Comprehensive Recon Guide

Introduction

This guide is made mostly with Extreme and Insane in mind. On lower difficulties the aliens have little HP and so loads more weapons hit useful kill thresholds so build plays a much smaller role in your success.

I'm going to go through each perk and a number of weapon choices first giving a fair amount of detail as to why they are good and you should consider them.

If you aren't interested in the reasoning and just want the builds themselves then use the headings on the left to skip down i will bullet point summaries there as well.

Perks

Red is dead - 10% team damage perk against Revealed targets, with pups and a few optics revealing things you basically always get value from this and it’s a team-wide damage bonus.

Got your back & Back in the fight – team reload and cooldown reduction provided you position behind someone is a huge damage boost for both of you. This allows you to fire indefinitely and get your drone and pups off cooldown faster.

Unbreakable focus & Eye on the prize – 50% reload speed and 50% handling for 1 tiles and 15% fire rate and stamina regen for 3 these are huge bonuses and this is applied to BOTH weapons. If you really struggle with getting stacks you can take extra masteries but its no where near as good as these.

Basic Pups – Reveals everything, gives the team great info, is means Red is Dead damage is applied against everything and can slow everything down by 30% with Distracting howl.

Bloodhound – highlights a single target making it take 25% more damage from all sources. This is arguably the strongest option for higher diffs as it helps bring down elites and specials.

Best Friend – gives the team a bunch of small bonuses (15% stumble chance, reload speed, damage resistance) and makes it so all their weapons Reveal targets. Doesnt work with distracting howl which makes this worse than standard PUPs imo but it is bugged with Threat detected giving you the 50% accuracy and stability permanently which makes for some more unique builds.

Guard Dog – pups defends an area slowing and dealing small damage to enemies within the area. This is the weakest pups imo purely because the area is around where you activate it so you have to run forward to use it each time which isnt great when you want to position yourself in the back and worse of all because the pups in front of you you cant avoid the frame drops.

Threat Neutralised – 15% CDR on a weakpoint kill, this is solid although blood hound doesn't benefit from it.

Threat detected – 50% accuracy and stability bonus, huge bonus but again with bloodhound you don't get as much/consistent use from it as you do compared to the other pup variations where you get to use that bonus for 20 seconds.

Best friends can really abuse this because its bugged giving you the bonus permanently after its first use.

Distracting Howl – 30% slow on targets revealed by pups, again very strong but doesn't work with Best friend so don't use it there.

Adrenaline Rush – 20% more healing from the drone for 1 tile can make a pretty big difference on missions with a lot of fodder (any big popper spawns you can let the lowest HP player heal 200+).

Duration 1 – the drone should spawn 3 magazines but sometimes due to lag or tick rates it will only spawn 2, 7% more duration ensures you always get 3 magazines to spawn.

Down Range – with a huge accuracy bonus from Threat Detected's 50% accuracy we can land more pellets at range with our CQW, Down Range increases that damage.

Hit and Run tactics – 10% move speed, 20% stun recovery and 20% grapple resistance. Since our positioning is very important the extra 10% move speed does come in handy, the stun recovery also means you are less likely to take multi hits as the flinch you receive when hit is reduced. Been taking this more and more for public games but for organised groups its less important.

Technician CQW Training – You can trivialise much of the game with a super buffed out CQW, they are just so far ahead of everything else in terms of DPS and the weapon masteries are percent increases so buffing strong weapons makes them even stronger.

Chain reaction – 30% damage after a kill. Certain weapons are inconsistent with or dont meet 1 shot kill thresholds with chain reaction you can now 1 tap runners and this can make stacking your passive and getting Got your back & Back in the fight procs much easier.

Down n out – 20% damage against stunned/knocked enemies. We can get the Tanker muzzle on the Zadak but this is also really good in an organised setting where your team mate can call out in advance when hes going to CC something.

Demo/Recon rifle Training – Even though CQW’s are insanely strong you can make more rifle centric builds work as getting your DMR/sniper to shoot faster or take 1 less shot to kill can make killing runners at range much easier where you are less contested by your team mates making for easy passive stacks.

Combined Arms – Increases reload speed, handling and range by 20% when both abilities are active. This should be good but the trouble is that this is 4 tiles is competing with Got your back's 2, then on top of that the drone only lasts 15 seconds with a 30s cooldown so its not active that often either unless you invest more into the drones duration.

Jackpot – auto reloads your gun when you kill anything above a runner is normally great for chain killing bursters/prowlers and i highly recommend it, but in this case Got your back should be doing this for us.

