Welcome to the Demolition Expert Build for Starfield. The Demolition Expert relies on the biggest, most powerful weapons to blast enemies to smithereens. It is the polar opposite to stealth builds – rather than sneaking around you will be engaging enemies head on with huge amounts of firepower at your disposal. If you want to see things go “boom” then this is the build for you!
Demolition Expert Build Table of Contents:
Demolition Expert Build Background
When creating your character at the start of your Starfield playthrough, you’ll need to select a Background for your character. There are 20 Backgrounds in the game, and each one has three starting skills associated with it, allowing you to get a head start with a particular build idea. Backgrounds may also affect some dialogue options as they change how NPCs see your character.
For the Demolition Expert Build, we recommend choosing the Medic background. This will give you a head start with the following skills:
- Pistol Certification – Increases your damage with Pistols. This will not be the ultimate focus of this build, but it’s useful to have a head start with at least one weapon type in the early game.
- Medicine – You will recover more health when healing yourself.
- Wellness – Increases your maximum health.
The latter two features of the Medic background are most important for the Demolition Expert build. Since you will be taking on enemies head on more than most other playstyles, you are inevitably going to take quite a bit of damage, so you’ll want to have plenty of health and strong options when it comes to healing.
Demolition Expert Build Traits
You can choose traits to further customise the abilities of your character at the start of the game.
Most of the Traits are not especially powerful and are more for roleplaying purposes. However one that is strong is the Wanted trait, which will give you a bonus to damage output when you are at low health. However, this trait also causes mercenaries to occasionally come after you (probably works in a similar way to the mercenary encounters in Skyrim).
Please note that traits are completely optional in Starfield – you can choose to have between one and three Traits, or none at all. Some traits can turn out to be detrimental depending on your playstyle and choices in the game. For example choosing Introvert will actually make you weaker if you later choose to adventure with a companion. So if you’re unsure, it is better not to pick any traits at all.
Demolition Expert Build Skills
Every time you level up in Starfield, you will gain one skill point to spend. These can be spent to improve various skills in the game. For a skill to be eligible for improvement, you’ll need to have completed a challenge that makes use of that skill. For example unlocking the next rank of the Security skill requires you to have picked a certain number of locks.
It’s difficult to give a step-by-step guide for what order to upgrade your skills in, however we recommend progressing through the following skills for the Assassin Build:
- Physical Skills
- Wellness – Increases your Maximum Health
- Weightlifting – Increases your Carrying Capacity. Especially useful for this build, as you’re going to be carrying a lot of heavy weapons around with you.
- Combat Skills
- Ballistics – Increases your damage with Ballistic weapons.
- Shotgun Certification – Why settle for a pistol at close range when we can use a shotgun? This skill will make your character more dangerous when using shotguns.
- Demolitions – Increases the damage and radius of your explosive weapons, and you take less damage fron explosions.
- Heavy Weapons Certification – Increases your damage when using Heavy Weapons
- Rifle Certification – Increases your damage with Rifles.
- Rapid Reloading – You can reload weapons faster. This will be really useful for this playstyle, as you’ll be spending a lot of time “running and gunning”
- Science Skills
- Medicine – Increases the healing you receive from healing items
Demolition Expert Build Weapons
In Starfield you will be able to customise your weapons with various attachments that change their behavior in combat. For example you will be able to make use of explosive or armour piercing rounds for some of your weapons. These will be a great fit for the Demolition Expert Build.
You will probably want to carry around at least a couple of different heavy weapons with you, such as Smartguns, Microguns and Bridgers. The Cutter you get at the start of the game is also a Heavy Weapon, however this does fairly low damage so it’s probably not a good idea to use it unless you are out of ammo in the early game.
When you need devastating close range damage, you can make use of a Shotgun, and for longer ranges you may want to make use of Rifles for their versatility – Heavy Weapons tend to have fairly low accuracy, so you may struggle using them in longer range engagements.
Demolition Expert Build Armour
Armour in Starfield is expected to fall into four categories, of which you can equip one of each at a time. These are:
- Spacesuits
- Packs
- Helmets
- Apparel
Armour is important for not only protecting your character from enemy attacks, but also shielding you from various environmental effects as you explore different planets in Starfield. High quality armour (especially Legendary armour) will also come with various modifiers that improve your character’s abilities in a specific way (for example a % damage buff when using a particular type of weapon).
Starfield’s loot is mostly random, so it is difficult to create a precise guide for which items you should be using. However look out for high quality armour that gives you good resistances, along with modifiers that increase your offensive or defensive capabilities.
