The GREAT MK12 Chain Axe | A Tutorial

Reginald had worked at the archivum for 35 years he had read every munitorum Manual of arms even though he wasn't technically supposed to so when his trusty markv chain axe's machine Spirit went on the fritz and Bruns Armory served up a mark 12 in replacement well he knew exactly what to do with it Reginald here so there's new patterns of weapons in Dark tide and most notably there is a new chain ax the mark 12 which is available for both the veteran and the zealot so is it any good how do you use the thing what are its attacks for and how should you build it we're going to cover all that in this fairly fast guide I think I found a way to make these a little quicker than I have in the past now I have to come clean with you at the start of this video that thumbnail is not accurate to my actual attitudes about the mark 12 but it was funny and I did kind of make it uh in response to some conversations I had with cl athetics uh and so I kind of had to keep it I will say I am disappointed that they gave us this chain Axe and not the two-handed chain axe but maybe one day we'll finally get my desired weapon and it'll turn out to not like it as much as I like the Mark 4 or something like that so we'll see in any case the role of the arestes mark 12 chainaxe in your kit is that of a specialist and Elite sniping tool on screen is a nearly perfect Mark 12 chain ax I might actually take a little bit more mobility and lose a little on defenses here but on the whole this one's almost ideal just as with the markv the modifiers that you need to make sure this weapon does the damage it needs to do is damage penetration and Shredder you can dump on mobility and defenses but don't dump too hard on either of them as for this weapon just like the markv mobility controls your Sprint speed Dodge distance and Dodge limit while defenses controls your Sprint cost and push cost both of which are important though on the mark 12 the push attack cost is a little less important since it's a much more single Target focused attack and you could probably dump here rather than losing out on that Mobility Stat one of the other downsides of the weapon I've chosen to show you here is the unarmored damage perk it's not in ideal it actually gets you over an easier break point on drag Gunners and that's pretty nice and also drag shotgunners but it isn't as good as taking Maniacs which can make it much easier to kill muties and drag ragers which are pretty key targets and probably more important than shotgunners and Gunners carace at 25% however in my opinion is completely required for the build that I will be showing you today and I'm going to explain why with 25% carace and thrust you can get a one tap on every Crusher you see pretty nice so with perks out of the way we're going to talk blessings the blessing pool much like on the markv is very viable you can pretty much use whatever you want including bloodthirsty if you really wanted to and I think that's really nice on this weapon however I'm going to make a strong recommendation that you pick up thrust thrust benefits on the markv very little it's only good for your heavy rev attacks it doesn't really benefit your swinging cord clear attacks all that much but on the mark 12 you're going to be using those heavy overheads without rev to try and snipe some Elites and you can get some really nice break points for one tapping things with your normal heavy attacks without having to rev anything up which is safer and easier than doing a big thrust rev attack likewise it benefits your heavy rev attacks so you can get some really spicy one Taps on some very big targets doing a ton of damage to key enemies for this reason thrust is a multi-benefit type of blessing on the mark 12 that it just isn't anywhere else and since I tend to try and stay in melee as much as possible on my zel it anyway and on my veteran I want a weapon that's going to be useful defensively I'm going to recommend Slaughter or head taker I think slaughterer is actually better on the mark 12 because you need a little extra damage on the uh light attacks to make them feel good especially on the veteran I think headt taker is okay it's fine on the light attacks but when you're doing heavy attacks you're using thrust which slows you down and so you're not going to be building headtaker all that fast when fighting Elites anyway which is usually where you want head taker instead of slaughterer since you're not going to be using it to that Advantage I think Slaughter is better it lasts a little longer so if you are fighting into a horde and then you go to kill an elite you'll probably still have those Stacks this makes the weapon more consistent overall and makes it nicer for with the extra cleave dealing with hoed enemies I think Revit up is actually a good choice if you're running Zealot uh and thrust it can actually make the weapon really fun to move around with with a swift certainty build type thing which I will link below it's kind of a joke build but it turned out to be really good in carnak twins for its various Mobility advantages so I don't know you're welcome to try it but don't take it too seriously blood Letter did not get me over any interesting break points that I wasn't getting out of thrust and in fact I kind of felt like if I was going to run blood Letter on the mark 12 I should just take the markv instead bloodthirsty also just didn't really impress uh I yes you can get some break points from it but it only benefits your special attack specifically your second special attack after getting a kill and if you want to ensure that kill you're going to have to use thrust and