Ultimate Blunderbuss Guide (PTR)

• Attributes
• Builds For Blunderbuss
• Blunderbuss Optional Passive Skills
• Blunderbuss Active Skills
• Gear
• Gems
• Equipment Perks
• Consumables
• Ammunition
• Weapons To Combine With:
• FAQ:

Blunderbuss is a mostly close-ranged weapon, which provides lots of area of effect abilities and gap closing tools with some protection skills and Rend applying. It uses ammunition, meaning you have to either craft or buy bullets unless you use Infinite ammo.

It’s perfect for close-ranged PvP and AoE situations, but it doesn’t have much crowd control and requires totally different builds for different in-game content. Blunderbuss has two shots for a standard attack (three with Extended Chamber), each of them firing six pellets for a maximum distance of about 16 meters. The closer you are to the enemy, the more chance that all six will hit the target, for a maximum of 138% weapon damage. 

You can aim to use the RMB to increase the accuracy. The rear sight shows the number of the charges and the number of your ammo.

Attributes

The Blunderbuss scales from the Strength primarily at x0.9 and has a secondary stat of Intelligence (x0.6).

First of all, choosing the main Attribute depends on what weapon you’ll pair with the Blunderbuss. If it’s a Strength weapon, you don’t really have any alternatives except Strength unless you’ll use the damage converting Gem in your secondary weapon. The only useful breakpoint will be at 200 Strength, and it doesn’t look great.

While Intelligence gives less raw damage since it scales at x0.6, you can also use the damage converting Gem. This will let you cover the weaknesses of the bosses and match the elements where you need them.

Intelligence has a strong breakpoint at level 100:

The next Intelligence breakpoint is at level 150, which go up to x0.8 damage scaling using the damage converting Gem:

And at level 300 Intelligence, which gives you +10% damage on first hit, synergizing great with Buckshot passive skill:

If you want to maximize your damage, use the hybrid build. Put 150 Attribute points in the Intelligence and 300 points into Strength. 

Constitution is a decent secondary Attribute, especially for PvP, 50 points will be enough to unlock 20% effectiveness to all health consumables, but you can get those 50 points with your gear or using +40 Consitution food.

Minmaxing your character’s surviving for endgame PvP you can also reach 200 Constitution breakpoint for a 20% armor increase, but this is a pretty arguable option.

Builds For Blunderbuss

1. For roaming world PvP, Outpost Rushes, and Wars this build with slow, gap closing, and ranged skills can be used. Take into account that your only damaging skill will be the Mortar Charge, which slows you on targeting and is pretty hard on landing a direct hit, but will add you both AoE attack and option to shoot over walls and structures.

Of course, if you use light armor and rely on a quick roll, take In-And-Out instead of Barbed Netting.

2. If you like to participate in duels, or prefer pure close combat in PvP, the build with Azoth Shrapnel Blast might be a choice. Wait for Last Chance cooldown, stack all damaging abilities, get closer with Claw Shot and unload everything you’ve got into the enemy’s head. Jump away using the Net Shot, repeat after cooldown.

Of course, Deep Load passive looks nice, but taking it means refusing the Barbed Netting, which is pretty useful, or Azoth Bomb, which might be hard to land in PvP, but there is always a possibility that your opponent will miss it and get himself blown.

3. Full AoE build will be extremely strong in any situation with multiple enemies, whether this is a War or an Expedition.

You can take Future Planning for faster cooldown, Last Chance for more damage reduction, or Lingering Flow as a utility option instead of passives from the Containment tree, since you have to spend two points on useless Future Endeavors and arguable Run and Gun to get to the Ramp and Fortifying Aggression.

4. If you don’t need the Rend application, you can skip the Blast Shot with its long cooldown and low damage and take Azoth Shrapnel Blast instead.

But keep in mind two things. First – you’ll lose a chunk of Azoth Shrapnel Blast damage without Unload, the Containment tree ultimate. Second – to get to the Double Down, the ultimate of the Chaos tree, you’ll have to take Last Chance instead of other options which increase your damage.

