STORM Of BULLET I
Sumiko Fagnoni
Bullet hell is probably one of the most widely disparaged overclocks in the game. It's often compared unfavorably to the base auto cannon, and simply dismissed as useless. In this build breakdown I will be showing why this is an unfair comparison, and why for me bullet hell ranks as in the top 5 overclocks for gunner primaries.
Bullet hell on the surface looks like an absolutely terrible overclock. It removes a TON of base damage from your bullets, and adds a probability based ricochet for one additional target to your bullet. It also comes with the largest accuracy penalty of any overclock. Base bullet hell with no other mods selected is basically unusable. Bullet hell trades direct single target damage for utility. It is up to the player to make the most of that utility to outweigh the downsides of the OC. This is why I personally find bullet hell the most fun OC to play, it gives a lot of outlets for creative play, and rewards you for coming up with interesting ways to use it.
Normally a personal choice tier. I would argue that on Bullet Hell you lose that choice and you have to take High Velocity Rounds +2 damage to help offset the massive -3 damage from bullet hell. Looking this mod as a percentage. Taking bullet hell lowers your damage by -3, which brings the base gun down from 10 to 7. You can now either take 600 ammo bumping your total ammo pool from 2400 to 3000 (25%). Or you can take +2 damage and bring your damage from 7 to 9 (29%). More importantly is breakpoints. With the ammo mod your breakpoints are going to suffer immensely. You are going to hit more armor since you are breaking it less often, and get more reduced damage shots on your already lower damage bullets. I did some tests on common ricochet targets below to show the breakpoints (median of three tests)
As you should be able to see, by taking damage you are saving roughly 20%-33% ammo, which means by taking the damage mod not only can you kill things much faster, spending less time on each enemy, but you save more ammo too. There is 0 reason to take the ammo mod with bullet hell.
This is where most people make their first huge mistake and go for Blowthrough Rounds. Usually this is a good choice on almost any build. However damage per bullet is not the draw of Bullet Hell, so making your bullets potentially hit one more target in a straight line is a very meager benefit.
Hardened Rounds is an OK choice for non-modded game play if you want to play with bullet hell on hazard 5. If you find yourself not being overwhelmed by enemies too often, you can swap from stun to armor break to increase your damage. Since you cannot control where the bullets hit enemies, ensuring that they can reliably break armor increases your overall damage significantly.
Variable Chamber Pressure is a good option to help bring your damage up. With this and damage on t2, you actually dish out quite a bit of total DPS counting both the main bullet and the bounced bullet. Assuming 90% player accuracy, and ignoring the tier 1 rate of fire mod it's the build with the 5th most DPS you can get on the minigun.
Aggressive Venting is extremely powerful with bullet hell. Bullet hell and stun keep enemies piling up near you as they swarm in without quite killing them. You often need to flick around to hit things directly that are not getting stunned, making it difficult to finish off targets. This pairs perfectly with aggressive venting, making a dense pile of damaged enemies nearby to hit with the vent. The vent will wipe out everything smaller than a guard and clear out a ton of space for you to reposition. Aggressive venting also helps mitigate another of bullet hell's weaknesses: being ammo starved. If vent connects with a big swarm it can do massive damage, if the fleeing / burning bugs retreat into a choke point, fire can spread to additional bugs doing a ton of extra damage and outright killing all swarmers trying to come through that chokepoint.
Hot Bullets is probably the meta pick for 6x2 on almost any minigun build, and unsurprisingly it goes great with bullet hell as well. You lose out on the personal safety of aggressive venting, and gain huge offensive power. Stunning a wall of grunts and igniting all of the guards and slashers can do a lot of damage. Stun and hot bullets work in tandem to ignite a target and stun other nearby targets. This results in very effective fire spread. The lower damage of bullet hell here actually helps in a way, preventing ignited targets from dying too quickly to spread heat to their neighbors. In sandbox (terrible terrain to fight with bullet hell) with hot bullets, stun, and bullet hell I can beat 100 hazard 6 slashers at once ( ) so it's not terrible at defense, just not as good as aggressive venting. The combination of fire spread, stun, and kiting is enough to keep them just in the sweet spot where they can't quite get you before burning to death. The other huge benefit of hot bullets is the ability to ignite distant targets to then use volatile bullets bulldog on. The margin for error is much thinner than aggressive venting, if you accidentally overheat you are in big trouble.
