Hellbat At A Glance

The HELLBAT is an up-close and personal flamethrower build that takes advantage of perks and mod synergies based on AOE damage and close quarters to set everything on fire. Don’t use this build if you don’t love being surrounded by bugs … and roasting them.

Flamethrower

• Oversized valves
• Triple filtered fuel
• More fuel
• Sticky flame damage
• Heat radiance

Subata

• Improved alignment
• Extra ammo
• Quickfire ejector
• Hollow-point bullets
• Volatile bullets

Satchel charge

• Extra satchel charge
• Extra satchel charge
• Rock mover

Drills

• Hardened tool tips
• Magnetic refrigeration
• Increased tank pressure

Neurotoxin

• Grenade variant 3

Armour

• Improved generator
• Healthy
• Temperature insulation
• Shockwave

Perks

Berserker is going to make your melee attacks do a very noticeable amount of damage and since you will be up close and personal there will be plenty of opportunity to make use of this. This perk is going to enable you to get more value from vampire which will also synergize with the increased health from your armour modification Healthy which give you +20 health. More health means you can afford to lose more which is going to synergize with berserker to give you even more melee damage at low health.

Vampire is all about restoring health while remaining in combat. This perk works particularly well with this up-close and personal Hellbat build. Use your pick to finish any low health Glyphid Grunts or larger. As stated above, this perk synergizes with Berserker because you can kill Grunts quite easily with a pick given the extra damage you will be doing. Use your picks power attack with the shockwave (+1 area of effect) mod often and when surrounded. Doing this you can heal yourself for a substantial amount in times of need.

Iron Will synergizes with the first two perks as it can provide you with an increased opportunity to live on when you would otherwise join Karl and the rest of the fallen. Note: this takes quite a bit of skill to pull off successfully. Given the high risk of this builds play style it’s worth having. Iron will also enables things like reviving fellow dwarves as a last ditch effort and to relocate yourself to a more favourable position where your team can more easily revive you.

Weekend Athlete provides an escape option. With this build you will sometimes need a breather for shield recharge. Running away to keep shields up is important as it allows the shield mod shockwave (area damage) to proc more often. I call this run-charging.

Veteran Depositor increases your survivability substantially so long as you keep Molly right next to you. Since you won’t be running far away from the fight area using this Hellbat build it is likely you can easily keep Molly near you or circle back around to her when run-charging your shields. This works well with the burrow method sometimes used with this build which I will describe later.