Though you can take Buckshot, Future Planning or Deep Load instead of On a Roll of Fortifying Aggression.

Blunderbuss Optional Passive Skills

A short explanation about arguable skills

1. Future Endeavors:

Doesn’t look useful at all with the stamina regeneration rate for now.

2. Run And Gun:

One second means one step, I couldn’t feel any visible effect from this skill no matter how hard I tried.

3. Bite Back:

Not a bad skill at all, but there are many more useful alternatives that don’t have any requirements and give a constant damage or protection bonus. This is not a Musket after all unless you’re not going to roleplay the fastest and sharpest hand in the Wild West.

4. Artillery:

Everything is in its name. Gives a lot of damage to Mortar Charge builds, but 10 meters is a pretty long distance for most other Blunderbuss skills, so it requires extra positioning and is not suitable for close-ranged combat.

5. Extended Chamber:

Taking into account the current reloading speed, which is about 1 second, 2 seconds of waiting is too much. Even more, this ability decreases your damage if you’re using the Deep Load, which gives a +15% damage bonus to the last shot loaded, or Ramp, which gives a +4% damage bonus after each reload.

Being in the Chaos tree, which relies mostly on AoE abilities’ damage, this skill doesn’t look useful at all for now.

6. Mobile Overload:

This is a passive skill from the Claw Shot tree. While being a pleasant bonus, like you can get up close to your enemy and fire at once, there are still other useful skills since reloading doesn’t take long. Mobile Overload doesn’t stack with the Extended Chamber.

Blunderbuss Active Skills

1. Net Shot:

A nice moving ability, this will allow you to kite enemies mostly in PvP. But since Blunderbuss doesn’t have many long-distance skills, this is more likely an escape tool.

2. Claw Shot:

Great gap-closing ability, allows you to be on top of the enemy from 15m away. This is primarily a PvP ability, as mobs don’t run away from you.

3. Azoth Shrapnel Blast:

This ability is pretty good at very close range. It can be combined with the Unload, Containment tree ultimate, which increases the number of shots from 5 up to 9. Works great with Claw Shot, jumping to the enemy and shooting him in the face. A bomb that shoots downward if you have an Azoth Bomb skill is just more potential damage.

4. Splitting Grenade:

The delay on explosion makes it easily escapable in PvP, so this is mainly a PvE skill. The manual detonation works to spread the grenades, but the 1,5-sec explosion delay still makes it much harder to hit your intended target as they could simply move out of the area. If you shoot too high, the grenades will explode in the air.

5. Mortar Charge:

A very strong AoE ability. The range is reasonable, including the arc, making it useful to shoot at enemies over walls and structures. There are two downsides: it locks you into the aim down sight mortar animation and is pretty hard on landing a direct hit.

But upgrades are pretty weak. By the time you’ve activated the ability and loaded the mortars, your stamina regenerates, so Steady is useless. Freedom also doesn’t really have a big impact. Streak is the best upgrade. It adds an extra canister, and increases the damage of every next mortar charge up to 30%, but requires spending 2 points on other weak abilities.

6. Blast Shot:

This ability doesn’t do a lot of damage but applies 20% Rend when upgraded and gives a 25% move speed bonus, which makes it a useful support skill. But it can be dodged easily unless it’s used on unsuspecting targets, so Blast Shot is mainly a PvE ability. Of course, it can be useful in mass PvP too.

Gear

Light armor gives you a +20% damage bonus and the best movement with a quick roll. 

Medium armor will give you more protection, +10% damage bonus, and +10% length of the crowd control debuffs, but you’ll not have a quick roll. Medium armor is also a nice option as a compromise between offense and defense.

Heavy armor offers the best protection and +20% length of the crowd control debuffs for the price of lower mobility. Since Blunderbuss doesn’t really have any crowd control, Heavy Armor might not be the optimal choice.

