One last thing though, you can equip pulse and zero only to avoid getting to an unintended gun when you actually want to swap (like when missing a blood rush)
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Just started the Clappy DLC with my new experimental build including rend, tear, and blood rush, plus unrelenting and am already seeing a major difference in DPS.
I’ll need to get better at knowing when and when not to go for blood rushes, but it’s clear that this is an opening for better Athena-play for me.
Shield of Ages is doing well. I’ve subbed the Company Man for the Bullpups as suggested by Omega. All-around improvements.
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The build and gear @arvianne listed is more of less what I use.
Eddie, Ages, Celestial Gladiator, Storm Front.
Hyperion one- and four-barrel shotguns, Fridgia, Vibra, Hail, Thunderfire, various others.
I love the combination of Krieg stacking and Zer0 micromanaging. Stacks, weave, blood rush, shoot, smite, slam (I take Hades Shackles but it’s really not necessary).
We differ by allocation of 3 or 4 points, but the builds are the same.
Other than Invictus, the omitted skills are generally considered pointless as I’m sure you’ve seen from the skill guide.
I have a second Athena strictly for melee, but that’s obviously another matter.
What’s the story behind not taking Invictus? I’m basically on-board with the essence of this build. I used it last night to get through most of the Clappy DLC and, for the first time, an Athena combat loop in UVHM made sense to me.
What broke the logjam for me was Rend - Tear - Blood Rush - Unrelenting. I was avoiding the middle tree after tier two because I hadn’t put Tear front and center of my combat approach when I’d tried it previously, so it all just seemed melee-focused to me. Understanding that Athena with Rend-Tear is basically sniper Zero with Kunai helped me get a concept of her.
It’s not a revelation to the world, as it appears this was obvious to a lot of people from jump street, but it is to me.
One thing I’d like to reiterate for future Athena convos is how much I love Anarchists on her. Dropping Maliwan SMGs for the plucky purple Vladof pistols was so inexplicably helpful to me that I almost think it’s psychological. (You know those studies where they have people throw darts at pictures of people they like and then people they don’t like? They tend to be more accurate with the latter. While I don’t mind Maliwan SMGs, j’adore Anarchists.)
Shields of Ages is almost as important since it’s Athena’s Blockade. It doesn’t exactly make her tanky, but it gives her, in my experience, a few extra breaths to take before being health-gated, which makes all the difference when you need those breaths to swap to a Vibra or get your Aspis up.
I need to farm up a shock Systems Purge. I’ve got one now that’s working fine, but it’s explosive.
I wish I could use Storm Fronts without killing myself. Quasars still down me occasionally when I underestimate their blast radius, but it’s not even close to the Athena death trap that Storm Fronts present.
I imagine Eos will be trouble later on, so I’m taking suggestions. Good way to build stacks and eviscerate him with a RL? Would rather not struggle with him.
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Nothing wrong with it but it just doesn’t do as much as the other skills.
That’s one of the “various others” I use.
Using a Storm Front for building stacks doesn’t work (compared to The Sentinel for ex) so I use a high RoF pistol (Anarchist) or SMG (Fast Talker ideally). Once stacks are high enough, I use a four barrel shock Hyperion (I found a glitch one with loop) and Company Man. Splodger is also quite good if one can spam reload to get loop.
And all the Rend, Tear, Blood Rush points go to maxing other skills.
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With YGROY it’s more of a visual cue for me. Seeing an enemy blow up to help me know who / where to Blood Rush next. I don’t think it does a lot of collateral damage to enemies the way Bloodsplosion does, but I’ve found that when I’m rushing towards a nearby enemy as someone is exploding the Aespis absorbs that damage and gets a boost. There’s some synergy there.
I get Kill Skills as a last resort in my build because they are useless if I am in a situation where I can’t chain kills. I will pick one to get me down a tier when I need to spend points, or If I have all the skills I really wanted and it’s not worthwhile to put it elsewhere. Since I only swap weapons when I absolutely have to, putting points in Mercurial had more to offer for how I was playing, even if it was negligible, than any of the other skills I could have chosen.
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So this is what I’ve been running with:
Differences with you: you have the point in PfG, you max out Mercurial, and you put 4/5 in Elemental Barrage and nab Hades’ Shackles, while taking a point or two fewer than me in some other skills. It looks like I put those points into Invictus, maxing out Gun Kata and CoP, maxing out Return Fire, and maxing out Vanguard.
Is there any re-allocation you would strongly recommend?
I’m not a big fan of Clarity of Purpose, but I maxed it out because I didn’t notice Mercurial when I had it, and I like the extra “punch” my melee gets with it. Is Mercurial clearly better than CoP, or is it simply preference, because you have to put the points somewhere?
Prepare for Glory I never understood; if I’m worried about going down too frequently, would it be counter-productive to put a point in there?
Would my dps in general gameplay take a huge boost by forcing myself into the Storm Weaving loop with Elemental Barrage? I don’t ever find myself wanting for mag size with Gathering Tempest, though I understand I’ll probably want EB for Eos.
Good explanation. I’m going to keep this in mind as I play more with what I’m running now. I might end up going back to Mercurial.
Alright I’m completely baffled. I’m on the first version of Eos, and I cannot even scratch him. I don’t even understand what element to use once his shield is down because nothing - not even a Badaboom to the face with 300 stacks does anything more than a sliver of damage. It would be pointless to beat him because I would completely run out of ammo anyway. I mean absolutely completely. In all my weapons.
