W40K: Inquisitor – Shocking Arc Sword BUILD GUIDE – Season of the Void Brethren

The Season of the Void Brethren will be among us very shortly on July 6th. I’ve been lucky enough to play in the beta for the past few weeks, and would like to share with you the build I’ve been playing! I believe this can be an amazing starter build for anybody, and thematically fits with the season since it let’s us play around with the Thunderbolt of Authority and a lot of the new items added around it.
Sadly, I didn’t have the time to grind to 100 and min-max this build to complete the hardest difficulty super endgame missions, but I’m confident that with this set-up you’ll be able to conquer late-game no problem. Right now at level 83 I have enough damage and survivability to comfortably do up to +8 difficulty missions.

WEAPONS

The two-handed Arc Sword is a great choice to start an Assassin character with this Season. This weapon has great Area of Effect Damage with Voltaic Strike and Shock Nova, and good mobility from the low cooldown Thunder Slide and Voltaic Backflip.
The seasonal “Blade of Madness” Arc Sword gives you a chance to trigger thunderbolt of authority when you use dash moves like Thunder Slide. This is a decently consistent way to procc this seasonal effect and can be paired with a lot of other seasonal items to make the thunderbolt stronger. Try to roll the secondary enchantment “Supreme cooldown reduction for Thunder Slide”.

Your Offhand should be any Melta Gun for it’s Armor Reducing ability.

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GEAR

Our Purity Seal benefits off this new Thunderbolt of Authority, the “Harbinger of Refuge” seasonal relic gives 1% supreme damage reduction and all resists when the Thunderbolt hits, for 2 seconds. The Thunderbolt Chains to 3 enemies, so this actually gives 3% damage reduction and all stats that can go beyond the soft cap since it’s Supreme.

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Our Inoculator is Genetor’s Redeem That has a chance to be used for free on Thunderbolt Hit, nearly a 5% chance if it hits 3 times. I have 2 Indomitine for yellow modules to get a massive 20% damage reduction for 20 seconds, one Coagulant and one Mitigator for Red Modules to quickly regain Health and Suppression. This Inoculator setup has a 32 second Cooldown, so the “Chance to reset Inoculator cooldown on kill” Secondary enchantment is really important. You’ll still be able to use this inoculator on command to heal in tough spots, but you can also expect to randomly use it for free from the Thunderbolts when you least expect it, it’s a great way to keep up damage reduction and suppression.

A big part of your damage bonus will come from enrage tokens. The easiest way to generate these is from a signum or purity seal with the relic enchant “Chance to get an Enraged Token on kill”, but some other ways include “1 Enrage token on critical hit” on relic neural implants, and “Chance to get an enraged token on hit taken” from Archeotech main or neural implants. You get an 8% damage bonus per enrage tokens, up to 20.

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A combination of a “Gain on kill” signum and a “Gain on Crit” Neural implant will be enough to keep these tokens up. You can get even more damage out of these tokens with other item enchantments like “Crit Strength per enraged token” from a relic neural implant, “Damage bonus per Enrage token” on any relic implant, “critical hit chance in enraged state” from an arecheotech Belt, signum, or eye implant, and more.

Our other signum is an Archeotech relic with “30% chance to add a general vulnerability when the target gets a debuff”, because we’ll rapidly be applying shock that makes the enemy get 10 stacks and take 100% more damage. If you don’t have this, a normal relic with “Increased damage in enraged state” works.

A belt, Eye implant, or Main implant Archeotech relic with “When in enraged state enemies within 5 meters are shocked” is really important for an endgame psalm-code combo we’re going to do.

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My Main Implant and Belt both have “HP Gained on hit for Every Enraged Token”, equaling up to 360 when I have the cap of 20 tokens. This Sustain has been amazing paired with my absurd damage reduction and dodge chance.

The Main implant slot has a lot of other good options, mostly the elusive Main implant of Wrath ancient relic that increases your maximum enrage tokens.

The Armour Piece I’m using is an ancient relic Armour of Storm that increases our damage based on our dodge chance plus a bunch of other good stats. We stack a lot of dodge chance, capping out in some circumstances, so this chest piece is really good. If you can’t get your hands on one of these, try a normal relic with the “chance to Avoid and Reflect enemy attacks back to the attacker” enchant.

PASSIVES

The Movement tree is what I usually go for first when I start a character, the left side of the tree gives us a bunch of speed to make the campaign go by faster, and the right side gives us a bunch of cooldown reduction to let us dash around with thunder slide and nuke crowds with Shock Nova much more often.