Armor Type	Light	Medium	Heavy
Head	1,5 lbs	2,6 lbs	4,7 lbs
Chest	3,5 lbs	6,2 lbs	11,0 lbs
Gloves	1,5 lbs	2,6 lbs	4,7 lbs
Pants	2,0 lbs	3,5 lbs	6,3 lbs
Boots	1,5 lbs	2,6 lbs	4,7 lbs
Shields	2,7 lbs (Round)	5,4 lbs (Kite)	11,0 lbs (Tower)

Also, you can combine different types of armor, light with medium, staying under 13 kg, or medium with heavy, staying under 23 kg. You can change your armor type by simply replacing 3 parts.

Maxed Medium Armor 22,9 lbs build (1L + 2M + 2H): Heavy Chest, Light Pants, 2 Medium and 1 Heavy piece.

Alternative Maxed Medium Armor 22,9 lbs build (2L + 1M + 2H): Heavy Chest, Heavy Pants, 1 Medium, and 1 Light piece.

Maxed Light Armor 12,7 lbs build (4L + 1M): Light Head, Medium Chest, Light Gloves, Light Pants, Light Boots.

Maxed Light Armor 12,6 lbs build (3L + 2M): Light Chest, Medium Pants, 1 Medium, and 2 Light pieces. If you need more in-depth information, how tankier you would be wearing a certain kind of armor of a certain Gear Score, feel free to use the New World Calculator by Mixed Nuts.

Look for Armor with Strength or Intelligence on it for best results, or with Strength/Intelligence and Constitution if you need 50 points to unlock 20% effectiveness to all health consumables.

Gems

1. Cut Pristine Onyx:

You will likely be able to open with the most powerful ability against full health foes. Synergizes great with Buckshot and 300 Intelligence breakpoint.

2. Cut Pristine Emerald:

Will help you to execute enemies running away since Blunderbuss doesn’t have any tools to increase damage dealt with a low HP enemy.

3. Cut Pristine Diamond:

This one fits more for a group play since you are likely to be in full health.

If you’re fighting mostly against one enemy type or using Intelligence or hybrid build, then you can use the following to convert your damage:

1. Cut Pristine Amethyst to fight against Ancients:

2. Cut Pristine Aquamarine against the Lost:

3. Cut Pristine Ruby against Angry Earth:

4. Cut Pristine Sapphire against Corrupted:

5. Cut Pristine Topaz against Ancients:

Damage Effectiveness	Slash	Thrust	Strike	Fire	Ice	Nature	Void	Lightning	Arcane
Ancients	-15%		+20%	-40%			+15%	+30%
Corrupted		+20%	-15%		-40%	+15%			+30%
Angry Earth	+20%	-15%		+30%				-40%
The Lost		-15%	+10%		+15%	+30%	-30%
Beast		+20%

For Armor Gems, you can use Cut Pristine Emerald for sniper PvP builds because the only ones who can kill you are other Musket users:

If you’re already level 60 and farming chests or mobs for gear, you need a Lucky Gem:

For other situations to provide generic damage absorption:

1. Cut Pristine Onyx:

2. Cut Pristine Malachite:

3. Cut Pristine Diamond:

Equipment Perks

1. Blunderbuss Skill Perks

These Perks can be found on armors and weapons but often slotted on Armor as Weapons have access to better Perks overall.

Crippling Blast Shot:

This perk looks useful for PvP, but Blast Shot is pretty easy to dodge and is used mostly in PvE.

Exhaustive Net Shot:

Maybe, the most useful perk for PvP against light armor users, who are rolling across the whole map.

Leeching Shrapnel Blast:

Nice utility option for solo playing, but I don’t think anyone will try to have it on his armor purposefully, 14% leeching once per 14 seconds doesn’t look great.

Plagued Splitting Grenade:

Could be an extra useful perk for PvP against healers, if the Splitting Grenade wouldn’t be so easily escapable.  

Resupplying Mortar Charge:

Since Mortar Charge is the best damaging ability, you’ll probably get kills with it, so for mass PvP this might be a suitable option.

Venturing Claw Shot:

Simply great for PvP. Especially combined with Unload: start with Claw Shot, get 9 pellets while jumping to the enemy, and shoot.

