W40K: Inquisitor – Heavy Flamer Burn Crusader BUILD GUIDE – Season of the Warp Surge

This Heavy Flamer build ignites enemies to a crisp with intense burns. This was my final build for season of the Warp Surge, and the one I used to do some of the hardest challenges like mastering a hardcore void crusade. This is an endgame build that requires quite a bit of investment in the form of rerolling items, rare psalm codes, and collecting specific archeotech or ancient relics. If you don’t have the materials to follow this completely, that’s fine! You can start off leveling with a normal on-hit flamer build that doesn’t focus heavily into DoT and have a great time. Your gear will look very different than mine, but you could slowly transition into this DoT focused build as you collect items, no earlier than level 50 since that’s when you’re able to socket the psalm code doctrines. It’s been a lot of fun, one of my favourite builds for sure, it feels so great to just have to one-tap most enemies and watch them burn while you’re moving onto the next pack.

One last thing before we start, I am very late in making this video. The season of Warp Surge is about to end in a few weeks on PC, but still has at least 3 months left for console. If you’re playing on PC, I’ll put any changes that affect this build in the new season first thing in the description, if you’re playing on console, don’t worry, you have a lot of time!

WEAPONS

We’re using one of my favourite weapons in the game, the Heavy Flamer, which let’s you move forward while constantly damaging enemies with its main skill, Flame Cone, and then do the opposite and flee backwards while damaging with it’s secondary ability disengaging strea. The other two skills have a much higher cooldown, Scorched Earth will set the ground on fire to deal damage every second, and phospherous splash can shoot a long-ranged projectile that knocks enemies down. The Heavy Flamer is versatile where it let’s you build for either on-hit damage, or damage over time, while keeping all four of it’s skills useful for both styles. This build is scaling heavily into Damage over Time, so we can basically ignore these damage numbers. What we really care about is this burning damage over time tag on all four skills. My most recent video was a guide all about damage over time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOt3Yh0Vwro) and how it scales, so check that out if you’re curious, but the short version is that it deals 80% of your base characters damage per second, up to 5 stacks, most damage bonuses don’t affect it and critical hits can cause your them to deal up to 200% increased damage depending on your crit strength. We have a lot of different perks, passives, enchants, and psalm codes that scale our burns to a ridiculous level where all you have to do is 1 tap most monsters even in up to +8 difficulty missions, which we’ll talk about later.

The actual weapon we are wielding is a relic with one of the new enchants added this season, 8.8% chance on hit to make all of your hits critical strikes for 3 seconds. I’m just as surprised as you are that I’m not using an explode on kill weapon like all of my builds do, it’s because this new crit chance enchant is so powerful that it can actually compete with explode on death for a lot of builds, especially this one. If you’re worried about a lack of AOE with no explode on kill enchant, one of our psalm code doctines causes burns to spread to nearby enemies, so you’ll still be able to take out large packs. Holding down Flame cone, we attack about 3 times a second, giving lots of opportunities to procc this 100% crit chance for 3 seconds. This lets us not have to worry about rolling any crit chance on gear, which let’s me instead focus on things like health or resists for tankiness, and more importantly, a ton of crit strength and vulnerability effectiveness to be sure our DOTs are doing maximum damage. Usually I don’t talk about the primary or secondary enchants in my build guides, but for this one, it’s so important to roll the right things on the right gear. Most importantly, crit strength, you’re going to want to roll crit strength on pretty much anything you can, especially your weapon since that can get the highest roll. You want a minimum of +86 crit strength to guarantee that all of your critical hits will at least deal 100% more damage, and more often than not 200%.

In the off-hand we have a melta gun, just for it’s melting ray ability that can melt 50% of an enemy’s armour, letting us take them down much easier. We only really use this in high difficulty missions or if a tarot card gives enemy’s armour.

GEAR

I have the new archeotech Warpsmith’s fury in my belt slot, just because I like the personal teleported for this build since the weapon lacks any real mobility. Any relic personal teleporter will work fine. If you hold down flame cone while you teleport, the channel will keep going. If you’re not a fan of the teleporter, there are a lot of good options for the belt slot like vortex of rapidity to stack movement speed, celtor’s flux for easy invulnerability, and any normal relic of your choice.
If you manage to drop any archeotech belt item with “Adds a heat vulnerability on causing burn effect”, forget everything I just said and throw that on, that enchant is so powerful.

