Yo, it's Namatokunsi here and that's another project. In this guide I'll cover everything I know about anarchist and how to play it, starting from basis and analyzing every mechanic, every skill setup and so on.

I started with the idea to make this guide in italian, but as there was not an english version on steam, here I am doing that. So now you know where my bad english comes from.

Also note that it'll cover just the loud aspects. Anarchist can also be used in stealth to transport bags faster thanks to its high armor value and transporter aced, but considering how much is used and how easy stealth missions are in normal circumstances, I see no need to go deeper than this here.

Anarchist is an armor perk deck with the unique propriety to transform your health into armor, giving you an insane pool of armor. But it doesn't stop here. Anarchist is also an armor gating perk deck, meaning that with its abilities you can get little quantities of armor. That said, let's start with the analysis!

• Blitzkrieg Bop
  So, this card gives you different abilities:
  
  
  1. Passive armor regen: With this ability, your armor regen cooldown depends on the armor you're wearing starting from 2s for the suit up to 10s for the ICTV. The exact cooldowns are 2/3/4/5/6/7/10.(PLEASE USE THE SUIT)
     
     However, you're not going to regen your whole armor, but only a tiny bit at a time.
     
     Also you can ignore completely armor suppression, a mechanic that doesn't let your armor regen if there's an enemy targetting you. Your armor will always regen after the cooldown timer no matter what.
     
     
  2. 2 Sec godmode: Here it is, an op ability. if your armor gets destroyed, you have a 2 second godmode and every shot at you will be ignored. This ability has a 15s cooldown, so using a custom HUD with anarchist is highly reccomended (true chads use vanilla one tho).
     
     Remember that your godmode is activated after the damage shot is applied, which means that a sniper can oneshot you if the sniper is the first one to shoot. On the other hand, if the shot that activates the 2 sec godmode comes from any other type of enemy, you'll be invulnerable to snipers for 2 sec.
• Straight edge/Death or Glory/Rise above
  
  So, I'll put them all together because they're all the same. What they does is just transforming half your health into armor, leaving you with 230*0.5=115 health and 230*0.5*1.2+20=158 base armor. Remember that every health boost is counted, and they'll increase your armor too! So a crew chief in the party, a bot boost or anything else gives you more armor.
  
  
• Lust for life
  
  This is one way to armor gate. everytime you deal damage you get 30 armor and it has a 1.5s cooldown. The damage outputs that works with this skill are: trip mines, throwables, fire, poison, fire dot, flashes, vehicles and personal attacks.

So, by looking at the perk deck we can say that anarchist is an armor gating deck with 2 gating abilities:

• A passive armor gating every 2s from Blitzkrieg Bop
  
• An active armor gating every 1.5s from lust for life
  
• (An active armor gating every 2s from bullseye)

We're gonna ignore bullseye for now, but it's a third armor gating ability you can use so don't forget about that.

Armor gating does not give you a lot of armor, but even a little amount of armor can save us from a Zeal shot. So the plan is:

1. armor goes down;
   
2. We use one of our ability to get a bit of armor;
   
3. armor goes down;
   
4. We use another ability to get a bit of armor;
   
5. armor goes down;
   
6. ...

But what if 2 enemies shot you at the same time?

Well, here comes Grace, a really important mechanic of this game. Grace is a invulnerability which activates every time you take damage (it has no cooldown, it's different from 2 sec godmode) and it lasts for 0.35s. The real problem with grace is that this is not a godmode but only an invulnerability that works with damages lower than the previous one.

To make an example, let's take 2 enemies with different damage, 1 Heavy Zeal (225 damage) and 1 Light Zeal (67 damage). If the Heavy breaks your armor, you are invulnerable for 0.35s to any damage equal or lower than 225, so you ignore the Light damage. But if the roles are inverted, your armor breaks with a 67 damage, so your invulnerability only works with damages equal or lower than that, so the Heavy will kill you with his 225 damage shot.

Here are some examples:

Why is grace so important with anarchist? well, anarchist works by getting chunks of armor and letting enemies destroy those. everytime it happens you're left only with your little health and you're pretty vulnerable.