2. Armor Perks

Refreshing with Resilient can be a useful universal choice depending on your secondary weapon:

Refreshing Evasion is useful if you’re wearing light armor and dodging a lot:

Physical Aversion is useful for PvP against Musket and Bow users:

3. Weapon Perks

Keen and Vicious increase your damage heavily and might be a universal choice for any situation:

Keenly Jagged is a nice choice to add a chunk of damage. If you land a critical headshot with this perk you deal a lot of damage over time:

Vorpal can be used since you’ll fire in a close range to land headshots easily:

For PvP against healers, you can use Plagued Crits. The maximum amount of healing decreasing is 24% for GS 600 weapons.

4. Amulet Perks

Slash Protection and Thrust Protection cover most PvE and PvP incoming damage:

If you really want to heap on the defenses, Fortified Recovery grants a fairly strong 30% Fortify for 5 seconds when hit below 50% health, but it has a 90 cooldown for the effect:

5. Earring Perks

Purifying Toast and Refreshing Toast are both great utility options for open-world PvP where health consumables tend to be used more. These all also help in PvE as well:

You can also grab Refreshing here as well if you don’t manage to get it on your armor.

Nimble helps the somewhat excessive use of Stamina from this build by boosting Stamina Regen slightly.

Beloved and Evasive can both help you mitigate aggro making you less likely to pull aggro in expeditions:

6. Ring Perks

Keen Awareness is a strong option for higher burst damage potential and Thrust Damage is a small damage boost in general:

Refreshing is also decent Utility with the lowered cooldowns, but that’s also available on armor:

Thrust Protection can be useful against Bow, Musket and Blunderbuss users:

Hearty will add you enough Stamina for one more additional dodge. If the bow player has 109.5 total stamina and each dodge takes 40 stamina (with 150 Dexterity attribute bonus), a player can dodge twice (leaving the player at 39.5 stamina), wait a fraction of a second for stamina to regenerate to 41, then dodge twice more for a total of 4 dodges:

Blood Letting works great with Keenly Jagged on your weapon:

If you are using a Gem to convert your damage, then a certain damage increase could be useful.

Consumables

In this chapter, you can find information about endgame consumables because you don’t really need most of them on low levels. You can easily find the low leveled versions of them because the names only differ by one word, except food:

1. First of all, you need Health Regeneration Food:

Health Potions:

And Regeneration Potions:

2. Attribute Food.

As a DPS player, you might want to increase your Strength and/or Intelligence.

You can use food with both Strength and Intelligence bonus for a hybrid build.

Constitution / Strength and Constitution / Intelligence combinations are also available:

Also, you can use Constitution food to maximize your health:

To find more about food, please visit our Cooking Guide.

3. Powerful Honing Stone will increase your damage. They can be bought or crafted at Smelter if you reach 170 Weaponsmithing level:

You can use cheaper stones, like Strong Honing Stone, because the difference is only 1%:

4. Powerful Gemstone Dust can be also bought or crafted at level 170 Jewelcrafting:

Since they’re used in the Mutated Orb crafting, you can buy Strong Gemstone Dust much cheaper:

5. Powerful Oakflesh Balm can be bought or crafted at 170 Armoring level. It also has cheaper analogs, but usually, they don’t cost too much, and you don’t use them too often:

6. Powerful Incense requires 170 Furnishing level to craft:

Otherwise, you can buy it or use Strong Incense, which often costs much less:

7. Weapon Coatings give a 15% damage bonus against certain types of enemies. These coatings are usually used in dungeons, where you’re fighting mostly against enemies of the same type, for example:

8. Ward Potions increase your damage absorption against certain enemy types. They can help you mitigate heavy incoming damage:

9. Absorption Potions can help you not only in dungeons but also in PvP against mages. They increase absorption by 15% against a certain types of elemental damage, for example:

10. Corruption Tincture and Blight Tincture remove afflictions and give 97,5% resistance to these afflictions for 5 minutes:

11. Infused Encumbrance Potion will help you a bit with bringing your sack to the nearest warehouse. It lasts 3 minutes and increases the Encumbrance Limit by 100:

I know that feeling, bro, even one Flint or Green Wood must not be discarded. 

For more Potions, you can check our Arcana Guide.

