**Update Changes:** - Today is a truly dark day. The Slugger (my favourite Shotgun) caught a nerf in a recent patch and now doesn't really stagger much very well. Especially Bots/Devestators. Still nice for dinging heads but, alas it's not so disruptive now. But hey, I guess the Punisher has a bit more use with it's stagger.
This popped up in the rotating comments right after someone said "I heard the slugger has a tighter spread" Not much else to add, just thought I'd share something funny I saw
You missed a lot with the plasma punisher. It’s better for bots than it is for bugs. The reason why, is the explosion AOE scales with distance traveled. It can 1 shot anything below a devastator, including the walkers. It also has the stagger mechanic and can stagger devastators and cancel rocket devastator shots. Also, you can kill tanks from the front if you arc your shots, the explosion will damage the tank. You CAN squeeze them beneath Hulk legs, and it can sometimes kill and or stagger them. But it’s really hard. You can also shoot the bot drop ships and the AOE will kill everything in the ship before it even drops
I've been running the plasma since I unlocked it, I absolutely love it. The AOE, though small, helps a lot when facing large amounts of enemies and it's VERY good against bots, basically worth it purely for how easily it can take care of walkers. Highly underrated and misunderstood.
I once back to back killed 4 Stalkers by stun locking them with it. Maybe the damage isn't amazing, but that stagger has to be near the top. I've caused chargers mid charge to stumble a bit with it. And there's very little like getting 3 strider kills with one primary shot from the front. I wouldn't call it niche, I'd call it specific. I feel like it needs more practice to get good with it than most guns do, but it does things no others can.
@@BelacDarkstorm my current favorite way to take care of the scout walkers is to penetrate the front with the autocannon. it just ignores it and kills the guy behind it. Looking forward to trying this method though when i unlock it
@@isaacmacqueen9695you can do the same thing with the plasma punisher! i think it depends on where on the front, though it’ll never take more than two shots
If your role is to stagger enemies and protect your team from melee threats while other people pour in the actual damage to finish them off, the punisher works quite well at range, as its spread can easily tag an entire group of three berserkers or a pair of spitters at once, staggering everything it hits - the stagger doesn't seem to care if you hit the target with the entire spread or a single pellet. The punisher has a hard time doing good damage at anything past 20 meters however as a lot of the spread will miss.
FINALLY! Someone tells people which gun should be used for which faction instead of calling it bad or good. I got so frustrated when people were calling the railgun bad after the nerf. Sure it's not as effective against the bugs anymore, but I find it to be amazing when dealing with the bots.
@@Siphonalsthere is a bug that causes damage to vary wildly based on if a ps5 player is in the group. Playing on PC exclusively though, yeah its pretty shit. I know the point being made is about using it on bots, but I can literally dump like 10 overcharged shots into a charger before it goes down.
quick note about the armor 2:00 There are actually 10 levels of armor, with 1-3 falling under "Light" 4-6 "Medium" and the rest being Heavy or Vehicle armor iirc, from a dev interview I watched. so even though the Liberator and Slugger both have "light armor penetration", it's more like Liberator has level 1 and Slugger has level 3. The Slugger can break bug armor but it's can't go THROUGH medium armor like the Liberator Penetrator......... I think. Honestly my experience with armor has been weirdly inconsistent.
From what I've heard a good deal of the inconsistency is that apparently the armor doesn't entirely move in sync with the skeleton on a lot of armored enemies currently. The effect doesn't show up visually like the bug that we had with Helldivers joining your ship moving out of sync with their pods, but apparently it's similar to that. This can cause the armor to "lag" behind the animation of the model you're seeing and sometimes just get lost entirely.
I heard something similar, except that since the slugger is at the edge of light armor creeping into medium armor penetrating, weapons with that type of edge damage get something like a 50% chance to cause medium armor damage, ostensibly making it medium armor penetrating-lite
@@bryanzzz748 If I recall, it was if your armor pen value is equal to the armor value of the target, you do reduced damage. If you exceed the armor value, you do full damage. If you're below the armor value, your shot bounces right off causing no damage at all. So the confusion stems from the fact that the devs gave us the super simplified weapon stats (showing 4 stats + a couple keyword tags), instead of the full weapon stats (each weapon actually has around 50 different stats). We assume all "light armor pen" weapons should perform the same, and if they don't work it must be medium or higher, when that's not the case.