So, let's redo our scheme, adding grace this time:

1. armor goes down;
   
2. 0.35s Grace;
   
3. We use one of our ability to get a bit of armor;
   
4. armor goes down;
   
5. 0.35s Grace;
   
6. ...

So, by now I told you the reason why anarchist is good. But what about the difficulty and the cons?

• Separate different armor gating
  
  Everytime we use an armor gating ability, it goes in cooldown. So it's really important to make sure that we use one at the time to maximize the times our armor can get shot. It means separate a passive armor gating (HUDs are really helpful again) from an active armor gating. Which is hard by itself. But if we want to make things even more complicated, here it goes bullseye. Bullseye only works with a headshot and it has 2s cooldown. Everytime we hit an enemy on the head, we activate both Lust for life and Bullseye at the same time, losing a potential armor gate.
  
  So, is Bullseye actually useless as an armor gate? Well, there're different opinions in the community, I think bullseye can only be used consistently as an armor gate with body expertise. With that, we can hit enemies at body and switch to the head the time we need that, activating bullseye and getting some armor. It's not easy and you need practice, but it works pretty well. Other than that, yeah, it's useless in its basic version.
  
  
  
  
• Little timings to work with
  
  Self-explainatory ig. Getting all those armor gatings at the right timing, consistently is impossible for a human. At this point I'd like to insert some probability factors in the guide, but I'll go easy with that as I can't say I have the knowledge to do so.
  
  So, why probability? Well, because when something is not consistent (really close to 100%), here comes the probability. Note that it's a probability coming from human error and not from the perk deck itself, as anarchist is purely mechanic and not probabilistic. If we could give anarchist to a machine, he'd play perfectly and consistently, but I don't think a Laplace Demon [en.wikipedia.org]has been born yet...

So, if we've a high probability to fail with armor gating and getting downed, how can we play anarchist? Well, it's pretty simple. Nobody wants you to get in the open, evalutate perfectly every cooldown and survive to swarm of enemies. You can simply play more defensive, using an armor gate only if you need. The more you want to be aggressive / making plays, the more skill you need to do so. With anarchist you can be really aggressive, but you need an insane amount of skill so it's not the way you get started playing the deck.

Another thing is being aware of grace. It doesn't sound right and sometimes grace periods are inevitable, but a lot of the time with anarchist they're caused by you picking the angle knowing that there will be 2 different enemies pointing at you,which is dumb to be honest. Again, being more careful can prevent you a down.

So, anarchist hasn't got a skillcap at all, and everyone can get better and better indefinitely by playing it (it's also the reason I love it). At the same time, I talked about how it really should be played in a theorethical way, but using anarchist is really easy even for someone new to the game.

So, which weapons is the best for anarchist? To answer that, we need to take a look at the skills first.

You don't really need any skill to play anarchist, you can just take the suit and start shooting. Because of that, anarchist has an insane amount of points that can be spent elsewhere. A lot of the unusual builds I created use anarchist because of this propriety. Despite that, there're still a lot of skills which are really helpful while playing anarchist.

• Berserker
  
  The first skill I'd like to talk about is berserker. As you can already tell, with anarchist you can't tank a zeal shot with your health, making the armor the only useful element in your playthrough. That's why Berserker is a must-have in an anarchist build.
  
  You can use berserker with frenzy or simply lowering your health at the start of the heist and when you heal up. Just remember those values:
  
  • Frenzy: 40% damage boost;
    
  • After getting downed: 80% damage boost;
    
  • Zerking: x% damage boost, up to 100%;
  
  I'll leave a couple of basic zerking guides here. remember that if you're in doubt, you can just test it yourself and find the best setup for you to zerk properly! If you have a cc in the party tho, all the armor and health boosts coming from that are gonna ruin your setups for sure. I reccomend to watch this video for better understanding of what to do when you're in a situation like that.
  
  
  
  Also if you have a standard 2 shot setup with a joker and you haven't any method to zerk, there's a cool but risky setup to zerk with enemies. Just get shot once by a light Zeal before getting a joker, then take a convert and get shot again by a light Zeal. You should end up with 95% zerk (pretty variable) but you can do it in any map with any equipment and with every c.ca 69 dmg enemy you can find (Shields, light swat, ...). Pretty useful in some cases ngl!
  