Cold as the grave is a trap option. The other two options on t5 are significantly better for any build, and this is compounded by bullet hell doing very little damage outside of hot bullets or aggressive venting. Typically on reviews for bullet hell where the conclusion is that it is bad, they pick cold as the grave.
The strongest secondaries are ones that will round out your build with high direct single target damage. It's also important to note that you do NOT want a secondary that will be used for a long period of time. You don't want the gun cooling too much with hot bullets, typically you will ignite a target and swap to bulldog, take a few shots and swap back to keep your heat in the red. With aggressive venting, you only have 5 seconds of downtime after a vent, you want to be back on minigun firing as soon as you can to begin building up the heat meter again. This means BRT in general is a bad choice since it typically requires a lot of time to have any impact. The coilgun is in the same boat since it requires charging before firing. Coilgun is in a weird place balance wise though, its hard not to recommend 222x3 hellfire with any primary since its so powerful, but it doesn't really compliment bullet hell very well so I will ignore it.
For the hot bullets build I use 2332X volatile bullets bulldog. This lets you ignite and snipe things from across the map, combined with bullet hell's ability to quickly find and kill leeches in the dark this build is extremely efficient at clearing out a new cave solo.
For the aggressive venting build solo I will usually take 2332X elephant rounds. Aggressive venting usually won't ignite most targets you would want to hit with volatile bullets like praetorians, or oppressors. Instead you can just rely on the fear and good old elephant rounds to deal with big targets.
For grenades if I am taking volatile bullets I will take incendiary grenades for the extra ignition source. Sometimes you just don't have the time to wait for your gun to heat up enough to ignite something, or you have a lot of small targets around a big one you want to hit with volatile bullets. The incendiary grenade can also be taken with volatile bullets and aggressive venting if you use it primarily as a source of ignition for large targets such as praetorians and oppressors. Though this still won't help you with longer range targets.
As always, you can take cluster grenades if you are good with them, they are much higher immediate impact grenades than incendiary. You can even take them with hot bullets and volatile bullets if you want an additional source of stun instead of an extra ignition source. It's hard to go wrong with incendiary or cluster grenades both are extremely powerful.
Bullet hell is a very aggressive playstyle, with either hot bullets or aggressive venting. Most of your damage is coming from fire in one form or another, so positioning and heat management is even more important than it is for other minigun builds. In addition bullet hell adds a lot of utility to your kit which should not be ignored.
The minigun cools slower the hotter it is. In order to stay in the red and keep hot bullets online you should aim to keep your heat hovering around 75%-85%. This keeps it at the perfect cooling speed to kite. Keep firing up to 85% heat, stop firing, turn toward the direction oyou want to go, jump and flick your aim back toward the enemies, start firing and the gun should roughly be at 75% heat again. This rhythm will also keep your gun full spun up most of the time for the 15% damage bonus.
Bullet hell is the ultimate leech killer. Even from outside a cave entrance you can often times accidentally find and kill leeches. Flick bullets over the ceiling randomly to find leeches quickly. =1012
Bullet hell an be used to find enemies around a corner that do not have line of sight on you. This can often be useful for sniping an acid spitter before it even sees you. It is often worth it to shoot a few bullets at a dark corner or unknown area to find threats. If no health bars pop up that area is empty.
With hot bullets your target priority is a little different than normal minigun. Deal with high threat low HP targets as normal, such as web and acid spitters. Most other threats however can be stunned and left alone such as slashers and trijaws. Instead you want to stun and ignite them and then move on to another target. Your goal isn't to kill bugs with bullets, it's to set as many bugs on fire as possible. This also means tanky bugs are a great target such as guards, since they will ignite and burn for a long time while presenting a very low threat.
Aggressive venting will often times knock down stalactites from the ceiling seemingly way too far away. When clearing out a PE or Refinery mission cave initially, bullet hell can be used to gather up bugs like normal all around you. If you stand under some stalactites the vent will cause fire fear and a rain of death from above.
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