Build Breakdoown: Bullet Hell (Gunner's Lead Storm Overclock, Modded Hazard 6x2)¶
| Post Info | |
|---|---|
| Author | u/Shotgun-Crocodile |
| Post Date | 2022-07-26 |
| Original Post Link | BUILD BREAKDOWN: Bullet Hell (Gunner's Lead Storm) [MODDED: Haz6x2] |
Bullet hell is probably one of the most widely disparaged overclocks in the game. It's often compared unfavorably to the base auto cannon, and simply dismissed as useless. In this build breakdown I will be showing why this is an unfair comparison, and why for me bullet hell ranks as in the top 5 overclocks for gunner primaries.
Why Bullet Hell?¶
Bullet hell on the surface looks like an absolutely terrible overclock. It removes a TON of base damage from your bullets, and adds a probability based ricochet for one additional target to your bullet. It also comes with the largest accuracy penalty of any overclock. Base bullet hell with no other mods selected is basically unusable. Bullet hell trades direct single target damage for utility. It is up to the player to make the most of that utility to outweigh the downsides of the OC. This is why I personally find bullet hell the most fun OC to play, it gives a lot of outlets for creative play, and rewards you for coming up with interesting ways to use it.
TL;DR
- Offense Hot bullets build: 322X3
- Defensive Aggressive Venting build: 322X1
Tier 1¶
This first option is an extreme no brainer. Bullet hell has such an absurd accuracy penalty that you need to pick option 3 Improved Platform Stability in order to get back to a weapon that somewhat feels like a minigun and not the end of a sparkler. The other options are not even worth discussing.
Verdict
Pick T1C Improved Platform Stability.
Tier 2¶
Normally a personal choice tier. I would argue that on Bullet Hell you lose that choice and you have to take High Velocity Rounds +2 damage to help offset the massive -3 damage from bullet hell. Looking this mod as a percentage. Taking bullet hell lowers your damage by -3, which brings the base gun down from 10 to 7. You can now either take 600 ammo bumping your total ammo pool from 2400 to 3000 (25%). Or you can take +2 damage and bring your damage from 7 to 9 (~29%). More importantly is breakpoints. With the ammo mod your breakpoints are going to suffer immensely. You are going to hit more armor since you are breaking it less often, and get more reduced damage shots on your already lower damage bullets. I did some tests on common ricochet targets below to show the breakpoints (median of three tests):
| Enemy | T2A More Ammo | T2B High Velocity Rounds |
|---|---|---|
| Swarmer | 3 | 2 |
| Grunt | 17-20 | 13-15 |
| Slasher | 30 | 22 |
| Guard | 54 | 41 |
| Acid Spitter | 22 | 18 |
| Web Spitter | 8 | 6 |
As you should be able to see, by taking damage you are saving roughly 20%-33% ammo, which means by taking the damage mod not only can you kill things much faster, spending less time on each enemy, but you save more ammo too. There is 0 reason to take the ammo mod with bullet hell.
Verdict
Pick T2B High Velocity Rounds.
Tier 3¶
This is where most people make their first huge mistake and go for Blowthrough Rounds. Usually this is a good choice on almost any build. However damage per bullet is not the draw of Bullet Hell, so making your bullets potentially hit one more target in a straight line is a very meager benefit.
The strength of bullet hell is that you have more bullets per bullet... so this means you get extra proc chances and status effect spread (stun, armor break, hot bullets) on each shot.
Improved Stun is the pick on this tier, that basically makes the entire overclock worthwhile. The stun duration triples, and you will be dishing out enough stuns to stunlock about 20 enemies at the same time. Another hidden benefit of this mod is that it keeps enemies off your back just enough that you have more time than usual to let the gun cool while kiting. Since you do not have the luxury of cooling on tier 1, stun helps you manage your heat level much more effectively.
Hardened Rounds is an OK choice for non-modded game play if you want to play with bullet hell on hazard 5. If you find yourself not being overwhelmed by enemies too often, you can swap from stun to armor break to increase your damage. Since you cannot control where the bullets hit enemies, ensuring that they can reliably break armor increases your overall damage significantly.
