Hitting at least 3 enemies with an attack, restores 12-15% toughness.
Hitting at least 3 enemies with an attack, increases your cleave by 140-200% for 2 seconds.
Pros
Cons
This build aims at doing two things. Sawing through hordes and killing specials/elites as quickly as possible.It is quite effective at it, although it has a weakness when it comes to ranged gunners (regular Renegade Guardsmen). You can work around this weakness by strategical positioning and flanking enemies or by singling them out with the bolter. But in the end the best thing to have is a Veteran Sharpshooter who knows that regular Lasgun enemies are some of the most deadly things in higher difficulties.
I've leveled my Zealot to 30 using this guide and I'm having a lot of fun with him so far.
So how does this work?
Hordes/Melee:
We use the Tigrus Mk II Heavy Eviscerator two-handed chainsword. It has a high amoiunt of damage, especially against unarmoured targets, and it works extremely well against hordes due to it's good cleave stats.
I'm using the following attack pattern for maximum cleave:
Heavy Attack > Light Attack > Light Attack > Push > Repeat
Alternating between Heavy and Light lets you cleave from right to left, but you have a small window of vulnerability between the Light and the follow-up Heavy Attack.
How to avoid damage:
There are several different possibilites to avoid damage. The first one is blocking, of which I'm not a huge fan of, at least not against hordes. It uses a fair bit of stamina depending on the incoming attack, but blocks all incoming damage until stamina is depleted. Blocking has it's place against very tough single target enemies or high damage high priority melee targets like Ragers.
The second one is dodging, and this is where the “Mobility†stat of the Eviscerator comes into play. Mobility determines the distance you move when you actively dodge. The higher the bar, the further you move. The funny thing is: Dodging doesn't interrupt your attacks. You're free to move around and swing that chainsword like a madman.
The third and often forgotten part is stagger. This is where our level 10 feat is highly valuable. A “Stagger†(Doom: Eternal players might know this as “Falterâ€) occurs when an enemy is dealt a certain amount of damage. The enemy is then put in a hit recovery animation and cannot retaliate until recovered. Stopping power on ranged weapons improves stagger, as does our “Punishment†feat. Impact equals stagger power, so at five stacks we're sitting at 150% extra stagger power which locks down hordes very effectively on Malice onward.
Elites/Specials/Ranged:
For our ranged slot we employ the Emperor's wrath using the Locke Mk IIb Spearheard Boltgun. The bolter is an interesting weapon with a pretty small magazine of 15 rounds and a comparably small ammo reserve of 80 rounds. It makes up for this with it's sheer stopping power and raw damage.
Everything apart the biggest, carapace armoured enemies gets blown to gibs with a two, three shot burst, if not less.
The “Shattering Impact†blessing greatly reduces the effect of armour on our enemies, so the bolter becomes even more effective against flak and carapace armoured targets. It also has considerable stopping and staggering power. You can for example use it on a Bulwark to send it into stagger state and temporarily remove it's frontal blocking ability. You're then easily able to finish it off with 3-4 well placed bolter rounds.
