Deep Rock Galactic Season 2: Boltshark breakdown 

Edit: Happy to report that banshee bolts now work and tasers now stack properly! See ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-TnKzURdC24M.html Couple of small corrections: since DoT effects tick once instantly when applied, the explosive chemical bolts DoT does 82 total damage at the base duration, not 80. Also explosive chemical bolts do 15/12 damage on hit instead of the 15/10 the other special bolts do. And a couple of extra bits I didn't cover or that other people informed me of: -The beam from taser bolts doesn't actually enable "does more damage against electrified target" type boosts, including magnetic shafts. But the proximity effect from tasers does. -Pheromone grenades give a speed debuff of 0.9x. That's not new, but I should have mentioned it for context since it's probably not common knowledge. Other drg test/info videos: ru-vid.com/group/PLqTo6tQ9tCOrABARyls3C94qzGo6TW3h_

Bonus tip: (Last I checked) Molly also makes a good mobile quiver for retrievable bolt storage if you have excess before a resupply.

I'm happy that they took the time to change the model for a trifork crossbow, so it shows the three bolts. hope they do the same for the ER and six shooter bulldog one day.

One thing I like about taser bolts is that it constantly applies electric to dreads when they otherwise don't get hit with lightning. This allows you to really take advantage of anything that grants bonus to electrically effected enemies. Things like bullets of mercy, magnetic shafts, or engineers shard diffractor all work well with it if you happen to bring it along for a dread mission. It's so much smoother than using an IFG and seeing them leave it within 2 seconds.

This was an unexpected surprise for me as when it was first showed off, people didn’t find it to be all that useful or fun to use. I was hoping out on it. But my god despite it being seemingly a low tech weapon, it is so technical. I feel like Hawkeye or Green Arrow taking this weapon since there is so many trick arrows you can bring along. And it’s pretty good for support. I really like pheromone bolts with specialist since bring a beast master perk and the pheromone grenades and you can basically let the bugs hurt themselves, which I always find amusing. Also aggressive venting works well to make it a bug repellent build. Also last thing to note. I never knew that trick of firing and changing ammo types at the same time. That’s actually EXTREMELY useful and don’t need to deal with changing them and wasting a lot of time with it. So thanks for that.

Judging by the thumbnail, I’d say that the boltshark is pretty strong if it’s capable of turning the weakpoints of glyphids into balls of white light that rival the brightness of the sun itself.

I think I've noticed a theme off the new weapons being unusually flexible. Thanks for the explanations and builds!

Aggressive Venting on the Drak has always been my favourite overclock, and I'm honestly surprised they buffed it considering how strong it was. It's a shame it was under utilized pre-buff. It's incredible with cryo and peheremone to temperature shock everything, Peheremone Bolts, Cryo Bolts and Peheremone Canisters and Aggressive Venting on the Drak has been my new favourite loadout.

Something to note: Fire Bolts still do the radial heat when hitting targets, so it’s nowhere near as finicky as you make it out to be. The cryo bolts are probably better though if you’re looking for more of an HVT standard bolt.

I've been really enjoying the fire bolts. Paired with pheromone bolts, it gives Scout a pretty great way to deal with squishy crowds. Pheromone bolt on a big enemy, fire bolt next to it and you'll light a huge number of bugs, normally including the big enemy. Doesn't feel finicky to me :)

I use the Fire Bolts OC with Pheromone Special bolts. Pheromone a Praetorian or Oppressor, then hit it with a Fire Bolt and watch the swarm ignite.

in a team setting, I think pheromone bolts generally aren't as good, since things die too quick for it to be useful most of the time. Electricity is better because you can stack them onto detonators, which can greatly slow its advance towards your team or Doretta, not to mention, its effect is actually useful against dreadnoughts in elimination.

tip: Scout's electric arrow work alot with the engineer's shard diffractor. since it has bonus damage to the electric enemies, Scout can mark some tough enemies like praetorian, Bulk Detonator, Oppressor, and boss too. making Engineer and Scout perfect for dealing massive damage in short amount of time

Surprised you'd like Aggressive Venting so much but not fire bolts. One pheromone and one fire bolt into a guard is great for fire and forget horde clearing. Not to mention them being great at clearing swarmers by just standing behind a bolt and maybe jumping over it a bit. It does put more pressure on your primary for single target damage of course.

