Inquisitorial Preacher | Immolation Grenade | Chorus of Spiritual Fortitude | Blazing Piety | Auric Ready
Build for Darktide

The Preacher

Chorus of Spiritual Fortitude is one of the most busted abilities in the game. It applies a massive overshield to you and your team, is a damage buff, and suppresses all enemies in range. It is essentially a 'pause the game' button, stopping all action and giving your team time to deal with the threats. This ability is normally balanced by a lengthy cooldown time. This build aims to shorten that as much as possible. By wading through hordes and maximising our crit-chance, we can easily replenish our ability in only a few swings, meaning that your team is benefitting from a new overshield before the previous one has even worn off. Turn that ragged horde into a free shield for you and your team and stun every heretic with the emperor's holy light. 

Playstyle

Trash clear is your speciality. When a fight breaks out, your job is to clear through the trash horde and start refreshing your ability Chorus of Spiritual Fortitude. This build is all about stacking as much critical chance as possible, which combined with Invocation of Death, works to drastically reduce your cooldown. This is why we pair it with a weapon with exceptional cleave such as the Tigrus Mk XV Heavy Eviscerator. You'll notice that in only a few swings into a dense horde, you can refill your ability in a matter of only a few seconds. In the video linked at the bottom, you can see that each swing into a densely packed horde can recharge as much as 20% of our ability. It is entirely possible to fill your ability and start channelling another Chorus before the overshield from the previous one has even run out. This is your primary purpose. Protecting your team with shields, suppressing enemies with your chorus and keeping up the 20% damage buff from Ecclesiarch's Call for as long as possible. 

The Tigrus Mk XV Heavy Eviscerator is a versatile weapon, however, and trash clear is not the only thing we can do. Charging up our shred and using heavy attacks allows us to do heavy damage to Monstrosities. We will never be able to match the damage output of a thunderhammer in these scenarios, but our damage is not too far off, whilst being much better at dealing with other tasks (and not needing to charge up Thrust). Owing to the amount of damage reduction this build packs in, even without our ability, we can deal good damage to all target types and help to stem the flow of dangerous targets reaching our backline. We are predominately a melee-focused class and build. But that does not mean we should forget about the ranged option entirely. The Zarona Mk IIa Quickdraw Stub is a favoured weapon of Zealots for its ability to quickly be drawn and dispatch priority targets our teammates might otherwise miss. 

Build Path

We start by moving down the right tree. Backstabber does not come up very often, but the extra 20% damage to targets not facing us can be a nice boon, and help to carve through Monstrosities that are focused on our teammates. But the real reason to it pick up is to grab Scourge and Enduring Faith. Critical hits cause enemies to bleed. Hitting bleeding enemies also increases our critical change. Every time we hit a crit we gain 50% Damage reduction, which helps us survive in melee combat. Second Wind is just generally a great node on Zealot. We will be weaving in and out of combat a lot in almost all Zealot builds, so proccing that extra toughness regeneration occurs frequently.

Heading down the Middle tree, we pick up Anoint in Bleed to improve our revolver damage at close range and Purge the Unclean increases damage to infested (helps us to 1-tap poxhounds), and deals increased damage to Monstrosities and reapers. Our goal is to avoid getting hit in the first place, so I don't think Restoring Faith is a great node, but still does provide more benefit than The Voice of Terra, as we will be using our ranged option sparingly. This allows us to pick up Immolation Grenade. This is my personal favourite of the blitz options for Zealot and allows us to create a ring of literal friendly fire. Especially useful when fighting packs of poxhounds. If you fight the dogs inside the ring of fire, then even if they jump on you, they will quickly get knocked off by the fire. It can also help to thin out hordes and add extra damage in prolonged fights. Immolation grenades last 13 seconds and have a fairly generous radius. If an enemy is caught inside this radius for the duration, only Crushers, Maulers and Mutants can survive. Maulers will be left with left than 10% HP, Mutants about 33% and Crushers...Ok they don't really take much damage from this, but it is useful to thin out the horde so you can focus on these larger targets. 

We move over to the left-hand side to pick up Until Death and Holy Revenant, Zealots' patented second chance perks. We will be trying everything in our power NOT to have these proc, but they provide a nice safety net if things go safe. There are also times when we can rely on these to do things that other classes cannot, such as a clutch teammate pickup under enemy fire. Benediction synergises well with the type of support build we are going for. The lynchpin of this build is Chorus of Spiritual Fortitude. With Banishing Light we can suppress an entire room full of enemies whilst providing a powerful +100 toughness to our entire team for a significant period of time. Benediction adds an additional damage reduction, allowing our shield to go further. Ecclesiarch's Call is preferred over Holy Cause. Most enemies will be suppressed for the majority of our channeling and our teammates already have a beefy shield. Adding extra defence is seldom necessary, and it is more beneficial to buff our team's damage so we can more quickly carve through the foes in our path. 

