Blastwave Amon (Onslaught Build - theory)

The general gameplay loop is to be in the face of your enemies, dealing damage in close range and doing as much melee damage and Action Skill damage as possible, while triggering executes on low health enemies.

Hola friendos, it's your friendly neighbourhood Moze Amon main with another Amon theory build. As mentioned above, this build hasn't been tested in game yet but would ideally serve as some day 1 inspiration for skill tree progression if you're interested in a close range, melee, mass AoE playstyle.

Build Concept and things to know:

This build revolves around a few key Amon specific mechanics. Primarily the weakness debuff that Amon has access to in certain skills ( Gut Punch Maiming Strike) Weakness is more or less Amon's answer to Slag from BL2 (may it rest in pieces). Weakness makes enemies do less damage as well as take more damage, and the kicker here is that Weakness is also considered a status effect, and as such, gets boosts from stats that boost status effect chance and duration (items like COMs and enhancements that boost these stats will pair very nicely with this build)

In terms of how to best use this build, it's very much a close range, brawler type build. Relying on AoE damage, weakness debuffing and execute-style abilities to finish off enemies with melee abilities

I'm also going to be using certain words like "trunk" and "branches". Trunk refers to the top part of the skill tree and the branches refer to the 3 diverting paths from the trunk

Skills

Trunk

As mentioned above, we'll be making heavy use of the Weakness debuff in order to give Amon extra damage and kill enemies quicker.

To start with, we pick Impetus for increased shield regen rate and movement speed, just to give Amon a touch extra survivability due to the fact that we're gonna be close range to nemies as much as possible. We also pick Discombobulate to increase the chance for our melees to crit and deal extra damage. However, depending on the bonuses to the crit chance and if its worth taking, we can take points in Heavy Plate instead for added survivability instead. Will need a bit of testing to see whats more worth it in practice.

We then go further in the trunk to pick up a few additional skills.

Tritanium Knuckles for extra melee and AS damage, The Best Defense for some extra overshield when dealing melee damage (which we'll be doing a lot of), Momentum for extra skill cooldown rate after dealing gun damage, as well as Forged In Steel for temporary invincibility after activating a forgeskill (once again - to help with close range survivability).

To wrap up the trunk skills, we get Gut Punch, which is one of the stars of this build. Gut Punch gives Amon the chance to apply weakness on melee damage and ordnanace damage. And since we'll be doing a lot of melee damage, you can see where this is going.

Branches

Moving into the branches, we invest in 3. However I'm going to explain this out of order a little bit. Bear with me..

Branch 2:

In Branch 2, we start with Into the Fray for increased damage and increased damage reduction when in close proximity to enemies. As we're going to spending most of the combat encounters in close range, giving Amon extra survivability (and damage) ties in nicely with this gameplay loop.

We also pick up Harbinger for extra melee damage AND max shield capacity on kill. max shield capacity which ties in nicely with Impetus from the trunk to pad out survivability, and extra melee damage never hurt anybody (except the enemies we're punching square in the face)

We then round out Branch 2 with Maiming Strike for increasing the chances that we apply Weakness to enemies. Depending on the chance to apply weakness, you can take or remove a point out of Maiming Strike and put it in Harbinger should you choose. But this will just require some testing and a bit of personal preference :)

Branch 3:

For Branch 3, we start with Catastrophe. Which has a solid synergy with this skill tree spec. Catastrophe gives Amon increased crit chance after applying shock to an enemy, and increased crit damage after applying burning to an enemy. Through leveraging shock weapons (or grenades), we'll be able to apply shock to a large group enemies, which will trigger Catastrophe which in turn, gives Maiming Strike a higher chance to apply weakness to an enemy. See the synergy?

We then pick up Judgment for increased melee damage to enemies below 50% HP and round out Branch 3 with the Stormcutter capstone, giving Amon a massive AoE shockwave more or less. Once again, shock tying in with the above skills to keep weakness on as many enemies as possible.

Branch 1:

Last but not least, we pick up the Fellfrost augment, giving Amon an execute ability to enemies below 25% HP that get hit with the follow up attack. The intention here is to make use of weakness to wittle down the HP of enemies, and then dash in and use Fellfrost to finish off the bigger threats before cleaning up the rest of the trash mobs.

Fin

Now once again, we don't know much about what gear is out there in the game. But based on the skill tree setup, we can surmise that the following would be useful:

• COM - Whatever class mod effect synergises with the Onslaught tree and ideally with passive bonuses to melee damage, AS damage, status effect chance and/or status effect duration
• Guns - splash + shock
• Grenade - splash + shock
• Enhancements/Firmware - anything that boosts status effect chance and duration, as well as melee and AS damage

In any case, hope this spec inspires some of you guys to test it out and iterate on it to make it your own, or at the very least, serves as a bit of a starting tree to work through as we all play through the game. Hope this was useful and I'll be back soon with more builds!

Ciao~