@@kedolan4992 We could really use more extensive stats, both for weapons/stratagems and for enemies. Maybe they could add a mechanic of having to kill a certain amount of enemies to reveal more and more stats about them.Or it could be tied to an in-game event about gaining scientific intel, then we would be given some more precise stats.
Interesting! The armor mechanic has been pretty weird and hard to figure out. Like things have 'light armor pen' but can put shots thru medium armor, and things that have medium armor pen dont seem to punch thru medium armor.
Something to note about the Punisher and Slugger The reload animation doesn't have a start delay like the Senator (revolver) does meaning you can load shells between shots pretty effectively. The time to load a shell is slightly longer than the time to shoot though so you do lose a little bit of fire rate but it's a useful thing to keep in mind when going into a larger fight. Sometimes you need to keep the pressure up and can't stop to reload for 10 seconds
If you start reloading and then vault over something, you glitch the gun into reloading no matter what so it just auto reloads while you fire away. (the reload does get interrupted by the firing animation though so you have to time it rather precisely to go through all your ammo. or you can just spray and pray until it's empty then wait till it's half full again then spray and pray and repeat)
you can completely stunlock hive guards, brood commanders, and stalkers at 1 shell with the reload thing. its actually crazy I wouldn’t be surprised if they nerf the reload speed a little bit
yea a 76-77 round mag on a shotgun is a lot better than 16-17 round mag who knew we can have belt fed shotguns (with the best in this case being our hands)
Definitely the strongest aspect of the pump shorties. Being able to just keep up a steady, uninterrupted salvo of hard hitting, staggering 12 Guage shells is really good at keeping bug swarms at bay.
I love the arc, so glad they fixed the crashing - especially with bugs you can take out tight hordes of loads of bugs in one or two shots, you can one shot most enemies including the brood commander if youre close enough, it tracks to stalkers when they jump and run - just removes bile spewers and nursing spewers. To avoid missing, like with the arc thrower you have to aim higher as rocks and corpses can get in the way- after that its a murder machine
I got my highest kill streak (or whatever it’s called) with the arc shotgun of 37. Sadly this was also when it crashed games, so my excitement was short lived. I’m glad that’s fixed though.
A less-known trick to using the Blitzer is that the long cycle time between shots (2 seconds) is *just enough* to swap to your secondary, shoot *once* and swap back. I run the Blitzer with the Senator revolver and you can significantly increase your damage output by swapping between both.
I unironically bring Punisher against bots. It instakills small bots and will stunlock big ones, very useful in keeping berserkers away from your squad. I run with light armor and get sneaky flanks to take out walkers and rocket guys and to split bot aggro. Surprisingly, I don't die that often playing like that.
The standard breaker shreds berserks in very short order. I consistently takr down 2-3 berserks per clip. That 30% damage penalty does not sound worth it, but I have not tried the spray & pray yet.
Yeah I've been using the buckshot pumpgun for as my standard gun and I really like it. I cant wait to try the slug shotgun though since ever since I started playing higher difficulties I end up seeing more of the big guys and its problems start to show up. It also seems like it would be effective in the bug camp too.
The Spray'nPray Breaker is actually a pretty decent weapon, especially in higher levels now that they've reduced Chargers/Bile Titans and replaced them with smaller bugs. Lot of people called it bad compared to the other shotguns but were testing all shotguns against Brood Commanders and Chargers, when it is designed for damaging/killing multiple minion enemies at once. Unfortunately because it was labelled as bad people are instead using the Incendiary Breaker and use it the way you're meant to use the Spray'n'Pray.
Exactly this ^ people still think it's bad, I saw a video of a guy calling the S&P bad...the footage was him shooting a bile titan???? Bruh I've been using it Vs bugs and bots and it works great, it's...a spray and pray!
Agreed. The SnP Breaker has come into its' own with the recent balance patch shifting higher difficulties away from 'lots of the big guys' to 'big guys supported by absolute hordes of the small fry'.
Currently the primary guns in general are in a really good place imo, feels like nearly every single one is viable depending on your playstyle and what enemies you’re facing
i'm of the opinion that the plasma punisher is a really good weapon, it's unique capabilties has made certain encounters trivial whereas any other weapon would struggle. pair it up with an MG, stalwart or laser cannon and you got yourself a very deadly arsenal on your back for almost any situation.
@@Lagunaturbia cold planets and against termanids. In the situation where you want a long range weapon with unlimited ammo, the cannon is a good choice. Its usable against bots, but not ideal.
