Outriders - Early Game Solo Turret Technomancer

Outriders is a looter-shooter quite similar to The Division (use of cover) but with faster and bolder combat where the use of cover isn't critical.

It also features an interesting "World Tier" / "Apocalypse Tier" system where you can adjust enemy strengths in exchange for superior loot drops. If you want the game to constantly scale and match your growth, you can just choose the highest available Tier. Or if you want to experience growing more powerful, you can reduce it. This is similar to The Division as well but with more clarity and finer adjustment possible.

This article is for the Technomancer class, and is aimed at new SOLO players and the early game, constantly playing at the highest allowable World Tier. The Technomancer is really the only class that can comfortably do this. The other classes do not have certain unique skills and features that make it quite as easy, especially early in levelling.

Early game means no set gear and extremely few Apocalypse and Legendary items, in turn meaning no reliable access to specific Tier III mods. You can theoretically farm Legendary gear by repeating certain long quest chains, but realistically you will just be buying them with Drop Pod Resources once you've reached the end of the main campaign and Expeditions are unlocked. If you already have an endgame character you can pass newer characters Legendary gear through the shared Stash to be Dismantled for mods.

Warning

The Turret Technomancer is really a terrible build to play because it encourages laziness. Once you get both turrets going, even without fancy Tier III mods, you might find yourself being lazy and letting the turrets do all the work while you stay in cover and maybe shoot a couple of stragglers.

Why is this bad? Because you are not practicing the other skills you need when confronted with a real challenge like a difficult Expedition swarming with tough enemies.

However, for casual players who aren't interested in doing everything, doing the toughest content and grinding for the best gear for the most optimal build, then this is a pretty good and somewhat relaxed build with a lot of leeway with what gear and weapons and mods you use.

Human Opponents

When faced with these, you can mostly stay in cover and flush out enemies with your Turrets, taking them out one by one. Shoot anything trying to flank you. If your Turrets are working too slowly, shoot enemies that come out of cover or are frozen.

Watch for the elites / bosses and try to isolate them and burn them down. Reposition your Turrets if necessary so they have uptime on these tough enemies and their damage is constantly healing you.

Beast Opponents and fast moving human melee opponents

Try to funnel them into a predictable path exposed to your Turrets. Ideally they are around a corner or behind a wall and you just throw your Turrets while keeping out of sight. Definitely shoot anything that moves past your Turrets -- you do not want to get swarmed.

Positioning is half the battle with Beasts, and can make the difference between a hectic fight and an easy fight, so try not to immediately run into whatever wide-open arena the devs planned. Instead, run back through whatever opening you walked through as that becomes the chokepoint for your opponents.

You'll probably have to support your Turrets with your gun to prevent any of them from getting close, and if you find you can't kill them fast enough, you might try switching to the Firepower build which focusses on damage with your gun, and use Blighted Rounds to make every gunshot an area-of-effect.

Weapons

We recommend Assault weapons: Assault Rifle, Double Gun, Light Machinegun, or Submachinegun. Pay attention to the variants -- even a Submachinegun can have decent range with the Tactical variant and you can convert the variation of non-Legendary weapons cheaply. You will probably want to use a Tactical Assault Rifle for your main weapon as it typically gives you the highest damage per bullet and therefore the most killing power for the ammunition carried.

For your primary weapon mod, try to have one with some kind of damage bonus that doesn't need a critical hit. Even with just Tier I mods there are some choices like Fireworks or Fusion Blast.

In the very early game we recommend you focus on the top tree when you get points for your Class Tree and when you have to make a weapon choice, go for Assault Weapons. For a Technomancer, the weapon choices are basically Assault weapons or Sniping weapons, and as a solo player you will generally not have the luxury to aim your sniping rifle nor will many arenas feature such long distances to require it. Further, aiming exposes you from cover, and many human enemies immediately duck into cover when you aim at them with a sniping rifle.

