Arbites
19-25% Impact for 1.5s on Hit. Stacks 5 times.
10-25% Damage vs Electrocuted enemies.
30-60% Rending on Critical Hit.
10% Critical Chance for every 0.3-0.45 second while aiming. Stacks 10 times. Discharges all stacks upon firing.
To serve the Lex Imperialis is to stand unyielding amid Havoc’s (40) Darktide. This build—The ‘Immortal’ Grand Provost Marshal—is a righteous incarnation of order through control, fortitude, and execution. You enforce the Emperor’s Law through unmatched death, stagger, suppression, and endurance, breaking the back of every heretic advance. Each strike, each judgment, makes the battlefield more stable, you and your team more deadly, and your presence a beacon of the Lex.
At the heart of this build is Forceful. Every stagger—whether from your melee weapon, ranged weapon, or blitz—grants you a stack (up to 10) of +5% impact and +2.5% damage resistance, lasting 5 seconds, with only one stack lost per expiration cycle or upon taking damage. These stacks are not mere buffs—they're the engine of your durability, offense, and crowd control. You primarily maintain these stacks constantly with your melee, aided by Concussive (which ensures weak spot hits count as stagger, including on unyielding, monstrosities, and bosses), and the combined attack speed boosts from Hammer of Judgement, Targets Acquired, and Lone Wolf, which let you attack faster, stagger more often, and keep your Forceful engine running at full pressure.
With every blow, you're gaining impact, resistance, and regenerating toughness. The defensive synergy with Forceful is also deliberate: Force of Will grants +10% toughness on every stagger (which we can safely assume with every hit); Suppression Protocol grants 20% toughness damage reduction when hitting 3+ enemies (a common occurrence with your cleave); Lone Wolf grants a flat bonus of +15% toughness damage reduction; Hold the Line gives further damage resistance on your next melee hit taken after each stagger (stacking to 5); Will of the Lex gives 0.5 toughness per stack (of Forceful) per second; and Walk It Off ensures spending stamina regenerates toughness over 3 seconds—particularly effective when blocking or sprinting, which will be frequent.
Your weapon of judgment is the Branx Mk XI Shock Maul and Suppression Shield. Light and heavy melee hits arc wide with a decent attack speed and stagger most enemies. Your push block also contributes to the enemies' stagger. With Hammerblow, every hit builds even more impact, stacking to +125% over time—a strong contingency to keep consistent stagger. High Voltage ensures all electrocuted enemies—applied by your weapon's melee, weapon's special action, and your Voltaic Shock Mine—take 25% increased damage.
The Branx Mk XI Shock Maul and Suppression Shield is more than a melee tool—it offers reliable, full protection mobile cover against gunfire at the cost of stamina, allowing you to hold position under sustained ranged fire in Darktide’s tight corridors or rare open-area standoffs. As you block, the weapon passively builds energy, either through absorbing enemy attacks or over time, storing up to 2–3 charges at full capacity. Its special action unleashes a wide, electrified cone that stuns, electrocutes, and staggers enemies both in and beyond melee range—instantly triggering all effects tied to stagger, rapidly recharging your Forceful engine, and creating crucial space to reassert control.
One of this weapon’s few shortcomings is limited mobility—especially while bracing, where your movement becomes heavily restricted—a notable liability when stamina runs low under sustained ranged fire. This is partially mitigated by options discussed below, but in critical moments—such as advancing on entrenched gunners while pinned or maneuvering to distant cover—the Branx Mk XI Shock Maul and Suppression Shield’s special action offers reprieve. Its discharge, as discussed, extends well beyond melee range, staggering enemies at a moderate distance and briefly halting incoming pressure. This creates a narrow but vital window to reposition, close the gap, or escape a compromised angle—turning a defensive constraint into a moment of opportunity. Additionally, when aimed at shield-bearing Bulwarks, it briefly forces their shields aside, creating a vital opening for direct engagement. In short, consider its special action as your default panic button—a reliable, immediate failsafe when control slips and pressure surges.
This weapon’s overall synergy with the build makes the weapon not merely a crowd-control tool but a self-sustaining engine of power. You are the eye of the storm—the more you are attacked, the more energy you charge (even while not melee); the more you stagger, the stronger and more untouchable you become. You impose order amid chaos, controlling the turbulence around you and your squad. Be the dam that holds back the Darktide—be the unyielding beacon of the Lex for your squad to follow.
