If you’re looking to optimise your Deep Rock Galactic Gear setup, you’ve come to the right place! This short Jury-rigged Boomstick mods guide will discuss the options for the five tiers of boomstick mods and whether or not they’re worth considering in your own mod build or outright skippable.
Tier 1
- Expanded Ammo Bags – Maximum ammo increased by 8
- Double-Sized Buckshot – Damage increased by 3
Expanded Ammo Bags versus Double-Sized Buckshot is a difficult one, as this is your dedicated remove-threat button compressed into a sawn-off shotgun. If you don’t take Expanded Ammo Bags here, you’ll probably want to take it later in tier 3 as the Jury-Rigged Boomstick doesn’t have a great deal of ammo to start with.
Double-Sized Buckshot is an incredible damage boost for a tier 1 upgrade though, and should definitely be the option you lean towards.
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Tier 2
- Double Trigger – Rate of fire increased by 7.5, allowing a nigh-instant double-tap.
- Quickfire Ejector – Reload time reduced by 0.7s
Again, both Double Trigger and Quickfire Ejector are incredibly good upgrades. Quickfire Ejector singlehandedly lops off just under half your total reload time in one mod, while Double Trigger boosts fire rate so significantly that you can almost instantly drop both barrels into a single target in front of you before they can begin to react.
This choice can be made simpler, however. In short, if you intend to level your Boomstick against large enemies such as Praetorians or Dreadnoughts, you’ll want Double Trigger so you can fire and back off sooner. If you intend to use it against almost exclusively smaller enemies, the reduction of reload time from Quickfire Ejector will be invaluable.
Tier 3
- Stun Duration – Stun duration increased by 2.5s
- Expanded Ammo Bags – Maximum ammo increased by 12
- High Capacity Shells – Pellets per shot increased by 3
This tier comes down to Expanded Ammo Bags or High Capacity Shells. Stun duration defeats itself, as the base stun for the weapon is already longer than it’s reload time (2.5s versus 2.0s) – and most enemies hit by the boomstick will be dead immediately, with the exception of large targets.
For those larger targets, you’re probably going to either run away during the 2.5s stun, or hit them again and get a new one – leaving no scenario where a 5s stun is helping all that much.
If you didn’t take Expanded Ammo Bags in the first tier, you probably want to take it here to help out with your limited maximum ammo. If you did, High Capacity Shells can be considered for a moderate boost to your firepower.
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Tier 4
- Super Blowthrough Rounds – Shots will penetrate three targets, before stopping at a fourth.
- Tungsten Coated Buckshot – Damage dealt to armour increased by an additional 300%
- Improved Blast Wave – 20 AoE damage in the area up to 4m in front of you per shot.
Your choices here come down to Super Blowthrough Rounds or Improved Blast Wave – Tungsten Coated Buckshot is typically a waste – as due to your restrictive max ammo, you’re probably not going to be intentionally using the boomstick to rip armour off a target.
Super Blowthrough Rounds is the mod you should take if you’re firing off into a horde of enemies, as it’ll punch through the front line and potentially well into a second one, outright killing or wounding multiple enemies a shot.
Improved Blast Wave instead grants you a small burst of AoE damage for a fairly large area in front of you per shot fired, and while it won’t do a lot to hordes, it is a great tool for wiping out a wave of small swarmers without expanding ammo directly on them.
Tier 5
- Auto Reload – Automatically reload when unequipped for more than 5 seconds
- Fear the Boomstick – Gain a 50% chance to fear nearby enemies whenever firing
- White Phosphorous – 50% of damage changed to heat damage type – chance to set enemies aflame
And we end with an interesting set of choices; Auto Reload turns up on another piece of Scout equipment – and is actually quite welcome here. Generally, when you pull out the boomstick, you are either in melee range with something attacking you that you need to kill quickly; or you’re about to attack a much bigger enemy and want to do as much damage as possible immediately.
You really don’t want to find out you forgot to reload last time in either of these scenarios’, and Auto Reload will remove that risk for you.
If you’re quite sure you’ll remember to reload on your own, however, Fear the Boomstick and White Phosphorous are your remaining options. Using White Phosphorous to get some heat build-up in may sound tempting, but targets are only going to take damage while burning when they’re alive – and often after being hit by the boomstick, alive is no longer something you can claim to be.
That leaves us with Fear the Boomstick, as the only remaining option, and while a little unreliable it can be the thing that saves you from getting overwhelmed with its ability to turn away part of a horde at a time.
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If you’ve been agreeing with my opinions up to this point, you’ll probably end up with a Jury Rigged Boomstick mods setup that looks something like this. That’ll be the end of this short guide on weapon mods, hopefully you found it useful. Did you find any other combos you thought were better than this setup? Let me know in the comments below.
If you’d be interested in reading more about Jury-Rigged Boomstick Mods, the link to the wiki is here.
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