This build is a bit ridiculous, and will have you and other people going "How is this idiot still alive?" Overview This build is centered around damage reduction, healing, and panic rolling while other things do damage. There's a bit of a 'synergy' idea here, so read on to this nonsense. This is NOT the best build, nor the smartest, it's just fun. Hope you enjoy it. Archetypes The 2 archetypes you're using for this build are vital and the source of a lot of the synergy and surviving being an idiot. It doesn't matter which slots they're in, as long as you can react quickly enough to use the class abilities when appropriate. First you use Handler, with the support dog. Support dog gives everyone near your pup a bit of health regen, and allows you to use his ability to give everyone good healing with a relatively quick activation. This is important to supplement your passive health regen, to keep teammates alive, and to keep... other things alive (you'll see shortly). Plus, the various bonuses of the class increase survivability, outgoing damage, and help you support your teammates better in multiplayer (faster revive speed, less friendly fire damage with the.... wayward shot, etc.). Also, ensure that your max health trait Vigor is at it's maximum, as this will increase how much health the pup regens with both it's passive and it's active howl. Also, very important, your pup can be used to revive downed allies. Just like you command your pup forward to trigger ambushes, command it to a downed comrade and it will use one of their relic charges to res them (200 second cool down per person, but being able to res an ally while still fighting is VERY useful). Second class to use is the summoner. Now, importantly, you aren't using the summoner in the typical 'bad guy' play style of sacrificing your minions for extra damage. Rather, you want them alive and consistently poking, and you want the max of them (this will make sense soon, I promise!). For these reasons, you will be using the Flyer minions, as they poke from a distance, can hit anything, and tend to take less damage. Additionally, the maxed passive of the Summoner gives you 1.5 hp/s regen, which stacks with your puppy's .25% max/second. You can start to see what we're going for here, but I promise, it gets dumber. Carry on my fellow gamers. Armor and Bedazzling (and Relic) Okay, here is where the whole thing starts to come together. First, your armor. We're going to be using the Leto Mark II armor set in all slots to maximize our damage reduction off of armor. "But I don't want to flop dodge!!!" Don't worry, I got you. You're going to use the Twisted Idol necklace. This means you'll still get to roll (heavy rolls with 50% stamina penalty, but that won't be an issue) but, this also increases your armor by 35%. Get that damage reduction. Now, for a relic, let's go with the Crystal Heart. 100% health regen across 10 seconds means that you can tank a lot of damage paired with the rest of this build. Additionally, the reduced movement speed is irrelevant, as you can still roll about and, in general, you will find yourself shooting, melee hitting, or rolling with this setup. For relic fragments, you want 3 blues: Damage Reduction (cause let's keep building this), Armor Effectiveness (doing all we can to make sure our armor has over 50% dr), and Healing Effectiveness (since this build is all about dr and regen). Now, the rings. This is where is all starts to come together. First, these three are what we are centered around: First, Thalos Eyelet, giving us a stack of Bulwark, and increasing stamina regen per bulwark stack. Second, Kolket Eyelet, giving us another stack of Bulwark and .3hp per second health regen per stack of Bulwark. Third, Soul Guard, which gives us a stack of Bulwark for every active summon. This includes both flyers and the pup, giving us 5 stacks of Bulwark, which increases damage reduction by 25%, and with the rings increases passive health regen by 1.5 per second and stamina regen by 10 per second. Last ring has a few reasonable choices, here's my suggestions: If you want a bit more damage, Soul Shard gives 5% increased damage per active summon, so you get an extra 15%. Hardcore Metal Band also helps with survivability, as getting hit gives you a stack of Bulwark for 10 seconds (and Thalos Eyelet allows you to have a max of 6 stacks). Or, if you want the heat off your health and you find yourself rolling about a lot, use Rerouting Cable, which grants 5% max heatlh as shield for every 20 stamina used, until you have 5 seconds of inaction, up to 50% of your shield. Any of these three are viable options, but I usually stick to Soul Shard until fighting a boss that has me rolling like I'm on fire, then I switch to Rerouting Cable. You also can use this slot for rings that prevent certain status effects dependent on the boss you're stuck on. But of course, I almost forgot... the one ring that truly leans into the health regen aspect of this build. A different survivability alternative to Rerouting Cable. If you don't want the deeper health pool (from the shield) and just want more health regen, there is, of course, Reserve Boosting Gem. For the top half of your health you only get .5% max health per second regen. Not bad, not great. It really shines in the bottom half where you get 2.5%, outpacing the healing dog's ability. The Pointy End But what weapons to use? Why, of course, weapons