The Way of the Blade
 Zealot Build - Warhammer 40k: Darktide 

Specifically built for Auric Maelstrom. You won't get top DPS even in Hi-Intensity Shock troop with this build because this one absolutely chews up melee units and I mean within seconds, using a pretty obscene combination of talents to make it crit like a blood-knife build but do the one thing that knife builds never do, protect team from horde.

+1 wound curio because Martyrdom, +health and +toughness curios so we're tough as a regular non-martyrdom player and we're not going to miss 8% damage and attack speed more than that

DEVILS CLAW mk IV

The Devils Claw IV is just an awesome weapon, it's so fun to play once you get into it's groove and it's heavy attack combo truly feels like that of a swordsman. Your main DPS combo is the basic LA + HA + repeat back and forth at the unprotected heads of your enemies, but the build really clicks on when you Dash forward and spam left-click at the kind of dense horde that only Maelstrom makes. Dashing and spamming left click at meat enemies will get that kill counter racking up 30+ just during the 8 seconds of your dash buffs.


Your first attack on a dash is a guaranteed crit, igniting the combo chain, so now in addition to dashing your skill essentially transforms into an entirely new ability, where you swing your sword so fast that all the meat dies so fast that none of their mechanics can reach past your forcefield of death, kinda like whirlwind, if you spin around then it becomes actual bladestorm. It's common to see trappers, dogs, ragers, and random other elites you never even saw appear in the kill-counter because literally everything in range will die in 1 second. Dogs will jump at you and die in the air without you even seeing it, so long as they're not behind you.

Here's the math for huge nerds like me:

Even a lowly 59% Cleave Targets Devils Claw like mine has a 4.77 target damage distribution, so your first 4+ targets begin to bleed from the Scourge proc, then you get +30% crit for 3 seconds and repeat

EDIT : Previously I thought the light attacks were stunlocking the ragers, however I 've learned that actually it just kills them so fast that they ragdoll in place like they were staggered.

-Dash gives you +20% attack speed, 
-Maximum mk IV finesse gives you plus another +11.76%, 
- plus +10% Faithful Frenzy talent

So even without any Martyrdom wound loss we're over 40% attack speed on an already very fast weapon, so you reach those max stacks for all your on-hit talents and blessings in the first second. So that enables from your chained-hits talents at max stacks :

+20% crit chance from Shred Blessing
+20% damage Sustained Assault talent
+25% damage from Disdain talent
+30% Impact strength and Uninterruptible from Punishment talent

And each of those light attacks on a weakspot or a critical are 180 on unarmored, which includes those little metal boys with their bald-ass head sitting on top of a flak suit, those guys get hit for 180 on the head since it's both unarmored and their weakspot, per hit, and your cleave is going nuts too, I'm not sure if cleave directly multiplies the value from Cleave Targets or not but if so that would mean you're bringing 200% (Savage Strikes)  of 4.7 = 9.4 targets, that's on-par with a Power Sword Mk VI heavy attack cleave AND you're doing it with the extreme mobility of the Devils claw, I don't feel much slower than a Knife-Zealot while doing any of this either. My other main uses the Power Sword VI and it's a close race but I think the devils claw is even faster at clearing horde and I'm not talking about in-theory.

On top of all that math, that's just assuming you just sit there and spam left click, the build only performs stronger the more fancy head-shots you can pull off with the mk IV's uniquely strong heavy attacks

We took Duellist giving us +50% weakspot and critical damage from a successful dodge, which you're doing if you're even fighting one guy, so that's happening here as well

Put it all together and you can pull off some pretty heavy damage combos, dash-in, slice and dice up the stacks, and then power up the strikedown heavy attack onto the bosses head, could probably pull off 2 or 3 in the 8 seconds of your dash-buff. Each heavy attack on Unyielding and Monstrosities clocks in base-line at 590 damage, and I don't think that's including any of the other modifiers above. I don't know how their math shakes out precisely, but I'm seeing numbers topping out at 3k+ single target damage being recorded on my scoreboard, and usually both top boss damage and top horde damage easily go to me, so I do think there's some huge numbers coming out of this tiny sword, the quintessential samurai wuxia experience

GUN
I rarely even shoot the bolter, and when I do I just hipfire unload the clip at all the crushers and bulwarks until everything is nice and meaty again, then back to sword. That's what the bolters here for, because I couldn't choose the Devils Claw mk IV twice, the bolter is for when there's a sniper, or theres something ruining the meat, otherwise I'm studying the blade

It's just a blast looking at the scoreboard and seeing 95% of your damage was all melee, and not only that but this builds numbers are usually the highest on the board, unless there's like a lightning psyker but we all know they're just stealing your kills anyway, every single one of them, ugh, lightning psykers, anyway, they're definitely not reading this, too busy dying to trash mobs without bothering to block or block-push even a single time, I think that's a shame.