You can still carry a sniping rifle or shotgun and swap to them in combat, especially if you run out of ammo for your favourite gun. Also, once you get the Cryo Turret or if you melee something and freeze them that way, you can try shooting them in the head with one of these high-damage weapons while they are frozen. In general however it will be simply inconvenient.

Shield Maiden

We recommend one of your weapons be an automatic with the Tier I "Shield Maiden" mod and preferably with Weapon Life Leech as one of the substats. This is your "emergency" weapon when you get into trouble and we recommend it for all classes and all builds in the early game especially as the game recommends you play aggressively but also likes to flank you suddenly with a bunch of tough adds when you do so.

You should try playing without this as you could potentially use that slot for something else more offensive, and as a Technomancer any damage you do heals you a little bit. But if you are suddenly in a tight spot or you're having trouble with a particular encounter, keeping your shield up with a Shield Maiden weapon can be a game changer.

Be careful about using a Light Machinegun for this role because the reload time is quite long, and melee enemies swarming you can kill you very quickly while you are reloading.

For all classes and all builds, in the early game this one thing can really make a big difference 

Armor

For this build, focus on Firepower early as we really need the level 22 Blighted Turret to really do some decent damage. Once we get that, you can switch to Anomaly Power and let the Turrets to most of the work. Also, in the early game you have fewer skills and fewer mods, so you can expect to do much more shooting and Firepower helps with that.

Do not simply discard all other armor. Save one set each for Firepower, Anomaly Power, and Health so you can be flexible. Respec on the Class Tree is free so you can experiment at any time.

Focussing so much of your armor stats on either Firepower or Anomaly Power can make your character really squishy, so be careful, and swap in some Health armor if you need it.

Also, Turrets will ignore certain things such as boss Rifts that fire projectiles so if you want to clear them before they become overwhelming you will have to do it yourself.

World Tier Rewards

Do not collect until you are level 30 and World Tier 15. Then set your World Tier to 15 and collect them all at once so that gear rewards are based on your level and World Tier settings.

Sell or Dismantle?

Assuming you are playing at the highest allowable World Tier all the time, then Dismantle only to collect mods for your mod library. Sell gear that isn't Apocalypse or Legendary -- even purple gear that returns Titanium when Dismantled. You will likely still end up with literally tens of thousands of Leather and Iron and it typically costs less than [(mod Tier) x 5 x item level] units to install a mod.

Endgame currency is Drop Pod Resources, which you use to buy Legendary gear after you finish the main campaign. You can buy Drop Pod Resources with Titanium, which in turn you can buy with Scrap (money) at 1625 scrap per 5 units or 325 scrap per unit. So in the end, Scrap is important and typically you can sell purple gear for more than the Titanium you get from Dismantling.

While you are still levelling, it is unlikely that you will retain any piece of gear very long so in general it is better to adjust your build and tactics, or use an aid like a weapon with the Shield Maiden mod or the Fixing Wave skill if you find yourself in a difficult arena.

The main drawback is you won't be collecting Shards, but you generally don't won't be upgrading your gear at all but replacing them with new ones, so you won't be using Shards yet. If you do want to collect Shards for upgrading substats, pay attention to which substat will return shards -- it will be marked with a shard symbol and only that substat will give shards upon Dismantling.

On the bottom right of the inventory screen there is a counter for the number of items you have marked as junk. If you mouse over that you can see the total yield for all items marked as junk if you Dismantle them all.

If you are not playing at the highest allowable World Tier you are still better off selling gear instead of constantly trying to upgrade. The amount of money you collect will start to accelerate to make shopping affordable. Change your World Tier to the highest possible, buy gear, then then turn down the World Tier again.

You should try to play at the highest possible World Tier you can handle. If you get stuck, you can turn down the World Level for an immediate advantage. If you play at World Tier 1 and you are stuck, you have to find better gear to get that same advantage. Levelling up your gear with Leather and Iron is somewhat feasible but not so much if you need Titanium (although at some point you can buy this) or Anomaly Extract.