The Zarona Mk IIa Quickdraw Stub Revolver is your secondary arm and your answer to distance. With Surgical, you build +10% critical chance per 0.3 to 0.45 seconds of aiming, up to 100%. Hand-Cannon adds massive rending on crits (which is frequently!), turning a well-placed headshot into a one-hit execution for most specialists and elites. Notably, its rounds pierce cleanly through multiple enemies in a straight line, allowing you to eliminate a distant gunner, flamer, sniper, or any other threat, even when obstructed by a horde—turning what would be body-blocks into collateral damage.
The revolver’s swift draw animation allows for seamless transitions from melee and ranged, enabling you to snap into action mid-brawl with practiced precision. While this responsiveness is always available as your melee strikes stagger all the enemies in front of you, creating breathing room, it’s especially effective when you leverage your crowd control tools—such as Voltaic Shock Mine, the Branx Mk XI Shock Maul and Suppression Shield's special action, or Break the Line—to create more space to shift into ranged sanctioning without interruption.
When drawn, its mobility gives you a subtle but meaningful speed boost when compared to the Branx Mk XI Shock Maul and Suppression Shield, while moving or sprinting—perfect for repositioning or closing gaps between engagements. This mobility can be further enhanced by a well-placed shot that invokes No Escape. Most importantly, revolver shots can stagger. That means even ranged engagement feeds and reinforces your Forceful stack loop, especially if there are no mobs within melee range. And remember, this stagger applies not just to your primary target—but to every enemy the bullet pierces on its path until it stops.
Take care when reloading—the revolver’s reload animation can briefly delay your ability to transition back to melee, potentially leaving you vulnerable to sudden displacers or flanking threats; time your reloads deliberately, ideally during crowd control downtime or while repositioning.*
*As discussed, the primary shortcoming of the Zarona IIa Quickdraw Stub Revolver lies in its reload speed, which can leave you exposed during critical moments. To reduce this vulnerability, consider swapping Targeted Brutality for Judicious Efficiency. While this adjustment slightly reduces the frequency of your burst cycle—outlined below—it does not compromise the overall rhythm or integrity of the build. Judicious Efficiency grants up to +20% reload speed on your next reload after eliminating an elite or specialist, whether in melee or at range. Crucially, this bonus has no time limit, allowing you to bank the effect until needed. This makes it an excellent counterbalance to the revolver’s primary inefficiency, ensuring that when reloads matter most, they won’t leave you vulnerable.
Your armor is momentum, toughness regeneration, damage resistance, and refusal. Health is not a resource to be traded. If it’s touched, your loop has already failed. That is why all defensive curios must prioritize Toughness as their primary stat. Toughness is your buffer: with Forceful, Walk It Off, Will of the Lex, Suppression Protocol, and Force of Will constantly restoring and protecting it, your goal is not to survive—but to remain uninterrupted.
Your first perk priority is Ability Cooldown. Break the Line and Arbites Vigilant define your burst cycle and control window; reducing their cooldown accelerates your offensive rhythm, enabling faster Forceful restacks and more frequent assertions of dominance. Your second priority is Gunner Resistance. In high-tier Havoc, ranged suppression is your deadliest threat. Stagger loops falter under concentrated fire—Gunner Resistance converts overwhelming pressure into survivable attrition, preserving your buffer when flanked or repositioning. Your final priority is additional Toughness. A larger buffer buys time—time to push, recover, re-engage, and reforge the loop when broken by spacing, elevation, or scattered enemy formations.
The Voltaic Shock Mine is not merely a utility—it is a mobile bastion of control that embodies your role as a frontline arbiter of order. Each pulse stuns and staggers enemies over 15 seconds, triggering a cascade of synergies: Forceful, Hold the Line, Suppression Protocol, and Justified Measures, while simultaneously creating space to regroup, revive, engage with an object, or transition into ranged combat.
Deployed immediately before or after Break the Line + Arbites Vigilant, it swiftly restores expended Forceful stacks, enabling a seamless return to your melee loop with all bonuses intact. Used tactically, it anchors flanks, neutralizes displacers, seals chokepoints, and turns enemy density into a liability.
Crucially, Lone Wolf, in addition to its other synergetic benefits, ensures a passive recharge every 60 seconds of the Voltaic Shock Mine, making the mine a reliable, self-sustaining tool, free from reliance on grenade drops. In the upper echelons of Havoc 40, where elite and specialist density, gunline pressure, and attrition intensity escalate, the Voltaic Shock Mine becomes indispensable—a reusable strongpoint that stabilizes the front, delays an oncoming horde, allows your squad to engage a boss or monstrosity without interruption from other melee enemies, sustains your engine, and reinforces your supremacy under fire. Deploy it deliberately and often—not with hesitation. Through Lone Wolf, this grants you the potential for 20 to 40+ mines per mission, not including the additional options to replenish from a grenade crate where possible. The key is rhythm: anticipate demand, align deployments with recharge pacing, and ensure you’re never without one when judgment is due.