NOT STUB REVOLVER
Edit: I learned that the stub revolver grants passive crit chance on melee weapon, and is faster to pull out, and kills single crushers faster and easier, and yet I still didn't feel like I was serving the Emperor whilst shooting the stub. I played a match with it, possibly the best kind of match, with 2 other stub revolver mains who were ultra competitive for kills the whole time, but I still out-damaged them overall because it's all just swinging-sword and solving crushers and snipers anyway to me. Something about the breakneck speed of the revolver also irked me, not denying at all that it's probably the perfect tool for pre-mades and certain playstyles. But I didn't feel like I could walk into a fucked-up room of fire and crushers and ragers and delete half of it with a lazy full-auto hipfire, so what good is the revolver really? Seriously though after playing with 2 other stubs in the match the overlap of role was palpable in a way the bolter never will be, I never groan when seeing an additional bolter, it's like an additional trauma staff, oh no you're going to have perfect horde clear in two directions. 

ALSO the main reason I'm not going revolver is I expected to see my average melee crit rate go way up with the promised +20% crit chance bonus from my revolver, shoulda been 50%+ from my normal 34%-38% but instead my melee crit rate WENT DOWN to 26% so either scoreboard is bugged, fatshark is bugged, I'm bugged, or these numbers aren't combining right. More reason to bolter so not my problem, probably a fluke, but damn I hate the way the revolver reloaded anyway, feels so weenie hut jr.

Why not Blazing Piety:

I tried it, felt cool when it triggered but honestly this build allows you to be super mobile, I'm often dashing back and forth from the frontline to the backline just to save allies from horde, push poxbursters, kill dogs, kill trappers (you can reliably kill trappers in melee, but you gotta be good at it), so Blazing piety didn't really trigger when I needed it. Usually it would trigger when the team is already boned and I'm stuck just having it out with the whole horde myself, and in that moment it was pretty cool, but not cool enough that I didn't wish I had something more every moment before that one, which is why even the tempting +25% crit chance and dash-spam ability cooldown talents in the Blazing piety tree just don't make it worth it. I'm already stacking +% damage and +% attack speeds with a baseline 30% crit chance from Scourge, more crit chance would be nice but I get +20% attack speed when I'm on my last wound of health and it just synergizes too perfectly with what the build does right, even though on-paper Blazing Piety seems like the right choice, it was the first version of the build I tried after all.

PARRY
The Real Top Experience of the Devils Claw is getting to pull off the Special Attack 'Parry'. There's only one attack in the game that requires the enemy hit you and it's here on the Devils Claw, and your team will freak out when you're just standing there in front of 4 ragers, not-swinging, well, if your dash is down and you can't spam them to death, or haven't got them all caught in your own rager-style inescapable Light-attack Heavy Attack combo, you can save yourself a lot of pain and frustration with Parry, it's not just for style points but it's still definitely about style points.

The parry works on ragers and trash mobs, it technically works on everything but lots of testing in Meat Grinder shows that Crushers and Maulers have variable timings on their attacks, and the parry timing window is actually extremely sensitive, in contrast to the ragers where you can practically spam Parry, miss the timing, leave it hanging while their slow attack connects, and it will still trigger and counter them. Anytime I'd parry a crusher overhead I'd rather just dodge, the only time I'd try it is when I commonly get stuck on terrain and panic and die, so maybe I'll learn to parry crushes after all since I'll get lots of practice


Since patch 14 and the hotfix they appear to have secretly nerfed the Devils Claw parry, because I have literally done bulwark and rager drills in the meat-grinder with the Devils Claw IV after patch 14 as well as after the hotfix, and I distinctly remember even greater effects awarded to successful parry. Once the awesome power of the Devils Claw IV parry could bust open a bulwark shield ( they would attack, get parried, and instantly transform into the 'popped' bulwark open shield stagger animation), but now that mechanic has disappeared, only dealing instant free damage instead. Similarly, meat-ragers would be knocked completely to the floor, whereas now a successful parry merely interrupts their attack-combo and staggers them long enough to get a heavy-attack in, before they start up their rage-combo again.

Well fine, both of those aspects of the parry were too powerful anyway, the devs probably saw me run up to 10 ragers, slide-spin at them, parry them all, knocking to them to the ground, and then kill them like trash horde, because that's what it was like,  whereas now it feels like you have a really cool move that can clutch a bad rager-situation. Your team will ping ragers at you a lot though, it will scare them how eagerly you run into melee like you're an oblivious fool, which you and I are, but not that kind, we just want to hear the parry-success-sound-effect.wav in the middle of an otherwise hellish maelstrom of danger and madness and we're oblivious to anything else

tl;dr do good melee with the sword and carry new players in maelstrom with your extreme mobility, tankiness, damage, and horde clear, if you don't know how to do good melee play smite and lightning psyker that's a great alternative to playing the game