Skills

Of course you should look for skill mods and there are several frequently encountered Tier I mods for Cryo Turret and a couple of good ones for Blighted Turret, so you should be able to always have them on your armor once you add them to your mod library.

Tier III skill mods are much harder to come by and you might try to obtain them from a Legendary item, which has fixed mod selections. There is a list of skill mods here, as well as which Legendary items have specific Tier III mods. However even with only Tier I mods, this two-turret build can be very strong.

Melee - Interrupt

Most people don't realize this but even if you have no Interrupt skills you can use your melee skill as an Interrupt, either the stationary push or melee while running for an area smash. A Turret Technomancer using two turrets means only one skill slot left, generally Blighted Rounds or Cold Snap if you are good going aggressive, or Fixing Wave if you need more healing for a particular fight. That means no Interrupt skills at all, so you will have to Melee interrupt.

Level 3 - Cryo Turret

In the early game the Cryo Turret is primarily good for freezing enemies and drawing their attention, to give you some breathing room especially against melee enemies. If you are too close to enemies they typically switch to targeting you, so pay attention to how enemies react to your turrets and how far you should stand off (if you can).

The Cryo Turret's main weakness is against human enemies who use cover. Enemies that stay in cover are basically safe so you will have to reposition your turret to flank them or behind them if you can. Or use the lull to rush an enemy, melee them to freeze them, and shoot them point-blank.

Start prioritizing armor that has Anomaly Power as an attribute. In general you can have nearly 100% uptime on the turret.

Level 4 - Pain Launcher
This is a very good skill against being swarmed and you can pre-emptively fire it against a mob charging at you because the range of the carpet bombing is quite long. This makes it a bit easier to use than Scrapnel for crowd control and Interrupt.

Later in the game some bosses start to move more erratically and they can end up walking out of the area, so it loses some efficacy. Try to hit them immediately while they are frozen by your Cryo Turret.

Once we get the Blighted Turret we'll swap this out and aim to overwhelm the tough enemies with damage instead of trying to Interrupt their powers.

Level 6 - Blighted Rounds

The text doesn't make it sound particularly powerful but that extra 50% damage to everything (including the main target) in a radius makes a big difference. As well, it seems that instead of bullet damage, it's all converted to Anomaly damage instead.

Good for focussing one strong target or helping against swarming targets, especially if you can funnel them into a predictable path and not get flanked, such as making them bunch up and run down a corridor or around a corner, right into your turrets. Practice using this as there are various nodes that increase damage to targets under the Toxin status effect.

Blighted Rounds has a long cooldown, so mods that increase the uptime help a lot. Tier I "Trick Up the Sleeve" and Tier II "Toxic Lead" partially refill your clips on a kill, so if you can switch back and forth between easy-to-kill enemies and the boss, you can constantly refresh your ammunition. In a panicky combat situation it's more likely you will kill all the adds and then focus the boss instead of taking fire from all sides, so the "Spare Mag" mod also helps as it gives you a second magazine of Blighted Rounds.

Tier II "Toxic Lead" should also work but seems to be less reliable.

Level 9 - Tool of Destruction

The Rocket Launcher is very strong against bosses and is an Interrupt so you could potentially stagger-lock them and unload all your rockets safely. But this skill requires Anomaly Power, and you really want the Tier I mod "Bang For Your Buck" to increase the number of shots available.

In the early game, a Firepower focus using Blighted Rounds is probably more convenient. Once you switch to Anomaly Power, Tool of Destruction replaces Blighted Rounds. Your Turrets can hopefully distract and freeze the boss then you blow them up with your Rocket Launcher.

Spamming the rockets from Tool of Destruction on the same target is likely to make it temporarily invulnerable to Interrupts, so you will hopefully kill it with your rockets or shortly after.

Level 13 - Fixing Wave

In general, try NOT to use this ability because it can end up a crutch.

While you are still levelling toward unlocking all your skills, playing at the maximum allowable World Tier may still be quite challenging, so Fixing Wave plus your emergency secondary weapon can help a lot.

