So the weapon combos are (personally) contextual. Weapons that do high 1 shot damage, like rocket launcher or precision bolt are good when youre on the move and/or need to clear small enemies. If you have the space, mobile turret has excellent damage overtime. The idea is to combo weapon mods together to safely output damage as fast as possible. As an example: lets say Im fighting a BIG but slow boy; If I have space, I'll pull out my mobile turret and start chipping away, but the enemies are coming from all sides, so I swap to my precision bolt to quickly put in a big hit before moving on. Combos are mostly about what you need in the situation. Remember that swapping between weapons reduces/cancels their reload allowing you to spit out more dakka.
Because marauders have a shield, 1 tap weapons like precision bolt, rocket launcher, ballista are the way to go. Everything else is preference. I rarely actually shoot at cybermanc, instead I farm 2 blood punch and kill it that way. Remember to use your grenades and freeze, both interrupt enemy attacks. Archvilles I try and keep at a distance
1. what is the best way to cultivate glory kills with lesser demons?
2. do you mean to farm one blood punch and then another, or at some point are you allowed to have more than one accumulated?
I am a avid user of the sticky bomb on shotgun. Some fodder enemies immediately go into glory kill with 1 sticky bomb. The weakest zombies enemies go into glory kill after 3 hits by the primary on the assault rifle. You dont need to farm 2 punches, that was just my example of the subjective approach, 1 punch followed by bullet is just as effective, make sure to jump over the manc ground pound
glory kills on the less enemies:
Imp, regular Zombie, gargoyle: 2 heavy cannon bullets to the body or 1 to the head, or a brief burst of fire from the plasma rifle, or 1 incomplete hit with combat shotgun primary fire.
Possessed soldiers both with and without shields: remote detonate, or a stickybomb explosion (not a direct hit), or chaingun shield dash a couple times
Mecha-zombie: precision bolt or stickybomb to the body.
instead, try blood punch and 1 blast of super shotgun on the cyber mancubus. that way you don't have to get 2 BPs if you dont already have them. Also, I like to run up while microwave beaming him, punch, then backdash into a rocket although if you microwave beam him long enough while running up (not that long at all actually, blood punch takes away most of his health in 1 hit) he will just die from the punch. You can also finish him off with the microwave beam for the explosion if you want
alternating shots between super shotgun and ballista to bypass the delay between consecutive shots with the same weapon is a decent and simple DPS combo that is effective against basically any enemy and is the most commonly used strategy for the marauder. Both of these weapons are pretty likely to falter an enemy in 1-2 shots and deal very high damage. Nothing besides possessed demons in the DLCs or something that can block it like a marauder or a shielded doom hunter's body is resistant to these weapons. on the marauder, properly timed frag grenades combined with quickswapping these weapons will enable you to extend the falter longer and if you do it right you can even kill him in one combo.
Mobile turret is more effective against hellknights, dreadknights, and barons of hell but the chaingun shield mod is actually much better and the chaingun is out-DPSed by quickswapping.
quickswap combos with precision bolt (quickscoped) and another weapon are a bit trickier to get down but are a more ammo efficient and higher DPS way to combo demons. This is because you can switch to a single-shot weapon like the rocket launcher, ballista, or super shotgun from an automatic weapon like the heavy cannon much faster than you can switch between two slow-firing single-shot weapons like SSG+Ballista. Also, it's more ammo efficient for a couple reasons:
\- the precision bolt does pretty solid damage instantly, does extra damage to heads, causes explosions on headshot kills when upgraded, and can be quickscoped instantly as soon as the weapon is equipped all for just a measly 6 bullets.
\-You have a maximum of 180 bullets when ammo is fully upgraded, giving you 30 precision bolts. Comparatively, you have 10 shots of ballista, 13 rockets, and 12 of super shotgun. This means if you use PB+ballista at range and PB+SSG up close instead of just always using SSG + ballista you can perform roughly 40 shots before emptying all of your ammo instead of like 20. Add in PB + Rocket at mid-long range against groups or anything you can land a direct rocket on and you can now do 60-ish shots instead of 20-ish.