then you can already One Tap whatever you just killed and you can get a slaughterer stack instead if you want it and so I don't really see value here since I'm always going to One Tap unless I'm trying to reduce how much thrust aack I need it just didn't seem like there was any added value I couldn't find Value in Thundurus that doesn't doesn't mean I'm right maybe there's something I'm missing however my experience with the weapon is that the light attacks only add one stack of brittleness unlike the light attacks on the markv and while the special attack will add four or five stacks of brittleness while it's doing it we've just discussed how with thrust you can always get a kill a One Tap so why bother stacking brittleness when you're going to concretely kill whatever it is you just hit and then with the heavy attacks you'll probably be picking your target better uh and using the Rev instead if it's too big to be killed with heavy attacks so I just am not value out of Thundurus on this weapon I'm not saying it's bad again I think you could use anything in here and still get value out of it but the best blessings to me are thrust slaughterer head Taker and Revit up the other three blessings that I've described are just not really all that worth it but if you get stuck with them don't feel that bad they're certainly not awful let's talk about the weapons attack patterns the mark 12 is largely a very straightforward weapon with only two of each type of attack very simple stuff the light attacks have two alternating x pattern swings that have the exact same stats for each swing they are Relentless which means they're more focused on stagger than they are on damage but they do perfectly adequate damage and they come out quickly they're great for horde management the heavy attacks are two identically sted overhead attacks with latching behavior that lasts for two ticks so very similar to how it works with the light attacks on the arestes markv and the Very otherwise familiar heavy attacks on the heavy chainsword variance or so I thought anyway until I nailed a crit and realized it's actually Four compressed ticks of damage and what this does mean is that while you can Dodge out of these heavy attacks just like you can with the markv without incurring any stamina cost you may see a bit more variable damage with the markv you can Dodge out of the first tick of damage and not get the second but with this you could Dodge out of the second tick of damage the third tick of damage or just before the fourth tick of damage at any time and since they're so compressed you're never going to be able to really reliably make sure that you're getting just one tick or another not that that's an especially big deal you're going to dodge out when you need to dodge out not just for fun but it might result in a little bit more Shifty break points if you find yourself having to dodge out the push attack on the mark 12 is a Thrust an actual stab using the I think Spike though you can do a REV attack with it too uh for the same number of ticks on the Rev attack as you would get out of a light rev attack on the mark 12 or either type of rev attack on the markv that is to say it does four TI of damage who knows how it does that cuz it certainly doesn't look like it can the Rev attacks on the mark 12 are a little different than they are on the markv or other chain weapons notably this batch of chain weapons that came out with the most recent p in 15.2 came with longer rev times the light attack rev is going to only do four tick of damage and the thrust as well but the heavy attack rev does five ticks of damage which means it's going to take you longer to get to the end of it but it does more damage at the end and across its duration as well this means it is a pretty heavy-hitting attack all right well we have talked about the attacks and how they are used what they're generally for let's get specific what are the key break points we want to carry about this is where I think I can save us some time rather than going through it piece by piece with every enemy like I've done in other videos I have created a table of all the key break points that you might care about and interestingly enough you should be able to hit these break points with either the veteran or the Zealot assuming a typical build in fact when testing these I used the same builds I used in my markv video and I will link those below and then for specificity sake in this table what I've tried to do is provide the minimum required application of Buffs whatever those are those are all listed on the right hand side uh I'm using thrust as a blessing and then I'm targeting headshot and it's for either class so I've tried to specify here in the notes on the far right exactly what the minimum requirement is in order to get that one tap so like maniacs for example drag Berserkers and scab Berserkers are really hard to get but the other ones are actually fairly easy like scab shotgunners you just need like one stack of thrust cold with no other blessings and Buffs of any kind and you can just tap them out so let's just walk through that as you can see you can get on drag Berserkers scab Berserkers scab shotgunners drag shotgunners scab Gunners and drag Gunners that is to say all the humanized elites except MERS a One Tap heavy attack no rev just the single heavy attack with thrust four and something right pretty nice for Reapers and bull Works you're going to need a heavy rev you are going to also be able to get a two tap just heavy attack with full thrust Stacks um so that's pretty cool that can be handy if you're looking to kill those quickly MERS you do need 25% carace and