Arc-12 Blitzer does have some pros. Bugs: If you get swarmed by small enemies you can run away and HIPfire the weapon while looking behind you to fight off those pesky hunters while still being very mobile and nimble. This keeps alot of damage and pressure off of you while savely getting out of danger. Bots: It staggers Devastators and everything below their armor-thiccness. (Including bugs) Combine this with it's ~30m reach and you can quickly disable those barrage wielding tincans. Both: After using it for every mission since it got released, I can say the spread appears wider when using hipfire but is more concentrated on the center if you ADS. Sadly it does NOT penetrate Charger Armor and above so keeping something on your back that can deal with those guys will come in very handy. It performs best when not used as a Primary weapon, but rather the side-arm to your Statagem Slot Weapon. I mainly run Arc-12 Bliter + Arcthrower and it works wonders.
I've noticed that the blitzer will chain to targets behind the initial hit, in a cone pattern. If they are all in a line to the side, you might get a single jump, maybe not. If you shoot a target in the front, with a large group directly behind, it can jump to a lot of them. It's meant to be used in the playstyle you suggested here, running and hip firing behind you.
The Plasma Shotgun is SUPER EFFECTIVE against bots, idk what you meant there. Everything else was spot on though. It kills the bot walkers with a single shot center mass to the walker, and the bot behind it. Aiming it at the ground against foot soldiers really fucks them up too. The Punisher Plasma is seriously underrated.
Its good that you pull out your pistol to deal with hordes of small enemies. I feel like players don’t realize that a back up weapon does not mean only use it when you run out of ammo on your primary. Like with the liberator P everyone’s like. Ugh bad magazine size and only good against armored enemies and bad for swarms. Its not made for swarms its meant for single medium targets not groups of enemies. They act like the machine pistol in their pocket doesn’t exist.
@@jmcfizzle29 I’d disagree with that. When they’re bunched up (which if I’m pulling it out, they probably are) it can clear out a good chunk very very quickly (enough to reload my primary, safely throw a ‘nade, or just reload the pistol). And when it comes to killing individuals, just hold reload, switch to single fire, and boom. It’s the starting pistol with more ammo.
@@jmcfizzle29 for the bugs it’s actually pretty effective against everything but the chargers and bile titans you just have to basically mag dump spewers and brood commanders but with its high rate of fire it has a fast ttk its a great secondary
Haven't tried it myself, but I hear that it's pretty effective. Then again, I only unlocked the thing the other day, so I haven't tried it out yet. Might run a "Shrieker-B-Gone" build (Incendiary Breaker to deal with the Shriekers, Autocannon for the nests)
I’ve also heard that the laser weapons are pretty good for them since they’re hit-scan. Haven’t tried that yet as I still don’t know when those things are going to be there, and there’s just so many combos to can play with.
@@chamberlane2899 The beam weapons are very good against shriekers since they have weak points at their wing joints. You can just sweep through them and down they go. The support laser can also kill the nests.
I dont know where you heard that it's "BEST" or HOW you tested it. If you tested it, then I guess you were shooting them when they were diving you, I cant think of any other option. Listen guys, this shotgun has GIANTIC spread, which means you can and WILL miss your targets +3-5m away from you with HALF of your pellets, do you really think you can hit at least half of pellets at flying enemy that is keeping its distance away and moves constantly? It's not good by any means, breaker shotgun is option Go-To when it comes to flying ones, lasers too especially Sickle, basically anything that is good in current warfare in air to air.
Plasma punisher i want to mention is fantastic against bots, and due to it's nature it is very useful against the shield bots because it staggers them and open them up to more attacks. Though i will admit against bugs i will take standard punisher
wow, this is only your second video? I like your style, quick and to the point! Hope you keep doing this series, you're onto something. Looking forward to your next videos!
I don’t have Helldivers 2 yet but the videos that I’ve seen so far about weapons and enemies are helping me already figure out what I want so thanks for contributing, I’m definitely gonna want the punisher and the slugger
I think this is the first time I've ever actually found a good vid from following a short's link. Good stuff! And I'm glad to see the Incendiary and Spray 'n' Pray being noted for what they're worth. Too many times I've gotten shit from teammates because I've ran either/or because 'it's not as good as the regular Breaker'
slugger and punisher's slow reload can be negated through spamming reload and shooting at the same time, this way you can shoot in a slower firerate but with the entire ammo capacity shot consecutively at your will
I noticed you didn't seem to know the range of the blitzer. You could have killed the charger in half the time if you had been closer with some of your shots.
