept

This will be a hybrid build that evolves as it goes through the leveling process. Pure combustors into pure destroyers to level first, then we bring up our defenses and branch into ‘utility’ passives.

The moment we get the 'Shock while Enraged' equipped, the built explodes, both in damage dealt, and survivability. The heat, shock and fear auras we will be running apply vulnerabilities extremely fast.

Later on the destroyers become debuffers as well, help bosskilling and snipe stragglers in purges. There are also some nasty caster enemies that the destroyers will kill from range, and we also let them do the killing in the ViP escort missions if there is the possibility of the VIP getting killed when he follows us too closely.
Once they are fully equipped with the endgame offensor module setup, their damage also becomes quite substantial, even on very high difficulty missions.

Why destroyers?

• fast rate of fire (for debuffs)
  
• some AoE
  
• decent AI with the right weapons
  
• don’t shoot into every obstacle, like combustors do

Leveling and Itemization, play by play style

In the most general terms, the leveling and itemization path is as follows (we try to not have to use mind resets):

In the very early levels, all we do is look for extra summoning slots. So any kind of weapon with three slots, a technomartyr belt, and a technomartyr armor. On all other gear pieces, we simply look for +xp and movespeed, that’s all we need. If the game refuses to drop a technomartyr belt or armor, we can buy one from the vendor. Inoculators, we look for red and yellow components (for healing, and working towards heroic deeds).

Just slug through the first couple of missions at ‘story’ difficulty
The moment you can access the bridge:
Put summoning slots everywhere
Put Psiloni Combustors into every slot once you hit level 10 (the unlock criteria might be different per sub-class)

Select the passives that will benefit your Combustors and then your Destroyers, as the passive trees unlock. I am putting screenshots of the skill trees at the end of this guide, with the early and late points marked

Construct Offense - the ranged damage boni for starters. AoE and top + bottom ones later
Construct Ability - just move + attack speed
Construct Defense - try to save up a couple of points when you get close to unlocking this, you want the two DoT related ones right away, then we slowly add the damage reduction and +HP things left and right

Construct Specialization: Needed pretty late, possibly the one point that gives data flux regen if you get annoyed by the cost of combustors, you need it anyway later to get to the AoE part for your destroyers.

Quick tip for an extra bit of XP: The 7th or so mission in the story should be available right when you hit level 10, it’s called ‘Infestation’. You have artillery strikes there, and guardsmen, so you can crank up the difficulty a bit, I usually run it at +3.

Destroyers unlock around level 20. Switch all your summon slots to destroyers, equip them with offensor modules. If you don’t have a full set yet, movement speed is the next best choice.
Level both weapons (Phosphor Blaster and Grav-Cannon) to max level, and equip. Put the passive points into the two destroyer-related ones in Construct Offense (lower right).

This switch from combustors to destroyers should catapult you into easily running missions above your char level already.

For reference: On level 21 - after switching - I did a +2 Wordbearers mission on a big map, with three tarots in four minutes, for three levelups.

We have still not put a single point into anything defensive for the TA! TA needs to move around a lot, to herd enemies into the destroyers, and needs to dodge well. Learn to time your Inoculator, I usually set it to one heal, and one ‘stop DoT’ component.

Around level 35, we have pretty much all the points in offensive for our destroyers we are going to assign. So we can start investing into defense for the TA, if you feel you are too squishy. If you feel your constructs are too squishy, we spend passive points on their defenses.
Intels up to +3 should be really easy. On the playthrough for this guide, I have not rolled a single stat on any item at this point of time. Playtime for level 36: 2.5 hours.
Without any rolling, I'm at 77% extra XP.
Priority assignment and campaign missions are easy at +5 at this point, the only things that kill you should be turrets and psyker explosions. And those blue sniper champions.

Here's what a +2 Intel looks like at level 42. Gear and Passives are also shown at the end of the video: Level 42 Intel +2

Around level 50, we are closing in on finishing the first tier of the season journey, my holdup at this playthrough was cortex fragments, at 83/100 at level 50. Don’t stress about it.

