Hi. New to the forums, but I thought I'd do a writeup on this build since it's a pretty different take on Energy Pistols compared to most of the Versatility Dex builds on the forums, but it also carried me to my first ever win on DOMINATING despite the fact that I haven't actually beaten the game before.
http@s://underrail.info/build/?HgMKAwMKAw7CoF8AAAAAwqBLS0YARksUMksANwBGwpEAKCsmASlZAsKaWsKIS8KHMz8qwoXCtMK9woPCncKewq3ip74K4rGgBd-_
(Can't post links, so this is the closest I can get, just remove the @ and copy)
EDIT: Updated to reflect necessary PK points for the build.
I think the Electroshock Pistol is way cooler than Plas or Laser pistols, so I wanted to try to make a build based around it, because it sits in a pretty unique spot. Because it's an energy pistol, it can hit insane crit numbers, and it's also able to distribute that damage into multiple kills with the chaining effect.
The kicker is that Electroshock Pistol optimization can work pretty much in reverse compared to optimizing other energy pistols. Normally maxing INT is a bad idea as you'll be overkilling most enemies anyway and you'll get less attacks overall, so your damage ends up becoming limited as a large portion ends up wasted on many enemies. But because the Electroshock pistol's chains deal damage based on a percentage of the last chain, massively overkilling your primary target translates into more enemies overall being killed by a single pull of the trigger. If you can kill 3-4 enemies with each shot, Electroshock pistol ends up being as or even more efficient than using the laser pistol to clear large groups of enemies.
That's the basic idea behind the build, anyway. I really like the idea of using non-conventional stats for damage, so the idea is to use Smart Goggles + Smart Module and Max-Int High Technicalities + Critical Power + Crit Power Spec + Sharpshooter + Practical Phys. to stack as much damage as possible to guarantee that our EPistol shots take down huge numbers of targets.
After doing some testing, I found that the sweet spot for average damage is about a 3k crit on main target, as that will not only ensure that your aimed shots and crit point shots will one-shot every enemy on dominating except the final boss, but it will also ensure that all chains do at least 800 damage, which will nearly guarantee that each shot can kill 4 non-boss characters of any type.
So what's the deal with the "0-crit" in the title? Well in order to take advantage of these damage numbers, we have to use Smart Goggles for most of the game to achieve the numbers we need to hilariously roflstomp encounters. We're also going to be pretty much skipping any form of crit chance increase from perks.
Why?
Honestly, no idea, the concept of putting a limitation on my build and it still being strong enough to beat dominating intrigued me, and Seeker Goggles compete with Smart Goggles for our damage. Furthermore, because we rely on special attack damage boost to hit these numbers, we're going to need to be making mostly special attacks instead of regular shots anyway...
Enter FO spec + tranquility, the other reason I wanted to make this build. I wanted to lean fully into the TM splash that every dominating build uses, and actually use it as a unique pillar of the build's gameplay rather than using it for the free goodies it gives every build. By abusing this setup to get a free LTI every other turn, Aimed Shot gives us a free crit (and thus, a free 4 kills) every other turn, and we can double-Point Shot a character under Ambush from Proxy to give us 3 guaranteed crits every 2 turns, and thus, about 12 free kills every other turn. LTI also allows us to double-Proxy on a turn, letting us trigger Ambush on lots of characters, even if they're split up.
This combo is also why the build runs 10 Dexterity, because that puts Electroshock Pistol down to 25 AP to fire: with Premeditation, you can Proxy, Aimed Shot, Point Shot, LTI, Point Shot for 3 guaranteed crits without needing AP buffs, making this build extremely consistent at 1-tapping entire encounters from stealth with blindsiding + TK grounding to instantly proc Opportunist. And you can use stasis, grounding, force field, etc. to reset and do this over and over again every other turn...
The main challenge of playing the build is keeping your character alive during those "other turns", where you'll have to use Napalm Grenades, EK Imprint, Grounding, and Stasis to force opponents to waste turns so you can reset your cooldowns and go again. However, it's consistent enough at doing this that you almost never need to rely on Bear Trap or Gas Grenade cheese outside of the very early game. Speaking of which!
