The Rambo Deck (LMG) 2023

Become Stallone, cut down everything in front of gun.

Context

Imagine you're in a nightmare lobby with 2 people running starter deck and a PS2 crossplay Doc who has 160 ping; we've been here before. We could always lean on the Messiah or Doomslayer Mom to support our team, dish out damage and keep our "flock" in line. Half of the deck you brought was made to support these 3 meat piles who keep dying, and in the end you're just wishing they were bots who would drop you some ammo. But what if your teammates were better off dead? What if we could just clear the hordes, kill all of the bosses, and win the game as a lone wolf?

Welcome

I will teach you how to delete everything in front of your barrel, explain the features that make this build so unparalleled, and give you the gorilla tactics that will keep you alive in almost every situation. This is a guide on how to become Rambo.

The Rambo Deck

This deck was created to provide buffs and utility to a generally underutilized weapon class, LMGs. You excel at 2 things:

• Killing everything
  
• Living

As a side note, we use the card "Face Your Fears" to provide temporary health if enemies make it close enough to you to fulfill the condition of "Killing within 8 feet of yourself" (♥♥♥♥ metres you're Rambo you work in merica measurements). This can be replaced with the card "Overwatch" if you prefer to keep your dumbass teammates alive, but this choice is entirely up to you. Hyper-focused is also used to increase your weak spot damage at the cost of movement speed while firing; if you manage to find the "Hellfire" card this will mostly offset your movement reduction, and finding the "Run and Gun" card will allow you to cancel this movement reduction as long as you remain sprinting while firing.

Your Character Selection

Character selection should be done based on what is available; if you are in lower difficulty lobbies, you can usually just snatch up what's best because you will be carrying your team. If you are on Nightmare or No Hope, I would recommend planning your pick carefully around your team's composition (only if you can trust them to fulfill their role and play smart).

Our first pick of the litter, if available, is Holly:

Holly is notably the character selected for most melee builds due to her passive, allowing her to sustain herself in combat without ever being in serious trouble. What makes Holly so sustainable is her passive, which grants her 1 Health every time she kills an enemy. Surprisingly enough, most players don't read; this 1 health is granted by any kind of kill with any weapon, not just melee kills (The bat she holds in every picture is bait). This means that if you find yourself in a situation where you are being pummeled, you can gain health from Holly's passive and temporary health from the card "Face your fears" to mitigate any extra damage being taken. This sustain is just generally a good thing to have on any build; and while you may think a melee build would need it, they have enough healing cards they can play to offset not having this extra point per kill.

Our next pick if Holly is taken:

Evangelo is always a great backup pick; the extra little bit of movement speed feels good, but we are using this character for the breakout ability. If you didn't notice, I did not include breakout into this deck. Breakout is one of the strongest utilities in the game, allowing yourself to spring back up from a Sleeper, Tallboy, or Stalker grab. this extra bit of utility truly makes you untouchable if you are prone to not checking corners or if you are a clumsy little goofball (♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ at playing the game).

If you are unable to snag those two picks, turn to the man:

Hoffman doesn't offer anything special to yourself or the team as an immediate perk; but, with a little luck, our kills will provide some extra ammo (Funny little factoid here: Machine Guns use a lot of ammo). Our passive, Cargo Pockets, provides a 15% increase to your ammo and your team's ammo capacity as well; so it's about half a magazine of extra bullets right off the bat.

Lastly, but maybe not least:

Jim. Jimmy boy, who I've never seen picked in any lobby I've joined since the game released. If you read the passives, it just kind of makes sense. Jim has an innate 25% faster reload speed which is amazing, and he also gives a little 10% increase to weak spot damage for your whole team. But his real passive, Clean Kill, is quite ridiculous. You gain +2.5% damage for every precision kill you land, stacking up to 10x; which is held until you are hit. This is a potential 25% extra damage (Similar to using Glass cannon card, without the crazy health debuff); AND IT IS GRANTED BY HEADSHOT KILLS ON ANY RIDDEN TYPE. While he is missing utility, he grants such an insane damage buff to himself it would be hard to discount his viability as your vessel to be Rambo with.