Our Neural implant has the archeotech enchantment, “Adds a heat vulnerability on causing burn effect”, which is one of if not the most important enchantment for this build. If you’re not familiar with vulnerabilities, it’s one of the strongest ways to scale damage in this game, making enemies take 10% increased damage per stack up to 10 stacks. This build brings vulnerabilities even further with the psalm code doctrine “vulnerabilities are 300% more effective for damage over time”, rolling effectiveness of vulnerabilities on every piece of gear we can, and slotting in uncreator psalms wherever there’s room.
You can roll this on belt equipment, neural implants, or on signums, but you just need one, so if you have this enchantment on another piece of gear you can replace this neural implant with a normal relic that has the enchant “180% damage bonus for burning effects”. The enchants you can roll on neural implants are mostly defensive, so try to get your resists in check, but remember to go for the secondary enchant “damage bonus for burning”, which we try to get on every single item we possibly can.

We’re using assault armour for this build! The Assault jump skill is just one more form of mobility that we can get outside of weapons, it pairs really well with the personal teleporter to hop around the map and finish missions in a timely manner. The relic enchant here is “chance to spawn a warp fleck on killing a champion enemy”. These warp flecks can refill your health, suppression, supply charges, and focus. Refilling supplies and focus is the really important part for us, we don’t have any other form of focus regen to use assault jump with, and being able to constantly recharge the personal teleporter with those supplies is amazing.

Our main implant is the ancient relic, “Main Implant of Boiling”. I usually hate Ancient relics, but this Main Implant and it’s Trauma or Toxins counterparts are actually really good for DOT builds. The main enchant gives me a 154% bonus for burning effects, which is also a normal relic enchant that is much easier to get, but the rest of the enchants on this ancient relic are what make it shine. We have a chance to add a heat vulnerabilty on burning that can help speed up stacks, chance to cause burning on heat skill which is useless for us, an extra 87% damage bonus for burns, and 46% less overheat that let’s us no longer worry about the heat gauge.
Ancient relics are pretty rare, if you don’t have this one at your level, you can replace this with a normal relic that has a damage bonus to burning effects enchant and you wouldn’t be much weaker, you’d be able to roll stats like HP and damage reduction for more tankiness.

The Eye Implant simply gives up to 3 seconds extra burning duration. This isn’t necessary, but it does feel good to know that your burns will be killing enemies even if youre multiple screens away from them since they last so long. Remember to roll some crit strength on your primary enchants, and burning damage on your secondary enchant.

The Purity Seal is a simple relic, Enter Focused State when Channeling. Focused state gives a 50% bonus to HP and suppression regen, it’s pretty noticable, and we’re looking for all the sustain we can get. Paired with my perks and gear, I regenerate around 364 HP per second.

The Innoculator is one of those items that stacks health regen, with the relic enchant “HP regeneration for every vulnerability stack inflicted”. We’re applying a lot of vulnerabilities from our neural implant’s stacking one every time we apply a burn, so this bonus ends up giving us a lot of HP regen that is multiplied by the focus given by the last item. For components I have one Neurophine, though I’d rather two, for a 60% movement speed boost that I can use to run around the map while channeling flame cone, and a ton of cooldown reduction to use my long cooldown skills more often. One red component with Coagulant to have a quick on-demand heal in sticky situations, and a green Salveboost that adds a large cooldown to increase the duration of that heal. The secondary enchantment % chance to reset inoculator cooldown on kill is really important for a set up like this, so we don’t have to worry about the 60 second cooldown.

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Almost every single relic enchant for signums give damage bonuses that don’t affect our damage over time, so there’s not many options. You could take some of these damage increases, while it won’t affect our main damage source, it’ll definitely be noticable, or you could go the utility route and get another warp fleck spawning signum and another with speed on picking up warp flecks, but I think this build has enough speed as is.
Right now I’m working with a combo of those 2 suggestions, one signum has a chance to drop warp flecks on killing champions, which helps tremendously with sustaining focus, and my other signum has %damage against burning enemies, which is a little noticable. The best in slot for a signum would be the archeotech relic “apply a heat vulnerability whenever you apply a burn” so I could replace my neural implant with something else.

Perks & Attributes

Our first perk is Enhanced Attrition, that gives up 50% of all non DoT damage dealt in return for a massive 150% bonus for all DoT Effects and 3 more seconds to their duration. This is the biggest thing that makes this a DoT build instead of an on-hit build, its a gigantic damage increase and well worth the 50% less damage everywhere else.

The next two perks are big for sustaining HP, since the only other place we have sustain is the innoculator heal and a tiny bit of HP gained on hit.
First we Have artificial organs 2 for 1% of max HP regeneration and 500 HP, trading away some innoculator effectiveness. We try to stack a large amount of HP to make this 1% regeneration more effective, and it get’s multiplied 50% by focused state. The innoculator effectiveness isn’t all that important, we just lose a bit of speed and healing that is made up from this perk.

Lastly we have Attrition Feedback to restore 0.3% of health each time a DoT Ticks down. 0.3% isn’t noticable unless you have a lot of DoTs on a lot of enemies, which we are able to do. This perk isn’t that good in low level missions, since you’ll be one shotting most enemies with a single tick of DoT anyways, but in high level missions it is a lifesaver since you’ll have a lot more DoTs sticking on the tankier enemies.