Later, if you need a particular skill such as something with Interrupts, you can swap out Fixing Wave and use your Shield Maiden weapon to help you out of difficult situations. On a two-Turret build, two out of three skill slots will be Turrets, so if you have Fixing Wave on the last skill slot, you won't have any powerful anti-boss skills like Blighted Rounds or Tool of Destruction. Boss fights can end up being very, very, long.

Because the Technomancer has a base 15% Weapon and Skill Leech -- you heal for 15% of the damage you inflict -- the best defense / survival tactic is to constantly do damage and heal through anything that doesn't one-shot you. This is also why the Rocket Launcher Tool of Destruction can be very strong when you focus the damage with an Anomaly Power build: Each shot can recover a large chunk of your health right away. It's not foolproof but combined with the Interrupt, you can briefly exchange fire with most bosses.

If you don't focus on damage output and try to play defensively with Fixing Wave, likely what will happen is boss fights get prolonged and you might die from mistakes when repeatedly trying to avoid big area effect attacks. Shorter fights reduce this a lot.

Level 22 - Blighted Turret

When you finally get this, you might be disappointed by the range, which is quite short. Fortunately the cooldown is also quite short so you can advance and reposition aggressively.

A good mod to find is Tier III Hazardous Modifications, which improves the range and gives it an explosion on impact. This explosion can hit enemies who are behind cover, and once they take damage, they are knocked out of cover and briefly staggered. Typically the turret can get another shot to more or less lock them in stagger until they die.

Also, once they are out of cover, your Cryo Turret can start taking shots at them as well, and that greatly enhances the utility of your Cryo Turret.

Ideally you want your turrets to both hammer the same target, quickly taking them down one at a time.

However this is a Tier III mod so you basically need to get really lucky with the few Legendary items you receive in side quests, until you can start farming Legendary gear after the main quest.

Once you have the Blighted Turret, if you need to free up one skill slot you can consider dropping the Cryo Turret and using the Tier I "Ice Component" mod. This makes the Blighted Turret freeze instead of inflict Toxin. If you are using Blighted Rounds on a Firepower focussed build you'll inflict Toxin on your enemies already, and the area effect of the Blighted Turret will hopefully freeze more enemies than the single-target Cryo Turret.

Early Game Firepower / Utility Turret Build

In the early game, if you are levelling your way toward 22 for the Blighted Turret and working through the main quest, focussing on Firepower and shooting will probably give you an easier time. Consider using a pump action shotgun when enemies get too close, and a double gun or assault rifle or tactical variant submachinegun to support your turret when it freezes someone.

With a firepower build we are using Turrets for their utility in Freezing, Vulnerability, and forcing enemies out of cover. In such a case, focus on Firepower and take a more active role in killing things and deprioritize Turret damage. Enemies hopefully either get frozen by the Cryo Turret or are busy shooting at the Turrets instead of you, giving you cover you need to safely shoot them back.

For the Class Tree nodes, some of the early ones might not make sense to take until you get Blighted Rounds and Blighted Turret, so choose the other branch in the tree and respec later.

It can feel risky but swap out Fixing Wave for Blighted Rounds and stay aggressive to heal with your class passive 15% Weapon Leech. If it's not enough, use your Shield Maiden secondary weapon or take the Pestilence - Suction Module node earlier.