You can level any way you like, starmap missions, intels or void crusades. The latter will probably give you the best shot at getting the first parts of the endgame gear. You should be able to finish any void crusade at this point. On my second-last playthrough, I did full mastery Amber, as my very first crusade, and did the Supreme at +8, closing in on level 70, after seven hours.
If you happen to get Azure shards as your level 35 reward, I’d beeline it to the supreme mission, and don’t bump it up (too much). The boss and turrets become quite nasty when the season mechanic triggers.

For void crusades, use my void crusade guides.

Your biggest damage boost in this part of the game are just levels (more stat points that turn into base damage for you and your constructs, and more damage from leveling your constructs’ weapons) and getting psalm codes for your constructs online. Either the 70% to single elements, or the ‘big’ 100% ‘general’, or 125% to a single damage type ones.

At level 63, I got tempted to check the actual power level, and started a mech mission on the Ecru crusade at +9 difficulty. Which was possible, without death. Clearing the big rooms was a bit of a pita, though, and getting the artifact, I had to leave the cogitator three times and reset. If I had to do it again, I’d switch out a perk to get more data flux regen.
From a perspective of efficiency, it wasn’t good. Just a bunch of void shards, not even a full level of exp, and three psalm codes. But it gave us a pretty good idea of how far we can push the supreme mission.

After our first void crusade and/or around the seven hour mark, we are level 70. We might have enough void shards to start the next void crusade right away. You could also craft the shards of your favorite color from other shards you have.
We are done with the majority of the Tier 2 goals for the season journey, and chugging along nicely on the ones that progress numerically.

Rather sooner than later, you’ll need to unlock the ‘major’ Tarot cards that give the big difficulty boosts, alternatively, you could now blast through the campaign until you unlock ordos.

At around level 75, we are finishing tier 2 of the season journey. We are almost done with tier 3 as well, but definitely stuck on ‘three challenges’ there, since that needs five days, and we are just eight hours in.

Tier 3 is all done around level 80, and tier 4 about half.

Quick snapshot at level 82 of the current playthrough:

• Three relic offensor modules
  
• 17 mio in cash
  
• 204 Machine God Sparks
  
• Six red Psalm codes (five of which are the same…)
  
• Swimming in void shards, there are four types we have 20+ of
  
• The eye implant is purple, level 25 with just +xp. One signum is level 31, also purple and just with a xp roll and vuln effectiveness
  
• Seasonal drops in three gear slots

At 84, I did my hardcore/mastery of a VC in one go, and finally dropped the Main Implant with shock when enraged. I crafted the red psalm code I needed, built the three psalm code doctrines, rolled a signum to 13% per enrage token and rolled life/shield drain on my weapon.
And was instantly able to run a mission at +11, with three tarots.

Video of a +13 mission on level 86, with gear and passives:
Direct youtube link, the embed seems to have issues: +13

Shortly after this video (on the same crusade) I did the supreme mission at +19, without any issues.

Construct Items

We only ever level Phosphor Blaster and Grav-Cannon with the tech fragments. The latter because it’s the best weapon, the former because it’s the least bad of the three others, and because we want a 2nd type of damage. Phosphor is heat damage, Grav-Cannon is phys, and the ultimate giant killer.
When we are leveling efficiently, we will outlevel our tech fragment gain around level 80, but once we start caring about the last couple of season goals, we will catch up again, and almost finish at level 100 on both weapons when we hit level 100. If you play party during the leveling process, your results here will probably differ. No big deal either way. Just don’t invest in any other weapon.

We only ever use offensor modules. Resist the temptation to put trigger effects on your constructs. It’s a waste of offensive power, and it will crash multiplayer games, plus you really, really don’t want enemies to be knocked back or down all the time.
Don’t roll your offensor modules, they drop quite often (there was a bug that resulted in too low drop rates for them, which was fixed in season 5)
Just keep replacing your old ones with higher base damage ones you pick up. If I find a decent relic offensor module with a particularly low damage roll, I'll allow myself a couple of rolls on it.