the arc shotgun is OK in my opinion if you: A) never stop shooting. like never. keep a 100% uptime. shoot, flick your camera around like crazy looking for something to shoot at while your helldiver is doing the pump animation. compensate for low damage by never having to exit the fight and reload. instead of delivering high damage in bursts, you deal small sustained damage constantly. B) be a bit self sufficient, take on hordes by yourself but take your time. run light armor and kite enemies around, wearing them down slowly with your 100% damage uptime. you can run off on your own and never need a resupply. expendable anti-tank could be a good match for this since your combat encounters are going to be so long and slow. you get to call it down potentially multiple times against the same wave, compensating a bit for the gun's weakness. just kiting them in circles and zapping them constantly to wear them down. this also means you will get a lot of value from bringing low cooldown stratagems.
A bit of advice I saw from a short a week or so ago with the pump shotguns is to reload between every shot. It increases the fire rate by a small amount, but also means you don't have to worry about stopping to reload a half dozen or more shells at one time.
On the Incendiary Breaker, the main value of this gun is that you can pick and choose. If you see a bug about to call for help, unload into the damn thing. You're flanking a guard and don't know when you'll get another chance? Get a few full bursts into it. You're being pounced on by hunters? Time to empty a few mags. But if you have a lot of enemies a good distance away? You're flanking around a breach? Maybe you're being chased by a swarm and they can't catch up because you're a light armor gigachad? Just fire off 1 shot or 1 burst and keep running. Let that fire do its job and slow burn through the enemies
you can "empty mags" with more reliable options than this. Test this shotgun on level 9 and you will soon find it very disappointing comparing to others, with one instance, it has BIG spread, thus anything swarms you up from behind like hunters, can be easily dealt with by just spamming around them (you dont even have to aim since spread its doing it for you) At the end its great for up close encounters which is now really common from the new change to spawning system. Still spray and pray or breaker is better as its more reliable (more universal)
Glad to see you on Helldivers 2. I used to watch your videos on Total War Warhammer 2 back before 3 came out and my PC couldn't keep up. I'm looking forward to seeing more good stuff.
I like arc blitzer just for the fact that it compliments the arc thrower a lot, you use arc thrower mostly for crowd control then when they get near you you use the arc blitzer to hit them hard and push them away then switch back to the arc thrower it mostly one shots any terminids till the warrior variants and can 2 shot spewers altho it still suffers from the fact that its an arc weapon that sometimes hone into dead enemies making it sometimes annoying to use
using it for fun or bc u like it it's alright but u could just replace the blitzer with the basic punisher or even better the slugger and u would get the same result but with more damage and more firerate, wich means u would be able to push enemies easier/faster and in bigger numbers
@@biggreen8025 the blitzer covers a lot more aoe than the punisher since its an arc weapon the fire rate doesn't matter since I mainly use it to push away medium enemies and one shot small enemies also cuz it can penetrate medium armor aswell like the slugger but has more aoe I just need one shot to push them then I switch back to the arc thrower...the arc thrower is the main dmger anyways I've been using it a lot more on helldive difficulties cuz the punisher runs out of ammo cuz of so many swarms tbh xD
Damn dude nice job teasing me with the Short and leading me straight here! Immediately into the good info, and different info from the short! Taking notes...
i find thta the biggest balance issue is a information issue in this game not knowing how the guns work not knowing the stagger mechanics not knowing the slugger spread not knowing the shots to kill vs time to kill vs max dps not knowing how much burn damage is applied with better information, this game would be a lot smoother to balance
Something I noticed is the Punisher shotgun staggers the shield, rocket and devastator bots really easy, and frok range too Even just clipping their feet, arm or shoulder with it will stagger them, allowing easier follow up shots, opening a window for teammates to kill it if you cant As good as the slugger is in almost every respect, the punisher is a much more forgiving weapon, but just as useful Hitting that eye slit can be a nightmare with the slugger in a bad situation
Yeah the slugger's lack of a spread means a lot of shots will do 0 damage instead of half+stagger. You'll end up burning through pistol ammo or slugs on the trash where your punisher would just splash them off the field.
Blitzer is fairly ok, you just need to understand, that the lightning pathing hates objects like enemy corpses and small rocks. Hipfiring the Blitzer from even slightly elevated ground, you can potentially hit 6 enemies on both sides of your FoV - 3 from initial bolts, and 3 more through chaining. But when there are lots of dead bodies in the way, it can't reach the stuff behind them, so this needs to be accounted for. What makes Blitzer good for me personally is the infinite ammo + medium pen + stagger combo. This means I can finally stop using the ammo backpack and try out some other loadous, without the fear of getting bullrushed by 12 bile spewers or hiveguards/brood commanders.
