Strategy:Bullet Dance

0.9.9.7

On Angel of Max Carnage, all of Bullet Dance's problems with inconsistency disappear and it gets to abuse its upsides gratuitously. You're effectively Sharpshooter but with rapid fire pistols. In this scenario, you should probably consider Bullet Dance, as it becomes one of the better options. With one level of Son of a Bitch and Son of a Gun 3, it knocks back on every hit. You can even use rapid weapons alongside your pistols, and that means Triggerhappy is no longer a dead level.

But real talk? If you're on any difficulty higher than Hey Not Too Rough, or playing anything other than Angel of Max Carnage, don't take Bullet Dance. That's the winning strategy. Just don't do it. Take literally anything else. Hell, play it the same but take Eagle Eye and Hellrunner and don't use a Mastery. Before I tried to make it work, it was already infamous for being the weakest of the pistol masteries by a landslide, and oh my god, it's worse than I thought. Once I actually got the darn thing working in a game, it felt worse than if I'd just not taken a mastery at all. You have to make so many concessions in every direction just to get there, and the "payoff" is actually worse than just staying masterless.

Let's go over why.

You're locked out of Hellrunner. You're going to be slow and you can't really dodge! Okay, but that can work in some builds. Not this, though! You usually compensate that with Intuition so you don't need to run away, you just see the battles coming before they surprise you, and even without that, you could definitely still do this if you could compensate for that with pure, raw, consistent DPS!

But wait! No Eagle Eye! No Eagle Eye means no Intuition AND inconsistent DPS! Bad bad bad bad bad. So what are you supposed to survive with, anyway? Tough as Nails? The one that's ineffective against plasma damage? That one? Badass sure doesn't do it, you need to be overhealed for that to have any effect aside from making rocket jumps go nowhere, which is really bad in a build that can't run! If you dip into Ironman enough times, you might as well just go Survivalist so you can take Eagle Eye.

Ah, wouldn't you know it. The one pistol mastery that lets you double-dip into Son of a Bitch and Son of a Gun, and you're locked out of Eagle Eye, the one thing that would make that worth it. You only really need one level for pistol DPS is the saddest part. This locks your pistols at an inconsistent 75% accuracy at max range. You're only 50% likely to hit any dualgunner shots at the same time, and you could miss 5 shots in a row entirely unless you aim them. I thought firing fast was supposed to be the name of your game! No, it just necessitates an annoying playstyle of always aiming your shots at enemies that are outside of the 3-square point blank range.

Not being able to take Eagle Eye alongside SoG/SoB hurts against one specific enemy that will kill you and kill you from it: the former commando. On a Scavenger build with SoG/SoB, you can take a shot or two at them from long range before it becomes too risky to stand your ground against them and you have to retreat and let them enter melee range with you, and you fire fast enough to take them out even with a knockback proc. Or you can just switch to a plasma rifle and kill them safely. With Bullet Dance, firing at long range requires Aimed Shots, which is too slow and will invite a counterattack almost certainly, so you have to lure them into melee range... but if you have any levels of SoB, which you need, you'll knock them back with a max pistol damage roll, and they're at face-melting distance! So you better bring a plasma rifle just for them and Revenants, but thanks to your accuracy being shit, you might need a few turns of getting decked in the face.

Sad! One of the advantages of SoB/SoG stacking, being able to knock enemies back, is so unreliable at long range with Bullet Dance that it never really comes into play for you unless it would foil your plans of survival.

You can BARELY make this stop happening by adding 2 Agility mods to each of your pistols, but those only add +1 to the pistol you add it to, so you're going to need four of them (!!!!!!). Hope you find a Combat Pistol, which needs one less! You need to get lucky and will also be sucking those down like no tomorrow, and of course that means you're going to need Finesse 2 to get Whizkid 2. Well, at least now you can aim your shots faster.

and then once you get your two Son of a Bitch levels, you have to take a dead level to get Triggerhappy, which does nothing for you until you get your capstone! Grammaton Cleric Beretta can use it, but you can't dualreload with that gun, and your accuracy isn't really good enough to use that feature anyway.

So because of that long detour, you'll be about halfway through Hell before Bullet Dance even comes online, just for getting what you need to survive, and by then, it doesn't kill nearly fast enough to justify what it does. Even if you managed to add Agility mods to your pistols, it feels like they miss even more, which is really bad because now you empty your pistols in three shots if all you have is one level of Triggerhappy. You empty them in TWO shots if you have two levels! If you try to get Reloader before you get the capstone, you'll beat a standard game before you get it, and you can't even aim your multi-shots, aimed shots is unaffected by Bullet Dance. Christ on a cracker! Where is the DPS supposed to come from?

Oh, and it gets worse. You don't just get to fire multiple bullets in your shots, either, it actually takes 50% longer per pistol to shoot now. So essentially it costs twice as long to fire as it did last level. So no matter what, you're firing at Aimed Shots speed. Wow! The annoying playstyle you tried to get rid of turned out to be the intended playstyle all along, and now it's here to stay forever! The one advantage of Pistol builds - easy target switching, fast firing speed, and ammo efficiency from lack of overkill - all gone! So now you're just worse Ammochain! You can't even use Ammo Chains to make the reloading less painful or annoying unless you go single pistol! Nor can you use speedloader pistols because you need those Agility mods for the accuracy, and even with Whizkid 2, you can only add one each to an assembly! You have a build with all downsides and no upsides! It feels terrible. There is no "DPS" to be found here. You don't even save any firing time unless you have two levels of Triggerhappy first, so you're essentially just forced to fire twice every time you shoot! You'll spend more time Dualreloading than you will firing your guns, so it's not even fun, and you better not click too many times by accident, or you'll single-reload and you're a dead motherfucker.

But let's be real! You'll be a dead motherfucker long before you get the capstone if you try to go for this, and if you ever manage to get that far, my condolences. If you really want to take a pistol with Son of a Bitch, Eagle Eye, and Son of a Gun, and still have a Mastery, I recommend Scavenger, which doesn't have any of these issues! You can't take Dualgunner with it, but at least you can make your one pistol real good, and you don't need to throw away four agility mods that you desperately need for your armor!

Ya Girl Juniper (talk) 08:25, 8 June 2023 (UTC)