Ultimately, we want the following setup for our five destroyers:

Three level 100 Offensor Modules, damage rolled to the maximum possible value.
Two each with 30% damage per Debuff as the relic enchant, one with the unique ‘debuff’ effect the modules can get: Chance to Poison, Chance to Hallucinate, Chance to Bleed, Chance to Slow/Knockback and Chance to Shock

The best secondary enchants are the ones with ‘Damage against X’, where you want X to be the things that can be applied to bosses. I think they can’t be shocked, but slowed, and made to bleed and poisoned. In a pinch, a general ‘+xx Damage’ or ‘+xx damage when equipped on a destroyer’ will also do.

Do note that you will not have level 100 modules anytime soon. When you hit level 100, you might have the odd 98 or 97, but mostly still level 90s. Full 98+ will happen after 100+ hours of play time on the char.

Your best sources for relic offensor modules are:

From crafting. Recipe either at the vendor, or from the Ordos Hereticus Store (middle green section of the Ordos NPC). If you decide to do Ordos, only ever run his (and not the other two’s) weekly missions, and do them right away, otherwise, you’ll outlevel the missions.
Don’t craft before level 90.
From the Sacred Vault special mission. Don’t unlock it too early, no one really needs a level 67 relic module.
You can also get lucky from Valorous Heart packs

The Lategame Build

The core is Enrage Tokens

We generate them via this relic enchant on Neural Implants:

1.0 Enrage token on Critical Hit

Or alternatively through this new, seasonal enchant.

20-35% chance to gain 1x Enrage/Berserk token on triggering a Holy Spell

The Enrage on Crit is faster, BUT if you get the seasonal item dropped to you naturally, I'd go that route just to save resources on having to roll the stat on the relic.

Our build never swings the weapon, so once we are at full (20) enrage stacks, we can switch out the Neural Implant in the mission to boost our damage even more. I'm usually too lazy to do this.

Every enrage token increases our damage by 8%, and we boost that even further via this relic enchant on one of our Signums:

6.0% to 14.0% to Damage Bonus per Enraged token, attacks remove 1 additional Enraged token

The state of being enraged enables the following mechanic:

When in Enraged state enemies within 5 meters are Shocked

Valid Items: Force Field, Belt Equipment, Grenade, Psychic Focus, Mine, Archeotech Item, Eye Implant, Main Implant

We combine this with three Psalm Code Doctrines:

Nova Psalm + Volkite Psalm + Transonic Psalm: Killing a Shocked enemy creates an explosion causing Shock and dealing damage equal to Damage from the killing blow

Phosphoenic Psalm + Technomartyr Psalm + Neuralis Psalm + Binharic Psalm: Creates a damaging aura dealing +100% Heat damage per second. 6m radius, ticks every .25 seconds

Transonic Psalm + Nova Psalm + Icarus Psalm + Aegis Psalm + Animus Psalm + Technomartyr Psalm: Causing Shock on an enemy creates an explosion dealing halved Damage and Shock to nearby enemies

The biggest boost to our damage output is applying vulnerabilities, and increasing the vulnerability effectiveness. We’ll help that along by socketing Uncreator Psalms wherever possible.

So the ‘sine qua non’ stat for the 2nd Signum is

20.0% to 40.0% chance to add a general Vulnerability when the target gets a debuff effect

Armor, we can go two routes, I haven’t made up my mind which I prefer, it comes down to what you get your hands on earlier, I guess.

Either Morality-based: Immunity to all DoT Effects

(Mind you, not everything you die to indirectly is a DoT!)

Teleports away from a potentially lethal blow in a random direction (10 seconds cooldown)

Or Ancient Relic

Techadept Armor of Shattering
Random Vulnerability (Heat, Warp, Physical) to the target on Hit
12.0% to 20.0% effectiveness to Vulnerability debuffs
1.0 sec Vulnerability duration
10.0% to 20.0% Critical Damage
-4.0% to -8.0% Cooldown Reduction for all Skills

If you can’t get either of those,
I’d use an Archeotech with either

3.0% to 5.0% chance to trigger a Fabricatus Scatter Field on Hit taken

Or a Relic with

10.0% to 15.0% Movement speed, when no damage is taken for 5 seconds

The advantage of the archeo/relic/morality route is that you can roll the best defensive stat for your constructs on it, which will bring them to the hardcap of damage reduction (when you pair it with the same roll on your belt):

12.0 to 20.0 Supreme Damage Reduction for Constructs

The next desirable stats on our equipment are damage mitigation (which we get a lot from our passives as well) and even more debuffing via aura. If we can’t get either, extra ‘damage against X’ is the next best choice.

