How to build a sergeant

By Averagefodder, in Only War

Posted at

So in the campaign that I am playing in, I am the sergeant. We've playing for a few missions, and now I've come to the point to where I feel I need a sort of focus point on where to spend my xp. Until now almost all my xp has gone into dodge, since I figured that there was no point in investing in anything else if my character could get blasted by any old dominate soldier. I have maxed my dodge and spent the little more I had on improving my ballistic skill. I've been looking through the books on some good talents and but I can't seem to find one that really stands out as extremely useful every mission. Of course there's the option of upgrading the characteristics, which I might end up doing, but I was wondering if any other players had some experience with building a Sargent. I'm looking for something that is useful beyond specific situations. Comrade advances come to mind, but I don't have any player experiences with those, besides the basic ones, and I'm not sure how good they really are. A lot of talents involve melee, but I've never been in any melee battles in this campaign and I have found from previous experiences that a pure melee character is easily beat unless he is operating solely close quarters; we do a lot of battlefield stuff so I don't think melee is for me.

Any past experiences or ideas are welcome!

Thanks

Posted at

Comrade advances are vital to the Sergeant! They give a Lasgun armed squad some serious hitting power! Melee skills with Chainsword/ las pistol are typical but not the only combat possibility. Look at Lasgun barrage and associated talents. Leadership and fellowship type skills are also integral to an officer. (Intimidation, charm etc.) It really depends on the style of your Gm's game!

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Thanks! I think I'll go for leadership type advances such as comrade orders.

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Get that True Grit ASAP. It is a game changer for added survivability.

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Agreed. Sweeping orders are awesome.

It's dependent (a bit) on the enemies you're fighting, but the ability to use the Get Them! order goes a long way to making Ork Boyz killable. Which in turn, needs the capacity to pass a command test.

Get Back In The Fight! is almost as important if your GM has figured out that suppressive fire wins encounters. One Ork Shoota Boy can easily catch the whole squad in a suppressive fire burst - and with semi-automatic fire, that's a -10 WP test for everyone. Which is a big deal for comrades as they don't get back up again afterwards unless they're ordered to...