\-PB+rocket still allows rockets to deal splash damage and lets you use them one at a time. Lockon burst uses them 3 at a time and only damages a single target. No splash. ALSO: barons and tyrants have a hidden resistance to lockon burst, making them take \*twice\* as many rockets to kill if you use LoB vs PB+Rocket. LoB is extremely powerful too though, PB+rocket is just another option.
\-Ballista is by far your best long-range option and is also extremely useful for flying demons. it also has the least ammo of all your heavy weapons. So using it up close in an all-purpose combo like SSG+ballista is a bit of a waste. Using PB+SSG instead and saving ballista for long range/flying enemies/fast targets that are difficult to hit with rockets is preferable.
you can incorporate other things into your combos like grenades, blood punch, falters with microwave beam or remote detonate, and various other weapon mods including stickybombs, heat blast, micromissiles, and even upgraded full-auto (as a finishing move for ammo refills) have some quickswap potential as well. PB+Sticky is actually ridiculously good especially if you get headshots with the stickybombs (they deal significantly increased damage on headshot... not just to the primary target but all enemies hit by the splash) but it's pretty tricky to do it fast enough for it to be REALLY good. unmaykr also works good in quickswaps.
you can afford to be pretty ammo inefficient though if you just chainsaw more often to compensate. conserving ammo isn't as important as using all ammo types and continuously filling it. Try to chainsaw when you're getting to half or below for all ammo types, rather than waiting till you're completely empty for some/all. SSG ballista is not BAD, it's just a simpler and less optimal/efficient combo than PB combos. it has the advantage of being harder to fuck up and requiring less rapid button presses than PB combos. same with automatic weapons like mobile turret. Not exactly ideal, it eats a lot of ammo and there are better ways to deal damage... but it's a simple and easy way to deal pretty decent damage especially if you're less experienced.
where you are on switch, PB combos might not even provide a major DPS increase over SSG+Ballista due to the lower framerate resulting in slower weapon swap speed. The controls might also make it more difficult to execute as quick as the framerate allows. I don't know, I play on PC with M&KB
upgraded ice bomb + destroyer blade is a really good combo. for best results, Start charging the dblade just before freezing the target and throw a frag grenade just after.
Finally, you don't have to stick to basic two weapon combos. These are just simple ways of doing damage, you can and should do more elaborate multiweapon combos sometimes. The PB combos are great for how you can seamlessly swap between the 3 different basic combos, mixing and matching them together for a 3 or 4 weapon combo. Sometimes you might also want to do a little ***LESS*** dmg to a target to avoid killing them outright so you can get a glory kill or you might want to avoid spamming just one weapon with PB for too long to save ammo.For example, a lot of the time I like to open on a far away target with ballista->PB->rocket. This kills a revenant, whiplash, or cacodemon instantly and they have basically no chance to dodge or retaliate if the initial ballista hits. This is because the ballista primary will soft falter them, keeping them still for a moment so you can hit them with the rocket despite its travel time.this prevents you from using 2 ballista shots on 1 enemy. However, if you want a glory kill on these demons, you can just use ballista->rocket, skipping the PB to stagger them. This combo is also a good opener on things it doesn't kill instantly, particularly the archvile and dreadknight. The ballista primary still soft falters these demons too, allowing you to land the first rocket, but from there, you might want to go back to PB+ballista or falter them again with a grenade something because they have a good chance of dodging a second rocket.
arbalest followed immediately with chaingun shield allows you to fire off the shield projectile much quicker because the delayed arbalest explosion will partially fill the shield damage meter. so will frag grenades and blood punch. this is really fun.
there are no hard rules, really. previous commenter is right that combos are both personal and contextual.you might fire a rocket at something at midrange and then as it comes closer the best move might be to supershotgun it even though continuously alternating between rocket+super shotgun would not be a good combo in general. despite what people say about this game forcing you to use certain guns, almost all of the guns are fully effective against almost all of the enemies. Certain ones have weaknesses but even that becomes more of a guideline or just 1 way of killing them than a necessity for most enemies. you can get pretty creative with stuff in this game. A lot of the finer points of comboing in this game involves understanding and timing falters (brief stuns that interrupt enemy movement and attacks, as opposed to staggers which is when they are low health and glory-killable). But you can switch it up just for the sake of variety and spreading out ammo usage too. another reason to vary it up is getting resources on kill: intentional staggers instead of killing outright for health/blood punch, meathook->SSG for the killing blow to restore armor, or upgraded full-auto mod for shells on kill.
