Zealot
Target receives 1-4 Stack(s) of 10% Damage if already Staggered. Lasts 5s.
Up to 5-20% Strength based on the charge time of your heavy attacks. Stacks 3 times.
Critical Hits spend Ammo from your Reserve instead of you current fuel tank.
5-8% Strength for every 10% of magazine spent during continuous fire. Stacks 5 times.
The crusher zealots main role is to be a front line wall preventing packs of specials from over running the team. We punt around every enemy type except bosses and muties even in large numbers and provide space to our team so that they can dish out more DPS.
We make a special effort to maximize our DPS and not just be a cc build. This includes prioritizing using charged heavy attacks over charged light attacks, aiming for weak spots, and using the skull crusher blessing to increase the damage enemies we stagger take.
Heavy attack slide: the crusher has a really long reach and you can extend it even further by timing a forward slide as you release the heavy attack. You can also replace the slide with a dodge in any direction. My bread and butter combo:
Heavy attacking with a backwards dodge is a great way to hit enemies that are rushing towards you while avoiding being hit.
Weapon stats:
Crowd control is the most important because we need a high attack speed.
Defenses:
Toughness recovery: the standard zealot dodge package. Second wind + good balance + swift certainty. This makes sprinting count as dodging and every time we dodge we get +25% TDR and recover 15% toughness
Crowd control: the crusher charge + heavy attack is our bread and butter and what we primarily use to dish out damage and stun lock enemies. Making contact with an enemy releases a small AOE that stuns enemies and as long as we have high enough attack speed we can prevent our enemies from even being able to hit us or anyone for that matter.
Stun immunity(thy wrath be swift): don't get stun locked in place by an inconveniently placed gunner or have your charge attack interrupted by a random pox walkers hit. This is especially important because our stun AOE won't go off if we miss our target or if they die before we hit them which can lead us to taking a bunch of hits.
Contingency plans: until death and holy revenant lets us survive when we would otherwise die, and then heal up enough to do it again every 2 minutes. Our other fallback plan is chorus of fortitude.
Gun: the gun is really a matter of preference and what you prefer to use to get rid of priority targets when they are too far away for whacking. My favorite option is the mk VII headhunter auto gun. It is good at taking out specialists gunners as well as the little shooters (I usually just 2 tap them rather than lining up the head shot.)
Ability: I like chorus because it acts as a reset button when things have fallen off the rails
And the constant charging of the crusher mitigates the usefulness of attack speed. That being said you can just swap to fury of the faithful if you prefer it.
Blitz: the best blitz for this build is the immolation grenade, but it's not worth the point investment, so I use blades of faith instead. They are a useful way to deal with specialists while our melee weapon is out or we need to reload.
Charge mechanics and perks: all of the perks I've tested so far don't count the charged aoe as hits only the ones you hit with your crusher.
Pious cut-throat: backstab kills are fairly easy to get with as much stunning as we do to enemies, we can maneuver behind them and slam more charge attacks into their back.