Maybe worth mentioning the incredible synergy the Drak has with the Xbow. Until now, the big upside of the Drak has been kind of useless to scout, namely that it doesn't have to reload, because scout kind of always ran born ready for boomstick and flaregun. Now, you can drop born ready (Or take the upgrade on the flare gun) and still not lose uptime. Not only does the Xbow demand a lot of attention in your hands from switching between bolts, leading targets, and it's slow reload, but now with the ability to queue a bolt swap in place of a reload, it's actually actively faster to not get the free reload if you intend to switch bolts anyways, which happens all the time with pheremones. In addition, PCF means the Drak can quickly and efficiently proc magnetic shafts on distant targets without taser, on top of already shoring up the Xbow's weaknesses by being strong against small targets like swarmers. I like pairing a Rewiring Drak with Triple Xbow with Pheremones and IFGs, as a generalist fasting scout to compliment the common ammo-hungry shard gun/gemini engi. Rewiring drak is obscenely ammo efficient, pheremones can build you space to spam more drak, and triple with IFG does huge damage to priority targets like wardens. If the team can survive without many flares (IE does not have a gunner), you can often skip two or three consecutive ammo drops on a build like this. Quietly goated on Sabotage too. My other choice is usually Minimal Clips M1k with Cryo/Pheremone and IFG, for faster horde clear via blowthrough and some very efficient swarmer clearing with cryo bolts. The aoe freeze on cryo bolts also doubles down on blowthrough value. Also fairly strong in large biomes like Biozone, where you can snipe ranged threats with cryo and pop them with m1k. IMHO, the huge upside to the Xbow is introducing flexibility in the scout's grenade slot, letting you get away with IFGs or Pheremones in many more situations. Previously, there was basically no situation in which cryo nades weren't a good choice, from securing resses to mactera swarm to removing death effects to clearing swarmers to just a general sterroid against priority targets. The only big loss is not being able to double cryo a bulk.

I enjoyed your mario sound effects with montages of bug deletion so much

In my eyes, with the M1000, the Scout already has a nice single target weapon and he needs crowd control badly. The Pheromone + Fire Bolts combo is pretty neat for that. You basically make a huge molotov out of one glyphid.

Awesome video. One thing that was missed is how effective the taser bolts are with the specialist perk for a few reasons. First, it can almost entirely stun nearly anything if you put 2 bolts directly into it for around 20 seconds. This includes Praetorians, Oppressors, Dreadnoughts, and even works SHOCKINLY (hehe) well against Prospectors, Nemesis, BET-C (when she's being naughty) and EVEN a bulk detonator (this also works against the ghost). This does a fair amount of damage and allows your team to wail on any big baddie from a safe distance. On top of that, two taser bolts will stop any praetorian in it's tracks and kill it outright. 3 bolts will nearly always do the same thing to an oppressor, and on haz 4 I believe 6 bolts will kill a detonator. Many don't realize how much damage these do over time, and if your team realizes this, no one has to waste ammo on most of the big boys. Scout can take them out early on his own without breaking a sweat. The last thing is that your special bolts are refilled between every stage of the deep dive. So scout can use up ALL of his special bolt at the end of every stage, and start full into the next stage. With the overclock you get around 30 special bolts with the right perks. It's incredibly useful in Elite Deep Dives, and is one of my favorite go to's with scout.

The sound you use when you kill them bugs with the Trifork volley oc is S-tier. Asides from that, some of the best drg weapon breakdown vids I've seen. keep it up chyeeeaah

Id rather have the ammo loss on hellfire then the duration nerf😭

Man . i always appreciate your videos . They help me optimize my build based on understanding what things actually do.

I don't know if this is an imagined effect of just how slow bugs move when hit by the electro-bolt beam, but it seems like you can "leash" large bugs like praetorians and oppressors if you shoot one electro bolt into them and another at the ground. This used to work on dreadnoughts but stopped after the most recent hotfix. It might be a bit niche, but sometimes it's handy to stop an oppressor in their tracks (they don't manage to even turn when 'leashed'.)