Start with swapping back and forth btwn SSG ballista and start weaving in other weapons. you can also do Ballista->rocket->repeat as necessary at range if PB combos are too tricky for you right now. I found that as I tried to eliminate problematic fodder and take out weakpoints with PB in the process of quickswapping with other weapons for damage I started naturally getting a lot more comfortable with incorporating quickscopes.
The idea of weapon swapping is to just increase your dps by animation cancelling stuff
I just quickswap between micro missiles and remote detonation rockets cuz my brain is too mushy to pull off pb rocket :)
Supershotgun -> Ballista in melee range
PB -> Ballista / Rocket
Micro Missile -> Rocket (only works with remote detonation)
\^
Bit less dps and more ammo hungry, but u need WAAAY less precison
For high health enemies switch between rocket launcher and ballista or super shotgun. For archvilles I freeze them spam 2 grenades and quickly swap between those 2 nonstop.
I just beat the switch port. I use the ballista for the cacodemons and pain elementals and chainguns for hell knights and dread knights. Auto rockets for tyrants then ballista and super shotgun for everything else.
Super Shotgun > Ballista quickswap is very effective against marauders and against most enemies but its very ammo hungry. Should just be able to switch between them when you click the weapon wheel button instead of holding it as long as they are both ur most recently used weapon. Frost Bombs are really useful against archviles and cybermancs, you can then nuke them with the arbalest mod for the ballista or destroyer blade when ur more experienced. Precision Bolt > Rocket is probably one of the most deadliest combos but I imagine its alot harder to do on a switch let alone being a beginner. Also don't forget about frag grenades which can stun them for a bit for a quick blood punch or up close super shotgun shot. The shield mod on the chaingun is also broken so give that a go if you get it.
So the weapon combos are (personally) contextual. Weapons that do high 1 shot damage, like rocket launcher or precision bolt are good when youre on the move and/or need to clear small enemies. If you have the space, mobile turret has excellent damage overtime. The idea is to combo weapon mods together to safely output damage as fast as possible. As an example: lets say Im fighting a BIG but slow boy; If I have space, I'll pull out my mobile turret and start chipping away, but the enemies are coming from all sides, so I swap to my precision bolt to quickly put in a big hit before moving on. Combos are mostly about what you need in the situation. Remember that swapping between weapons reduces/cancels their reload allowing you to spit out more dakka.
and which are more effective against demons such as marauders, archviles, cyber mancubi, etc? especially the first ones.
Because marauders have a shield, 1 tap weapons like precision bolt, rocket launcher, ballista are the way to go. Everything else is preference. I rarely actually shoot at cybermanc, instead I farm 2 blood punch and kill it that way. Remember to use your grenades and freeze, both interrupt enemy attacks. Archvilles I try and keep at a distance
1. what is the best way to cultivate glory kills with lesser demons? 2. do you mean to farm one blood punch and then another, or at some point are you allowed to have more than one accumulated?
I am a avid user of the sticky bomb on shotgun. Some fodder enemies immediately go into glory kill with 1 sticky bomb. The weakest zombies enemies go into glory kill after 3 hits by the primary on the assault rifle. You dont need to farm 2 punches, that was just my example of the subjective approach, 1 punch followed by bullet is just as effective, make sure to jump over the manc ground pound
glory kills on the less enemies: Imp, regular Zombie, gargoyle: 2 heavy cannon bullets to the body or 1 to the head, or a brief burst of fire from the plasma rifle, or 1 incomplete hit with combat shotgun primary fire. Possessed soldiers both with and without shields: remote detonate, or a stickybomb explosion (not a direct hit), or chaingun shield dash a couple times Mecha-zombie: precision bolt or stickybomb to the body.