The Playstyle

We've covered your build and character selection, so now it's time to play the game. You are going to load in and be f*cked until you find yourself an M-249 of any quality, or at least one of the two automatic secondaries (Glock 23 Auto or Tec-9). Once you have your guns, you will come online and begin the slaughter.

What you will immediately notice is that you are unable to scope in. This is because scoping in is awful and a waste of time; and you are rewarded with some really amazing buffs for throwing away your ability to look down scope. If you are still doubting my credibility, ask yourself this important question: Would Rambo look down scope on a machine gun? We are running Mag Coupler, Widemouth Magwell, Shooting Gloves, and Ammo Belt in this build to provide faster reloads. This faster reload speed provides minimal downtime between bullets flying out of your fully automatic secondary and the need to reload more bullets. You will also notice that we've included "Ammo Stash" to provide unlimited ammo for secondary weapons, so you will always have something reliable to turn to when you run out of ammo in the M-249.

We run the cards:

• Phosphorous Tipped
  
• Fill 'Em Full of Lead
  
• Admin Reload

As stacking buffs to keep your fire rate and damage high the longer you remain shooting, and swapping to your secondary will allow you to maintain those buffs until Admin Reload has done it's thing. We also run Quick kill to greatly increase accuracy for all weapons; The funny thing about Machine guns is that you gain some accuracy from holding down the trigger. This is signaled by your crosshair bouncing around on your screen and reducing in size in between rounds. The more you play around with LMGs, the more accurate you get with single shots or sweeps.

Most of the cards in the deck are here to keep you firing and dealing increased damage, but that is something you can achieve with any type of gun in the game. What makes using an LMG instead of an AR special is the use of the card "Suppressing Fire", which gives you a 40% chance to slow all nearby enemies to the target hit by 50% for 5 seconds. This brings enemies to a crawl as they approach, allowing you to spread out damage and refrain from taking any.

Your goal is to shoot enemies; more enemies means more time for stacks, and more stacks means more damage. More targets hit means slower targets, which means more time to deal more damage. What you'll also notice is that the more you do more of, the less ammo you have available. Switching to secondary is good, you should find a Compensator attachment for your secondary as well as a fast mag to keep bullets straight and firing when you need to let the LMG reload or you run out of ammo. If we are getting into attachments, the best in slot for the LMG will be your laser attachment for accuracy, an extended mag, any kind of scope that gives weak spot damage increase, and a stock that allows you to move fast or swap weapons fast. I actually prefer picking up the "Walking Stick" on your sidearm, because you lose your Suppressing Fire buff when you stop using your primary.

You are allowed to play a little dumb on this build, but if I have to give some general advice:

• In most cases, your teammates are meat shields. Let them do the stupid things first and hang back a little. If they are actually good at the game, that is all the reason to let them walk into danger first.
  
• Check every corner. This goes for all builds, every game. Sleepers are really easy to kill (1 bullet) so you should feel dumb for not killing it first thing when you enter a room or walk past a wall. Once again, let your Teammates be the dummies.
  
• Let your support be the support. You aren't picking Holly/Evangelo/Hoffman/Jim to go around and revive people in the middle of hordes, you are there to kill everything so that your team can revive safely. Clear a path for them, let them handle objectives like loading shells, holding totems, or turning valves. You should be shooting whenever there is an enemy on the screen. You can even use your secondary to start stacking before the horde arrives if you just fire bullets.
  
• Steal all the assault rifle ammo, and buy full ammo before leaving the safe room at the beginning of every level. I am not joking around here. You may seem like an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for taking all the ammo, but if you have good aim then you are doing the most damage per second out of everyone else on the team. If you have a support on your team that recognizes this fact, have them drop you more assault rifle ammo as you move through the level.
  