Early Game
There's two major pieces of advice for routing the early game with this build that I can give. First, is get Elwood's Laser Pistol early (you can find a guide for it on the other Laser Pistol builds) because the early energy weapon, good starting Guns skill, and early XP boost to level 3 makes everything before Depot A a complete joke. In Depot A, you want to use your stealth to skip all fights except for the mutants near the main gate with the Old Junkyard key. If you kill them and shut down the turrets at the security room, you can go through the entire rest of depot A without having to fight a single mutant.
In Core City, you will hit another progression wall where enemies suddenly become much harder. Getting Persuasion up to 55 and doing all of Abram's quests will let you take all of Jack Quicksilver's quests early. On Classic XP, these quests have exactly 0 combat, yet give a combined total of something like 20k XP, which can easily powerlevel you all the way to level 14 before you even start any core city quests, giving you another level boost to hit the level at which this build comes online, which is getting Crit Power. After this point, the build can carry you all the way to Deep Caverns if piloted right. (You will probably need gas grenades and bear traps for the Coretech quests though... at least I did.)
Gear
Your gear will change somewhat over the course of your playthrough, but you want to always be using an Electroshock Pistol with Amplifier + Smart Module, and a Laser Pistol with either Efficiency/Amplifier or Polarizing/Amplifier depending on how much reloading of your laser pistol you can tolerate.
For most of the game, we'll be running Smart NVGs to hit our key damage breakpoints, but eventually we get so much damage that we want to switch back to Seeker NVGs just to guarantee that our Ambush shots will crit, as without Seekers, it ends up being a little inconsistent, which can cause more reloads.
Finally, for our chest, because we don't need Infused Rathound Leather for the armor, we can instead use psi-beetle Tac Coat for additional psi cost reduction. We are going to be casting A LOT of spells, and we don't have the good Will perks to offset our costs, so we need this + Flexibility to ensure that we can cast as many spells as possible on a turn. We ofc are running a high quality energy shield emitter and ninja tabi boots.
Oh yeah, belts. Belt can be whatever, I just used the Large Waist Pack to offset the lack of Pack Rathound on my character, but you can also use electroinvestigative belt if you can stomach the 130 max carry weight.
I would recommend crafting a rathound leather for crit at some point however, as for my fight against the final boss, I had to switch back to crit gear to reliably do actual damage to him before the fight got too out of hand. It might not be necessary if you're more familiar with the fight, but it's good to bring to Deep Caverns as a backup, just in case. It saved my save, it can save yours too.
Psi
This build is all about Intmaxxing, so we want to take full advantage of this to acquire a huge library of extremely strong Psi spells which have basically no scaling on their effectiveness.
I personally ran LTI, PTC, Stasis, Entropic Recurrence (halves the time the boss fight takes with a big Electroshock Crit on your opening turn), and Force Field, Proxy (for Ambush), Telekinetic Grounding (Opportunist and it's just really good) and Electrokinetic Imprint (lessens the burden of not taking Quick Tinkering)
This build turns most of dominating into easy cheesy town despite the fact that it has a pretty severe limitation in the whole "0-crit" thing, although 2 big notable problems for the build are A. Greater Coil Spiders, and B. the final boss. But both of these are extremely easy to mitigate with the wide variety of CC effects and ability to squeeze out free extra turns, so they don't end up actually becoming too much of a problem. I beat the final boss on my fourth try. (didn't one-shot him though, had to rely on mutagen puzzle + stealth to blow the tanks, so I consider the build to somewhat fail here as you have to actually put some effort in, which is not the goal here.)
The other major limitation is that this build can be quite reload-heavy sometimes because the electroshock pistol is straight up just gambling with your damage at a certain point. This becomes less of an issue lategame with stasis, TK grounding, and Grenadier+LTI Flashbangs.
One final note about your last perk: it can literally be anything. Grenadier, Trigger Happy, Recklessness, Paranoia, Pack Rathound, Interloper and Quick Pockets are all viable options, and it really doesn't matter too much. In my case, I went Grenadier so I could cheese a bit of the final boss away with infinite Napalm.
Overall give this build a shot if you're struggling with DOMINATING in the mid to early game, if you like somewhat weird gameplay loops, or if 1-tapping an entire encounter never stops being funny to you, it's pretty consistent there.
