So from my experience the dnipro assault rifle is your best friend starting out and you can usually find one near those cooling tower rooftops or grab it from merchants around yaniv station. Its really solid with that 5.56mm ammo which youll find pretty much everywhere, and it tears through those armored mutants like nobody's business.

For your backup weapon definitely grab a saiga D-12 shotgun, trust me on this one. Those bloodsuckers and pseudogiants love to get up close and personal, and having a semi-auto shotgun with ap slugs will save your life more times than you can count. Maybe interesting - the mechanics in garbage can hook you up with some sweet magazine extensions that make it even better.

Something cool I learned about artifacts - if you pair a thunderberry with lead containers, you basically never run out of sprint which is super handy. Throw in a weird nut for those annoying bleeding effects and a weird ball if youre doing a lot of peek shooting. The damage reduction really helps you survive those early firefights.

If youre more into the sneaky approach, swap that dnipro for a silenced buket s-2 smg and maybe grab skifs pistol since it never needs repairs. Just keep in mind that once you start getting into exoskeleton territory, youll probably want to switch things up a bit. The gauss rifle becomes pretty tempting especially with diamond armor, but you lose some flexibility with your artifacts.