Pretty much the best stat for this is this relic enchant

When in Enraged state enemies within 5 meters are Feared

Valid Items: Force Field, Belt Equipment, Grenade, Psychic Focus, Mine, Archeotech Item, Purity Seal, Inoculator, Inoculator

Followed by this Ancient purity seal

Purity Seal of Trauma

Inflict Bleeding on Critical Hit
80.0% to 150.0% Damage Bonus for Bleeding effects
12.0% to 20.0% Damage Bonus against Bleeding enemies
3.0 to 4.0 Virtue/Bloodlust/Psy Focus/Mindlink
4.0% to 6.0% Critical Hit Chance

Passive trees

Early (combuster-boosting) skills in green.
Later (destroyer-boosting) skills in red.
Questionable ones that we can possibly do without are in yellow. I prefer to play full aggro, attack, attack, attack style and resummon the constructs when they die. If you want to play more summoning-focused, that's where you want to put your points probably.

Gear rolls for the TA, and stat points

I'm a big fan of rolling stat points on gear. I prefer enough points in Bionics to get soft-capped on damage reduction. If you prefer a more minion-based playstyle, we want enough points in Bionics to get them - together with supreme damage reduction rolls on our belt and armor - to the hard cap of 80% damage reduction.

Most points into Logic for that sweet, sweet extra damage (for your shock-explosions).

Apart from that, we have to try to fit all the important stats mentioned in the lategame build section into our available gear pieces. Shock while enraged can only be on the eye implant or the main implant, Fear while enraged only shows up on inoculators or belts (and purity seals, while you don't have the Trauma one).

Primary and secondary rolls depend on your weapon stat selection. If you 'cheat' soft-cap crit chance there, you don't need crit chance anywhere else. If you use a three or four yellow inoculator, set to 40 critical hit strength each, you are pretty much maxed out there, and want critical damage instead.
After crit has been sorted out, we usually look for base damage for the constructs, all res and movespeed to cap us.
Secondary rolls have a source of slow, make sure to roll this stat either on your weapon or your belt:
16.0% to 30.0% chance to Slow on Critical Hit

Remember that 'reroll all' has a chance to change the number of primary and secondary enchants! On some gear pieces, the primary rolls are mostly worthless, but nifty secondary ones can be had.

We want a fair bit of 10.0 to 18.0% Suppression Damage Reduction, so that gets rolled on some secondary slots.

Best secondary for the weapon is 'Damage against X', if you focus on your summons, you can go for 'Damage against X for constructs'.

The neural is set (token generation, then switch to extra damage).

The eye implant is either shock enrage, or extra damage in the form of

Eye Implant of Stride
40.0% Critical Damage
8.0 to 12.0 Critical Hit Strength
4.0% to 6.0% Critical Hit Chance
0.03 to 0.1 HP
10.0% to 20.0% Critical Damage

Main implant is either shock enrage, possibly some new relic stats that came with season five, or

Main Implant of Wrath
10.0 to the maximum of Enraged tokens
0.03 to 0.1 HP
6.0% to 10.0% Damage Bonus
6.0% to 10.0% Movement Speed
3.0 to 4.0 Warfare/Accuracy/Force/Logic

Purity seal is set: Trauma

Belt: Can be your source of Fear aura, or whatever you want it to be

Armor: Has been mentioned before. There are Morality ones that people like. Ancient of Shattering for extra vulnerabilities, or whatever you want it to be

Inoculator: Can be your source of Fear aura, or whatever you want it to be. I mostly use three yellow, one red (DoT removal) or four yellow.
Worthwhile secondary: 6.0% to 10.0% chance to reset Inoculator Cooldown on Kill

Weapon: Has been mentioned, I like the crit chance by reserve, but you can use pretty much everything, as long as you roll shield drain and life drain onto it.

Signums: Have been discussed, general vulnerability and 14% per enrage token.

Sockets

What we put into our sockets hasn't been finalized. There are some new options via seasonal Shards (Thunderbolt and the season five shards), and possibly the effects of red Psalm Codes were changed.

