u/abca98

Hi everybody, I have been thinking about some builds lately, one of them being a Kirkhammer STR-based character. Since I would be playing in transformed mode most of the time, I would make little use of firearms, so I didn't see any point in leveling up BT.

Starting as a Cruel Fate, my options would be limited to a Hunter's Pistol and Blunderbuss, and I was surprised to see that the regular Cannon, Flamesprayer, Rosmarinus and Gatling have no BT requirements either. However, other than the Gatling, those are all slow heavy hitters or short ranged, which the hammer already covers, so I thought I could incorporate some ranged firepower into the build.

I don't want to use Arcane tools beyond Empty Phantasm Shell and the blunderbuss is for short range, so it was going to come from either the Hunter's Pistol or Gatling. With a Cruel Fate's starting 5 BT, the pistol deals 160+ 3 damage, while the Gatling deals 180+1. It takes 20 BT for the pistol to do more damage per shot than the Gatling (205 vs 207). It's worth noting that the Gatling has really bad scaling, going only from 1 to 72 bonus damage at 99 BT, while the pistol goes from 3 to 136. At those levels, of course, you would upgrade to the Evelyn which goes even highter at 189 points.

It's also true that the pistol is the only one of the two that can parry, which is why I was thinking about using both depending on the situation, with the Gatling being the low hp finisher/aggro/stagger/ranged dps tool.

To end this, I'm aware of the speed difference in the firing animations, and I would like to know if there's some multi-hit mechanic to the Gatling that makes its damage be higher than the numbers make it seem, some flat BT-increasing Bloodgems that could help or if I got everything nailed. Thank you.