Somehow never realized that the Slugger shoots slugs even though it says it in the description and is called the SLUGger. Speaking of the Slugger, you can actually reload in between shots to shoot indefinitely with very little downtime for reloading, getting rid of the slow reload problem (can also be done with the Punisher). Only downside to this is that the reload will get rid of your crosshair, making it a bit harder to hit shots, especially at a distance.
Just picked up Helldivers 2 this weekend, and now I find that my favorite Total War creator is making guides for the game. Looking forward to what methodologies you come up with for testing sentry turrets.
I like to reload my pump shotties AS i fire them, when i know i need more than the internal magazine can provide. i'm a little sad you didn't mention the versatility of never needing to wait for a full reload, but hey, that's just me. The regular breaker in particular is pretty reliable at killing small targets at medium range too. Great video
If there's one thing this game desperately needs it's a gun range mode. Just a single-player area, like the tutorial, that lets you go around and test out all of the equipment you've unlocked, (with maybe some "Press button to summon fodder" bits so you can actually see the effects on target,) so you can actually figure out what things actually do without, you know, the imminent threat of death getting in the way of learning. I had the exact same complaint about MGSV when it came out, (which seems pertinent here, given how many of the gameplay systems have overlaps with how MGSV works,) and some people gave me shit for it, but then a few years later I played Peace Walker for the first time, (which is basically a prototype for The Phantom Pain portion of MGSV anyway,) and PW *has* a freakin' gun range. It drives me a little nuts when developers go to great lengths to put together rather complex systems for their games, but then don't give the players any reasonable arena to figure out how they work. I guess to some extent, playing on Trivial difficulty in a private lobby gives you quite a bit of wiggle room to fuck around, but even that can be really inconsistent and you'll occasionally get matches where you seem to get swarmed by 5 times as many enemies as normal, (which I've been able to directly verify by kill count, given that I'm the only person in the game.) I realize Helldivers are, even in-universe, functionally expendable, but if you're gonna give a guy his own private military space ship to tool around in, you'd think you could spare a couple of acres on a liberated planet for him to set down once and a while and figure out what all the new guns do.
Information on the two guns you didn’t like, which are actually two of my favorites. Plasma: I take the plasma punisher against bots, for a couple of reasons. It can kill the striders with one shot to the front, as the explosion basically ignores the armor and instantly kills the trooper driving it. It can also kill shield devastater from the front pretty easily as well. Secondly, it has a really good stagger, allowing you to stunlock anything smaller than a hulk (All the devastaters). Thirdly, it has a lot of drop, which, while limiting its range, allow you to shoot things from behind cover while they can’t shoot you back. Favorite bot primary. Arc Blitzer: This is an amazing gun for kiting bugs. It ignores Medium and light armor, but I don’t think it ignores heavy like the other arc weapons. What it’s good for is running and gunning. I would recommend using it if you are going heavy on air strikes. It’s not a good weapon to stand and fight with. It will arc to dead bodies and miss what you are shooting at. But if you are running away, that’s not a problem. You sprint, then flick behind you, shoot, and keep running. The arcs lock on to targets, so you don’t have to aim. The DPS is terrible, but the burst is pretty high so it ends up that the damage over the time when you are actually shooting it is super high if you are running and gunning. Also has a stagger effect, which can stop bile spewers from spitting at you. Also will one shot brood commander if you hit it perfectly.
So, IDK if anyone mentioned it but it's about the Plasma Punisher. 1. Hits through the walker armor, killing the pilot without needing to flank them. 2. Kills all bots lower than berserker in 1 direct, or 2 splashes. 3. Can FIRE BEHIND COVER OR DOWN FROM THE HIGH GROUND (keeping you from being perforated by red glowy beams) 4. A stagger weapon. You shoot a heavy devastator and it opens up its shield, or staggers for your friends. Same as with Rocket Dev's 5. Perfect to pair with the Senator and the Stalwart OR the AMR (Anti Matt) and the Redeemer Pistol depending on what you want to play into, being more aggressive or passive since it works best in the middle ranges, I prefer this on a BOT mission and find it harder to use on BUG missions. Also, it staggers hive guards from holding shields up for you to spray your secondary into the legs.
i like to use the arc with a guard dog against the bugs, you can basically take out whole groups with the arc and the guard dog makes up for the low fire rate
This is so much better and useful than all the other S to F tier lists; Every shotgun has a clear use for different cases and different playstyles. Thanks
One thing to note with the Incendiary BReaker is that you WILL catch yourself and teammates on fire with the ricochets, so don't spray a charger or hive guard in the face with it while near others.