  Math behind it:
  get shot once: 115 health -->46 health
  Take a joker: 46 health --> 72 health
  get shot once more: 72 health --> 4 health
  
  
• Health and armor boosts && Frenzy
  
  I'll dedicate an entire section to certain setups and stuff like that, I'll just mention some skills here.
  Because of Rise Above, both boosting your health and armor can give you more armor. The most useful skills in doing so are:
  
  • Partners in Crime: +30% health --> 184 health;
    
  • Iron man: +30% armor -> 205 armor;
    
  • Both combined: 313 armor;
  Also Frenzy can give you 10% and 25% damage reduction, which is a big help as enemies shots will deal 203 and 169 damage respectively. Remember those skills, as we'll use them a lot in the setup section.

I'd like to be a bit more precise about converts. For anarchist, converts are really important for many reasons. First of all, Partners in Crime. Secondly, they can take the heat off of you, which is really helpful when you're a killing machine. Thirdly, and probably the most weird, they're the perfect meatbag to shoot when you want to regen armor. Think about it, they're always following you, they're kinda immortal and most of the time they're sitting still near you. It's really easy to leave a headshot to them, getting both bullseye aced and Lust for Life. So when you need an armor gate, remember that there will be your converts too!


Talking about useful skills for anarchist, let's see which skills are useless with this perk deck:

• Die hard
  
  Generally this is a great skill. The only problem with anarchist? It ♥♥♥♥♥ up your grace period as it gives you a damage reduction. So, while interacting an enemy can break your armor, but with a shot that's not 225 damage. After that, if you try to stop the interaction and shoot him he's gonna deal a full 225 dmg, so grace is not gonna activate at all. That's what happens:
  
  
  
  
• Armor regen skills
  
  Remember that every armor regen skill is useless with anarchist! The perk deck locks the armor regen at 2s with suit and no skill is gonna change that value.
  But thanks to ovk, all the skills related to armor breaking, like Dire need basic and second wind basic, are disabled.
  
  The only exception is Dire need aced. in fact, the basic version is not really disabled, but it lasts a single frame (1/60s). That's why it's useless. The aced version works perfectly tho, and it becomes
  the equivalent of "for 6 seconds the Dire need effect persists".

Talking about weapons, there's no real preferred class here. Because of the high skill points pool that anarchist has, you'll have no problem in making a build for every weapon. The only thing I can say is that you have to take into account berserker, so even low dmg weapons are a good choice. Apart from that, any LMG, SMG, Rifle, Sniper (no 500 damage ones), pistol and pump can be used.

Another really cool thing about berserker is that you can obtain some cool breakpoints. because of that, berserker really shines with weapons like 168 dmg snipers, DMRs, 100 dmg rifles, pumps...

I need to talk a little about fire. In fact, using fire weapons is really effective with anarchist as fire deals a bit amount of damage periodically, meaning that Lust for Life will activate continiously. So also using a brothers grimm with fire rounds is a pretty effective way to play anarchist, without even counting that the weapon is stupidly strong by itself.

Here's a little example about both armor gating and how effective it can be with fire:

There're really cool setups with anarchist. In fact, if you boost your health and armor good enough, you can achieve some tankiness. Let's start saying that you should always use one of those setups or create a new one. Nevertheless, you always want to have a 2 shot setup.

• 2 shot setup (converts)[pd2builder.netlify.app]
  
  Probably the easiest setup of all those. with partners in crime you can easily obtain 230*0.8*1.2+20=241 armor pool, which is enough to tank a 225 dmg Zeal shot. To be fair, this is even enough to tank a 240 dmg sniper shot. This is indeed the most used setup as it's really cheap of points and really effective.
  
  
• 2 shot setup (no converts)[pd2builder.netlify.app]
  
  You can also ignore completely partners in crime and go for Iron Basic + Frenzy basic. With that you can get 205 armor, which is enough to tank a 203 dmg shot (remember, you have 10% dmg red because of frenzy).
  
  Obviously tho this is not enough to tank a sniper shot. If you want that to happen you need frenzy aced.

