Welcome to our Back 4 Blood Build The Messiah guide. You queued quickplay for Veteran or Nightmare campaign. You ended up in a lobby with a guy who picked Starter deck and another one on Xbox with preteen shrieks coming from the open mic. You’ve seen this before, you know what’s coming.
Sure – you can leave the lobby and search again, as you always do. Let nature have its way, why bother? Alas, let him who is without sin cast the first stone. When everyone’s a Sinner, nobody is. They are Innocent. Their survival is impossible, but perhaps… they’re just waiting for a Messiah™.
Back 4 Blood Build The Messiah
The Messiah™ is a niche build that makes realistic assumptions about the quality of crossplatform public matchmaking in B4B and tries to find optimal solutions to the kinds of problems the game creates on higher difficulties, in an attempt to give a skilled player the right tools to carry a team of near zero or net negative quality to victory (aka The Next Map).
The Problem
Enemies create damage, damage kills players, dead players cannot travel to The Next Map.
The Approach and Key Concepts
The Approach to solving The Problem is multifaceted due to a feature called “gameplay”. You must use this gameplay and its imperfect tools to manage the Enemies and their Damage just enough to pass to The Next Map.
Team
Also known as your flock. Do not let the user interface fool you – you are alone – but not quite in the literal sense. Being truly alone would be manageable. Instead, you must face the added challenge of your team’s deficiencies, alone. Expect scared birds, car alarms, friendly fire. Expect nothing and you shall receive less than that.
Since the immediate goal is the survival of your flock, you must think of it as a non-renewable resource that must be managed with perpetual care, similarly to a Tamagotchi. Where were u when flock is kil?
Enemies
The omnipresent assailants of your flock’s welfare are your enemies – The Ridden.
From Volatiles to the Final Boss, you must be prepared to surpass all potential compositions that would otherwise lay waste to your flock. This strife for universality forces your hand on weapon choices, but more on those later.
For all practical purposes, your enemies are infinite. They exist to deal damage to your flock and since your flock is a finite resource, it will inevitably perish under their constant stream of harassment.
Damage
From the moment you leave the safe room, your team will, by its own lack of virtue, experience a constant stream of Infinite Damage. To manage it, you must become an Arbiter of Damage, not unlike a Cenobite . To that end, you must control the flow of damage like a dam controls the river – let it pass through your team and balance its edge just enough to make your team’s available health last as long as necessary for reaching The Next Map.
The actual damage calculation (also called the Speed of Death) is reminiscent of Newton’s Second law of motion, namely the derivative equations of instantaneous velocity . For the purposes of this guide and its descriptive simplicity, we will treat damage as average.
SurvivalTime = FlockHealth / Damage (hp/s)
The science above makes it clear that the less damage your team experiences, the longer it can survive. As you cannot predict exactly how much time will it take to reach The Next Map, you must always be ready to manage another quadrillion of Damage even while standing in the safe room doorway.
Under all circumstances avoid the risk of being damaged yourself – or worse – incapacitated. When you fall, everyone falls. Your flock is your meatshield.
Mitigation
So far, we have learned that a flock will inevitably perish when faced with Infinite Damage. You have two options to prevent and delay that from happening – 1) Kill the Enemies before they reach your team or 2) Mitigate their damage. You must learn to use both of these tools to protect your pitiful herd.
But how do you mitigate Infinite Damage? In theory by Infinite Health. Since consumables are a rare resource and often out of your immediate reach, you must depend on the only two Cards that open up the possibility of Infinite Health – Overwatch and Vanguard, the Keys to your Success.
A common error in reasoning is expecting your teammates to deal with some enemies themselves. It may be tempting to “leave that one common for Jim” while you dispose of greater threats, but rest assured Jim will not step up to the task. The idea is about as realistic as an electron in a quantum field of probability suddenly appearing on the other side of the known universe. Not entirely impossible, but probably hasn’t happened yet since the Big Bang.
You must therefore gauge the minutiae details of incoming threats and establish of mental queue of processing them based on how much Infinite Damage their existence adds to the team’s Pool of Suffering.
The Next Map
Also known as victory, it is a cyclical dichotomy between helping the Innocent and doing literally anything else. The life of a Messiah is painful yet honorable.
The Weapons – Back 4 Blood Build The Messiah
Your weapon choices must cover all situations and distance extremes in order to give you enough space to improvise the ideal outcomes of engagements by minimizing Damage dealt by Enemies.
Primary
For sturdier enemies and longer ranges, your picks are the hardest hitting sniper rifles – Barrett M95 and Phoenix 350L. With these, you will prioritize enemy weakpoints in order to shorten their lifespans, shortening the time they have for dealing Infinite Damage.
Secondary
Due to some fundamental Card interactions and the need for answers to practical positioning problems, your secondary weapon must be melee. Your pick is simplified to either the Bat or the Machete; due to their wide swings, these can kill more ridden in one attack compared to the overhead strikes of other options.
The Cards
You can only have 15 cards. In case of failure or forfeiting your duties for psychological reasons, you may only get to see a few of them. You must forgo the many interesting card options for the most important aspect of the game – survival and success. The initial two card picks are of utmost importance.
Breakout
In the event of incapacitation, the game is over. The first card pick must therefore offset your greatest weakness, one that can end a run immediately.
Think you can do without it? Ok, theory time. Was Jesus the son of God or was he just a carpenter? For the purposes or realism, let’s say he was a carpenter. Does a carpenter make mistakes? Yes he does, Jesus would also take Breakout and besides, you’re no Jesus.
Overwatch
Overwatch is your bread and butter solution in mitigating Infinite Damage. You must actively play towards its effect condition, guarding your flock from a distance and herding it together with potshots if it goes astray.
Information on further card choices and options is WIP:
The Strategy & Tips
- Mute everyone upon entering the game. You care neither for accolades, nor for banter – do not be distracted from the ultimate objective.
- Stay behind the team like a guardian angel, your fundamental strategy for making use of Overwatch damage mitigation. With up to 15 points of damage negated in one Ridden kill, it is your primary tool of managing the flow of Infinite Damage into your “teammates”.
- Permanently ping the path the team should follow. Do not expect anyone to actually follow, but in the unlikely scenario someone notices your ping, it may speed up progress to The Next Map.
