Overview
Tired of reading build guides written by beta males who slowly complete missions by carefully blocking every attack? Do you want a build guide that tells you how to actually defeat your enemies instead of cowering until your teammate kills them with a ranged weapon? This is it. We take the most intuitively powerful career in the game, then pour an unreasonable amount of performance enhancing drugs down our throats to create the most unstoppable Giga-Chad in Vermintide; The Meth Knight.
Intro
If you want to skip our long explanations and gameplay tips, then you can use this link to see the build with no context: [link]
If anything you see confuses you, or you want an explanation of how to operate the build in detail then keep scrolling.
This is the ultimate Chad build in Vermintide, it mixes the most intuitively overpowered career in the game, the Grail Knight, with a complete disregard for your own personal well-being and a ton of potion use. Which is why we call it the Meth Knight. The single target damage from Grail Knight is unmatched by any other career, and with the proper weapon selection your horde damage will be nothing to mock either. This build is not like the other builds published by the Vermintide community, it is not meant to block your enemies for 20 minutes while your friends kite them to death with ranged weapons, nor is it meant to be a single part of a carefully constructed team composition. It is meant to stand on its own and function with any group. Chad gamers know that the best way to avoid damage from enemies is for those enemies to be dead, just like in every other game that has ever existed. All of the testing and development of this class is done on Legend difficulty, and any statements made about damage thresholds, horde size and composition, or health pools is based on Legend difficulty.
Talents
Level 5: The first talent we will be using is Lady’s Wrath, the reason is obvious, killing is what we do best, and now we get rewarded for it even more than we already did. The team healing talent Gift of the Grail is very beta, and we kill more often than stagger, so Lady’s Generosity would short change our temp health. We also typically do the killing of monsters and elites, so we will get big returns from this talent in those fights.
Level 10: The second talent is Virtue of the Ideal since it essentially gives you a flat 30% power almost all of the time. This is just plainly better than Virtue of Heroism, which only gives 25% to heavy attacks. On first glance it may seem that Virtue of Knightly Temper has a tempting effect, this is a trap. Critical strikes kill elites more often than not anyway, and the effect is gimped to being near useless against monsters. We also don’t have exceptionally high attack speed, which means that we get fewer critical hits than other loadouts anyway.
Level 15: Our next talent is Smiter, because our bladed weapons need help staggering enemies they fail to kill, it also helps us deliver even more single target damage to elites, which is the priority of this build. Enhanced power is pretty cleanly worse on a build with no ranged weapons, and Bulwark may have applications with alternative weapons that already stagger elites reliably, but those weapons would be less deadly than our blades, and therefore less Chad.
Level 20: This talent is the crux of the entire build, Virtue of the Penitent gives us access to our sweet, sweet meth. When combined with the Concoction trait which will be attached to your charm this gives you an incredibly overpowered meth mode available at almost all times. In fact, you will likely find that you have more potions than occasions to chug them for full effect. Without Concoction you can still do around 3x the damage and have extra cleave during every important fight. The beta-male build guides out there either gloss over this talent completely, or give some soy-boy explanation about needing the health regeneration quest for your team, and thus tell you to play Virtue of Duty to increase your odds of receiving it. As a matter of fact, the quests for regeneration and damage reduction are easily the worst of the lot. The quests for power level, attack speed, and cooldown regen are all incredibly powerful and are universally useful, while health regen and damage reduction only apply when you get hit, which you are trying to avoid anyway. While all of the quests are good, none of them come close to the power of tripling your damage, instantly recovering your ability or making your attack speed too fast to see, all of which happen when you drink a potion with Concoction equipped. Virtue of Purity is easily the worst of the three, because it not only fails to give you access to meth mode, but also makes you more likely to get stuck with only health regen and damage reduction. Real Chads run Virtue of the Penitent and kill everything that might deal enough damage to necessitate the other quest benefits.