I actually found Fire Bolts to be some of the best swarm clear in scout’s arsenal right now. One phero bolt/nade, followed up by a fire bolt can clear a cave. Swarmers almost literally don’t get to exist if you have them, and while they don’t do jack shit to robots, you can keep the ground mostly clear of any junk while your team deals with that. If anything, I’ve found Bodkin points to be kinda meh. Forgoing extra ammo just so my bolts deal with grunts slightly better is a little redundant when I can just… _use my primary or fire bolts for the same effect._

With fire bolts, you can place two bolts next to each other on the ground. The heat stacks, and so two bolts will ignite a horde of grunts passing by them without the need for slows or additional kiting.

So glad this video was made, had no idea what do with the Boltshark despite being a Scout main. Lots of thanks for this!

Such a thorough explanation of a weapon's mechanics and different builds you can use with it. Awesome work, rock and stone miner!

Great stuff! Loved triple shot bolts but didn't even think about using them with magnetic shafts/taser special bolts for even more damage. Also I'm seeing more and more examples of aggressive venting with plasma carbine. Almost makes me want to try that gun

Idk why you didnt mention the synergy between pheromone nades and chemical bolts, its godly. It makes swarms a joke quite frankly whether you're playing solo or co-op.

Just wanna say, loving this recent content from you. Keep it up mate! Also, thanks for showing the mod at the end, I've been really wanting to test stuff recently!

Thanks for the help with understanding cryo bolts, I've been trying to get some overclocks for the boltshark and that was my first

And here I was hoping Trifork Volley would have a wide enough spread that it would take a single Taser Bolt shot to put down an electric fence 🫤

Excellent info as always, my dude.

Thanks for this video. Since the update came out I’ve felt like the boltshark was very underwhelming. I’m still a very confused as to why it has such huge damage reductions against the main big body enemies in praetorians and oppressors, but highlighting all the varied uses has really opened my eyes. I can definitely see why the normal bolts feel so weak, because I haven’t been taking full advantage of special bolts. Great stuff and thank you.

I personally combo the bodkin bolts with the bouncy rounds of the plasma carbine. It actually makes scout pretty decent at crowd control letting him much more effectively deal with bigger groups of enemies that he otherwise can’t handle

Bro, you make awesome videos, keep up the good work!

that fear bug be like Bulk: Imma rip ya a new one *metal pipe sfx* Bulk: OH SHI-

YES i have been awaiting this

Cryo Bolts also allows you to consistently freeze oppressors because it radiates the effect, when they would usually shake the freeze off quickly.

Taser bolts can forcibly apply the shocked status to targets that are normally immune to it (like Dreadnoughts). Rather, this gives you a second, long-lasting alternative to applying the shocked status without using an IFG if you have them equipped, which combos quite nicely for other players that might be running on-shock effects (like Shard Diffractor's last mod).

I saw you put pheromone darts on with the fire bolt mod, but didn't mention the synergy between the two, making it so that fire spreading is significantly more effective. I sometimes "milk" bigger bugs by pheromoning them and shooting a fire bolt or two into them after. Then the crowd from the pheromones sets on fire, killing them faster and allowing more bugs to attack the bait bug. I have completely trivialized swarms when doing escort missions. I bait a big bug and watch the entire swarm go to them and completely ignore the dozer. However, pheromone darts are significantly weaker in a uncoordinated team due to allies killing your bait.

Taser bolts can create lines on one target, making them great at dealing with large threats. Four bolts, 2 on each weakpoint, will nearly straight kill a BetC. 2 in the face of an Oppressor, and one on the weak point creates two lines on it.

1:35 Molly doing her thing

Great content as usual

Looking forward to your Shard Diffractor video.

Don't forget that taser bolts inflict electrocution on targets that are normally immune to it. The long-duration (stacking?) slow makes them excellent for mitigating dangerous high-health enemies, like oppressors and dreadnoughts. Unfortunately, because dreadnoughts specifically have a high resistance to electric damage(WHY?). As such, a max duration/max special ammo build isn't quite worth it, even if the damage per full reload is over 8K. It is pretty effective against dreads, but unreliable, I suspect a lot of damage comes from the arcs.

1:25 Something you probably should've tested: It seems like the area damage DOES affect more than one enemy, but it only does when you actually hit an enemy, not terrain. I've seen the Boltshark kill multiple grunts without Bodkin points.

thanks for making these mate

You caught me on the jumbo shells thing. I like my secondary to hit hard, so I do like the triple bolt thing

ExCh bolts are by far my favourite, really good for clearing out a crowd from a dead temmate or warden, And then the DOT.... It's just really good.

my favorite thing to do with taser bolts is Absolutely MELT base dreadnaughts.