Ammunition

Ammunition can be crafted at the Workshop or bought from the Trading Post.

There are five Tiers of Ammunition.

1. Infinite Ammo (Tier 1) is available from level 1 character, has a 1.00 damage modifier, and works if no ammo is equipped.

2. Iron Ammo (Tier 2) is also available from level 1 and has a 1.05 damage modifier.

3. Steel Ammo (Tier 3) is available from level 20 and has a 1.10x damage modifier.

4. Starmetal Ammo (Tier 4) is available from level 40 and has a 1.15x damage modifier.

5. Orichalcum Ammo (Tier 5) is available from level 60 and has a 1.20x damage modifier.

Weapons To Combine With

1. Ice Gauntlet scales with Intelligence. This build focuses on keeping your enemies away from you by casting crowd control abilities while you try to shoot them from a safe distance with Mortar Charge. It can be used in Expeditions, Wars, and other heavy AoE situations.

2. Void Gauntlet scales mainly with Intelligence and can be an amazing supporting weapon since Oblivion doesn’t go away when you swap your weapon, giving 20% Empower to you and your allies, and 15% of the target’s weakening. Or you can root enemies with Petrifying Scream and then hit them with Blunderbuss.

3. Fire Staff scales with Intelligence. This will give you more AoE damage and mobility, while Blunderbuss will help you in close-range combat and when you’re out of mana. One downside of this combo is that you have limited crowd control.

4. War Hammer scales primarily with Strength and provides a lot of crowd control options. You can use the Blunderbuss to close the gap and then Stun and Knockdown your foes. Armor Breaker allows you to get a quick attack off that applies a powerful Rend without taking the Blast Shot; you can combine that with the Sundering Shockwave perk, and you can easily hit the 30% Rend cap.

5. Great Axe scales primarily with Strength and also does a great job of gap closing. Gravity Well works great immobilizing your enemies so you can unload everything you’ve got in close range. Using Enfeebling Maelstrom perk on armor will let you decrease the incoming damage for the whole group by 3-14% with Maelstrom in close combat. Unyielding can grant 10% Fortify for your allies standing near Gravity Well, while you return back 20-50% of your damage as health with Insatiable Gravity Well perk. 

6. Musket scales with Intelligence as a secondary Attribute. It provides significant ranged damage and can even provide some crowd control with Traps, but extremely single targeted and has no movement options. Blunderbuss adds AoE abilities and close-ranged options if someone gets too close. Both weapons deal Thrust damage and are weak against Lost and Angry Earth-type foes.

7. Rapier provides great mobility. Thanks to gems, you’ll be able to focus on Intelligence to scale the damage of both weapons. The downside of this combo is that you have limited crowd control. Both weapons deal Thrust damage and are weak against Lost and Angry Earth-type foes. 

8. Spear. Scaling primarily with Dexterity, the Spear scales damage with Strength as a secondary Attribute. It provides a lot of crowd control with Sweep and Vault Kick, nice defensive options, and Rend to increase overall damage. 

Primary Spear’s weakness is closing the gap to its foes. Use the Blunderbuss’ Claw Shot to get on top of your foe, and then stun them with a Vault Kick and Sweep them to the ground. Both weapons deal Thrust damage and are weak against Lost and Angry Earth-type foes.

9. Hatchet scales primarily with Strength and provides health sustain through Berserk, which allows you to heal up from combat. Feral Rush can root enemies. You can also make the Hatchet a throwing weapon, add some moving tools and decrease the number of enemies healing by Throwing skill tree. This combination would be nice mostly for PvE because Hatchet has a very small hitbox.

10. Bow can deal massive damage at a middle distance, but scales with Dexterity. This could be a flexible build, you have both close and mid-ranged damage, it’s effective for PvP and Expeditions, and has a fair amount of control and sustain. Both weapons deal Thrust damage, which is weak against Lost and Angry Earth-type foes.

11. Sword and Shield can be also combined with the Blunderbuss, which can provide Rend application with a moving speed utility bonus from the Blast Shot. But mostly this combination is about giving a strong AoE damage to the tank.

FAQ