There is a guide on Steam and a topic on reddit which include the best loadouts for all the mercs (just google “dirty bomb best loadouts” and these will be the top 2 finds). Those are mostly accurate and overlap each other, but I think they’re wrong when it comes to Arty.
I’ll start by saying that objectively the “BR81 Aggressive Rifleman” seems to be the best Arty loadout overall. It has three useful perks (drilled, chopper, explodydendron), but unfortunately features the BR-16. If burst rifles are your thing, by all means go for it.
However, I can’t really convince myself to use burst rifles, nor am I really efficient with them. I do better when using dreiss, so I’m left with 3 options:
D72 Classic Rifleman (fail safe, quick draw, extra supplies)
D43 Revised Rifleman (unshakeable, spares, fail safe)
D83 Original Rifleman (chopper, unshakeable, extra ammo)
Both guides suggest D72 and one of them claims that the “extra supplies” affects the artillery strike cooldown. I have checked it personally and at the moment of this writing, the augment affects ONLY the ammo cooldown. To be honest I’m not sure what justifies the existence of two augments which do roughly the same thing (“extra supplies” and “extra ammo”). Before the recent patch, the “extra supplies” augment was broken altogether and didn’t affect any Arty ability. It has been fixed now, but affects only ammo. I doubt that’s a bug since the devs have obviously put their attention to fixing the augment, but decided it shouldn’t include artillery strikes in its effect.
So what does the “extra supplies” do actually? It reduces the ammo cooldown from 8 seconds to a whooping 6,4 seconds. Hardly a game changer if you ask me - has anyone ever had a problem with lacking ammo packs to distribute? A useless perk. As is “fail safe” (who the hell calls in an artillery strike next to oneself?)
The only useful perk of D72 is the “quick draw”. It allows to pull out the artillery marker faster so it contributes to reducing the start-up. However, one can simply prepare beforehand and choose the marker when still behind a corner (by pressing “4” by default) and call in the strike immediately after coming out of the hiding. Naturally, sometimes one has to jump into battle and has to quickly switch between weapons. Even then, the quick draw is not really neccessary, as you can use your experience and utilize the general chaos of two teams fighting to gain that extra split second (because that’s what quick draw gives you - a split second) and call in the strike… and if you rush into combat without your team as an Arty, you’re doing it wrong!
That’s why I think that D72 is actually the WORST of the dreiss loadouts!
D43 is a bit better - it also features two poor augments. “Fail safe”, which I’ve already written about and “spares”, which allows an extra clip. The rate of fire of dreiss is so low that I doubt one will ever find themselves in a situation where they quickly need an extra clip. They will have plenty of time to replenish the ammo long before it’s needed by simply tossing it to themselves.
The “unshakeable” augment is very good, much better than the “quick draw” in my opinon. It reduces the explosion damage by 20%. I’m not sure about the specific damage figures, but that means that a grenade toss which would otherwise deal 100 damage will deal only 80. That’s quite a lot and very often means a difference between dying or not. Since explosives are quite abundant in Dirty Bomb (Nader nades, Fragger nades, mines, various air strikes etc.) the augment is very useful. Even more with the late popularity of Fletchers’ sticky bomb spamming.
And thus we come to what I consider the best Arty loadout with dreiss - the D83. “Extra ammo” is naturally useless for the same reason as “extra supplies”. However, it also features the great “unshakeable” augment AND another useful augment, namely “chopper”. Dreiss does poorly in close combat so very often it’s a good idea to just rush in and score a melee hit. The loadout gives the user the cricket bat, which is a high damage melee weapon of itself. Coupled with the “chopper” it increases Arty’s combat effectiveness in close range - something he really needs with such weak primary weapons.
So to sum up - I think the “best loadout guides” should actually include D83 as the “dreiss loadout of choice” for Arty. The “extra supplies” of D72 doesn’t boost artillery strikes and I doubt it’s a bug this time. Obviously, if it worked with artillery strikes it would be the superior loadout, but for the time being D83 is a lot better.
I haven’t discussed the secondary weapons included with the loadouts, but I seriously doubt they make enough of a difference to justify choosing a loadout with inferior augments.
So what do you think?