Darktide

[Asian tech support]

Doublepoosting.

 

[Swine Schwein]

Absolutely hooked, loving this piece of shit. I can make sense of most things now. Been diddling with Zealot and Veteran.

I haven't really understood Zealot yet. Well I know he's a melee guy, but it hasn't clicked yet, I feel like there's something I don't understand about his skillset and how I'm supposed to play him. So far I can dispatch the armored ogre-looking fuckers with the crit ult+thunder hammer but that's about it. I assume I have to get good at dodging and staying close but I suck at that, especially because I always want to dodge diagonally forward which is not a thing in this game..

Veteran on the other hand is 100% for me. Playing with a controller, so the best-feeling weapon for me so far is the braced autogun with a torrent mark. Not too much aim assist, not too much awkward zoom, no iron sights, feels good and provides suppression. Using just the basic ult lets me easily destroy specialists from afar and I also get a self-replenishing grenade that fucking murders the armored crushers, again, from afar.

One thing to note about the game: it can be equally fun with randos than with friends, at least on the lower difficulties. Playing with friends can be good but you tend to miss so much of the characters' banter which is constant, and luckily also good. I had a few chuckles last night. Also, the characters tend to point out important things, such as ammo crates, med stations, right way to go, specialists spawning/dying and so on. I can't remember the last action game where I actively enjoyed listening to characters speak.

 

[Asian tech support]

I haven't really understood Zealot yet. Well I know he's a melee guy, but it hasn't clicked yet, I feel like there's something I don't understand about his skillset and how I'm supposed to play him. So far I can dispatch the armored ogre-looking fuckers with the crit ult+thunder hammer but that's about it. I assume I have to get good at dodging and staying close but I suck at that, especially because I always want to dodge diagonally forward which is not a thing in this game..

@Blazing Piety did an excellent up to date summation of zealot found here.

Post in thread 'Darktide'

Dec 2, 2025

I started up a Zealot last night for shits and giggles.

Any build tips from you fellas?

Zealot is my most played class by far, so my two cents in addition to what @Asian tech support said. I'm not some master build crafter or anything, but this is what has worked for me.
For the talent tree:

• For the top of the tree Duelist and Second Wind are always taken. I flip flop on using either Disdain or Backstabber, sometimes running both, but Disdain is probably the better option of the two. You can optionally take Purge the Unclean if you are building towards dealing with...

• Blazing Piety

Reactions: x 3 x 1

If there was a wishlist for future entries, diagonal sliding would be highly placed. Dodge-sliding and adjusting the camera can sort of function as a diagonal dodge. Every class has nodes tied to dodging and most of them are auto includes. Dodging is a critical part of the game. If you wanna see some shit, on veteran take a stamina curio with some sprint efficiency, the stripped down blessing on your autogun, and the duck and dive node from the bottom right of the tree. As long as you're sprinting with >50% stamina, you automatically dodge (most) ranged attacks and every time you dodge, you replenish 30% of your stamina. Little feedback loop.

 

[Blazing Piety]

I haven't really understood Zealot yet. Well I know he's a melee guy, but it hasn't clicked yet, I feel like there's something I don't understand about his skillset and how I'm supposed to play him. So far I can dispatch the armored ogre-looking fuckers with the crit ult+thunder hammer but that's about it. I assume I have to get good at dodging and staying close but I suck at that, especially because I always want to dodge diagonally forward which is not a thing in this game..

You're absolutely right about dodging and staying close as zealot.

Zealot as a class is centered around melee, obviously. When you pick talents, you want to pick those that directly benefit melee combat or benefit some type of close range action, like dodges. You can pick talents that benefit your ranged abilities, but in 99% of cases you're just wasting talent points if you're picking ranged nodes unless you have some specific reason for doing so. The benefit of taking all the melee talents is that you become a powerhouse at close-range. You won't be as tanky as an Ogryn, but you will deal far more damage.