• Announce that you are doing an LMG deck before you lock in. Tell your teammates that you will be using 1000 assault rifle rounds every map (absolutely not an overstatement, you will use a ridiculous amount of ammo), and you will not be leaving them any assault rifle ammo in any of the crates you find. If they are slightly competent at the game, they will have an SMG build, a support build, a sniper build, a shotgun build, or a melee build. You can get away with 1 other person using an AR, but if everyone is using Assault Rifles (or, god forbid, someone else decides to just pull out an LMG) it will become a quick issue.

Some Interactions, also my thoughts on the RPK

One of the most interesting things about going an LMG build is your interaction with the Minigun.
If you were questioning this interaction, yes. Every LMG card and stack in this deck will be applied while using a Minigun. It is very fun. Lots of fire damage, quickly slow enemies, stacking damage, stacking fire rate, and bullet penetration. You are the one who should be on the Minigun, but having a Minigun and an LMG firing down range at the same time is still very good.

The slow applies once for a 50% reduction, but the 5 second timer is reset on subsequent hits (40% chance per bullet fired from an LMG).

Pyro is another temporary health card that theoretically works with your Phosphorous Tipped card, but applying fire damage is somewhat inconsistent. I haven't really tested this as a usable alternative to the other conditional temporary health cards, but if you try it please leave a comment and let everyone know if it's good or bad. I can see this working well with hordes, but not well at saving your live if things get desperate.

The RPK is garbage. The damage increase at the cost of fire rate is less damage per second and less enemies hit per second (Fire tick damage, slow application across a horde, bullet penetration). Use it if you cant find an M-249, drop it the second you find an M-249.

The Nemesis is garbage, and will definitely get you killed. Let your idiot teammate pick it up because it's a shiny Legendary! Honestly, if you can bait someone into taking it, they will be more useful at pulling enemies into a nice little group surrounding them for you to cut down.

Good Luck Soldier

It's time for you to take your shirt off, tie a headband on and drop into this jungle we call Back 4 Blood! As a Steam user, you have the unparalleled benefit of being a socially outcast computer nerd who will not miss the touch of a woman (you've never felt the touch of a woman) when you are venturing deep into the hordes of enemies in front of you. These Xbox and Playstation players need your help clearing recruit missions, and they can't do it without a certified Rambo user in their lobby (They saved their money instead of buying a GPU). If you enjoyed this guide on how to become Rambo, please leave a like and check out my other guide on how to become Mr Krabs:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2978707237

[ale乂•☣•]

fine deck for up to veteran.

[dafoose]

If you want to try it sometime lemme know.

[Sixop]

Secondaries with unlimited ammo and fast reload will always be useful for moving through the map in between hordes. This deck is essentially combining some of the play style of a speed deck and the utility of a DPS deck. The LMG is for when you need to clear a large group of ridden, mutations, or a boss (Very quickly). You maintain damage with minimal reload downtime.

While you aren't reloading your primary directly, the speed of "Admin Reload" is affected by your weapon's reload speed. Global reload speed with all of your guns will make a huge difference in hordes when you only need to swap reload for 2-3 seconds.

I think your idea of a synchronous deck is perfect for groups of friends; but this game is mostly just people on Xbox playing on cross play (It's a game pass freebie). I do a lot of quick play and >90% of my games I have to clutch up. This deck just keeps damage and pace in a good spot for yourself to lead with.

[dafoose]

Sounds like this build is more about your secondary gun than your LMG. Ammo stash is a secondary focused playstyle. Considering you are reloading when using other guns I hardly see the need for reload speed, you could be adding other cards to buff your playstyle. I like the idea of an Tec-9/LMG Playstyle though.

It's funny, when you say "Doomslayer Mom"...that could be me.

Not bad guide style, I also made a double LMG Guide called "Meatgrinder Mom"
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2653150553

Or if you want to try my synchronous "Tropic Thunder" deck that's a team Double-LMG with unlimited ammo. ; )