Thank you very much for this information.

Trifork volley works great with the buffed electrifying reload GK2. It can both set up big targets for the crossbow and deal with large crowds of grunts by itself. Tri-fork helps with it's lacking single target damage.

You should do breakdown videos of all the weapons. 👍 I like that you focus on what the weapons and their builds can do instead of what they can't do.

Pro tip: you can shoot pheromone bolts on a big target like Praetorians to gather enemies around it, and then stack 1-2 fire/cryo bolts to inflict status on the clustered mobs.

People talk trash about it but with upgrades it is pretty good

So I'm testing tasers against nemesis in sandbox. Apparently the taser bolts apply a stacking, permanent electrocution effect to the nemesis of about 1.65 damage per damage tick per bolt, IN ADDITION to the damage the bolts themselves do in proximity. This same behavior can be seen on Patrol Bots, though the damage comes out to 2.2 per damage tick (possibly rounded, I have a hard time testing 2 as the patrol bot dies before I can get clean results)

My favorite bolt combo builds are using bobkin and chemical to turn it into a grunt clearing machine, trifork and electro, with magnetic for the reason you mentioned in the vid, and ice and pheromone, along with IFGs or stunners, so I can have all three grenade effects in one build.

Bodkin points are amazing for conserving ammo

The freeze bolts make me forget about my grnades so many times. It is like I have Crowdcontrol for day.

These are so good

I use the electric bolts on dreadnaughts - it does good chip on armour. So I can be moving while the bolt is doing the job of removing it's armour and revealing its weakpoint.

good timing on that video. I was wondering if the more potent special bolt effect upgrade in tier 5 affects special bolts like the cryo and fire bolts as well

Tips appreciated for playing with this thing in the first place, cuz I just don't know how to begin. I have the fire bolts, cryo bolts, tri-fork volley, and quickfire overclocks. Edit: I have since played with this more. I didn't like fire or cryo bolts at all. However, I have done tri-fork + taser bolts for an elimination melting build.

I think it's worth mentioning that magnetic shafts has a remarkably large homing range and will literally turn your bolts 90 degrees mid-air to hit things, I find it's sometimes easier to aim next to a weakpoint and let the bolt turn itself into it with certain enemies, aiming in the general area below mactera or example

Not sure if this is intended but iirc the fear chance on the bolts happens on some kind of tick, and so triggers a LOT more than 33% of the time, as well as when the bolt is in the air (I think that part IS intended). Someone may have to fact check me here

The Mario noises are hilarious

my second favourite scout build uses trifork volley pheremone bolt crossbow with aggresive venting electrocution chance plasma carbine. electric to trifork for big stuff, phermone bolt to aggresive venting blast for small stuff.

Pheromone grenades plus explosive arrows is a perfect combo

Pheromone bolts/nades are divine on explosive guts mission.

Hey, I wanted to let you know. You're good at this.

Tazer bolts are also good for putting electric defuff of oppressors and dreads. I need to practice bio chemical bolts, but I still feel wierd that they have less ammo then pheromone bolts. Wish they would just set all the special ammo to 12 and be done with it.

I think I need to give magnetic shaft another go. My test run against dreadnoughts were kinda iffy, as trying to shoot a weakpoint proved difficult, if there's two beasties in the electric field. For me it just shoved the arrows into the armor, not into the weakpoints where i aimed. Doing sharp 90° turns while doing so.

Firebolts seem like they'd be handy in instances where someone has Neurotoxin grenades. The gas is flammable so you can set it off in one shot. Also if everyone is running fire stuff the heat would build up quicker.

Hi, returning to DRG and loving the new weapons. Your videos have been super helpful, now I like using Coil gun. Have you done a video on the Corrosive Sludge Pump for Driller yet? If not, when do you plan to do it?

Hey boss, is it worth taking IFG + Bodkin for magnetic shafts? How does it work with bodkin? Does the bonus apply after the first hit for all enemies? Does the guidance still work after the first enemy?

Coming by to say I've been running 12111 cryo crossbow alongside pheromone grenades and have been sussing out the bolt-stacking breakpoints for freezing various targets. It's quite amusing to pheromone bolt a Praetorian, stick a single cryo bolt to its face and watch everything that goes to it get crunched up into little bitty ice cubes. Thinking about switching to more special bolts, though. Elimination and Salvage holdout seems to be the only time I ever run low on or out of cryo bolts.

thank you for this! Just got it and felt the electric bolt to be weak AF. however, havent used it much and can't wait to try your tips!