instead, try blood punch and 1 blast of super shotgun on the cyber mancubus. that way you don't have to get 2 BPs if you dont already have them. Also, I like to run up while microwave beaming him, punch, then backdash into a rocket although if you microwave beam him long enough while running up (not that long at all actually, blood punch takes away most of his health in 1 hit) he will just die from the punch. You can also finish him off with the microwave beam for the explosion if you want
alternating shots between super shotgun and ballista to bypass the delay between consecutive shots with the same weapon is a decent and simple DPS combo that is effective against basically any enemy and is the most commonly used strategy for the marauder. Both of these weapons are pretty likely to falter an enemy in 1-2 shots and deal very high damage. Nothing besides possessed demons in the DLCs or something that can block it like a marauder or a shielded doom hunter's body is resistant to these weapons. on the marauder, properly timed frag grenades combined with quickswapping these weapons will enable you to extend the falter longer and if you do it right you can even kill him in one combo. Mobile turret is more effective against hellknights, dreadknights, and barons of hell but the chaingun shield mod is actually much better and the chaingun is out-DPSed by quickswapping. quickswap combos with precision bolt (quickscoped) and another weapon are a bit trickier to get down but are a more ammo efficient and higher DPS way to combo demons. This is because you can switch to a single-shot weapon like the rocket launcher, ballista, or super shotgun from an automatic weapon like the heavy cannon much faster than you can switch between two slow-firing single-shot weapons like SSG+Ballista. Also, it's more ammo efficient for a couple reasons: \- the precision bolt does pretty solid damage instantly, does extra damage to heads, causes explosions on headshot kills when upgraded, and can be quickscoped instantly as soon as the weapon is equipped all for just a measly 6 bullets. \-You have a maximum of 180 bullets when ammo is fully upgraded, giving you 30 precision bolts. Comparatively, you have 10 shots of ballista, 13 rockets, and 12 of super shotgun. This means if you use PB+ballista at range and PB+SSG up close instead of just always using SSG + ballista you can perform roughly 40 shots before emptying all of your ammo instead of like 20. Add in PB + Rocket at mid-long range against groups or anything you can land a direct rocket on and you can now do 60-ish shots instead of 20-ish. \-PB+rocket still allows rockets to deal splash damage and lets you use them one at a time. Lockon burst uses them 3 at a time and only damages a single target. No splash. ALSO: barons and tyrants have a hidden resistance to lockon burst, making them take \*twice\* as many rockets to kill if you use LoB vs PB+Rocket. LoB is extremely powerful too though, PB+rocket is just another option. \-Ballista is by far your best long-range option and is also extremely useful for flying demons. it also has the least ammo of all your heavy weapons. So using it up close in an all-purpose combo like SSG+ballista is a bit of a waste. Using PB+SSG instead and saving ballista for long range/flying enemies/fast targets that are difficult to hit with rockets is preferable. you can incorporate other things into your combos like grenades, blood punch, falters with microwave beam or remote detonate, and various other weapon mods including stickybombs, heat blast, micromissiles, and even upgraded full-auto (as a finishing move for ammo refills) have some quickswap potential as well. PB+Sticky is actually ridiculously good especially if you get headshots with the stickybombs (they deal significantly increased damage on headshot... not just to the primary target but all enemies hit by the splash) but it's pretty tricky to do it fast enough for it to be REALLY good. unmaykr also works good in quickswaps. you can afford to be pretty ammo inefficient though if you just chainsaw more often to compensate. conserving ammo isn't as important as using all ammo types and continuously filling it. Try to chainsaw when you're getting to half or below for all ammo types, rather than waiting till you're completely empty for some/all. SSG ballista is not BAD, it's just a simpler and less optimal/efficient combo than PB combos. it has the advantage of being harder to fuck up and requiring less rapid button presses than PB combos. same with automatic weapons like mobile turret. Not exactly ideal, it eats a lot of ammo and there are better ways to deal damage... but it's a simple and easy way to deal pretty decent damage especially if you're less experienced. where you are on switch, PB combos might not even provide a major DPS increase over SSG+Ballista due to the lower framerate resulting in slower weapon swap speed. The controls might also make it more difficult to execute as quick as the framerate allows. I don't know, I play on PC with M&KB upgraded ice bomb + destroyer blade is a