Level 25: At this level we play Virtue of Stoicism to make us more durable, this is really the most practical choice for any Chad. Getting 50% of the damage dealt back just for taking the damage combines with the temporary health from Lady’s Wrath at level 5 to make you quite possibly the tankiest career in the game. Virtue of Discipline has high potential for damage dealing, which might make you think it is the alpha Chad play. Unfortunately the design of the game makes timing blocks strange, since there can be dozens of enemies swinging at you simultaneously, which means that if you block one you will be forced to block the rest. In addition to this, timing blocks is typically less beneficial to you than simply using a push to stagger a ton of enemies. While you could hypothetically do a timed block and then push, this is too stamina-intensive for any weapon with good cleave, especially if you block multiple hits. Pushing before blocking will typically let you kill more enemies faster than a timed block. Virtue of the Joust is the beta-male pick. Stamina regeneration and push arc are only useful if you’re not killing your enemies. When you are in a bad enough spot that you need to block everything without counter attacking then odds are good that you will die with or without this talent, rest assured that when Chads die, we die without Virtue of the Joust.
Level 30: Virtue of Audacity is the only choice here. If both attacks hit while you’re in meth mode a monster will be down to half health and you will be able to follow up with several more meth swings, and by the time you finish those swings your Blessed Blade will be back! Additionally the second swing can be used to kill an additional elite during regular combat. Killing two Chaos Warriors with one ability use is better than anyone else can possibly hope to achieve. Virtue of the Impetuous Knight is simply terrible. Getting movement speed from your ability that is meant to kill elites and monsters would only be good for running away from a tough fight, which is a very beta play. Virtue of Confidence simply doesn’t have the reliability we need, it can kill multiple elites, but only if those elites line up for you obediently. Better to reliably kill two of them than to usually kill one and occasionally kill two or three.
Jewelry
Necklace: The trait on our necklace is Barkskin, and the properties we will be using are 20% health and 30% block cost reduction. Our necklace is easily our least important piece of swag, the unfortunate truth of the matter is that the necklace properties are intrinsically not very Chad. This is not to say they aren’t useful, just that they don’t help us kill. All necklace effects revolve around health and damage reduction, and Barkskin is easily the most consistent and effective for conventional builds. The properties are in a similar situation, there are just no Chad options, so we take the most consistently useful buffs to health and block cost reduction. If you are trying to prioritize which items to re-roll this one is on the bottom of the list.
Charm: Our charm will make up for the beta nature of the necklace very swiftly by granting us 5% attack speed and 10% power vs. infantry along with the premier item trait for this build, Concoction. This means that our charm is our primary source of drip, and re-rolling it should be very high on your resource priority list. Power vs. infantry allows us to kill some specials and horde minions in fewer swings. Without this our Bretonnian Longsword would fail to kill chaos marauders reliably in two hits, and fail to kill clanrats in one hit, which would severely injure our ability to kill hordes. The attack speed is pretty self explanatory, the more times you swing, the more damage you deal, this benefits essentially every build in the game, and the other property options we have will not change our hits to kill for anything in a horde, so it is better to just swing faster. Crit power can seem like a tempting property here, but keep in mind that we normally swing a little slower than other builds, thus getting fewer criticals. Besides, meth mode will give us all the damage we need with or without critical hits anyway. The big thing on the charm is the Concoction trait. Just read it and it will be clear why it is so powerful, then re-read Virtue of the Penitent. Almost every horde will generate enough kills to give you a free strength potion thanks to Virtue of the Penitent, and that strength potion will be transformed into uncut meth by this trait. Down any potion and you are guaranteed to kill an entire horde or a monster with very little help from your team, and by the time a horde is dead your team will nearly have enough kills to get another potion. This is pure alpha Chad gamer tech, winning guarantees more wins in the future, use this and let the betas who read other build guides stare in awe as you do things they thought were impossible using a trait and talent which their build guides say are bad.