1. Pestilence - BR/8 Impact Amplifier
2. Pestilence - Weapon Leech
• For very long fights you might try Sower of Decay to improve the uptime of Blighted Rounds, but if you have Blighted Round mods -- Spare Mag plus Trick Up the Sleeve on an automatic weapon, both Tier I -- that extend it's uptime, they should be enough that you don't need a cooldown reduction.
3. Pestilence - Drill Coating
4. Pestilence - Nitrogen Capsules
• Toxicologist sounds good with 30% more duration on Toxic, which normally lasts 6 seconds. This would extend it by 1.8 seconds. However, Toxic duration does not stack, it only refreshes. So when Blighted Rounds or Blighted Turret are hammering away at a target, this will only come into play when they stop and at that point you get an additional 1.8 seconds of damage ticks.
5. Pestilence - BR/8 Impact Amplifier
6. Pestilence - Purge
• Or Nitrogen Capsules first if you are not using Blighted Rounds much for whatever reason. In any case once you get the Blighted Turret to help put Toxin on targets, you'll want to switch Nitrogen Capsules to Purge.
7. Pestilence - BR/8 Impact Amplifier
8. Pestilence - Assault Master
9. Pestilence - Assault Adept
10. Pestilence - Drill Coating
11. Pestilence - Sharpshooter
12. Pestilence - UT-14 Clips
13. Pestilence - Purge
14. Pestilence - Empowering Antenna
15. Pestilence - BL-STM Havoc Nexus
16. bridge - Exposing Toxin
• We delayed this because it required BL-STM Havoc Nexus to reach this for a conditional 15% more damage with Vulnerability.
• Marked for Execution sounds good but that 40% actually translates to Vulnerability 15% x 40%, or just 6% more damage.
17. Pestilence - Purge
• If you chose Nitrogen Capsules at step 6, consider changing it to Purge or taking Purge in addition to it.

There will be three or four points left over. You can try:

• Pestilence - Two Sides of the Power
• 10% damage dealt and received. Feel how it plays and decide if you want to keep it. It can be mitigated by Fixing Wave but you really want to keep one skill slot open if you don't need to rely on Fixing Wave.
• If it feels too dangerous, go for Marked for Execution instead. Less extra damage and more conditional (needs Toxin) but you're not taking extra damage either.
• Pestilence - Nitrogen Capsules
• If you took Purge at Step 6 you might want to take the remaining Nitrogen Capsules node to better ensure getting the Long Range Damage bonus.
• Long Range starts at 18m, and we took one Nitrogen Capsule node earlier on, bringing it down to 15m. Another node will bring it down to 12m, which is almost the same as Short Range (10m). Many enemies like to rush you in this game, so this helps you retain the Long Range Damage bonus.
• Tech Shaman - Anomalous Body, Tech Shaman - Fracture
• We're reaching for a bit of additional damage here and have to take one extra node, so this has rather low priority.
• For a Turret Technomage we'll have our Cryo Turret out, but you can also get Freeze with your melee attack and Cold Snap.

Once you've unlocked the Blighted Turret, this build using Turrets for support and focussing on Firepower is still viable and in some cases it's easier to focus down a boss with Blighted Rounds.

Anomaly Power Turret  Build

When you unlock the Blighted Turret at level 22, you can switch over to Anomaly Power to increase your Turret Damage and let them kill most of the enemies for you. Ideally you have been keeping one set of gear with Anomaly Power and another set with Firepower so you can switch back and forth if undecided or if the situation makes one build better than the other.

We held off doing this until getting the Blighted Turret because the Cryo Turret is single-target and can't do that much against massed enemies, and in any case the damage is somewhat low. Instead, we used the area effect from Blighted Rounds to help us manage those and used the Cryo Turret for support. And if we switched to Anomaly Power, Blighted Rounds becomes much weaker because we aren't focussing on Firepower.

Blighted Turret does respectable damage and can frequently be repositioned for a better firing angle or if the enemy destroys them. Together with the Cryo Turret they can typically handle most enemies but you will still want to support them against bosses, especially if the boss ignores them and keeps marching toward you. Because we switched away from Firepower to Anomaly Power, instead of using Blighted Rounds try Tools of Destruction with mods like Bang For Your Buck to make the most of each use.

Compared to the Firepower build, an Anomaly Power Turret build is weak against very fast moving enemies that try to reach you. If your turrets and your gun can't kill them fast enough they'll run past your turrets, you'll get swarmed, and you have to reposition and set up your turrets again.