The core of Zealot gameplay is playing aggressive. You want to be in the deep of the horde, because when you are, you'll get the maximum value out of toughness replenishment and toughness damage reduction nodes and other damage nodes that you should take on the class. It's not uncommon to find yourself in the middle of hordes taking virtually no health damage because of the sheer amount of toughness DR and toughness replenishment you can get. You aren't invincible of course - you can still be caught by disablers or hit by Mauler or Crusher overheads just like any other class - but you have plenty of tools to avoid those situations. Nowadays you also have to take Until Death, so you'll always have that as a get-out-of-jail-free card for situations where you get backed into a corner.

Zealot excels at a bunch of things:

1. Hordeclear. With multiple different bladed weapons and having access to the flamer and bolter, hordes of trash mobs shouldn't be any threat to you. You also do great in horde management if you take weapons like the Crusher, which do great amounts of stagger even to Crushers (the enemies).
2. Killing specialists. Knives can kill every specialist except for mutants with a headshot and almost all of them with a bodyshot, so getting good with knives can allow you to take out all sorts of threats like snipers and trappers before they can even get close to your team. This also extends to elite gunners and shotgunners.
3. Boss damage. There are plenty of talents you can take and builds you can run to either quickly deal with bosses, or even kill them outright if you build for it, which is very valuable when dealing with lots of bosses on certain missions.
4. Revives and rescues. By taking the revive speed node Providence and running revive speed on your curios, you can get revives and rescues off incredibly quick, which has huge benefits in all sorts of situations.

Now of course other classes can do these things too, but in my opinion Zealot has the benefit of being able to tackle all these things without having to make serious adjustments to his talent tree or playstyle. If you are good at dodging and are comfortable being up close, that takes care of a lot of situations you find yourself in.

There are two specific situations that I can think of where Zealot can run into issues:

1. Hordes of Ogryn enemies. Bulwarks in particular have a really nasty habit of blocking your melees with their shields, and when you have hordes of 4 or more Bulwarks, it can be a challenge to find an opportunity to strike depending on your loadout. Waves of Crushers can also be intimidating if you're newer, but Crushers are often more bark than bite.
2. Hordes of elite gunners. If 20 elite gunners all focus their fire on you, they can shred through your toughness and health in the blink of an eye. You aren't gonna be fast enough to kill all of them with knives, so this is where having a suitable ranged option comes in handy.

Choosing a melee that suits you is also important. The Thunderhammer is great at single-target damage which makes it perfect for boss killing, but it is really not good at hordeclear and has a horrible moveset IMO. If you aren't feeling it with the thammer, try picking something like the relic blades, which are way more versatile and are still able to shit out damage. Whether you prefer fast weapons versus heavy weapons comes down to personal preference; you'll just need to try them out to see what you think of them.

A build that was making the rounds around a month or so ago is a.a's Fatmangus build. While it is sorta a gimmick build focusing on making Zealot tanky through HP increase and damage reduction, I've seen a lot of people really like the build, and it is surprisingly effective even in Havoc that I wouldn't really consider it a gimmick. I'd give it a shot - it might be what you need to make Zealot click. a.a's other builds for other classes are also pretty cool.

 

[Swine Schwein]

A lot of shit

Thank you, your helpful autism pretty much covered everything I could even think about asking.

So keep close and get comfortable with the dodge, alright, just gotta practice.

I kind of want to remain a crusher-deleter, especially since I play a lot with randoms, so the thunder hammer will do for the time being - even if it's really slow with hordes. I tried some chainsaw sword in the meat grinder practice area, which was neat, but deleting a crusher took a bit too long. It dies in one attack but I'm probably vulnerable to other enemies during the saw animation.

I used some heavy sword in the early levels and I was really getting that quick cleave carnage when fighting hordes, so I might go back to something like that if I can find an enjoyable way to deal with the big boys otherwise. I might check out the knives, if they feel ok with a controller.