Verdict
Pick T3B Improved Stun.
Tier 4¶
This tier offers the first real choice, which depends on your personal preference.
- Variable Chamber Pressure is a good option to help bring your damage up. With this and damage on t2, you actually dish out quite a bit of total DPS counting both the main bullet and the bounced bullet. Assuming 90% player accuracy, and ignoring the tier 1 rate of fire mod it's the build with the 5th most DPS you can get on the minigun.
- Lighter Barrel Assembly is another great option. This lowers your reaction time required to start stunning things which makes it better at dealing with getting overrun. Another good reason to run this mod is if you frequently find yourself needing to cool enough that the gun starts spinning down. Since the gun cools slower the hotter it is, if you get to the very top of the heat meter before letting it cool, the gun will spin down before you should start firing again.
- Magnetic Bearings is entirely useless. There is 0 reason to ever pick it.
Personally I take Variable Chamber Pressure. All of the issues that Lighter Barrel Assembly fix can also be fixed by improving your skills. Don't heat your gun past 85%, if it does you need to work on your kiting and situational awareness. Prespinning your gun when you expect to get into a fight is sufficient 99% of the time.
Verdict
Pick T4A Variable Chamber Pressure.
Tier 5¶
This is where the choice in playstyle comes in. You can opt to play defensive, brawling, closer range with aggressive venting. Or a more long range, offensive style with hot bullets.
- Aggressive Venting is extremely powerful with bullet hell. Bullet hell and stun keep enemies piling up near you as they swarm in without quite killing them. You often need to flick around to hit things directly that are not getting stunned, making it difficult to finish off targets. This pairs perfectly with aggressive venting, making a dense pile of damaged enemies nearby to hit with the vent. The vent will wipe out everything smaller than a guard and clear out a ton of space for you to reposition. Aggressive venting also helps mitigate another of bullet hell's weaknesses: being ammo starved. If vent connects with a big swarm it can do massive damage, if the fleeing / burning bugs retreat into a choke point, fire can spread to additional bugs doing a ton of extra damage and outright killing all swarmers trying to come through that chokepoint.
- Hot Bullets is probably the meta pick for 6x2 on almost any minigun build, and unsurprisingly it goes great with bullet hell as well. You lose out on the personal safety of aggressive venting, and gain huge offensive power. Stunning a wall of grunts and igniting all of the guards and slashers can do a lot of damage. Stun and hot bullets work in tandem to ignite a target and stun other nearby targets. This results in very effective fire spread. The lower damage of bullet hell here actually helps in a way, preventing ignited targets from dying too quickly to spread heat to their neighbors. In sandbox (terrible terrain to fight with bullet hell) with hot bullets, stun, and bullet hell I can beat 100 hazard 6 slashers at once so it's not terrible at defense, just not as good as aggressive venting. The combination of fire spread, stun, and kiting is enough to keep them just in the sweet spot where they can't quite get you before burning to death. The other huge benefit of hot bullets is the ability to ignite distant targets to then use volatile bullets bulldog on. The margin for error is much thinner than aggressive venting, if you accidentally overheat you are in big trouble.
- Cold as the grave is a trap option. The other two options on t5 are significantly better for any build, and this is compounded by bullet hell doing very little damage outside of hot bullets or aggressive venting. Typically on reviews for bullet hell where the conclusion is that it is bad, they pick cold as the grave.
Verdict
- Pick T5A Aggressive Venting for a more defensive / close-quarters playstyle.
- Pick T5C Hot Bullets for a more aggressive / longer-range playstyle.
Summary of the Two Options¶
With all of this said we can divide the good bullet hell builds into 2:
- Offense Hot bullets build: 322X3; and
- Defensive Aggressive Venting build: 322X1.
