Driller Tips
Kills shouldn’t really be your top priority as Driller. He’s mostly a crowd-control class who often gets kills “stolen” because he’s really good at just softening bugs up for the rest of the team. If you’re seeing a Drillers with hundreds of kills it likely just means a mission had a ton of Swarmers, of which he’s the best at killing.
“Drilling tunnels and blowing things up” is the Driller’s role, and your team is always really thankful for a good Driller! Obviously you’re good at digging through the mandatory dirt tunnels, but you can also connect 2 caves if they’re near each other, make a tunnel to the escape pod, or make tunnels to other rooms on missions like Point Extract to speed up the mission.
One thing you’ve gotta learn (or un-learn) is to not use his flamethrower like most other flamethrowers in video games. You’re not supposed to w+m1 the bugs, instead the flamethrower lays down burning napalm on the terrain. That is your main source of damage and cc. Enemies that walk through it take tons of damage, and get slowed/lit on fire. You can make a circle, or a squiggly S-shape, or a straight line. Whatever makes the most bugs walk through it. Practice doing that.
Also, you’re second-best next to Scout at reaching hard-to-access areas. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but Driller has insane mobility. You can drill up walls to reach minerals near the ceiling, or safely drill down huge pits to help your team with vertical mobility. Basically, you’re slower than Scout, but you can essentially get your entire team to everywhere a Scout could get, with a bit of work.
Lastly, you’re the best class for terrain prep. You’re especially valuable on missions where you can start a fight that forces you to stay in a limited space (Salvage, Elimination, and Sabotage come to mind). Make sure the terrain is flat and traversable for your team. If you can’t flatten everything, at least clear a lot of space and make tunnels between different elevations. For example, if the terrain around the Caretaker looks like this:
|-----|__|-----|_,You want to make it look like this:
/---___O|__|O(The O’s are a tunnel).
…or something like that. Sorry if this doesn’t make a lot of sense right now. You’ll get a feel for him eventually.
In terms of target selection, Driller plays like an AoE Gunner, but at short range. For larger targets you need to rely more on status effects, their synergies, and your teammates. For smaller targets, save ammo with DoT or in the case of freezing, damage multipliers.
For instance, a flamer makes short work of fodder, but can still ignite a Praet. This pairs well with Subatta & burning bonus damage & weakpoint. Cryo can freeze them opening them to x3 damage & you can carry 8 throwing axes.
Overall Driller excels at support. Burning is an extremely good tick damage as it can interrupt enemies like tyrant weeds. (Just ignite every sprout you see and this enemy is a cake walk)
Lastly, killing bugs is only an objective in 1 mission type. As a Driller your focus should always be on facilitating the swift completion of the mission objectives and a safe extraction. That is more important than a number on the mission summary.
Driller is the closest thing to a melee class that DRG has. Be close to the swarm and use your AoE weapons to deal with quantities. Your primary weapon and satchel charges can take out huge chunks of swarms. The secondaries and Drills can be used as single target damage, or to add a bit of precision to the crowd control. Stay close to your team and deal with sheer chunks of flesh that are just too much work to deal with for other classes. Out of combat, you serve the purpose of getting rid of unwanted trash. Flatten uneven terrain and remove obstacles like crystals and rocks so you and your team can more easily traverse it. Also dig shortcuts through terrain so your team can always retreat in case of danger.