Here are some crappy builds.
Generic melee build. I like the mk6 combat blade with uncanny/flesh tearer so I can be the king of dots but it works with whatever weapon you like. Something you might notice: I did not take the attack speed node (swift endurance) from the bottom left nor did I take hypercritical. The reasons are the attack speed isn't that good with the knife because you only get 4 stamina with it and hypercritical has anti-synergy with toxic renewal as insta-kill effects don't count as melee kills. Why does that matter? Because this class fucking sucks at generating toughness in melee.
It's possible to drop maxed out chems for something else and take a stronger stim while you're at it but I'm personally confident in keeping this stimm available when I need it.
Some other matters of clarification, jittery isn't that good when we only have 4 stamina and we're constantly draining it with push attacks so we can only take the crit aura. That middle part of the tree is really badly laid out. Cheap shots is crap but it's better to have at least something that can potentially give us damage than something that's not active often enough to be useful. Nimble is good and I don't like not taking it when the class is this fragile. Burst of energy and battering strikes are both pretty good (burst of energy is also on the veteran tree but on a 20s cd) and if you wanted to ditch maxed out chems or punching above one's weight for one or both of those, that would work.
This build does a crap ton of damage and dots are about 40% of it with the enemy density on the higher difficulties but it dies so fucking fast.
Uzi build. There are two extra points, I'd take some combination of focused resolve, long lasting, sticky hands, burst of energy, or maxed out chems. It's also possible to juice up the stimm a bit more. The rending from the stimm plus the rending from pick your targets lets you kill crushers but it's not good at it. The shivs or the mk3 combat blade with uncanny probably have to come out for dealing with crushers. Other than that, it's hose everything with no survivors. This build can be set up to use regained posture and the infantry autogun with stripped down where you can do a budget veteran and sprint with infinite stamina through gunners but you already can do that with desperado so eh it's a thing I guess.
I cannot make the fucking crate work. I was also wrong about something: of course dropping the crate uses the stimm, it needs it for the effect. Using the crate without the stimm up only purges corruption and makes you immune to gas. This both devalues practiced deployment as you want to use the crate with a fat stimm and also makes chemical dependency entirely unusable on crate builds as dropping the crate does not count as stimming yourself.
