Deep Rock Galactic: Driller’s Secondary Guide (Season 3 Updated)

The Subata 120 is the first secondary for the driller.

Unlike the other secondaries who focus on some utility and crowd control, this gun focuses on single target/burst damage. This is something that the driller is usually lacking, as all primaries are crowd control weapons.

This makes it a good tech choice, the gun offers different solutions compared to the others.

During season 3 this weapon receives a major buff that solves the issues it used to have before the season, and it can rightfully claim it’s place as an equal to the other driller secondaries.

I count this build as a “good baseline”. This has enough damage, enough ammo, enough accuracy, and enough sustain. This should work for all the overclocks as well.

Modifications:

This is one of those weapons where our mod choices will mostly be determined by how we use it. The aforementioned base build offers enough damage, good accuracy while going for sustained fire, and plenty of ammo to use. While the subata loves to hit weak points, that build can also get away with not hitting them every time.

The only slot I’ll specifically mention is t5. This choice depends on if we plan on shooting bugs are on fire or not, because if we do 1 is significantly better than 2 (+50% damage, +7.5 heat damage for the base build vs +2 corrosive), but if we don’t then it does nothing.

I call it a “true sidearm” because we can basically mold it to what we want/need. It is quite difficult to completely break this weapon, possibly the most major one would be to pick volatile bullets then not use the crspr for the fire. So we can feel safe with this in our holster.

I’ll start with auto fire, as at least with how I use the gun this one is peculiar.

The build I treat as a “base”, was actually an auto fire build. Because, this is the overclock where it is crucial to have a larger mag and more ammo due to the faster rate of fire, and we need the recoil compensator because it has a lot of recoil. This specific build turns the gun into an actual pocket smg.

This is also why I nickname the Subata the “Glock”, as this is now the infamous (and in some countries like the US, illegal) Glock 18, so we can round out our already extensive war crime records.

Homebrew is a nice clean overclock for the weapon. I’m not exactly certain how it interacts with the corrosive damage, but the “baseline” build is able to one shot swarmers on a lowroll.
We can pick what we want in t1-3, the t4 and 5 mods are the ones that make it function.

Any mod/overclock with randomized damage has the same problem. IF the low roll means that we no longer hit breakpoints (in this case the 15 damage we need to oneshot swarmers) then the gun becomes annoying to use. This is what we need to watch out for.

Chain hit is a strange tech choice here. It is a clean upgrade if we just use a basic build, but we can build for it as well. Here we lean into accuracy and weak point damage because that is what the overclock wants us to do. We can still pick damage in t4 if we feel like it, that will make the ricochet shots better.

This kind of overclock is always strange, the one on the bulldog is not bad, but there are better options. Here it’s a somewhat reasonable pick, as the gun already likes hitting weak spots and that is what this overclock wants us to do.

Oversized magazine says that it is not a clean oc, but I beg to differ. The only thing we need to do is pick faster reload in t1 and we mitigated the only downside it has, and we’re still a tiny bit faster to reload than the base gun.

Tranquilizer rounds gives us the second longest stun in the game. We can build it all sorts of ways, but if we pick this then we should stun. t4 and 5 gives us enough damage to function, so we can go all out on ammo.
We should pick t1 2 if we want to compensate for the lower mag size the overclock gives us.

I personally recommend it with a sludge pump, as we can stun targets inside the goo. Now they can peacefully soak in the acid.

Explosive reload is kind of the same beast. The damage mods do not affect the explosions, so we can just go all out on ammo, and accuracy if we wish. t1 and t3 are freebies, in t2 only ammo makes sense. t4 and 5 just gives us the usual baseline so we don’t really need to fully rely on the reload.

Subata is a secondary, so we should keep our primary in mind when we build it. We can always just use the subata as a “standalone gun” if we want that.

The combo we have is the volatile bullets mod that drastically increase our damage. If we only shoot burning bugs, we can sacrifice the damage mods for other features.

t4 1 is less useful as it is a conditional +60% while the +3 damage has a guaranteed +50% heat if we just hit the target. This makes the weapon shred targets even faster than normal.

I honestly don’t recommend it. It’s not completely awful, it can break frozen targets but we lose the weakpoint damage bonus. This is important, as that bonus is the thing that gives Subata the best time to kill among all the driller secondaries.
So can work, but you have better options, for example the EPC is a better companion here.

There is no implicit interaction between the pump and the Subata. But, there is a use case where the this pistol still shines.

Because the pump primarily deals DOT, we can use the direct damage to complement it. Normally we can struggle killing targets close to us, as the time to kill on the pump is low. This gun can quickly pick off everything that needs to die like yesterday, not in the next few seconds. No other driller secondary can do this, the EPC can somewhat emulate it but it won’t be this quick.

We can somewhat emulate this with axes, but the subata has more ammo and is generally more efficient for this job.

This is the utility that can make it an excellent choice for this primary.

Because it is one of the older weapons in this game, it is worth mentioning the change that made this gun be in it’s rightful place.

Before season 3, t5 2 used to be called “mactera poison.” It gave 1.2% damage against mactera enemies.

For the gun’s original intended role (pick off whatever the flamethrower struggled against, flying enemies) this was decent. But over time this became a “brick” choice. You picked it if you did not have fire in your kit, as that would have been an even worse pick.

The bonus corrosive damage sounds like an odd choice, until we check the bestiary.

All mactera enemies are weak to corrosion except grabbers. This means that this mod still serves the same purpose, but now it is also useful against everything else.