Secondary and Grenades¶
The strongest secondaries are ones that will round out your build with high direct single target damage. It's also important to note that you do NOT want a secondary that will be used for a long period of time. You don't want the gun cooling too much with hot bullets, typically you will ignite a target and swap to bulldog, take a few shots and swap back to keep your heat in the red. With aggressive venting, you only have 5 seconds of downtime after a vent, you want to be back on minigun firing as soon as you can to begin building up the heat meter again. This means BRT in general is a bad choice since it typically requires a lot of time to have any impact. The coilgun is in the same boat since it requires charging before firing. Coilgun is in a weird place balance wise though, its hard not to recommend 222x3 Hellfire with any primary since its so powerful, but it doesn't really compliment bullet hell very well so I will ignore it.
For the Hot Bullets build I use 2332X Volatile Bullets bulldog. This lets you ignite and snipe things from across the map, combined with bullet hell's ability to quickly find and kill leeches in the dark this build is extremely efficient at clearing out a new cave solo.
For the Aggressive Venting build solo I will usually take 2332X Elephant Rounds. Aggressive Venting usually won't ignite most targets you would want to hit with volatile bullets like praetorians, or oppressors. Instead you can just rely on the fear and good old elephant rounds to deal with big targets.
For grenades if I am taking Volatile Bullets I will take incendiary grenades for the extra ignition source. Sometimes you just don't have the time to wait for your gun to heat up enough to ignite something, or you have a lot of small targets around a big one you want to hit with volatile bullets. The incendiary grenade can also be taken with volatile bullets and aggressive venting if you use it primarily as a source of ignition for large targets such as praetorians and oppressors. Though this still won't help you with longer range targets.
As always, you can take cluster grenades if you are good with them, they are much higher immediate impact grenades than incendiary. You can even take them with hot bullets and volatile bullets if you want an additional source of stun instead of an extra ignition source. It's hard to go wrong with incendiary or cluster grenades both are extremely powerful.
Playstyle and Tips¶
Bullet hell is a very aggressive playstyle, with either hot bullets or aggressive venting. Most of your damage is coming from fire in one form or another, so positioning and heat management is even more important than it is for other minigun builds. In addition bullet hell adds a lot of utility to your kit which should not be ignored.
- You almost exclusively want to fight in small corridors and hallways. Fighting out in the open is death. You lose all the benefit of heat and fire spread if the bugs can separate out and stay far away from one another.
- The minigun cools slower the hotter it is. In order to stay in the red and keep hot bullets online you should aim to keep your heat hovering around 75%-85%. This keeps it at the perfect cooling speed to kite. Keep firing up to 85% heat, stop firing, turn toward the direction oyou want to go, jump and flick your aim back toward the enemies, start firing and the gun should roughly be at 75% heat again. This rhythm will also keep your gun full spun up most of the time for the 15% damage bonus. See DRG - hot bullets/stun/bullet hell vs 100 slashers for a demonstration.
- With aggressive venting, stun enemies in such a way that they make an arc you can move into, you want the bugs to surround you right as you vent.
- The playstyle with aggressive venting is very aggressive. Learn how much time it takes to vent from anywhere on the heat meter so you know when to start wading into the bugs to get the optimal vent off.
- Venting causes massive fear which is not only great for personal safety, but if you can force bugs to retreat through a small chokepoint they will do massive damage with heat spread to other bugs, and also you can now hold the chokepoint again.
- Bullet hell is the ultimate leech killer. Even from outside a cave entrance you can often times accidentally find and kill leeches. Flick bullets over the ceiling randomly to find leeches quickly.
- Bullet hell can be used to find enemies around a corner that do not have line of sight on you. This can often be useful for sniping an acid spitter before it even sees you. It is often worth it to shoot a few bullets at a dark corner or unknown area to find threats. If no health bars pop up that area is empty.
- With hot bullets your target priority is a little different than normal minigun. Deal with high threat low HP targets as normal, such as web and acid spitters. Most other threats however can be stunned and left alone such as slashers and trijaws. Instead you want to stun and ignite them and then move on to another target. Your goal isn't to kill bugs with bullets, it's to set as many bugs on fire as possible. This also means tanky bugs are a great target such as guards, since they will ignite and burn for a long time while presenting a very low threat.