Moving down we pick up Faithful Frenzy. The quicker we can attack, the more frequently we can proc our crit hits and the faster we can replenish our ability. Punishment does not benefit this build, but is a necessary pick-up. The invocation of Death is where everything starts to come together. The 1.5 seconds off our ability is based on the amount of crits we hit in a swing, not one crit per swing. As such, we pair this with a weapon with a high cleave so we can activate it as frequently as possible. Blazing Piety provides the massive crit bonus we are looking for, and allows us to start our critical hit chains, which will be amplified by by Scourge. We opt for the right keystone modifiers Fury Rising & Righteous Warrior to further increase our critical chance and make sure we have Blazing Piety active as long as possible. It's more selfish than going for the support skills of Stalwart & Infectious Zeal, But as it is in service to a cooldown that benefits the whole team, It still serves to buff your strike team more overall.

Weapons

This build is most effective with weapons with high cleave as it increases the chance of proccing critical hits and as such, Invocation of Death. Both Eviscerators work well for this, but I prefer the Tigrus Mk XV Heavy Eviscerator. The attack speed is slightly lower than the Tigrus Mk II Heavy Eviscerator, but the light attacks are a simple, horizontal sweep that allows us to cleave through hordes efficiently. Heavy attacks can be used to deal with stronger opponents as it is a simple to control vertical slash and the revved special attack can be used in situations where you see an opening to deal significant damage. We take extra damage to flak and maniac. Some people will run the extra +5% crit chance. I don't find it necessary or something that makes much of a difference.

Let's crunch the math. All weapons have a 5% crit chance.  We can +25% Crit chance from the combination of Blazing Piety & Righteous Warrior, putting it up to 30% crit chance. By taking Shred We gain an additional 4% per chained hit. This does not have to be on the same target and we will quickly stack this up. So 5 x 4% = +20% crit chance, so our crit chance is now 50%. Then from Scourge, we can get another 30% Crit chance, putting our crit chance up to 80%. At this point, what is going to benefit you more? An additional 5% crit chance, or +25% damage to an enemy type that is giving you grief?

The Zarona Mk IIa Quickdraw Stub is a tried and tested firearm to dispatch distant targets that our team miss. It can be pulled it quickly, can penetrate multiple targets, and can one-shot a great variety of enemy types. I opt for Flak to increase our breakpoints against Scab Shooters. Surgical paired with Hand-Cannon with headshots allows us to 3-shot Crushers with headshots, 2-shot Maulers and 1-shot Dreg ragers.  

Curios

After 500+ hours in Darktide, I have a simple rule of thumb when it comes to Curios. For melee classes (Ogryn and Zealot) Take 2x Toughness and 1x Health Curios. For ranged classes (Veteran and Psyker), take 3x Toughness curios. Veteran benefits massively from Toughness and Ogryn massively from health, with the other two classes falling somewhere in between. There are a few niche builds that might require Stamina Curios, but this is a pretty safe rule to stick to, and means that you have curios that are effective for the vast majority of your builds. Wound curios should only ever be used by Zealot Martydom builds. Even then, I consider Martyrdom builds a bit gimmicky and less effective than other Zealot builds, which is why I only ever run them for banter and memes.

For perks, I opt for raw stats. +20% Gunner Resistance is the most useful resistance node as it applies to Scab Gunners, Scab Shotgunners, Dreg Gunners, Dreg Shotgunners and Reapers. This is the largest collection of enemies out of any of the resistance perks. These enemies can absolutely shred you in seconds, and make up a significant portion of the enemies encountered in Auric Maelstroms. The difference between running 3 of these perks compared to running none is night and day, and arguably the single most useful perk you can apply to your curios. +5% Toughness and +5% Health provide us with raw stats that you can never go wrong with. If you have to pick between one of the two, go for Toughness. This is because the Health Curio provides 21% Health, and the Toughness Curio provides 17% Toughness, meaning that the Toughness Perk is a better value proposition. 

Strengths

The preacher is a support character. As such it works as a force multiplier, and gains extra benefits the better your team is. That's not to say that you can't do things by yourself. The Eviscerator is a versatile weapon, benefitting from one of the best horde clears in the game, whilst still doing respectable damage to heavier targets. Our revolver is fantastic for sniping specials and either killing or weakening elite enemies so they can be finished off. With a dense enough horde, it is possible to pop your second chorus before the shelf from the first has even faded away. In this way you can prevent chip damage to your team, and keep even mediocre players alive and in the fight.

Weaknesses

Without a dense horde, it is difficult to get our Chorus off of cooldown. The minute-long recharge rate can leave you hanging when you need it most. Also, Beasts of Nurgle I find to be an issue. Both Plague Ogryns and Chaos spawn can be chunked down by our eviscerator, but the Beast is difficult to get into Melee with without suffering corruption damage. I did experiment with running a bolter to deal with this situation, but the quick pull-out time of the revolver is just too good to pass out. Instead, I focus on crowd control and trust my teammates to deal with these Monstrosities most of the time.