Painkillers – 10% damage resistance in the drone area. You are better off rolling out of the area to avoid damage than staying inside and taking 90% damage.

Weapons

Zadak – Great weapon for Recon, can Equip a laser sight, can get a tanker muzzle giving us our own source of CC which is huge for helping to unpin teammates or deal with elites it also has one of the longer base ranges of all the Shotguns which is amazing when we can get a huge accuracy bonus.

M37 Pump – Old faithful, its long reload doesnt matter when we are auto reloading and its an extremely consistent 1 shot kill shotgun against runners.

Heirloom – Similar damage to the M37 pump but it shoots faster and its got access to the miller twist once again searching for some extra CC and while normally the heirloom suffers from awful accuracy, we can fix that fairly easily.

Scout – The scout is normally not that impressive because its just shy of 1 shot head shotting runners but thanks to Chain Reaction we can hit that 1 shot threshold, 1 shotting runners guarantee’s us the kill for Got your back and our passive stacks.

Twilight – all around solid DMR that’s probably the “meta” rifle at this point thanks to its consistent 2 shot kill and high RoF. Whats not to love.

If you aren’t planning on using Chain Reaction and prefer an automatic then any other assault rifle will do the job but I would look at the Halberd and Gruppa they both have more firing DPS than than the Kramer (slower reloads shouldn’t be as noticeable thanks to the auto reloads) and they can both use the laser sight for Red is Dead.

Heres a full breakdown of weapon stats:

https://1drv.ms/x/s!AmZIWebhFO4clVxcMTnNK5MwRK3w?e=529mUF

Attachments

For scopes anything with a reveal effect is going to activate red is dead for 10% more damage so these should always be considered when available.

For magazines regardless of the weapon we don't have to worry about max ammo because we can deploy more ammo and we aren't as reliant on reload speed either so we should be looking for Fire Rate, magazine capacity and possibly some other nice to have stats like stability.

Muzzles are no different to any other class, we should be looking for damage.

Fire snipers weakpoint damage is important because if it can break a kill threshold going from 3 to 2 shots or 2 to 1 shot to kill is a massive TTK improvement.

Fire rate gives more raw DPS than weakpoint damage as it stacks multiplicitively with the guns fire rate while weakspot damage stacks additively (10% fire rate results in shooting 10% faster for 10% more DPS, 10% weakspot damage on a weapon with 200% weakspot damage goes to 210% which is only 5% more DPS on a weapon with 300% weakpoint damage it would go to 310% which is only 3.3% more DPS) so for other weapons this is usually the better choice.

Standard PUP's Build

- We have our essential perks to boost both our team and ourselves combat effectiveness, Red is dead, Got your back, Back in the fight, Unbreakable focus & Eye on the prize.

- Standard pups reveals all enemies so distracting howl to slow them all is a no brainer.

- Pups lasts about 20 seconds and goes on CD for 20 seconds (we will shorten this) so we get great value from Threat detected.

- Threat neutralised effects both abilities so why not. This also means we dont really need the extra duration for the drone as we will be using it more often.

- Chain reaction because with the Zadak and a Scout we get some good value.

- CQW training so we can shoot the Zadak faster.

- Down and out can is nice damage with 2 tanker muzzles but can easily be swapped out for down range or hit n run or even another mastery and Adrenaline Rush.

Bloodhound Build

- Again we have the essentials Red is dead, Got your back, Back in the fight, Unbreakable focus & Eye on the prize.

- With blood hound we still want distracting howl for the slow on what we target

- Harder to make use of Threat Detected as specials should die in 5 seconds and the cast time is 1.5.

- We don't need CDR for Bloodhound so no Threat neutralised instead opting for the 1 duration on the drone to ensure we are getting full ammo with every use.

- Chain reaction because its just a big old damage boost but it, hit and run and adrenaline rush could easily be some rifle masteries if you'd prefer.

- Extra masteries/Expertise for the CQW prioritising accuracy as we don't have Threat neutralised.

Best Friend Build

- Threat detected is bugged with Best Friend giving us its massive 50% accuracy and stability bonus permanently after the abilities first use, this gives us room to play around with some off meta/weirder weapons that are mostly held back because of their poor accuracy/stability and still succeed.

- Essentials again; Red is dead, Got your back, Back in the fight, Unbreakable focus & Eye on the prize.

- No distracting howl this time as it doesn't work.

- Threat neutralised gives 15% CDR to both abilities and because of that i also haven't taken the extra duration on the drone as i should be activating it far more often.

- Hit and run again but again this can be changed to down n out or down range for more damage.