that are just as borderline silly, with mutators that work too well. For our main gun, we have 2 options. Monolith causing extra damage can be quite useful if you're stuck, and being able to fire and forget the mod has saved my backside more than once. However, I have found that Twisted Arbalest works surprisingly well, in particular against bosses with minions or groups of enemies. The mod builds quickly and deals nice bonus damage, staggers most everything, and is fast to use. Additionally, using the Bandit mutator can be tasty, as it has a chance to return the shot into the weapon on each hit (yes, every one of the 5 bounces that hit an enemy). For a melee weapon, there's two solid options. The one I'm currently sticking with is Atom Splitter, as it hits hard, hits a wide area, and if you can figure out how to do a neutral evade attack (hit dodge without the sticks engaged so you hop backwards then attack), you'll shoot out an anime-style sword wave that deals solid damage. It's only downside is being a tad slow, but the Edgelord mutator compensates by increasing weapon attack speed and the speed you can charge up the sword wave. Maxed out Edgelord gives you 3% lifesteal on that sword wave as well, which is no small amount as it's base damage is over 600. Another solid choice for mutator if you find yourself ammo starved a lot is Transference, allowing you to refill some ammo every time you whack something, but you probably won't need it if you lean more heavily on your handgun, listed below. You can also use Gas Giant for solid hits and to proc corrosion on opponents if needed, and the DoT is nice, but for just straight bashing your way through stuff in front of you, Atom Splitter wins. Your pup already procs bleed on its hits, so you'll have some DoT ticking in every fight. Another mutator that increases your survivability is Shielded Strike, granting shield on every melee hit, sometimes allowing you to go blow-for-blow with some enemies. If you feel you don't need the attack speed boost, use this instead, and increase your tankiness even more. Now, given how the rest of this has gone, I bet you can guess what the handgun choice is... That's right, Cube Gun. While it doesn't have the burst damage or frills of a lot of others, infinite ammo means nothing is ever out of range, and the damage is decent. The shield ability can block some incoming damage and be a debatably useful but always entertaining source of outgoing damage as long as you remember to shoot it before it is broken or dissipates (by activating the mod again while aiming). Also, throw the Ingenuity mutator on there. True, we don't care much for the level 10 perk, when maxed out you get 30% heat buildup reduction and can fire more continuously. This is what I meant earlier when I said with this build you're either rolling, hitting, or shooting. Traits! One of the limitations we have to deal with in this game is, unlike in the original, you can't just infinitely stack traits. You will have a limited number of trait points to distribute, and we want to maximize the benefits to our silly build, so we can't just choose them willy-nilly. Hence, the following. First, choose Handler as your starting Archetype. Once you have Handler and Summoner maxed, you will obviously have Kinship and Regrowth maxed, both which are beneficial to your regen, and keeping your maximum number of summons alive. For this reason, we DO NOT take Blood Bond, as we don't want our minions taking extra damage, we want them alive so we can max our ring benefits. Additionally, we do max out Rugged, so we double our summon's health. Now, we obviously should max out Vigor, Stamina, and Expertise. This gives us maximum health for the percentage based regens, maximum stamina to counteract the armor weight, and when we do lose a minion, we'll get him back faster (not to mention popping puppy heal more often). Amplitude is also a useful one to have maxed, particularly if you decided to use Monolith for your long gun, as it means the mod will be quite large. And, of course, Max out Barkskin for an extra 10% damage reduction. Now, mods are fairly important in this build for our outgoing damage, and cube gun can have questionable accuracy sometimes, so here's the rest of the choices: Spirit for bonus mod power generation, Arcane Strike so when we're playing whack a mole we can pop mods again sooner, and Handling for, ya know, handling. Final Thoughts Now, I know I haven't touched on corrupted weapons yet, I need to test them more before I give an opinion. Corrupting the twisted arbalest seems silly as it reduces the number of bounces, invalidating the mutator, but the corrupted cube gun ability paired with the ingenuity mutator means a LOT of pew pew activities. So overall, this is geared towards spiking your dr, health regen, stamina regen, and making it so pickups are generally not needed, and your ammo hungry teammates can take most of the boxes. Is this the best build? No. Is it effective? Probably also no. However, it's fun as hell, I'll play for hours without using a relic charge, and there has been more than one time that I'm the last one standing against a boss, getting hit a bunch but regenerating health enough to survive, and I can all but hear my teammates going, "How is this idiot still alive?" I know this isn't a terribly long guide, but I welcome suggestions, and let me know if I should slap a TLDR in here too.