I do want to add a note to the incendiary breaker... You can lob shots into crowds from afar pretty reliably; I do this all the time but it isnt the most ammo efficient way to far this weapon but it is very fun.
2 tips I have. For the Punisher and Slugger, you can reload between shots and keep roughly the same firerate that you would normally have. I do this all the time, and it allows me to chew through hordes like they're nothing. You don't even need to worry about ammo efficiency, because a single resupply box gives you 60 shells, and an ammo can gives you ~40. The damage at range is better than you'd expect, and it doesnt seem to lose it's stagger. Absolutely do not underestimate this shotgun, especially combined with DoT, or guard dogs. It's how I routinely rack up the most kills on my teams, while still being able to run something like the EAT or Recoilless Rifle to easily deal with chargers and titans. I frequently run punisher+napalm strikes against the bugs. It makes quick work of basically entirely bug breaches. The napalm kills most chaff, and anything that survives is weaker, and can be easily mopped up, or staggered so they stay in the fire. For the Blitzer, it's much better as a secondary to a stratagem weapon, and is great for buying time to swap to your stratagem. You can hot swap between the blitzer, and a different weapon, which allows you to keep fairly good crowd control, without burning through too much ammo. I personally run it alongside the MG-43. You fire the Blitzer, swap to the MG, fire a few rounds, and then swap back to the Blitzer. This allows you to make up for the Blitzer's poor rate of fire, as you can fire a good couple MG rounds while the Blitzer is on cooldown. Would I rather bring punisher+flamethrower(another favorite loadout) against bugs? Yeah. But it's still a fun and effective loadout, especially when I feel like running an MG (which are criminally underrated)
Slugger “it’s powerful over a decent range” it takes out spore towers the other side of the map with 6 shots. It’s a beast. Arc shotgun won’t hit the leg, it always aims at the “centre mass” of the creature same as all the other arc guns.
helldivers is one the few games that make shotguns 1=1 like they are in real life. The pellets just dont magically dissappear after 10m and you can snipe 100-150m with the punisher. It is always fun to play trap and skeet with the jumping robots or the dropships.
When using the incendiary breaker. It is fairly effective VS Bots as well. The incendiary breaker does still light the bots on fire, as they have organic components. They seem to take reduced damage from the fire but can similarly be run around until they expire. If caught up close you can quickly burst down all of their melee variants as well. I have found it works great vs bots as a sort of side arm to a strong support weapon. Personally I run the Anti-material rifle and a jet pack, with the incendiary as a melee range fallback.
No one mentioned this, but since tick damage (Fire, Gas) is bugged for non-hosts, Breaker Incendiary is pointless joining other people The tick damage bug applies to the following (off the top of my head) Orbital Gas Strike Breaker Incendiary Incendiary Grenade Thermite Grenade (I think) Eagle Napalm Strike SEAF Artillery Napalm Orbital Napalm (I think that exists) Incendiary Mines Flamethrower Let me know if I missed any but the Breaker Incendiary is bad for non-hosts
The incendiary is awesome against the bugs. When you’re being chased by a horde nothings better than spraying an entire mag and nearly killing 20 bugs from burn damage alone
the incendiary breaker is the KING of choke point denial, its essentially a flamethrower in the primary slot and FANTASTIC for dealing with large swarms of any size bug, its ROF also gives you the ability to deal with less than ideal pileups on yourself, I love using it in large sweeping motions over fields of bugs on dif 9 as more or less an extended range flamer. the more bugs you ignite with each shot, the more value you get out of it.
I used to play the slugger a lot against the bots , the one shot in the head and the stagger effect was really cool but since it got nerfed I enjoy my life more with other weapons
I use the Plasma Punisher on the hatchery missions. It'll pop a large number of eggs per shot, and with the ballistic arc, you can sometimes hit eggs from outside the hive if you know where the eggs are and use a bit of indirect fire.
Big note on the Punisher Plasma: It can stunlock all devastators, even heavies through their shield, making it one of the best primaries for bots, not to mention the fact that it can one-shot striders with a well-placed shot.
I've also found that the incendiary breaker is surprisingly effective against shriekers. Its large spread means it's easy to get a hit, and the fire usually takes em out pretty quick.