Trinket: Our trinket will be using 10% cooldown reduction and 5% crit chance along with the Shrapnel trait. This is a pretty intuitive setup for a trinket, but still incredibly Chad, especially because your ability does insane amounts of damage, meaning that cooldown reduction is just a sneaky way to gain an overall damage buff. Crit chance also activates your Swift Slaying trait on your longsword more often, and just generally ups damage. Many beta gamers are out there playing curse resistance on their trinkets, hoping to avoid the penalties of carrying a grimoire. That is a smooth brain tactic. The best way to avoid being downed or killed is to kill every disgusting rat-man, goat-spawn or pagan who approaches you before they even swing. If you can’t kill them that quickly, then block or use a push. Never give up damage, which benefits you in 100% of scenarios, for health, which only benefits you when you misplay. Misplaying is within your control, so control it instead of trying to minimize it. Shrapnel is a pretty uncontroversial trait, it just boosts damage and gives you an emergency button for your entire team. Grenadier is less consistent and the meth knight is always charging into melee anyway, which means he would not have time to throw another bomb even if he randomly got one, not to mention that the extra shrapnel damage applies to the enemy hit, not to the attacker, so the entire team does 20% more damage. Explosive Ordinance is just worse than the other two options, but probably has some niche application that the meth knight is poorly suited to utilize it for. Ultimately none of the buffs attached to the trinket are particularly important to the build, so it provides significantly less drip than the charm, but decidedly more than the necklace. This is a low priority re-roll.
Weapons
The meth knight has access to a long list of melee weapons, and most of them are reasonable to use if you spend a lot of time nailing down their combo structure and move set. This gets even more complicated when you realize that it is possible to switch cancel into different melee weapons mid combo with the grail knight. Because this creates so many permutations of damage and attack patterns it would be excessively time consuming and cumbersome to cover all of the options available in combination with each other. As such, we will only be discussing the exceptionally useful weapons, but these are certainly not your only options when considering this build, they are only the most alpha Chad gamer options available.
Bretonnian Longsword: This is the weapon. Every other weapon for this character has something which can be used in a similar fashion or has nearly identical attack patterns, but the Bretonnian Longsword has something that no other weapon has, the riposte. When you charge a heavy attack with this weapon you also block until the attack is released, so not only can you hold the attack as long as you please, you can also completely juke Stormvermin and Chaos Warriors who bounce off your riposte and then get their armor cut through by a heavy attack almost instantly. This allows you to kill elites with exceptional speed and safety, which few other careers can manage as effectively. In addition the first two light swings have an almost identical pattern to an executioner sword, except that they come out much faster and deal slightly less damage. They cleave through hordes with ease. The third light attack is a single target overhead with high damage, you will normally cancel this swing during a horde, but if there is a special or elite mixed in with the chaff you may complete the combo to get a high damage headshot. The first two heavy attacks have very wide sweeps and hit hard, in addition to cutting through armor and riposting. The third heavy is a single target overhead with incredibly high damage, and often ends the fight even against Chaos Warriors. We use 5% attack speed and 10% power vs. Skaven in order to reliably one hit clanrats and clear hordes in a timely manner. The trait is Swift Slaying for obvious reasons, more attack speed means more damage per second, and while we don’t critical constantly, we do it often enough to make this very consistently give us attack speed. This is the alpha Chad gamer weapon.
Bretonnian Sword and Shield: While having a shield may not seem like the Chad way to play, on the grail knight you have very little choice. Because you are incapable of sniping specials with a ranged weapon you need a way to deal with their attacks until you reach them, or an ally kills them. You also have the unique ability to block warpfire with a shield, which means that literally every special can be either blocked with a shield, or dodged, both of which can be done at the same time. When a ratling gunner begins shooting, block him. When a warpfire thrower starts burning everyone, jump in front of the flames with a shield and advance. When a monster turns his attention to you after you eat half his health bar in a meth rage, pull out your shield. This weapon is essentially here just for the shield, which is why it has 2 stamina and 30% block cost reduction. Our Chad play here is the trait Off Balance which will up our damage to bosses and elites we were forced to pull out the shield against. When we do pull out the shield against a horde it means we need to push and then immediately attack (not to be confused with the push attack) to get a shield bash with a massive area stagger. Beware of using the push attack, because it has terrible reach and only hits a single target, it can be used to headshot armored enemies, but it is terrible against hordes. The first two lights are limited area sweeps with decent damage, they function well against single targets, but are lackluster against hordes. The third light is another area stagger shield bash that beats back hordes gracefully. It does have a long recovery, however, and it is best to follow it up with a block or switch cancel into the Longsword to finish off the horde. The first heavy is an overhead single target swing for beating monsters and elites, the second is the shield bash again, and the third is a high damage stab great for headshots. The combos for this weapon require solid timing and a firm understanding of when to block, block cancel and switch cancel based on your specific scenario, but it has an amazing push arc, and can reset a horde for another round of Longsword cleaves when used properly. It also cuts through monsters and specials like butter. This is the second weapon that I recommend, but it could hypothetically be replaced by any shielded weapon. As long as you are running Lady’s Wrath and Smiter it would be wise to avoid using the mace and shield in this slot though, since they will stagger far more than kill, while your primary weapon will kill more than stagger, leading to a decrease in temp health gain overall. The regular sword and shield is a very similar weapon with different lights and different shield bash placements, and while it is viable, it is much slower than the Bretonnian variant, and it all shield bashes with it take longer to access. In the end, the Bretonnian Sword and Shield is the best choice for this slot if you actually intend to win.