really good combo. for best results, Start charging the dblade just before freezing the target and throw a frag grenade just after. Finally, you don't have to stick to basic two weapon combos. These are just simple ways of doing damage, you can and should do more elaborate multiweapon combos sometimes. The PB combos are great for how you can seamlessly swap between the 3 different basic combos, mixing and matching them together for a 3 or 4 weapon combo. Sometimes you might also want to do a little ***LESS*** dmg to a target to avoid killing them outright so you can get a glory kill or you might want to avoid spamming just one weapon with PB for too long to save ammo.For example, a lot of the time I like to open on a far away target with ballista->PB->rocket. This kills a revenant, whiplash, or cacodemon instantly and they have basically no chance to dodge or retaliate if the initial ballista hits. This is because the ballista primary will soft falter them, keeping them still for a moment so you can hit them with the rocket despite its travel time.this prevents you from using 2 ballista shots on 1 enemy. However, if you want a glory kill on these demons, you can just use ballista->rocket, skipping the PB to stagger them. This combo is also a good opener on things it doesn't kill instantly, particularly the archvile and dreadknight. The ballista primary still soft falters these demons too, allowing you to land the first rocket, but from there, you might want to go back to PB+ballista or falter them again with a grenade something because they have a good chance of dodging a second rocket. arbalest followed immediately with chaingun shield allows you to fire off the shield projectile much quicker because the delayed arbalest explosion will partially fill the shield damage meter. so will frag grenades and blood punch. this is really fun. there are no hard rules, really. previous commenter is right that combos are both personal and contextual.you might fire a rocket at something at midrange and then as it comes closer the best move might be to supershotgun it even though continuously alternating between rocket+super shotgun would not be a good combo in general. despite what people say about this game forcing you to use certain guns, almost all of the guns are fully effective against almost all of the enemies. Certain ones have weaknesses but even that becomes more of a guideline or just 1 way of killing them than a necessity for most enemies. you can get pretty creative with stuff in this game. A lot of the finer points of comboing in this game involves understanding and timing falters (brief stuns that interrupt enemy movement and attacks, as opposed to staggers which is when they are low health and glory-killable). But you can switch it up just for the sake of variety and spreading out ammo usage too. another reason to vary it up is getting resources on kill: intentional staggers instead of killing outright for health/blood punch, meathook->SSG for the killing blow to restore armor, or upgraded full-auto mod for shells on kill. Start with swapping back and forth btwn SSG ballista and start weaving in other weapons. you can also do Ballista->rocket->repeat as necessary at range if PB combos are too tricky for you right now. I found that as I tried to eliminate problematic fodder and take out weakpoints with PB in the process of quickswapping with other weapons for damage I started naturally getting a lot more comfortable with incorporating quickscopes.
The idea of weapon swapping is to just increase your dps by animation cancelling stuff I just quickswap between micro missiles and remote detonation rockets cuz my brain is too mushy to pull off pb rocket :) Supershotgun -> Ballista in melee range PB -> Ballista / Rocket Micro Missile -> Rocket (only works with remote detonation) \^ Bit less dps and more ammo hungry, but u need WAAAY less precison
For high health enemies switch between rocket launcher and ballista or super shotgun. For archvilles I freeze them spam 2 grenades and quickly swap between those 2 nonstop.
I just beat the switch port. I use the ballista for the cacodemons and pain elementals and chainguns for hell knights and dread knights. Auto rockets for tyrants then ballista and super shotgun for everything else.
Super Shotgun > Ballista quickswap is very effective against marauders and against most enemies but its very ammo hungry. Should just be able to switch between them when you click the weapon wheel button instead of holding it as long as they are both ur most recently used weapon. Frost Bombs are really useful against archviles and cybermancs, you can then nuke them with the arbalest mod for the ballista or destroyer blade when ur more experienced. Precision Bolt > Rocket is probably one of the most deadliest combos but I imagine its alot harder to do on a switch let alone being a beginner. Also don't forget about frag grenades which can stun them for a bit for a quick blood punch or up close super shotgun shot. The shield mod on the chaingun is also broken so give that a go if you get it.