Stuff Yer Armour, 'Eretic
 Zealot Build - Warhammer 40k: Darktide 

THE ANTI-ARMOUR ZEALOT

This Zealot build will have you focusing on the tankier enemies of Darktide. These armoured units can slow down the momentum of you and your team and can become a serious annoyance when facing them alongside a horde, so your job will be to eliminate that threat as soon as possible. This means that you'll be spending a lot of time getting up close and personal and when it calls for it, charging into a group of enemies to reach your target (like the raging fanatic you are). In these cases a good understanding of your abilities will help you quickly dispatch your target and keep you alive long enough to regroup with you party.

Whilst you'll primarily act as a damage dealer, this build will also increase your own survivability and gives you the opportunity to act as a secondary support role for when your team is getting pressured by multiple enemies.

Weapons

Melee

In terms of raw damage, the Indignatus Mk III Shock Maul won't be taking the number one spot. But, what makes this a powerful weapon and ideal for this build is that with the combination of your Blessings and good use of the alt stagger attack, you can easily overwhelm your enemies with an unrelenting barrage of attacks. The perks used for this weapon are +10-25% Damage (Carapace Armoured Enemies) and +4-10% Melee Damage (Elites). Since most Carapace enemies are also Elites, this means that you could be dealing up to +35% damage on perks alone. The Blessing, Skullcrusher, causes staggered enemies to take an extra 10-40% damage for 5 seconds. Combining this with the previously mentioned Perks, Carapace-Elites (Scab Mauler, Bulwark, Crusher, Reaper) can take up to +75% damage when staggered. Adding Opportunist on top of that can take the potential damage output even further due to its ability to ignore 10-25% of armour on all armoured enemy types (both Flak and Carapace).

Due to the effects of these Perks and Blessings, you'll be wanting to start most engagements with a stagger attack (though you may want to use a different strategy, if your target is surrounded by other enemies, through the use of the Zealot's main ability Chorus Of Spiritual Fortitude). With how easy it is to stagger enemies with this weapon, it almost guarantees that you'll be stopping most enemies (minus monstrosities and bosses) dead in their tracks.

Ranged 

Since this build is heavily melee based it allows for a lot of flexibility for your choice of ranged weapon. You'll mainly be using your ranged weapon in scenarios where your enemy is too far away to get to in melee or it's just more advantageous to stay at range. A few examples would be fighting snipers, mutants, hounds, trappers and in some cases, oncoming hordes.

The Columnus Mk V Infantry Autogun is a good all rounder, as it has a high rate of fire, respectable magazine capacity and decent damage for an automatic. The high fire rate makes it great at melting hordes and makes light work of most specialists. It does however lack the accuracy at long distances, so I'd also recommend the Zarona Mk IIa Quickdraw Stub Revolver for its accuracy and insane damage output.

Curios

Zealots usually benefit from having a mix of Toughness and Health Blessings. Since there's a lot of factors in this build that cause your Toughness to increase and regenerate at a quicker rate, I'd focus on buffing your Health. This will give you more chance of getting out of a sticky situation where your Toughness has been depleted.

+1-4% Combat Ability Regeneration is an important perk to have as you'll be wanting wanting to have your ability readily available as often as possible. With a 12% increase to ability regeneration your cool down time will go from 60 seconds down to 52.8 seconds. Now this doesn't sound like a lot, but combined with Pious Cut-Throat (20% ability cooldown on backstab kills), It can become pretty effective.

I also like to use +5-20% Damage Resistance (Gunners) because these trigger happy bastards love to send a hail of bullets your way and there isn't much you can do about when fighting off other enemies in melee range.

Talents

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I'll be focusing on Blitz, Aura, Ability and Keystone here. Most Passives are pretty self explanatory.

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Blitz - Blades of Faith

You may be wondering. "If this build is all about dealing with armoured enemies, why would you choose the throwable that isn't efective against armour?" Well there's two reasons:

One - This build is strong against unarmoured enemies too. It's just that you'll primarily be one of the ones dealing with the big guys, but you'll have no problem caving in the heads of most specialists too. Headshots with these throwing knives do incredible damage making them a handy tool to have. They're also easy to refill from ammo boxes and by killing Specialists and Elites with melee (which you'll be doing a lot of).

Two - Quite simply, if I don't use them, it fucks up the talent tree. So yeah...

Aura - Loner

Having some level of Coherency is going to come in handy for those times you get cornered off by the enemy and you're not in close proximity of your team. Similar to your Curios, this Aura is will give you a better chance of getting back to your team when you're being overwhelmed.

Ability - Chorus of Spiritual Fortitude

This ability is fairly versatile due to being able to stagger entire groups of enemies, buffing the Toughness of both you and your close teammates and also giving you all a 20% damage boost through the Ecclesiarch's Call modifier. There's multiple different scenarios where this can become incredibly useful, so being able to reduce the cooldown time for this ability is going to play a big role in a how effectively you can switch to a support role when necessary.

Keystone - Inexorable Judgement

Movement is important with this build, so getting a damage and attack speed buff for simply moving around is a nice addition. You should also be dodging a lot, making Inebriate's Poise a very effective modifier. Because of this you'll spend a lot of time with high stacks of Momentum, doing constant bonus damage.