- Aggressive venting will often times knock down stalactites from the ceiling seemingly way too far away. When clearing out a PE or Refinery mission cave initially, bullet hell can be used to gather up bugs like normal all around you. If you stand under some stalactites the vent will cause fire fear and a rain of death from above.
- Bullet hell can stun things behind you. Depending on your situation you can often rely on bullet hell to stun enemies behind you without looking. This is a huge boon on your attention economy letting you focus on the enemies that matter more.
VODs¶
Assorted videos using Bullet Hell on Hazard 6x2:
Isn't it just the base auto cannon but worse?¶
Incoming Rant
No. Not even remotely.
This is a common opinion of spreadsheet jockeys that look at the damage numbers and conclude that it just "turns the minigun into a weak autocannon" since it can only hit 2-3 targets per bullet. They then take it into missions using blowthrough and cold as the grave, and play it exactly like the autocannon, as uncreativly as possible and conclude that its a bad autocannon.
Thinking about bullet hell for even a few seconds should be enough to realize this isn't true. Autocannon can't hit enemies behind you. Autocannon, can't shoot around corners. Autocannon can't seek out and kill all leeches in a massive cave in seconds. Autocannon doesn't stun. Autocannon has horrific accuracy and anything farther away than 20m is might as well be out of range. Splash from autocannon doesn't do weakpoint damage. The autocannon can't apply heat, the most overpowered status effect in the game. At this point I'm tired of coming up with things and listing them, I'm sure I could keep going for a lot longer.
In general the autocannon is not a flexible weapon. And lacks a coherent, smooth combat loop. The minigun by comparison is fantastically flexible and has a well designed (probably on accident) combat loop. The main reason the the autocannon performs well in the vanilla game, and to some extent starship troopers one of the more popular "difficulty" mods, is low enemy variety. The AC excels at killing non-vetran grunts. And haz <=5 provides basic grunts coming at you slowly from one direction in spades. This weak enemy composition does not force you to split your attention and will not punish mistakes.
Once you get to hazard 6+ levels of enemy variety the autocannon falls off a massive cliff. The bugs are faster, and the quantities mean they spread out and flank you much more often. The autocannon struggles to even deal with grunts in modded difficulty because of the increased speed and variety. Guards will regularly make it through to you, blocking tons of shots that would normally be hitting slashers and grunts. They can force you back much more effectively, and split your attention dealing with flanking grunts, costing you a lot of time retreating and then taking back space after the wave is over. On haz 6+ this is pretty much a death sentence. Simply by taking the minigun over the autocannon you can mitigate almost all of these problems. The ability to stun enemies is huge. For example, if a menace spawns 20m away autocannon needs to seek cover, or blow a shield. Minigun will flick to it until the stun icon pops up (usually a fraction of a second) and then go back to ignoring it. This can usually be done in your normal kiting cycle while in the air from a bunny hop and costs almost nothing. The larger the enemy variety the worse the disparity between economy of attention gets. The autocannon just can't deal with anything that isn't grunts in an time efficient way. Whereas the minigun with stun can easily shift focus to deal with something in a fraction of a second, and shift back. Now when you take bullet hell on the stun minigun, you don't even need to aim at the threats you want to stun. You just need to aim near them. Over the course of a swarm this results in a huge savings of attention that normally you would need to spend on special threats. One of the biggest advantages of bullet hell is having all of this free attention to reinvest during a swarm. In that regard I would actually argue that autocannon and bullet hell are polar opposites.