that's in part because you're really very likely to hit the head with these attacks they're direct overheads it's hard to hit the shoulder it's very likely to hit an arm so in general I find that smacking wers and that have a 25% K Pace will kill them Crushers require just a little something from the talent pool but you only need three stacks of thrust 25% carace and like something right and that'll get you over the line you can't just go in completely cold mutants uh you can actually do this with just a heavy attack to the back body shot you do need need five stacks of martyrdom or three and three stacks of thrust in order to get that kill and that's the list I hope I didn't make any mistakes in my list here is my first attempt after all I'm sure I made at least one but in any case it should be pretty close to true and you can rely on that much at least and that will make this a lot easier as you're going to build your mark 12 and try to figure out how to use it obviously everybody's Mark 12 is going to be a little different and some of these break points are very tight to get so if your weapon isn't as good as mine you may actually have a fairly challenging time hitting a few of these for example the Berserker are really hard to nail now you may notice that there are no Specialists on this list and that's because you can very easily One Tap all of the Specialists with the heavy attack on this thing at most maybe it's one stack of thrust for I think Trappers otherwise should be a shoe in for an easy kill regardless of other benefits uh the mutant is one of the ones I wanted to call out because you can get a spicy One Tap but more commonly it's going to be two if you're sitting not at five stacks of Marty and don't have a bunch of stacks of thrust built up that kind of thing it's really there academically to let you know it can be done and and I often use rev attacks on muty as they're charging by anyway so just FYI just to recap then on our way out the door you're going to use your heavy attacks against Specialists all types of man-sized Elites and you can even use them against bigger enemies if you're looking to maintain Mobility while delivering solid damage your heavy rev attacks are going to be your preference for getting solid kills on Reapers bullworks maulers and Crushers and possibly muties if they're charging by the Light rev attack is a little weird on the mark 12 cuz it doesn't have a very strong use case that's not to say you'll never use it I certainly use it occasionally to deliver solid damage then follow up with a light or heavy attack the push attack rev attack on the mark 12 is also interesting for the same reasons without blood Letter it doesn't hit any super interesting break points but it's certainly a good way to deliver a large amount of damage reliably in a mixed group especially since the thrust is precise the thrust itself on the push attack does a lot of damage and can be a great way to finish off an enemy quickly if you're looking to get a little extra reach as well and then the light attacks are used entirely for hord Clear anything from producers on down the light attack followup to rev attack can be good if you miss a break point a couple light attacks is a good way to get some stagger and damage in to kill whatever it is you're trying to hit though I will say I tend to use the push attack for that the most because I tend to be surrounded by enemies and so it's the safest way to secure that single Target kill with that we have covered all of the key break points what each swing type is used for what the weapon itself is used for and how I recommend you build it normally I'd go into tips tricks and idiosyncrasies but to be perfectly honest I don't have any of those that exceed anything I've already discovered in the markv video most of that knowledge reports directly over into this weapon this weapon is fairly simple with from my perspective not a lot of complexity it doesn't have the Deep depths that the markv has to it that's partially due to the simplified break points it's partially due to the simplified swing patterns and lastly it's probably due in part to the fact that I've already explored the markv to such extreme depths that when I come back to the mark 12 which is very similar and a lot of Base functionality there isn't much left to say none of that to say I don't like the mark 12 I like to take it up for a spin from time to time there are definitely reasons to take it it hits harder than the markv on some key targets and that can be a lot of fun and you know it gives me a good reason to bring Revit up I'm not saying you want to take Revit up on your veteran but it actually pairs fairly well as with Revit up if you want to do something like have a sort of slightly slower and slightly stronger thunderhammer that can get you to the Target a lot faster in that sense if you wanted to treat this like a thunderhammer I suppose you could pair this with a lawbringer or flamer or something to help the hord clear weakness you might have all right well I think that about wraps it up we've explor this weapon as deeply as I've been able to figure out so far and I am looking forward to the next part of this video which will be out soon essentially I'm going to do a which is better I'm going to steal from my buddy wild spice over there and see which of the two chain axes I prefer based on whatever hard data I can pull together with that I'll just say thank you all so much for visiting and have yourselves a lovely weekend bye-bye

Channel: Reginald

Views: 11,068

Keywords: Darktide, Chain Axe

Id: QmRZLqOIX70

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 06 2024