I don’t understand how to do damage to him. I cannot get my stacks higher than 300 or so no matter what I do. And apparently that’s not enough. I kind of felt this would be a problem ahead of time since everything I rely on In mobbing doesn’t work against this guy. Never had this much trouble with him before.
I’m using the anarchist and the company man, but they do nothing.
EDIT: Alrighty then. I went to YouTube and found an old Joltz video where he showed his method/build/load out. Looked solid enough; tried it out; worked like a charm. I’m not sure what accounts for all that extra damage but it’s INSANE. Maybe it’s the Heart Breaker getting stacks really high?
I didn’t want to use the Heart Breaker since technically it doesn’t exist in TPS, but I stopped worrying and learned to love the data mining.
The build I used was this:
Still don’t really get where such a massive damage differential came from. It’s gotta be Maelstrom, no?
Load out was a Cel Gladiator, Quasar, Systems Purge, and Reogenator for equipment.
Shock Badaboom, Heart Breaker, Shock Company Man, and Vibra Pulse for weapons.
Basically, you just throw up your aspis, switch to your HB to activate Storm Weaving, fire away and build a bunch of stacks; switch to CM and eviscerate his shield; then switch to Badaboom and repeat until dead.
I’m in awe of the difference this build made. I went from not being able to damage him beyond slivers at a time to beating him in roughly four minutes. (I’m sure speed killers can do it a lot faster, but this was my first time as Athena, with a probably not ideal set up - no loop glitches or anything. Probably beat him faster than I did with Jack.).
Impressive. And baffling.
Corrosive. And target the crit spots.
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Yeah, when I fought EOS with Athena targeting the the Engines on his back and Sh4dow-Tp in the cockpit to get to get those crits in to get the damage going. When Eclipse is airborne the Ack Ack and Clear Skies kits for airborne device damage boosts, or a Tranquility or System Purge.
IIRC the turrets also are major weak spots when they appear? I forget which phase that is in though.
Eclipse has Turrets from the start, but of course his biggest weakness is when the Eye rotates to the rectangular crit spot.
I feel like I am mixing up EOS and Saturn when I think about where its turrets are place. It has shoulder mounted multi-pod rocket launchers, and maybe hip ion canons?
The fight is so hectic I’ve never been able to get a good look at him, or patiently chip away at him, especially in his second form. (I can never remember which one is Eos and which one eclipse, so I just call them both Eos and/or eclipse). Didn’t even know he had shootable turrets until I saw someone hit them in a video.
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That sounds like Saturn, although EOS/Eclipse also unleashes barrages of homing rockets which can pass through the barrier at the respawn station 
and ion cannons.
Agreed! Although there are spots below the ‘deck’ of the walkway where you can duck behind the vertical ribs - good spot to take a peek from every now and then.
I think it would be easier to focus more on him if he didn’t have a bunch of extra trash enemies running amok.
When I was typing “amok” autocorrect changed it to “amoxicillin.” Wtf?
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An antibiotic. Obviously, your autocorrect correctly divined that the game was throwing viruses at you. It was simply confused about the type of virus and whether or not an antibiotic would be effective…
Back on topic: I generally have found I don’t need to worry too much about those, unless they’re right on top of me. They’re actually helpful for those times I forget to duck.
One tip: the virus glitch things that have either the red or green aura are useful. Green ones launch a corrosive attack on nearby targets, while red ones will stream healing to you. Don’t know if you’d picked up on that while playing through the preceding missions or not, but I always make a point of hitting the green ones if I see them.
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The single biggest improvement I made to my struggling Athena was using the Shield of Ages. There’s no substitute for a gigantic shield. I’ve tried all the others, but always stay alive longer with this shield. I also max out United Front and try to put all my badass points in my shield statistics.
It might seem wasteful putting points in United Front if you have the com that starts shield regen as soon as you raise the Aspis. I like the extra size shield.
I’m not a fan of melee usually, but Bloodrush with Rend causes some decent damage. It also moves you pretty fast around the field. And it’s just a blast to use 
I use Maelstrom passively. Storm weaving meh, sometimes I use my scroll wheel. Quasars and Thunderfire, seem to work fine. Glitch weapons are the most fun.
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My Athena is on hold temporarily while I work on Wilhelm, but I can only second this. The Shield of Ages was a true game changer. Perhaps I’ll get good enough with her at some point to be able to branch out, but for now I’ve got my binky.
And I do the same thing with my BAR - ever since BL2 I focus first and foremost on the shield stats. Though I should say this bit me in the ass when I moved on to melee Zero, as it made the Hide unusable without my BAR entirely diabled. (I realize people often prefer a purer experience by leaving it off, and in certain situations I do too, but usually, when I’m just playing for myself, I find BAR removes a lot of things that are just annoying and makes several otherwise unusable items viable. In TPS I put a bunch of points into reload speed and fire rate solely so I could use the Omni-Cannon.)
As I may have said above, I made a mistake in assuming that Bloodrush and Rend were mainly for melee builds. For some reason, I didn’t take the hint given by Tear that that’s not the case. My Athena skills have improved tenfold since I’ve grown more accustomed to basing my gunplay on the bloodrush-rend-tear loop.
It bothered me that I had to completely respec for Eclipse/Eos, but that’s the exceptional case. I never had to do it anywhere else. I guess that’s sufficient.
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I see you found what you needed. But if you ever want to branch out, just let me know, I’d be happy to help.
Here’s a little over-the-top “proof is in the pudding” for my qualifications. And I can help you get to this level, or anywhere in between with relation to Athena.
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