General Gameplan
The basic gameplan with the meth knight is just as Chad as you probably guessed, we charge into melee every time. We lack the mobility options that careers such as Zealot or Handmaiden use to turn the tables on large groups of elites, so we need to focus on actually killing them outright. This is the main way in which our career outshines others, we kill elites much more quickly and more safely than almost anyone else. Using the riposte of our Longsword and our Blessed Blade to cut through groups of multiple armored elites without needing to outmaneuver them is the primary goal. We also lack the ability to snipe specials with a ranged weapon, meaning we will often rely on our shield or our teammates to kill them. There is another power that is the namesake of this build, one which others in the same career lack. Meth.
Read these and let it sink in exactly what will happen every time your team completes the quest, which is to kill 175 enemies (that’s is just over the size of a single Skaven horde). You will get another dose of incredibly overpowered meth. It triples your damage, it triples your attack speed, and it makes your Blessed Blade come back incredibly fast. This means you can kill a monster or a horde solo with a single dose. Not only that, but you will have plentiful doses, and any time things look even slightly tough you just hit the meth and it will fuel your killing spree until you earn another dose.
Monsters
Defeating monsters is generally simple, hit your meth then immediately use Blessed Blade with the damage buff on it, then beat on the monster until the meth wears off, then Blessed Blade again and the monster is dead. The monsters have no defense from this, as the Blessed Blade staggers them for a long time and you swing incredibly fast for incredibly high damage while they recover from the stagger. If you really need to fight without meth then pull out the shield, block their string, dodge their heavies, and use the first two light attacks and the first heavy to deal serious damage, especially after blocking.
Specials
Dealing with specials is more or less something that this career doesn’t do. We can use our meth to go ludicrous speed and charge any specials that we have trouble with and kill them with a single blow invariably, but there are really only a few specials that we have any other strategy for. When possible leave these units to your teammates while you kill elites. Packmasters can be cleanly beaten by a Longsword heavy held until they enter our very long range, then they eat the very fast swipe and die in one hit. Warpfire throwers can be blocked with a shield while advancing, and then easily killed by two push attacks or kiting them. Ratling gunners can be blocked by a shield, but advancing on them requires dodging left and right while slowly pushing up until they need to reload. Gutter runners need to be dodged or pushed during the pounce. Leeches need to be dodged then heavy smacked twice. Blightstormers need to be killed by someone else, but you do have the movement speed buff to reliably escape the storm when not cornered. Globardiers need to be killed by someone else while you avoid the gas. Standard Bearers will require you to advance slowly and destroy the standard, often after killing several buffed units in the process, this job is better done by a bomb or by someone with a mobility tool as their ability.
Elites
Dealing with elites is our specialty, and we have several options to do it effectively. Killing between one and four armored elites is very simple and intuitive for the meth knight, use your Blessed Blade to kill one or two, then use heavy riposte strikes to kill the others one at a time. Essentially you just straight up duel them like the ultimate alpha Chad. If we get pinned in by a Chaos Warrior or Stormvermin patrol then we can fall back on the shield to take a few hits, this cannot be a long term gameplan however, because stamina is not infinite, and Chaos Warriors can use their overhead strikes to break our block instantly anyway. It is also a very beta plan with no hair on its chest at all. The sword and shield can use it’s first heavy attack or it’s push attack to aim for a single target headshots, but this is risky either way, as both have long animations and follow up attacks that are bad against armor. When the number of armored enemies gets beyond four things start to get a lot more complicated, so we will treat these groups in a more targeted fashion. An alternative strategy to each of these in depth plans is to take your meth and use your new mighty morphin methamphetamine powers to kill everyone in sight with little to no effort. Don’t hold back if there is any doubt, because the meth is plentiful; your withdrawals wont last long.