Your primary melee loop—light attack → light attack → push-block → repeat—is your bread-and-butter engagement pattern. Each melee attack carves through a wide arc, staggering swathes of heretics and maintaining control across the frontline. The push-block not only delivers additional stagger to feed your Forceful engine, but it also continuously triggers Drive Them Back to increase cleave damage and stagger, as well as Walk It Off, converting stamina expenditure into sustained toughness regeneration. Crucially, this combo is self-sustaining: each push-block naturally regenerates the single stamina point it consumes by the time it reoccurs in the loop, allowing you to repeat the sequence almost indefinitely.
Against Maulers, Crushers, Reapers, bosses, or Monstrosities, adapt fluidly—chain into strikedown attacks after your lights or heavies to deliver high-impact finishers.
Your ultimate decree is delivered through Break the Line—a keystone talent and signature ability that, when woven into a proper burst rotation, elevates this build’s damage output to rival—and often surpass—the leading meta builds of other classes. This forward dash and bash inflicts a massive stagger in a cone and grants +25% damage and +50% impact for 6 seconds, while the dash also offers limited additional maneuverability to close distance or reposition under pressure. Commendation from Condemnation enhances this effect, granting up to 100% toughness and 75% stamina instantly when hitting clustered elites or specials. When leveraged with the Branx Mk XI Shock Maul and Suppression Shield, Break the Line can be activated while bracing—ideal for approaching entrenched gunners without exposing yourself.
When paired with Arbites Vigilant, it consumes your Forceful stacks for an additional +2.5% strength per stack—up to +25% bonus damage for 10 seconds. This sequence forms your primary burst cycle.**
This ability has a low base cooldown (20s), and with Targeted Brutality, recharges rapidly—0.5s per hit on basic enemies or 1s per hit on elites, specials, and monstrosities, up to 5 seconds per activation. With 12% cooldown reduction from defensive curios, the effective recharge time drops to approximately 12 seconds. Under optimal conditions, your next Break the Line is often ready just as Arbites Vigilant’s 10-second buff ends—leaving only a brief 2-second window before the full rotation can repeat.
Use Break the Line strategically—but also fluidly and often—as its timely execution is the cornerstone of this build’s capacity to convert control into sustained, repeatable bursts of high-impact damage. In dense combat, this enables a near-continuous burst loop, letting you enforce battlefield control with relentless tempo and virtually no downtime between empowered engagements.
The key to this rotation is restoration: your Forceful stacks return almost instantly. Just resume melee, deploy your Voltaic Shock Mine, or activate the Branx Mk XI Shock Maul and Suppression Shield’s special action—any of these, when directed into a dense enemy cluster, will rapidly reestablish your durability engine. The Branx Mk XI Shock Maul and Suppression Shield’s special action offers the fastest restack—short of a pre-deployed mine—and can be activated within half a second of landing Break the Line, allowing you to strike at the height of your burst window and fully capitalize on the combined bonuses.
When facing bosses or monstrosities without mobs nearby, shift focus to weak point strikes—each hit builds Forceful stacks via Concussive, albeit more slowly, while granting allies an additional 25% bonus to melee damage against that target.
**Note: Activating Arbites Vigilant consumes your Forceful stacks—and with them, their associated damage resistance, toughness regeneration, and impact. While the temporary loss of impact is partially offset by the Hammerblow blessing on your Branx Mk XI Shock Maul and Suppression Shield, this brief window before Forceful restacks leaves you at your most vulnerable. Time your burst carefully and ensure you have a means—be it Voltaic Shock Mine, melee, the Branx Mk XI Shock Maul and Suppression Shield's special action—to reestablish your loop immediately.
Melee Engagement: Lead the charge and control the crowd of enemies. Emphasize the environment and chokepoints. Aim for weakpoints, for stagger certainty, while assured that no matter where you hit, your wide attack arcs will be able to stagger multiple foes per swing. Frequently leverage dodges and push-blocks to trigger bonuses to weak point and cleave damage. As you attack each enemy, each stagger fuels your Forceful engine—escalating durability, attack speed, movement, and raw damage. Near maximum stacks, the combined strength, rending, stagger, cleave damage, critical damage, and weak spot damage bonuses allow you to dispatch elites, specialists, and mobs in one to three strikes.