From now on, it's highly reccomended to use bullseye aced. this is because you're not playing anarchist for a little armor gating anymore, but for a bigger one (300+ armor is a lot). In order to fullfill your armor pool, Lust for life is not enough. That's why the anarchist gameplay kinda change, if your obj was to obtain small chunk of armor and let enemies break them, now it's to full your armor bar and to make sure that your armor is always up.

• 3 shot setup (sort of)[pd2builder.netlify.app]
  
  Another cool setup (and also my favourite) is the 3 shot setup. With Partners in crime + Iron man + Frenzy aced you can achieve a 3 shot setup. In fact, you get (230*0.8*1.2+20)*1.3=313 armor. This is not really enough to tank 3 hits (168 dmg each), but if you regen your armor meanwhile you'll get 30 more armor (because of lust for life) and you'll tank one more shot. Another alternative is to have a cc in the team, but it's not that common sadly.
  
  
• LBV 3-shot setup[pd2builder.netlify.app]
  
  With anarchist you should only use suit, but if you are a bit expert and you want to jump into the world of armor gating, you should try something new. Here it is something new. With bigger armors, you can tank a lot of shots and then regain all the armor from armor gating. I'll link my LBV setup((230*0.8*1.2+50)*1.3=352), which gives you a full 3 shot setup. Getting bigger armors (other than ICTV) without cc is useless, as you'd always end up with a 3 shot setup anyway.
  
  
• ICTV 4-shot setup[pd2builder.netlify.app]
  
  This is actually pretty interesting. With ICTV you have a 10s armor regen, but you can achieve a solid (230*0.8*1.2+170)*1.3=508 armor, which is just enough to reach the 4 shot breakpoint (507 armor).
  Gameplay is really different and using bullseye properly is really important with this situation, but you can literally tank everything.
  
  Getting past the 4 shot setup is impossible in normal condition,with cc you can reach the max armor value of 654, which is still not enough...
  
  
  Please don't use other armors if you don't know what you're doing. They're worse than suit in every way, you should use them only just for fun.

Talking about builds, I'll link a couple of build guides. You can find a lot of anarchist builds in those, as well as some useful tips. Thanks to every creator ofc, they spent time to make all of them.
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2579063691
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2141942312
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1939955661
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2125901380
Also I'll link my build guide. The only issue with that? It's in italian. But no problem, as there're all the pd2 builder links you'll need!
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2464831054

Remember that there will be some useful example at the end of the guide regarding all those setups, as well as in those linked guides!

Anarchist is extremely powerful in killing both for the boosts coming from berserker and the little timings it works with, which makes the player spend less time into cover. Moreover, its dependance from dealing damage makes it perfect for risky plays with a lot of killing.

This is anarchist on paper, a solid and aggressive perk deck. But can we play like that consistently? As we said a lot of times at this point, the answer is partially yes, but the more risky the play is the more skill you need to pull it off.

This comes with an idea in mind: every perk deck in this game can still be played in a more passive way than intended. This is clear with Muscle and some others, but maybe harder to imagine for anarchist. But staying into cover while waiting for the 2 sec, trying to get a lot of armor before some plays is a good way to play it more defensively. Also this doesn't mean you can't have a good dmg output, as in this game is really easy to keep up with kills while peeking from corners.

So, from a practical point of view, how can you play anarchist? Let's start with some fundamentals:

• Cover
  
  As we're talking about the DS world, cover is your best friend. It has some useful roles while playing anarchist: you can use it to wait for your 2s godmode, wait for the passive regen of the armor (every 2s) or shooting to an enemy for the active regen, taking a small break from killing enemies, using it for regaining a little armor pool for some other plays. But most importantly, you can use it as a support for killing as you do with every perk deck. As I've simplified a bit some concepts, here it is a video if you wanna know more about cover in general:
  
  
  
  
• 3 armor gatings
  
  Remember also that in the game you can have 3 armor gatings. So be sure not to run in the open pretending to armor gate continiously for 10 times or more. That aint gonna happen. Instead, if you want to make a risky play, like clearing a group of enemy pointing at you or doing an obj, remember that you have 3 armor gating at maximum, nothing more. If you want to know how much time it is, considering the fact that ppl will shoot you after 0.35s (grace, bless god if it doesn't work btw) you'll get 4 grace periods, so 1.4 s. To achieve that tho you should be really skillful and activate every gating distinctively (bullseye too), so maybe a 1s survivability is more realistic. This is a very optimistic POV as a lot of times enemies will be a different type (which makes grace a pain in the ass), you'll also have to wait for 2s passive armor regen and time it right. Anyway, when you want to make a play like that, be sure to kill enemies ASAP. Your obj in those plays is to clear the area first, you can't do anything else.
  