Now lets consider another issue with hazard 6x2. Increased stationary enemies. Autocannon SUCKS at breaking into a fresh cave. Its bad accuracy means it can't at all deal with spitballers and breeders at a distance, and even leeches are iffy since your rounds can go right past their grasping arm even at point blank. It sucks at dealing with naedocytes. The minigun again deals with all of this better. You can easily pick off spitballers using the weakpoint, and shoot down the spitballer projectiles. You can laser focus on the breeder weakpoint and shoot down all the naedocytes. Bullet hell improves this even more by adding the ability to quickly check for leeches without needing light, and mopping up naedocytes and swarmers without even needing to look at them. This means you can now escape into an unexplored cave without needing to gamble on a leech not being present. With hot bullets and volatile bullets a minigunner can empty a cave of threats very rapidly, whereas the autocannon is at the mercy of the cave generation to give it small caves to clear.
On top of all of this the autoacannon has a bad combat loop, and poor synergy with secondary weapons. The autocannon is designed as a crowd clearing AoE weapon. This holds up fine on hazard 5 even up to double enemies. However the downside is the 5 second mandatory reload you can't get around. During this time the gun is non functional, the only damage it can deal is toxin you have previously already set with Neurotoxin Payload. Without the enemy speed buffs and numbers, on haz 4/5 you tend to get a trickle of trash enemies, then a few slow praetorians behind that are easy to kill in isolation. This is not the case in haz 6x2, the grunts are constant, and the praetorians will be a part of their wave which means you need to deal with them at the same time as the grunts. In tunnels their acid spray can actually be dangerous. If you do not clear them quickly more will catch up and start spraying till you wind up with 5-6 praetorians 2-3 oppressors all mixed in with grunts. In tight spaces this is a death sentence. Whether or not you have time to reload is almost entirely a matter of luck or burning shields. A damage oriented minigun build can clear them itself just fine, and bullet hell with elephant rounds or volatile bullets can stunlock and execute them with no problem. You also tend to be up close and brawling anyway since you are trying to maximize aggressive venting, which makes weaving in power attacks easier. Crowd control autocannon builds will struggle and eventually get zoned off with too many acid/oppressor attacks going off and get killed by a spitter or slasher. To combat this you need to take fear to turn praetorians around, and elephant rounds to kill them quickly. Now the issue is that on haz 6x2 you don't have that freedom, since when you are reloading you are completely helpless and will be killed or heavily damaged in that 5 seconds without a strong crowd control secondary such as hellfire, electro mines or maybe explosive magic bullets. The minigun gets around this by covering for itself while overheating with aggressive venting. The damage and space that venting creates is as if you never stopped firing, in may cases its actually a lot stronger than if you had just been firing that whole time. Combined dash/vent/stun/bullet hell/shield is a perfect combat loop with plenty of survival and tools that all chain together smoothly. You don't need any other tools which frees your secondary slot up to pick elephant rounds or volatile bullets to finish off the build and handle any threat. On top of all that, the minigun also has the option of just not overheating. You are in charge of your heat buildup and can change your firing rhythm to control when, or if you overheat at all.
Now... lets talk about consistency. On hazard 6x2 the wave timer is extremely tight. Only giving you 1-2 minutes at at time without a wave or swarm. Relying on the autocannon to clear takes a lot of time, even with its strongest OCs. Neurotoxin requires a lot of waiting around for the damage over time to kill things. And Big Bertha requires you to be in a state of perpetual reload since the magazine is so small. You spend a lot of time kiting backwards away from spawns waiting to reload or for them to die to toxin. Once you manage to clear and push forward the next wave is often times spawning, trapping you in a perpetual loop of combat. Minigun with stun and aggressive venting can much more consistently push into and through a swarm to get to the other side. Using a shield to collect nitra in the next room if needed. The autocannon will usually need that shield to push through in the first place. In general this means the minigun can complete runs more consistently than the autocannon because you can breach into caves faster, spend less time running from swarms, and generally are quicker.
This is not all saying the autocannon is unusable. Its just a much worse designed weapon than the minigun. With sufficient skill with kiting, and some luck you can make it work solo. And on teams NTP is very usable, but its still just a weak version of sticky fuel driller. You are always better of bringing sticky fuel and a minigun over NTP. Minigun will always give you more flexibility and options in any given situation.