Oh boy, next is the defractor, this is either going to be really helpful, or really depressing (love firing my laser but the deepcore is hard to get out of my hands and breach cutter is some steep competition in regards to being more generally effective.

What if pheromones and fire at the same time? That sounds pretty brutal.

Tasers are extremely effective against Nemesis. Not quite sure why, but they do a ton of damage plus slowing it to a standstill. I thought the taser beam stacked with the proximity AOEs, giving 3 sources of damage and slow, it doesn't seem to do that with bugs, but from the damage I see on Nemesis it might actually be working there. While the Zhukov's have more total damage on paper, a Boltshark with Bodkins will likely put out a LOT more damage in practice, owing to the Zhukov's abysmal range and accuracy. The Boomstick isn't even a competitor for damage, even at its maximum damage build it does less than the Boltshark (basic bolts alone) and that doesn't account for the accuracy. Multiple Penetrations are the only way to get anything comparable.

Have u found the electric bolts + trifork volley to be useful against dreadnoughts? I've tried it a bit and I think I like it! However I'm trying to figure out a good primary to compliment it

I would imagine mix pheromone bolts with cryo/Pyro bolts would be _very_ nice.

Nice video, interesting ideas. I like to shoot harder targets with long duration pheromone bolt and follow it up with one or two freezing bolts. Then i just clean all the icicles with primary weapon :)

I didn't know detonators fear from the arrow. Should've know it's a bug, I've thought it was a unique feature to the Nishanka.

Bodkin bolts overclock I love 💘

Not sure why you stuck cryo arrows in enemies but not the fire ones. I find them (fire arrows) to be pretty damn good at doing large swaths of damage from just one arrow stuck in a grunt guard. Combined with pheremones and baby, dinner is served. Absolutely based music choices though holy shit.

I hear music from Rabi Ribi in some of your vids. Good taste in games man!

i never really put too much thought into magnetic shafts, but seeing it here, i think i will start using the boltshark with the gk2 with E.R. does the magnetic shafts mod work with all bolts, or is there a limited number?

Does anyone know if magnetic shafts adds electrical damage like most of the other mods/overclocks that give a bonus to enemies afflicted with a status? Or is it like bullets of mercy that adds kinetic? In this case more pierce damage.

i like just sort of dumping the shock bolts into crowds, hitting some bugs directly and shooting some arrows into the ground. If the shock effect isnt hitting killing a bug or two, just shoot another arrow! its quite lethal if used that way but its incredibly ammo innefficient, i run it with a max ammo setup using the t2 extra special ammo mod AND the duration + special ammo clean OC AND the T5 duration increase, but i still run through them really fast

I heard some Dodonpachi music during the Pheromone bolt section. Bullet Hell gamer? Edit: oh there's even more Dodonpachi music! And isn't the track at the beginning from Rabi-Ribi?

Quick question: why in the name of Karl do electro bolts have that ring around them if the electric beam has 1/3 of that range?

What's your aggressive venting build? Really wanna try that out. Wonderful testing as always tho!

It's been a sec since this video came out, does the explosive chemical bolt do anything to how a bulk dies? Does it die the same or does it do the special animation and explosion?

Pheromone bolts work good only in solo. In full random lobby everyone will shoot the bug under pheromones first.

Does anybody know how to get that empty test chamber at 6:13 ? I've seen it a whole lot in this channel, and would love to use it to test out my builds, but I can't find it at all on the mod website.

Fire bolts make this weapon the best secondary for scout by far in the majority of scenarios. No other secondary allows for the wave clear that fire bolts do.

The one thing i dislike about it is the time it needs to change ammo type even with the related perk. However, i didn't know about the firing + reload button trick... Haven't gotten the reload overclock either, gotta try that.

I’m curious about something for both the fire and cryo bolts. You think that maybe if any of the bugs that get hit by them, they get double the temp increase while the bugs around it get the normal temp increase? It does feel like odd to use. And maybe if they give something special when you hit targets with them might improve their use.

You left out my favorite part of this weapon. If you take electro bolts you can shoot one at a lootbug and watch them squirm and die via electric chair