Welcome to our Corrosive Arc-Knives Rafa build guide! This build uses Rafa’s Arc-Knives Action Skill to dart around the battlefield and eviscerate enemies. With the help of a few select Legendaries, Arc-Knives can be maintained indefinitely, resulting in a unique build that is played entirely with melee damage.
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- Fun and Unique playstyle.
- Low gear requirements.
- Works for mobbing and bossing.
- Flying enemies.
- Anything explosive.
- Your own grenades.
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Skill Trees
This Arc-Knives build focuses entirely on the This Year’s Gimmick skill tree, fully committing all 49 points into it. Alongside the Arc-Knives Action Skill, Altered Cabrón is the Augment of choice due to its passive boost to Corrosive damage to support the build. The Inferno Protocol Capstone is used to provide the build with a consistent source of Incendiary Damage, which will be incredibly useful for synergies that we’ll detail in the Skill Breakdown of the guide.
The other skill choices consist of various damage-boosting options to further maximize the damage of your Arc-Knives. This is done through a mix of Melee Damage, Gun Damage, Skill Damage, and Elemental Damage, all of which have the power to boost your damage and can stack multiplicatively with each other.
Playstyle
Playing with Arc-Knives can be as simple as clicking on the closest enemy and watching them split in half as you slice through them with your blades. While good position and situational awareness will certainly help, the build’s Esgrimidor Class Mod ensures your Arc-Knives can be maintained indefinitely without the need to concern yourself with other weapons.
Through the use of the Groundbreaker specialization and indirect damage from skills, your damage will scale up as you continue to damage enemies. This means being aggressive and attacking enemies is imperative to dealing good damage. While this does come with its own risks, making use of Repkits will allow you to immediately remove the cooldown of your Action Skill if you ever get downed, so you may start the damage cycle anew.
Skill Breakdown
A brief breakdown of the build’s key skills:
- Cruel Accrual – Provides a massive damage bonus to Skill Damage. As the build exclusively uses Action Skill Damage and associated damage from skills, this is a huge buff.
- Diamond Hands – Acts as a large source of Gun Damage until a shot is fired. This can be converted to Arc-Knives damage through Specializations and will never expire as you will never even shoot your gun.
- Sinergia – Yet another big source of Gun Damage and Melee Damage; however it requires the use of Ordnance Damage in order to apply.
- Inferno Protocol and El Diablito – This combination will continuously deal a small amount of Incendiary self-damage and bonus Ordnance Incendiary Damage, providing you with a way to activate Sinergia.
- Booming Business – This skill is explicitly not chosen, as spawning Grenades under enemies as you melee them often causes more self-harm than good. If a way to avoid self-damage in the future is available, this skill has huge potential.
Specializations
By default, Arc-Knives gets nearly all of its damage scaling from Melee damage. However, through the use of key specialization passives this can be greatly diversified to scale off of Bonus Gun Damage and Non-Melee Attack Damage. Due to the sheer strength of these passives, investing into the Runner and Daredevil trees is almost mandatory to be successful with the build.
The four essential perks to pick up are:
- Bear Arms to allow Melee Damage to be scaled by Bonus Gun Damage.
- I Am A Gun to allow Action Skill Damage to be scaled by Bonus Gun Damage.
- Groundbreaker will take bonus Elemental Damage dealt by Arc-Knives and store it for bonus damage on future attacks. This provides the build with a source of infinite damage scaling.
- Now With Caffeine – Adds Action Skill Cooldown to Repkits, to ensure Arc-Knives is always available.
Once you have spent 40 specialization points in the respective trees for the build’s passives, any remaining points can be spent in the Survivor skill tree to boost your Health and Shield values.
Gear and Manufacturers
Due to the build relying entirely on Arc-Knives for dealing damage, you will not require any specific guns. This drastically reduces the gear requirements down to a small handful of utility items.
Guns
This build does not use guns and in most cases shooting a gun is even detrimental as it will consume the bonus damage from the Diamond Hands skill. Instead, you should ensure you have guns of the Corrosive, Incendiary, and Shock elements. The stats of the guns do not matter, however, equipping the appropriate element before using your Arc-Knives will allow you to apply its element as bonus damage due to the Collaborate Ignition skill.
For emergencies, you may additionally opt to have one gun with a high damage output, such as a Jakobs Sniper Rifle, in the rare situation that only flying enemies are available during Fight For Your Life.
Ordnance
Slippy is by far the best option as this build’s Ordnance. Due to the Grenade scaling off of Melee Damage, it can deal massive damage and is a perfect fit on the surface. However, having points in the Booming Business skill, often passively provided by your Class Mod, can be a recipe for disaster with Slippy equipped. If Booming Business skill points are a problem, you can opt to simply equip any Jakobs Knife to nullify any self-damage.
Class Mod
Esgrimidor is the Class Mod of choice for Arc-Knives builds. It provides a small boost to Melee Critical Hit Chance and, more importantly, will extend the duration of your Action Skill when you do crit.
Of the skills available for your Class Mod, you should heavily prioritize points in Cruel Accrual first and Dial In second. In addition to these skills the Class Mod can also roll Booming Business as a detrimental skill. If possible you should avoid Mods with this skill to avoid issues with self-damage that we described earlier.
Shield
Being up close and personal with enemies puts you at a significantly higher risk than if you were shooting them from afar. With this in mind, you should look for the most defensive shield possible to ensure you can stay alive. Timekeeper’s New Shield is a great option if you are able to stack Health, and will allow you to get better value out of Lifesteal effects. However, you can also use the largest shield you can find, which any Purple shield with the Turtle passive and a high roll on shield value can provide.
Enhancements
Enhancements are focused entirely on improving the effectiveness of your guns. Since you will not be using guns with this build, they provide very little value. However, as Bonus Gun Damage offers some value to the build, you can use any Enhancement with a high Gun Damage passive.
Repkit
The primary role of Repkits in this build is to activate the Now With Caffeine passive to reduce the cooldown of your Action Skills. With this in mind the Triple Bypass Repkit stands above all others due to its ability to store three charges. As a small bonus, getting the Hard Hitter passive on your Repkit will also provide a small boost to damage. If you do not have a Triple Bypass yet, any Order Repkit with two charges is a solid alternative until you can get your hands on one.
Firmware
Action Fist and Reel Big Fist are your two strongest options for Firmware, both providing solid bonuses to Melee Damage. You can choose to split your 5 Firmware slots based on personal preference. The 3-piece bonus for Reel Big Fist provides a damage nova on kill that’s slightly better for mobbing, whereas Action Fist’s 3-piece bonus provides you with a damage boost on kill that can be more effective against larger enemies.
The Baker Firmware also serves as a good defensive alternative, providing bonuses to Shields and Health for its 1 and 3-piece bonuses respectively. You can consider this option if you have not been able to find a strong Shield you are happy with.
Quick Tips
- Keep hitting enemies to stack up Groundbreaker’s damage bonus.
- Use your Repkit to quickly bring your Arc-Knives off cooldown.
- Continually attack aerial enemies to prevent falling.
- Swap your weapon’s element before activating your Action Skill.
You are now equipped with all the information needed to slice through Kairos in style!