For attributes we completely max out toughness because we want the extra 50 hp per point to help with our regen, and every other tanky passive from the milestones such as resists, hp regen, and the final 10% damage reduction.

We put the rest of the points into warfare, I have 12, you can go for more through gear if you wish, that 5% deflect is a nice enough bonus for me though. You can do a version of this build that completely maxes out warfare because the 1% base damage per point is one of the very few things that will affect your Damage over time, but I liked the milestones for toughness a lot more.

We pretty much ignore virtue, I got it to 5 to help my warp resist out, but the rest of the milestones and bonuses just aren’t really worth it for this build.

Passives

The first passive tree I go on almost every character as soon as I can at level 12 is the movement tree. This left side gives us a bunch of movement speed and the right side gives us a bunch of cooldown reduction that helps make the early leveling process feel a lot smoother. Evasive bionics is an amazing point to stack damage reduction with our armour and belt skills. We don’t go for the middle because we don’t need that much cooldown reduction that we get from a lot of other sources.

The Area Effects tree is super important, we get all but one point in it. All of these little points give good damage or increased AOE, while the final point, eradicative protocols, will reduce the cooldown of AOE skills on hit or on kill. Scorched Earth is an AOE skill that hits multiple times, each time proccing this passive to finish it’s cooldown really fast.

Next is the DoT Tree. All of these small points give a nice 10% Dot damage bonus, Haemotoxins give us even more duration, and Volatile substances even more damage. We don’t go for the middle point Toxin Synergy, because that just increases our hit’s damage against burning enemies, and we don’t care about our on-hit damage.

Spending a few points in the critical hit tree helps us not only crit more often, but sustain HP with berserker rage healing 1% of max HP per critical hit, that synergizes with our weapon enchant every hit is a critical hit for 3 seconds

6 points in the heat damage tree gives us another way to apply vulnerabilities. We already apply one every time we inflict burn. but burns only stack 5 times where vulnerabilities stack 10, so we need a bit more. This tree also gives us a bit less overheat.

I get nearly every point in the Defense tree because I want to be really tanky, and all of these little points really help cap my resists. We also get a lot of general damage reduction from Bulwark of Zeal, shock dampening, and Defensive stance turns our reduction into deflect. The final point Reanimator Glands let’s us survive things that would kill us, and the HP regeneration will be multiplied by the focused state.

The Health tree gives us a lot of defense in the form of maximum HP that scales the Artificial Organs perk to give more HP regeneration. Just a lot of good defensive points.

We can get even more defensive points alongside a few offensive ones in the suppression tree. Due to one of our psalm code doctrines that I’ll talk about shortly, we’re able to sustain max suppression mostly all of the time, so points like “3% movement speed when suppression is protected” “10 hp regen when suppression is protected” and “2% critical hit chance when suppression is protected” are all active all the time. The final point, Grim Resolve gives us a solid 10% supreme damage reduction whenever we get hit while in protected status.

Psalm Code Doctrines

The most important psalm-code doctrine for this build when it comes to scaling damage is in our weapon, the 5-piece doctrine “vulnerability stacks are 300% more effective for DoT effects”. This is why we care so much about vulnerabilities, why it’s so important to get an item that applies them on burning skill hit. The 6th slot in this weapon has an invictus shard for more DoT damage.

Another important doctrine when it comes to area of effect, is in my chest-piece, the 5-piece doctrine “inflicing a burn on an enemy also puts burn on nearby enemies”. This doctrine is a lot better than I originally thought it would be, it let’s you apply maximum DoT stacks on an entire pack without even having to aim as long as you hit one monster. The 6th slot on this has an uncreator psalm for 50% increased effectiveness to vulnerability debuffs, which is something you’ll see in a lot of my gear.

The 3-piece doctrine in my inoculator is something I touched upon earlier, it’s how I’m able to sustain maximum suppression almost all the time. “10% of all DoT damage done is gained as suppression”. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m doing a lot of DOT damage, so that’s a lot of suppression back. This doctrine and other forms of leech get less and less valuable as the mission level goes up and your damage goes down, but this is so helpful in most missions.

My main implant has an uncreator psalm for more effective vulnerabilities, and two Sicarian shards for 10 crit strength each, because I was trying very hard to reach a total of 86 crit strength to make sure my critical hits always affect my DoTs.

Lastly, my belt gear has another Sicarian shard for crit strength, and another uncreator psalm for vulnerabilities.

Conclusion

That is my heavy flamer build for Season of the Warp Surge. Like I said, this video came out pretty late, the season is ending in about 2 weeks on PC so I’ll be sure to put any big changes that affect this build in the next season in the description, but hopefully it’ll still be playable without much changes. If you’re on console, you still have a few months to play this build or any build that you want.