Bleed n' Burn Madness Zealot
Build for Darktide

Through FAITH, ye art redeemed

These weird weapons can work well together in the right build. 

Pros: Extremely versatile and fast DPS build where each of your tools is perfectly suited to a different job. You deal a lot of damage quickly and can prevent your team from getting overwhelmed. 

Cons: If you use the blessings shown above, you may struggle in mixed hordes (but that's where flamer comes in). I included a breakdown of other blessings that are better for general use. 

How to play this build:

• IV Chain Axe: Use lights against sporadic enemies, Heavies against tightly grouped enemies, push attack against wide groups of enemies, and the light special against anything that would take more than 2 lights to kill. Against Muties, dodge and then light special. The heavy special does slightly more damage, but leaves you vulnerable longer. There's a few situations where it's good: Crushers can die to 2 light specials or to a heavy special and a couple light attacks. Muties die faster to a heavy special if you have time to ready it. Maulers will typically die to a heavy special. Ragers will die to a heavy special, but take some time to bleed out after a light special. For the most part stick with light specials over heavy specials though. 
• Flamer: Conserve ammo, switch to it when a clearly overwhelming horde shows up, or against a group of armor. Use left click when you need to stagger something, like a dog or an enemy about to hit a teammate. Either use small bursts of ~5-10 ammo at a time then swap to the axe, which will burn trash to death and apply brittleness to anything that lives, or burn the entire mag. 
• Chastise the Wicked: use it to refill toughness if overwhelmed. 
  • In addition to +20% attack speed, Chastise has a hidden benefit where it lowers the armor value of all enemies you hit by 1 category for 3 seconds or until you hit with a melee attack. This is in addition to the increased attack speed for 10 seconds. So Carapace enemies will be dealt damage as if they were flak instead, and flak as if they were unarmored. This means that while using Chastise, the flamer can actually deal good damage to armored enemies. 2 Chastises and a full magazine of flamer will kill Crushers. 
  • When using Chastise to power up a shredded attack, it will only power up the initial hit, so you actually want to use it immediately after the initial hit, which will then give the rest of the special attack armor piercing, and give your next initial hit armor piercing and crit. This is enough to 1-shot a crusher with a light special. 
• Throwing Knives: Use them to take out Gunners, trappers, bombers, flamers, snipers, etc, especially when one might try to hit you while you're using your axe special. As tempting as it may be to use them constantly, easy elites and specialists that aren't threatening should be taken out in melee to generate a free knife. Use it to reduce the number of gunners as you run in. It will also pierce the first enemy it hits if they are unarmored or infested and die to the attack, so you can hit a dreg shooter and a bomber with the same knife, but if a dreg bruiser runs in front of it you won't get the bomber. A throwing knife to a rager's head will weaken them and make them easy to kill and get your knife back. If using Thunderous, knives apply 10% brittleness while the axe is out. 

Other tips

• Against bosses, you want to start with a chain attack and chastise during it, then just use lights for the highest dps. 
• If there's a teammate meleeing a horde, you are usually fine to just join them in melee instead of wasting your flamer ammo and making it hard for them to see. Use the flames when there's Elites and Specialists mixed in with the horde, the team is getting overwhelmed, or if they're coming from an angle no one is already covering. 
• Ping while using the flamer. Your allies may struggle to see high value targets with your flames everywhere. 
• Make use of Swift Certainty's inherent ranged dodging to take out shooters. It only works when you're not running directly at the shooter though. 
• If the team has a Survivalist aura Vet, you shouldn't have to pick up much ammo. If the team doesn't have a Survivalist aura, you will need to be extra conservative with ammo unless there's 2 Psykers. 

Chain Axe IV

Stat Priority: Shredder = Damage = Penetration > Mobility > Defenses

Shredder determines only special attack damage, if your shredder stat is low then you won't want to use the specials very often. 

Blessings

There's 3 very effective blessing combos for the Chaxe IV. They come down to personal preference and what hadron gives you. Here's a breakdown. 