Stormvermin: When you end up fighting a large group of Stormvermin the most important thing to do is quickly eliminate the shielded enemies first, because the polearm variants are far easier to cleave through with Longsword heavies. With shields in the mix there is no way to stagger more than one enemy per heavy swing. The best way to deal with the shields is to use Blessed Blade on them, hopefully killing two, and then doing a three hit light combo on any who still live. The first two hits will break their block, and the final overhead should kill on a headshot, and stagger them long enough for follow ups even if you miss the head. You can break down the shield with heavies, but they need to be in quick succession and it still takes all three hits. Of course, you can always just take some meth and start making heavy swings with triple damage at the speed of light attacks to settle things too.
Chaos Warriors: Chaos Warriors have a similar issue to shielded Stormvermin, we can’t cleave through them, even with Blessed Blade you will only ever kill two no matter how well you aim your strikes. This means that after killing two we may have to play a slower game where we riposte and wait for strikes to follow up with heavies. Unfortunately it takes several heavies to kill a Chaos Warrior, even if you hit the head, which can make large groups of them a tough, but certainly possible, fight. Naturally, this is a perfect time to hit the meth. With your new super powers you will be nearly untouchable, and will almost certainly kill three or four of the Warriors before the comedown and your Blessed Blade will then be ready to finish anyone left over.
Mixed Elites: The worst thing about mixed groups of elites is pure numbers. Usually the Stormvermin have many units who are weaker, and the Chaos Warriors have fewer units who are tougher. When they show up together you get the worst of both worlds, too many to kill with Blessed Blade and riposte tactics, and too tough to cleave through with heavies. With the power of meth we can still win these fights though! When your Blessed Blade returns in seconds and your light attacks cleave through Stormvermin it seems like the ultimate elite patrol is just another horde. Unfortunately this is basically the only reliable way to deal with this situation other than having fellow giga-Chad builds on your team who can also cut through enemies like butter, so remember to play with other alpha gamers who will help you kill enemies during your crazed meth plays instead of soy-boys who block until someone else draws the enemies attention.
Hordes
Hordes are simple for you, use the first two light attacks on your Bretonnian Longsword, then block cancel and start again. Repeat until all enemies are dead. If you feel like the horde is too big for you to kill it solo, or if you’re low on health, take some meth and make it easy! By the time you kill them all you’ll have another hit of hard drugs anyway. There are some more refined options available to you, such as using the push-then-attack input on your Bretonnian Sword and Shield to get an area of effect shield bash before switching back to the Longsword, or even doing the three light attacks with said shield before switching. These can yield big staggers and give you some breathing room, but you will be doing all of the real killing with the Longsword, so don’t get lured into thinking the stagger can win the day.
Closing
This is far from the only way in which you can make a functioning grail knight build, and it is not even the only way to play the meth knight. There are alternate builds that swap out weapons, and sometimes even talents, to create play styles more suited to the individual using them, while still maintaining access to copious amounts of performance enhancing drugs. The only things which are truly required are the talent Virtue of the Penitent and the charm trait Concoction, every other choice is simply what we tested and found to be most effective. However, this is all of the essential knowledge you will need to become the true giga-Chad of Vermintide; the indomitable Meth Knight. Using this build guide you should be able to show all the beta male game journalist-level players around you what it looks like to be a true alpha gamer. Because maybe you were born with it, or maybe it’s methamphetamine. If you want to see alternate tactics and build strategies for the meth knight, or more build guides that have the refined muscular features of an alpha gamer, then keep your eyes out for more Chad Build Guides in the future, and feel free to comment here with more bold and brash build suggestions.