- You can buff either weapon here i normally buff the rifle because its fun but SMG's with near perfect accuracy can easily out DPS shotguns if you are landing weakpoint shots so i recommend trying them out (not on missions with loads of crushers though as they don't have a weakpoint).

Guard Dog Build

- Essentials again: Red is dead, Got your back, Back in the fight, Unbreakable focus & Eye on the prize.

- Duration so we don't have to run forward and activate pups as often, hard choice between that and hit and runs move speed.

- Threat Detected because pups lasts 24 seconds

- Threat Neutralised as it effects both abilities

- CQW training again because shotgun is OP

5-3 Queen Build

- For the queen i have a specific loadout because her fight is very different to the rest of the game.

We want bloodhound to increase our damage against her

- Unlike in other missions where the target is dead in 5~ seconds shes going to be alive for a few min so we make use of Threat detected.

- Hit and runs move speed is a no brainer as we are going to be kiting.

- Bedside manners, 25% extra bleed out time is noticeable on Extreme/Insane when the bleed out times are so fast and we also revive people 50% faster which is great for clutching.

- Hazard seals because we are likely going to have to run through some acid at some point and the pathogen runners/poppers aren't that effected by chain kill.

- The Heirloom is also equipped with the Miller twist barrel for a 50% slow that we can apply to the queen, this is on top of distracting Distracting howls 30% too.

- Can use almost any rifle, Twilight is just the go too.

Playstyle

All of recons damage comes from his weapons because of that you have to be somewhat of a good shot but even if you are not the best there are some things you can do to greatly increase your accuracy and damage.

Aliens tend to follow the same paths as one another and if you use a choke point they will end up nice and single file lane for you to dink them. Sometimes its fine to just find a line they take on the wall and as long as its proc'ing Got your Back just don't move your mouse and just kill those.

The tanker muzzle and stumble change with our snipers and shotguns there's a high probability that a body shot will make them react in a predictable way making a follow up headshot very easy.

This is arguably why the Twilight is so popular, it shoots fast enough that you can stun/stumble and get your 2 headshots to kill very easily.

Because of Got your Back its often a good idea to prioritise runners to constantly reload yours and a team mates weapon.

Because you have a CQW you can also deal big damage to specials and elites especially with blood hound.

So its well worth familiarising yourself with your shotgun so you know how many shots you have and using the last 1 or 2 in the mag to try and kill runners so you don't have to reload.

Going to mention this again, combined with Down range and/or Chain reaction turns out shotguns into short range DMR's, dont be afraid to to use it like one while your pups is active if you're getting better results than using your rifle.

Aliens agro is determined when they spawn and doesn't seem to change until they have done at least their first attack or are CC'd and generally speaking they target the closest target to them.

Because of this we can ensure we get little agro by simply standing behind our team mates. Here are some crude paint drawings to show what i mean:

As you can see you don't have to be miles back just a few feet will do it but it makes a pretty big difference.

On Extreme/Insane most people should know by now that they should not be ADAD strafing constantly and will stand still for the most part while shooting, but don't rely on it, this is why i like scopes with less zoom i want to be aware of my team mates to make sure i can see if they decide they want a haircut.

Same applies to you, once you have found your spot and been shooting don't suddenly move as your team mates wont know you have and if they then move you could tag them.

Team Composition

Recon works in just about every team comp because hes got a lot of supporting perks in his kit and he brings the whole team up.

Ontop of that hes a bit of a generalist wants to be able to kill a steady stream of runners in order to make a lot of his kit function and so he can get CDR and auto reload both his and a team mates weapons, but having a shotgun means he can also deal some very high damage to specials/elites

Because of this he likes to be paired with damage dealers that are more capable of fighting specials and elites and who want to be in front like Gunner, Lancer, phalanx or pulse/sniper tech. This way he can focus on runners and help with specials/elites in between.

With that said classes/builds/players that kill all the runners like Flame Tech, especially Demo but even a Lancer with a smartgun can be a real pain to play with because at this point you are competing for the same kills only you are up against an aimbot, AoE spam or placing their turret forward killing the horde before you can even see it.

Closing Words

Hopefully this has helped some people improve their recon game. I made this mostly so when someone asks me about recon i can shoot this over to them.

If you have any further questions or suggestions or if you think i got anything wrong please let me know (i kinda blew through this guide in like 2 evenings).

If you want breakdown of any other Classes let me know and i'll give my 2cents.

I'm going to leave some gameplay so people can see what to expect:

Full game 4-1 Insane with Explosions (runners are bursters)

Full game 3-1 Insane with travel light (no consumables)

Recon solo holding a room in 1-3 Extreme with(out) pubs

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3046186845					

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