Blunderbuss Void Gauntlet

Blunderbuss Void Gauntlet is a glass-cannon style build with one of the highest skill ceilings in the game along with a moderately high skill floor. This weapon combination excels in close quarters PVP and has an emphasis on locking down an opponent, penetrating their armor, and deleting them within a few seconds.

Attributes

With your attribute split you want to be focusing getting 300 intelligence, 200 strength, and put the rest into constitution. This allows you to maximize your damage output on blunderbuss and void gauntlet while still being moderately tanky with 150 constitution’s critical damage reduction bonus. We do miss out on some armor bonus’ but since our damage is so high it more than makes up for this.

An alternative stat split is 300-350 strength, 150 intelligence, and 150-200 constitution. This will provide more damage per auto attack but have less damage from damage over time effects on the void gauntlet.

Consumes

We run fire absorption potions with lasting consumption bags to buff the duration to 45 seconds. With a 90 second cd, this gave us 15% fire resistance with 50% uptime! We also use health, serum, and mana potions. Mana potions are used to proc the empowered toast bonus. These have a much shorter cd than typical potions.

Armor

This build excells in close quarters so we want to build our armor in a manner that will help us sustain to close distance to the target. Shirking heals and elemental aversion will help us versus long range poke like fire staff and musket while conditioning will help us while taking duels. We’ll use thrust protection to help versus spears and a 5/15 elemental/physical gem split. This leaves us vulnerable to strike damage, which mainly comes from the war hammer, but will allow us to be moderately tanks versus all other match ups.

We also utilize shirking empower and the elemental band to hit the 50% empower cap consistently. Blunderbuss typically has high base damage, but low empower so this will allow us to push our damage to the next level.

We opt for slowing tether and do not take plagued splitting grenade perk options due to this build being scale for small-scale combat.

Weapons

We take a customer gorgon’s blunderbuss in order to hit 725 gearscore with the perks we desire. We also could take a deepriver blunderbuss for an equivalent, but much cheaper, 700 gearscore option. It’s important to have a runeglass dot gem and attunement that is different from fire damage to maximize the value of the elemental band.

Heartgems

There are 3 heartgems that are viable for this build:

  1. Stoneform - the best heatgem overall in the game. Will let you survive almost anything if used correctly.

  2. Vines - a heartgem that focuses on crowd control. The exhaust is no longer cleansable with purifying heart, but this still is a solid option.

  3. Cannon - a finisher style heartgem that can be used after the main combo is finished.

Skill Tree

We focus on taking the damage boosting perks in both skill trees. For blunderbuss we take plagued splitting grenades for a combo-upside. If you grenade -> light attack -> azoth shrapnel blast -> light attack you will deal massive damage! On the void gauntlet side the tree is fairly standard. If you take additional perks into essence rupture it will get a 1 second cd between activation, so it is usually best to just put 1 point into the skill.