6.5-8% Strength for 3.5s on Hit. Stacks 5 times.
7.5-15% Weak Spot Damage. Weakspot Kills also ignore Enemy Hit Mass.
30-60% Rending on Critical Hit.
4.5-6% Critical Chance for each expended round in your weapon (resets on reload).
A build that has an answer for everything. It won't play exactly like your average zealot build. You don't have stun grenades, so you wont have the easy res or save in the middle of chaos. You don't have shroudfield so you can't get a near guaranteed save whenever you need it. But what you get in exchange for not having those two very powerful tools is an incredible amount of survivability and kill power. You can melee in mixed hordes with the best of them and your pure trash clear will be unparalleled. If a mauler or crusher arrives to ruin your day you have the revolver to burst them down and can dance back with your dodges while reloading to take care of any more. If you are in a tough spot and need to kill another right away then your ult and an overhead will generally do the trick. Or if you still have your revolver out and ult one of your throwing knives will do serious damage with a head shot because of the handcannon blessing applying to your critical hit throwing knives. In dense hordes you will regain your entire ult or 95% of it with one heavy 2/3 swipe at head level. This also triggers your extra toughness damage resistance and guarantees 4 seconds of extra survivability. Dodge dancing often will trigger your other benefits, giving you constant toughness, damage reduction, and extra weakspot/crit damage which your heavy sword will make excellent use of. You oneshot headshot mutants with heavy 1. Dodge back when they get close and your downswing should be lined up perfectly every time. On a crit your heavy 2/3 will oneshot headshot mutants as well, so don't be afraid to swing wildly when its chaotic. The weakspot hitbox on them is strangely large around the sides and back sometimes when you have a wide angled attack aimed at head level, so you will find yourself clearing them quickly pretty often. The 20% extra backstab damage helps with that I am sure.Take every opportunity to safely ult into a horde and clear the chaff with one ult use and a heavy 2/3. Gets your buffs active, clears a chunk of enemies, bypasses an armor type and nets you 20% attack speed for 5 seconds. Get a feel for the ult use into heavy 2/3 for frequent battling. It replenishes your toughness and gives you tons of damage resistance because of the guaranteed crit and will allow you to tank a lot of ranged fire if thats the hairy situation you are in. If you are generating ult fast enough and hitting dodges too then you should have no problem drawing all that fire and killing the horde while surviving the ranged dps that manages to hit you between dodges. This build benefits from being in the thick of the fighting all of the time. Don't dive too deep, but do your job and tie up the gunners, kill the elites, and when necessary empty your revolver on boss weakspots. You don't do the greatest boss dps, but you do respectable dps all the same. Knives are great for oneshotting trappers, snipers, and any other special or gunner elite that is convenient to throw on. Hitting the headshots is crucial, else they will just laugh at you and keep doing what they are doing. Practice with these but don't get too fixated on using them all up when you remember you have them. A time will come when you are the last one left alive and you have used all of your ammo on bursting down a boss since your sword doesn't do much more than tickle bosses. The knives will be your answer to the sudden trappers that are showing up to ruin your day or how you clear the snipers that are camping your bound up allies from cover. After a lot of practice you will be picking off the trappers as soon as they show up on your radar before they can get a shot off and hitting snipers at 30 meters. Alternative weapons:Melee:- Rashed mk II combat axe works well with this build. Brutal momentum, shred, Maniac and Carapace/unyielding is what I run. Paired with it I will take a ranged weapon that doesn't need to kill bosses since the combat axe can do well enough there on its own. I will usually take an agri braced autogun with it for high density dps, or the zarona revolver/shredder autopistol depending. - Indignatus Crusher is my preferred choice for melee heavy maelstroms as its special helps give consistant disruption to armor waves. Its got a pretty particular attack set though for horde clear with light spams to kill and alternating light1/heavy2 for mass stagger, and heavy1/light2 for single target dps. Theres a lot of switching up you can do with it once you get comfortable and its a very safe and reliable weapon, it just doesn't kill as quickly as the combat axe or heavy sword will. With it ill usually take a the Zarona revolver for pinpoint precision and to be able to sprint faster when moving about. Both of these weapons work very well with the talents set up exactly as they are. If you go combat axe you could swap out Disdain for extra stagger or potentially ambuscade if you want to run a high monster dps ranged weapon.