• If you find yourself stuck in an encounter like this, consider switching to the Firepower build to see if you can kill them before they get close.

The reduction in Firepower means Blighted Rounds will be weaker but not entirely obsolete because of the utility of it's area effect. However in general we will switch to the rocket launcher in Tool of Destruction. It has massive burst damage but much less flexible.

Here are some considerations that guided our Class Tree node choices:

• Anomaly Power bonuses were hard to gauge
• The "Anomaly Fuelled" nodes in the Demolisher tree add 15% Anomaly Power, but the other numbers we saw, such as Skill Damage Bonus or the damage ratings on the Turrets did not simply go up by the same amount.
• If you take off all your armor (no Anomaly Power from armor, only base Anomaly Power from levelling), the results are much more expected with 15% Anomaly Power translating to 15% more damage from the Turrets.
• Wearing armor with Anomaly Power of course increases Turret Damage, but the "Anomaly Fuelled" nodes then seemed to contribute less toward Turret Damage.
• "Adrenalizing Antenna" and "Overclocked" are supposed to give 30% and 40% Anomaly Power respectively, but separately or stacked together they didn't add up to 30% more turret damage.
• With various factors at work for damage, it's also hard to gauge damage bonuses like "Fracture" where frozen enemies take 30% more damage.
• That said, if you like running around hitting enemies in melee range and then shooting them, this can feel like a great node to take.
• There are two "Marked for Execution" nodes that increase Vulnerability by 40%.
• This sounds great on paper, but Vulnerability is 15% more damage taken by the enemy, and 40% is only an additional 6%.
• If we go for both nodes it'll cost quite a few Class Tree points for an additional 6%.
• For this reason, we chose only Exposing Toxin to inflict Vulnerability. The Blighted Turret is an area effect attack and has quite a short cooldown for frequent repositioning so it has a much better chance of getting all targets affected by Vulnerability.

Here is the final Class Tree point spend:

1. Demolisher - Anomaly Fuelled
2. Demolisher - Disturbance Coating
3. Demolisher - Anomaly Fuelled
4. Demolisher - A.N.E.T.A. Plates
5. Demolisher - Anomaly Fuelled
6. bridge - Wipe Out
7. Tech Shaman - Anomalous Body
8. Tech Shaman - Fracture
9. Tech Shaman - Anomalous Body
10. bridge - Exposing Toxin
11. bridge - Marked for Execution
12. Demolisher - Adrenalizing Antenna
13. Demolisher - Ordnance Technician
14. Demolisher - Anomaly Fuelled
15. Demolisher - Anomaly Fuelled
16. Demolisher - Disturbance Coating
17. Demolisher - Anomaly Fuelled
18. Demolisher - Team Player
19. Demolisher - Anomaly Fuelled
20. Demolisher - D-Kay Toxin

Ascension Points

If you diligently do every sidequest, you will be World Tier 15 and earning Ascension levels before you get to the final zones in the main quest.

You can get up to 200 Ascension Points, meaning you will get every node maximized eventually, but in the early stages, you can consider spending your early points this way:

1. Anomaly - Anomaly Damage
• Both the Firepower and Anomaly Power builds benefit from this. Blighted Rounds changes your bullet damage into Anomaly Damage, and it is a powerful boss-killer, so Anomaly Power will benefit that as well.
• According to this Reddit discussion, Anomaly Damage is a percentage applied to calculated damage. For this reason it is considered more valuable than Anomaly Power which increases damage that can be mitigated by Resistance.
• Increasing this stat will not show any increase to the calculated Turret Damage on the Skills screen, presumably because that raw value will be adjusted by resistance and other factors.
2. Anomaly - Anomaly Power
• For Anomaly Power builds, otherwise skip this.
3. Brutality - Weapon Damage
4. Brutality - Long Range Damage
5. Prowess - Critical Chance
6. Prowess - Damage Against Elites

The more ranks you put into one category, the more of a bonus you get, so if you choose one category, try to maximize it first.