S tier

• Headtaker + Thunderous: Thunderous is less useful without Bloodletter, but its still useful and Headtaker gives you enough power to use the push attack offensively in hordes and increases your boss damage. If you want to debuff a whole pack of armor at once, spam push attack 4 times and watch your team melt them or switch to the flamer real quick. Against bosses do 3 quick lights, then a heavy special and chastise, then spam lights and it will die fast. This combo gives the best boss killing power. 
• Headtaker + Slaughterer: this is the "meta" combo and it's good and basic. You miss out on the utility of Thunderous, but you can use the push attack offensively after just a single heavy swing to get Slaughterer going and can handle mixed hordes much more easily. If you happen to have both headtaker and slaughterer stacks up when armor shows up you can dispatch them quickly. This combo is the best against mixed hordes and FUBAR situations

A+ tier

• Thunderous + Bloodletter: brittleness results in higher damage for you, and helps your team. It applies 10% per attack that hits. This heavily increases your team's damage against armor and increases their damage against monstrosities/unyielding by about 25%. The special attack counts as only one hit, so without Bloodletter, that means your special attack only applies one stack of thunderous. 
  • Bloodletter has a unique interaction with Thunderous: if Bloodletter is the original source of bleed on an enemy, every tick of bleed will trigger thunderous as long as the chainaxe is out and the enemy is bleeding. This means you'll get to max stacks faster and the debuff will continue as the target bleeds, even if you switch targets to a different enemy. 
  • Bleed stacks on special action hit for all other chain weapons suck, but this one is good because it's 16 stacks, which is as high as bleed can go. Each stack increases the damage and duration. The bleed also applies on the very first hit of the combo, so you'll be doing full bleed damage while grinding your axe into their face. 
  • This combo only works if Bloodletter is the first source of bleed applied to a target. If bleed is triggered by any other effect before you hit with Bloodletter, the stacks from bloodletter will simply be applied to the previous instance of bleed and thus won't trigger thunderous. However, the reverse is also true. If you apply bleed with bloodletter, then you or someone else adds bleed stacks later, those bleed stacks can still trigger thunderous. 
  • You can cancel a special and switch targets, letting the previous target die from bleed or your team's damage in many situations while you debuff/start killing the next one.
  • This combo is the best for team support.
  • This is my favorite blessing combo of the 3, but not one I recommend for others

A Tier

• Headtaker + Bloodletter: Headtaker is useful everywhere. Power will also increase bleed & burn damage.
• Thrust: tempting for the huge heavy damage increase, but since heavy specials have terrible DPS and are risky it doesn't add as much value as other options. A-Tier on Chaxe XII. Use with Headtaker. 

C Tier

• Bloodthirsty: Follow up chain kills with regular lights. Decent source of bleed but the guaranteed crit only applies to the initial hit in a special attack and there's better ways to get crits as zealot. 

D Tier

• Rev it Up: 20% more speed is cool. Not a game changer though. 

Flamer

Using Chastise the wicked as you use the flamer will massively increase your damage in most situations. Crits apply 2 burn stacks instead of 1.

Stat Priority: Burn > Cloud Radius > Ammo = Damage > Mobility

Burn: affects how fast Burn is applied and the max burn stacks that can go on an enemy. at least 78% makes it 16 stacks max. 73% only gives 14 stacks max. 

Cloud Radius: affects flame distance, suppression radius, and how close enemies need to be to the flame to be hit. At max you will apply burn and fire damage to enemies that are within ~1.5 meters of the visible flames. 

Ammo: going from 50 to 80 brings your mag size from 30 to 33. Not a huge difference but every shot counts because of how burn stacks are calculated and the very long reload. 

Blessings

A tier: 

• Blaze Away - only comes as III and has been nerfed heavily, yet it's still sadly one of the few good flamer blessings. Power increase also increases burn damage right as your burn stacks get high enough to be valuable. Encourages you to mag dump which is its only downside. 
• Overpressure - blaze away but trades raw power for flexibility in doing small bursts of flame then switching.  Blessing is currently bugged and doesn't work. Hopefully fixed soon. 
• Quickflame - the reload speed buff isn't very high but it's just enough for you to reliably reload in the middle of a horde which can be crucial. 

B Tier

• Fan the Flames - Primary attack has great stagger already without this blessing, but it does let you protect allies better and comes at the cost of damage. Can occasionally save you from being overwhelmed by a horde of armor, but Chastise will do that already. It just turns the weapon into a weird Purgatus. 

C tier: 

• Showstopper - 20% chance to explode elites and specialists on kill sounds really cool. In practice it rarely activates and even when it does it mostly just staggers stuff rather than doing valuable damage. By the time an elite or specialist is dead, all the chaff that would take meaningful damage or be staggered from it is probably already dead. 

F tier: 

• Inspiring Barrage - you'll refill your toughness by expending a magazine, but you already have Chastise for that and most of the time you'll have full toughness when shooting this at a horde. 

Momentum vs Martyrdom vs Crit

Up to personal preference. I like Crit for the more reliable cooldown reduction while fighting bosses and hordes, and to provide extra crit for the team. Momentum is also strong for the attack speed and raw damage. Backstabs for cooldown reduction can be easy to get by dodging around enemies if you're proactive.