  For Example, this is a really risky but viable play:
  
  
  
  
• Preventing Grace downs
  
  Talking about grace deaths, I know a lot of times it's inevitable. If you make space and move to another cover and you get graced by 200m, you couldn't predict that. Because of this, everytime you make a play you want to think about the worst-case scenario and how to survive that. This means just playing a bit more carefully when possible and just trust your luck when it's not (objectives, fade ending etc... there are a lot of situations where you don't have time to be defensive).
  But if we talk about you, overpeeking from a corner, then you're doing it wrong. Peeks have to last the least amount of time and you always want to have only one enemy in the screen (done by peeking at steps, and everytime you meet an enemy you kill him before continue). This is the way you can prevent a lot of downs without losing performance in game.
  A good way to practice that is playing with Full Speed Swarm[pd2mods.z77.fr] (FSS), a mod which makes AI way more fast to react. With FSS enemies have all the same ridicolous speed so they tend to grace way more than normal. If in this situation you can resist them, then you'll have no problems in the vanilla game!
  
  Recently Yokai made a cool in-game example while talking about targeting, so I'll leave it right here (Timestamp =16:21):
  
• 2 s godmode
  
  Talking about running in the open, we need to talk about 2 s godmode. That's your best friend while playing anarchist, but also your worst enemy. 2s makes the life easier, makes the perk deck way more flexible and it let you do obj, cross the street, kill some group of enemies, do converts, take ammo and make those risky plays way easier. What's the deal, then? 2s godmode has a 15s cooldown, so be sure to wait for them and be more defensive when you're waiting for it. But more importantly, it activates the first time your armor breaks, which means if you want to cross the street and an enemy shoot you from behind, you'll lose your 2s (as you'll want to kill the enemy from behind), so you'll be waiting 15 more seconds to cross that street. All because of ONE ENEMY. Mantaining your 2s and using it when you want is no easy task, but playing defensively in those occasions will be enough most of the times.
  
  
• Objectives
  
  Objectives are pretty important while playing Death sentence, but anarchist doesn't give us that many skills to use for them. Normally, as you have high dps due to berserker, you let others do obj while you clear the area and cover them. But as this game is not that much co-op most of the time (sadly), you need to be ready to put your life on the line doing obj. My best suggestion here is to use your 2s godmode and at the same time be sure to have cleared the area well enough. Also remember it's better for you to stop the interaction if an enemy turn the corner, as you are really squishy if you can't deal damage.
  
  
• Counters
  
  So, who're gonna be the anarchist counters? Well, first of all, snipers. They can one shot you destroying both your armor and health. Dealing with those is really hard, as if you don't know the spawn locations you can spot them only when their red laser is pointing at you. Because of that, knowing snipers locations is really important while playing anarchist.
  
  some others counters are enemies with high rate of fire, like LMG dozers or Black dozers. Be careful and don't engage them if you don't have 2s godmode or a cover to use.

Well then, time for us to find some examples. I'll link some of them here, but every youtuber you find listed here is a great DSOD player who has a lot of examples in his channel, so be sure to check that too!

Talking about setups, here there are some other examples:

So, here you are at the end of the guide. I hope all of this informations will be useful to a lot of people, I tried my best to make this guide good looking and I think I did a decent job at least.

I'm really sorry if there're a lot of videos in italian, but I normally make content for my community as there's no one who really does that properly imo... On the other side, in the international scene there're ppl way better and more skilled than me, so check them asap.

Tell me everything. I'd like to get any feedback to get better at making guides as well as improving my already existing ones. Rn I'm trying new things out, so it's the best moment for you to tell me what's wrong and what's good.

Really huge thanks to everyone for the examples. Also huge thanks to my contributors, Vlad and Pink, for checking out my guide. Also Pink checked all the text as there were a lot of mistakes. Apart from that, I hope you a great day, and keep those elmets flying!