Attrition: When pressure surges, deploy the Voltaic Shock Mine or activate your Branx Mk XI Shock Maul and Suppression Shield's special action to reassert control. Both are tools of area denial, but the mine—when placed with intent—becomes a momentary stronghold. Use it to secure a revive, lockdown a pack of poxhounds, seal off a flank or chokepoint, open space when surrounded, or buy time for you or an ally to safely interact with objectives or puzzles.
High Offensive Burst Cycle: Activate Break the Line to consume your Forceful stacks, unleashing a burst capable of clearing elites and specialists or inflicting considerable damage on monstrosities. Immediately rebuild stacks through cleaving nearby mobs, using your Voltaic Shock Mine, or unleashing your Branx Mk XI Shock Maul and Suppression Shield's special action—allowing the cycle to repeat without interruption. If no mobs are present, maintain pressure on the boss by striking weak points to restore stacks and sustain your offensive momentum.
Ranged Combat: Use the revolver to eliminate ranged threats and isolated targets, maintaining stack uptime and battlefield control. Leverage its increased mobility to reposition quickly under fire or close distance with precision. Tactically alternate between melee and sidearm to adapt fluidly to the flow of combat and sustain your momentum.
Durability: Never relent. Your offense is your defense—Forceful, Will of the Lex, and Walk It Off, etc., sustain you deep in melee. However, your resilience hinges on maintaining a steady flow of staggers. When out of melee or facing dispersed enemies, your stack loop breaks over time—reducing your toughness regeneration, damage resistance, and overall survivability. Quickly reposition, take cover, dodge, slide, sprint, and rely on your accumulated defensive stacks until you are in a more favorable position. Exposure to incoming damage without the means to efficiently restack will also quickly strip away your direct Forceful damage resistance and toughness regeneration bonus, leaving you more exposed. Therefore, you must maintain a cautious aggressiveness as you engage with the enemy. If you can maintain your stacks, you can even weather sustained gunfire and withstand all but the deadliest blows. Additionally, be warned: discipline is everything. Keep your enemies in front of you. Command the chokepoints. Know the terrain—and dominate it. Stay aware of your allies’ lines and your enemies’ movements. Even the Grand Provost Marshal is vulnerable when flanked, isolated, or overrun. Lastly, remember, in addition to all that was said before—staggered enemies don’t strike back. With such overwhelming durability and control, you may be tempted to rush headlong into the fray ahead of your squad—but doing so risks overextension, isolation, and entrapment. Even the Arbites do not enforce the Lex alone.
With compounded and sustainable toughness regeneration, damage resistance, attack speed, direct damage dealt, strength, weak spot strength, rending, critical, and cleave bonuses, and the ability to strike multiple foes in a single melee attack, you maintain relentless pressure and damage in the heart of battle. Your durability lets you anchor the frontline, while your sustained and burst potential allow you to contend for top damage output—all while controlling the flow of combat for your allies. Importantly, you are a damage multiplier for your squad—your staggers can sustainably increase the damage dealt by your team up to a maximum of 25%.
For those new to Darktide, or still learning its ways, fear not—for the Emperor protects. With His guidance (and a measure of luck), this build’s layered resilience allows even novice Enforcers to survive—and occasionally thrive—at lower threat levels: Malice, Heresy, and Damnation or Auric, through sheer aggression alone. Indeed, His will permitting, you can endure—and even contribute—simply by mindlessly striking in melee or firing your revolver from range. The passively stacked toughness, resistance, regeneration, and inherent overlapping talent synergies will sustain you without tactics, timing, or precision. No memorized rotations. No careful positioning. No complex combos. Just advance. But know this: that is not the way of the Adeptus Arbites.
For the seasoned Arbitrator—for those who seek to uphold the Lex as the perfection it is, who pursue the mantle of the 'Immortal' Grand Provost Marshal and aim to ascend the upper echelons of Havoc 40—mastery demands more. Coordination. Positioning. Buff tracking. Precision. Aggression. Patience. Teamwork. And above all—judgment. Only through these can the full authority of the Lex be enforced through your hand.
“They may run, scatter, and hide. Their crimes, blinding, reveal them.They may beg for mercy or offer compromises. The Lex grants none, and neither shall you.They may raise arms in defiance. You will break their spirit, rend their flesh, and send their souls to judgment.
Where the Lex is absent, heresy festers. We are Malcador’s will made manifest—the God-Emperor’s judge, jury, and executioner. Where we tread, the filth of humanity trembles so that Terra may forever endure.
Let those who defy the Lex—Lexbreakers—be broken beneath it.”