One thing is certain: Vulnerability boosts wherever possible.

We have two belt slots, one will be an Uncreator Psalm.
Three slots open on either Inoculator or Main implant, one will be an Uncreator Psalm.
Two slots open in either the weapon or the armor, one is set for ToA. The 2nd, I will experiment a bit, but it's quite possible that results will be inconclusive. Either Uncreator, or a level 5 Season of Judgement shard.

Ordinatus Psalm Reduce the Target's armor by 5% per Hit (this used to break the 'Armored' or 'Heavy Armor' attribute on enemies!) was a given in season four. We will have to see the changes.

One red psalm used to give stacking supreme damage reduction.We will have to see what it does in season 5. (edit: It's now 'Increases Damage Reduction soft cap by 1', so pretty useless).

If we get our suppression knocked away all the time, a level five Resistor Shard in the weapon will solve that.

I have also used a resistor shard as all-res.

Generally speaking, we look for 'utility' that we can't get anywhere else, and ultimately to shore up our defenses.

End of season 5 run update:

You probably want a level 5 Warp Shard, and a level 5 Judgement Shard in your weapon. Both trigger 'on Hit', and one gives supreme movespeed, the other gives general vulnerability.

Perks

by popular demand

You select what you need the most, you try to fill the biggest gaps left by your gear.

Read and Re-read the skills. 'Melee damage' is NOT base damage. It's the bonus to 'melee damage' you have.

Rule of thumb: All the overly specific, too good-sounding perks are trash.

The selection also depends on your playstyle. If you are always ahead of your constructs, parasitic Bio Link does very little.

What I'm usually using during the leveling phase, at some point or other:

Movespeed (MS). Unfettered Manouvering
AS and MS for constructs: Electro-Scourge
More MS: Stride of the Blessed.
You can fool around with the perk that blinds on DoT
If you do get one-shot, you can put in Blessing of Saint Victorious
Cull the Weak for anti-boss damage
Ad-Hoc-Subjugation for extra vulnerabilities
Skitarii Neurosync, if your constructs die like flies

Lategame setup:
Cull the Weak
Stride of the Blessed // Blessing of Saint Victorious
Ad-Hoc-Subjugation

Todo, what I'm working on

Fully fleshing out the final build.

Currently Testing
ZERO points in Constructs, Teleport belt.
Moving around the weapon enchants (check secondary vs. primary), use Uncreator instead of season Shard.
Switch eye implant, either to extra AoE, or the new relic enchant that lowers heat res (shock is heat)
Currently Testing

I don't really know where the insane sustain this build has comes from. I suspect it's from the passives in the health tree. But tbh, it's just boring to test it out. The build works beautifully, I don't need to know exactly why.

I am not 100% certain on the whole debuff tree. I'll try to test extremely high difficulty missions with, and without it. But testing is such a drag, because it's difficult in the game to get consistent tests set up.

I also don't know whether I like the damage-sharing between the TA and the minions.

I'm not even sure the AoE parts in Construct Specialization work. If I was really starved for passive points, these would be the first ones I'd try taking out.

[grimstalker]

@smoggach the fira aura psalm code crits for you

[smoggach]

I'm pretty confused. Did they nerf this or something? If your constructs can't crit and you never swing the weapon how do you get enrage tokens? What am I missing?

[grimstalker]

@Simonov_vlad: I never pushed hard there, I think 117 was my max.

[Simonov_Vlad]

@grimstalker What is the maximum level you got on the construct weapon?

[AVBG]

Post lists in two guides. Continue for others?

[grimstalker]

@AVBG: You can ask. I won't do it. _You_ however can do it and send it to me and I'll incorporate it.

[AVBG]

> There's a morality choice in the intro, and you will not get to max morality through the campaign if you miss it.
Neocore wrote that now when skipping the campaign when creating a hero, he is given 300 morality points in the selected direction.

PS: As for the your Void Crusade guides, can I ask you to add the mission numbers from Vrakos's guides to your mission numbers, so that it's easier to find his mission maps?

[grimstalker]

@Awesomer: it matters not.

[Awesomer]

what is the best subclass of TA to start off as?

[Tachanka]

Thank you! <3 You are true TA scientist^^