The one comment I have is that drills and axes are actually pretty insane because of one major trait: they count as melee damage, and therefor benefit from and can activate melee perks, including Vampirism. Combined with the upgrade that makes drills cool down on hitting enemies it honestly makes them very good at being a dwarf barbarian, just drilling through a hoard of grunts and healing off of it.

You really buried the lead with the EPC. Thin containment field completely changes the way you play driller as a whole! It takes a little practice, but with a some skill, you can mine aquarks on the ceiling, mine gold veins in half a second, and shred pretorians and mactera alike! There's really nothing in DRG like it!

One thing you missed about the secondary weapons:

In a mission in a really complex cave, the drop pod to get out was way higher than us and looked like we might not make it. The driller just drilled up at 45 degrees and straight to the exit. Easy peasy finish.

Greybeard with over 400 hours on record here. I’m of the opinion that the Subata is useful precisely BECAUSE it's so plain. Yes, the EPC does more damage in a larger area, but the travel time of the projectiles makes it less useful against enemies you need to be precise for. The microwave cannon is a fine substitute, but I find it overheats very quickly (in fairness, I do prioritise focus mode for its accuracy). The pistol shoots with hitscan, is highly accurate, doesn’t need to worry about overheat and is quick to reload. It provides what all of the Driller's primary options lack; reliability at medium or long ranges. Bonus points for being the weapon least likely to accidentally hit a teammate!

this might be the best start to a channel I've seen, even more then Dankpods. Amazing content, subbed!

Driller's drills are not very effective as weapons per-say, but they do fear, stun, and break armor extremely reliably making them a very good choice to use for enemies that are swarming you if you need to get them to STOP doing so immediately.

Deconstructing scouts with satchel charge is the best aspect of driller gameplay

C4 isnt a mining tool. Its a scout hunting tool. Dont forget.

Subata Pistol ain't bad if you build it for damage. Something Driller's primaries don't really excel at is damage per second versus weak points because, well, weak points are not their specialty! If you find yourself behind say, a Praetorian or a Dreadnought, compare drenching it in your primary to just unloading a mag from the Subata into its butt as quickly as possible. Inflicting your primary's status on them can help in the long term in a protracted or difficult fight, but the raw and nearly instant damage of the Subata is not to be snubbed because the situations will call for it sometimes.

Great guide, but I would like to add some stuff about weapon combos.

Drill melee is very good when combined with the cryo cannon. Frozen bugs can't fight back and with the Vampire perk you get some health back with every kill.

9:37

More tips for driller.

Not sure if this has been mentioned- The bots in the game die (nearly) instantly after being set on fire (full flame gauge). This is similar to how flying enemies die after being fully frozen. So the flame thrower can be very effective in missions where you encounter a lot of bot enemies such as the Industrial Sabotage mission. Also, the drills will chew up low health enemies like the bot Shredders(35hp), Glyphid Swarmers (12hp), Glyphid Spawn(5hp) and Naedocytes(5hp) (those small flying bugs that shock you) making them an effective defense. This is especially useful for the flying enemies that may be hard to track with gun type weapons.

4:47

You forgot to mention, that pretty much all big bugs have high resistance to fire, making flamethrower inefficient, and sometimes detrimental to your team, especially on elimination missions.

Cryo Cannon + Drills + Vampirism is really fun. Also the Microwave emmiter is great too because it does lots of damage to frozen targets. It's my fav combo so far

i love my driller main friend, he makes missions go so much faster cause we dont have to mess around with convoluted cave systems and can just b-line for objectives

My favorite part about being a driller is racing MULE and others to the extraction point.