Next is the Area Effect Tree. Every single skill on the Arc sword counts as AOE, so they benefit from every point in this tree. Eradicative protocols in the middle is important, it lets you regain skill cooldowns by hitting many enemies at once.

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Vulnerabilities are a really good way to scale damage, so we spend just 3 points in the melee tree to apply them on critical strikes. We also spend 7 points in the Heat Attacks skill tree for the same thing. Now whenever we crit, we apply two heat vulnabilities that can stack to 10 for another 100% increase in damage on top of the general vulnerabilities we apply from the signum.

Since we’re applying vulnerabilities on crit now, the critical hit tree becomes really good. We take almost every point here, this tree is really good for damage from the crit chance and strength alone, and the final point red thirst can potentially stack up to another 100% damage bonus.

Next is the Defense Tree, which is pretty common for my builds since it makes resistances a lot easier to deal with and has some amazing defensive points in itself. I was mostly drawn to the dodge points, Counter Maneuvers for 3% and Defensive Stance for a bunch more when we get damage reduction from our inoculator and purity seal.

Then I spent a few points in the health tree just to grab all of the Flat HP Nodes to feel a lot tankier.

PERKS & ATTRIBUTES

Our first perk is “Keen Fury” to stack up 10% crit chance and crit damage on kill. We have a base of 29% crit chance not counting some buffs from the passive tree, so an extra 10% bump is great to help us not only deal more damage but apply more vulnerabilities.

Then we have Nephrine-monger for 20% dodge chance when our class resource is full. Dodge is a big part of surviving for this build, and we even get a damage bonus from it. This perk is great because we barely every use our class resource, so this is almost always capped at 20.

Last but not least, we have “Cull the weak” for a simple 50% damage bonus against debuffed enemies, which will be all the enemies if I’m shocking or applying vulnerabilities.

For Attributes, we max out Accuracy. The 1% base damage per point is so powerful, especially paired with one of our endgame psalm code doctrines. The last two milestones for Accuracy are amazing for sustain and damage.

Then we throw the rest of our attribute points into Survival, just to get as much dodge as we can.

SOCKETS & DOCTRINES

As soon as you unlock socketing in the tech tree, put four sockets in your weapon or chest, whichever one you’re more attached to, and fill those sockets in with a damage psalm code doctrine.
This build will benefit from either “100% Heat Damage” or “100% two-handed damage”, so use whichever one you have the supplies for. We’re not keeping these for the endgame build, but it’s a huge damage bonus that’ll let you do much harder missions for now.

As soon as we can, we put the “Shocking an enemy creates an explosion in 3 meters” 6-piece doctrine. This doctrine is really expensive, you need 2 red codes and 3 yellow, but it’s an extremely powerful endgame tool. Half of the Arc Sword skills apply shock, so it’s already decent, but this doctrine mostly shines when you get a shock aura, which we have from our Eye Implant “When enraged, nearby enemies are shocked”. This shock aura applies rapidly, creating this fountain of AOE damage around any enemy you stand by. This area won’t actually hit the effected enemy, but every enemy around it, so if you’re able to get even a regular enemy next to a boss, you can quickly shred it. This psalm code Doctrine has been amazing for AOE clearing.

When we can, we switch out the Psalm Codes in our weapon for a four piece “150% damage bonus to AoE skills but -30% to effect radius”. We have more than enough AOE Capabilities from our shock explosion doctrine and thunderbolt of authority, so now we just need to boost our single-target damage, which is where this doctrine comes in, giving every one of our skills a big damage boost. Put two of your highest unlocked tier of seasonal Archeotech shards in the last 2 slots to procc the thunderbolt more often.

One slot on the rest of our items are filled with an uncreator psalm each because 50% vulnerabiity effect is amazing, and the rest filled with Cybersmith shards for 25% AOE damage bonus each.

ENDING

There is the starter build I’ve been playing, one that I think will work really well for anybody starting the season with an Assassin. Remember that this stuff is just coming out, all of the footage was taken from beta gameplay and there’s a lot of time for the community to figure out powerful combos with new stuff, so feel free to experiment and change things around to your preference. For example, you might want an explode on kill weapon rather than the seasonal weapon if you’re not interested in the Thunderbolt.
I hope you enjoyed my quick guide, thank you for watching, and good luck with your season adventure!