 

[Asian tech support]

Patch day. Their blogsite is easier to read than steam or their forum though they were still too lazy to include weapon change minutiae.
https://www.playdarktide.com/news/b...te-out-now-patch-1-11-0-expeditions-game-mode
tl;dr - shout nerfed, psyker nerfed, plasma gun nerfed, ranged scum nerfed, other scum buffed, zealot buffed, ogryn mostly buffed, arbites buffed on paper but unchanged in practice

Spoiler: my own read on the scum changes

The new scum tree looks stupid and there are a weird tax nodes that don't have to be there even though they fucking said the changes were there to eliminate exactly that.

Let's start off with the good.
I like that they're making toxin builds more of a thing. My melee scum builds tried to incorporate some of the toxin nodes even if the others might have been optimal or meta. The new Splash Damage node is crap on its own but very good with both Toxic Renewal and Toxin Mania. I don't think Virulent Strain or Targeted Toxin are any good - 10% damage taken (for 5s lmao) isn't good at all and regular enemies doing 15% less damage isn't consequential. If it was a flat 30% it would be worth it but not as it is currently. I honestly don't think 30% is that big a deal for bosses either as I don't think it reduces corruption damage and the bosses that do corruption are the most dangerous because of it. The only one that actually does damage is the daemonhost.

Onto the bad.
Vulture's Mark and Adrenaline Frenzy were unchanged and both of those keystones are about as useless as they come. The entire class is still enabled by Chemical Dependency and it takes more nodes get there now, or more accurately, it requires a tax to get there. I'm actually shocked that these weren't touched. As long as Chemical Dependency gives cdr while the ability lockout timers exist, it will always be the best, end of discussion.

Blessed Stimms and Long Lasting should be somewhere else and that spot in the tree should either bottlneck into Sample Collector (because of how good Chemical Dependency is, no one plays scum without the cartel special despite it not being mandatory) or into Burst of Energy (because the top of the tree is crowded). Veteran solved a very similar issue by bottlenecking into Close Order Drill. Because Gunslinger Improved is invalidated by Pickpocket and Survivalist and Ruffian is only useful for Rampage scum, that leaves only Anarchist as an aura of choice for ranged scum, making Long Lasting a tax. Long Lasting isn't even that good. You want the stimm on cd so you can get Sample Collector doing its thing so you can get your stacks of Chemical Dependency sooner. Additional 5s of downtime is actually huge. Blessed Stimms on the other hand just became a lot more useful with how corruption works in the new mode. Any corruption resistance did. Beacon zealots useful again.

The bottom left part of the tree is completely without cohesion. It's an eclectic mix of ammo nodes and melee nodes and looks like a dumping ground for nodes that had nowhere else to go. Some of those nodes are good but a ranged build that goes into that area isn't going to take [Swift Endurance, Hyper Critical, Channeled Devestastion] and The Sweet Spot isn't as good as it seems due to the weird ways conditional damage stacks. For ranged builds, the only nodes worth looking at are Pickpocket and Unload, while Ammo Jack is just there as a Pickpocket tax. It's weird that most of the good ranged nodes are at the very top of the tree instead of down there.

I'm not even going to go into the Pickpocket gutting. Ranged scum is dead, long live melee scum.

 

[ChampFantana]

Ranged scum is dead, long live melee scum.

Then what's the point of playing Scum at all?

Melee Scum is basically just a re-skinned Zealot.

 

[evrae]

Yeah Melee Scum is just a Zealot reskin, Pickpocket nerf isn't surprising but it's a massive gutting. Also those Zealot buffs aren't at all significant. Nerfing bubble will make "oops all gunner" seeds even more obnoxious, and I found them to always be worse than "oops all crushers". Scum will be even more essential to reduce cooldowns. I remember in my premade for Havoc I could pop Icon as Zealot and chain it with my Psyker using Bubble during my downtime and vice versa, all thanks to our Scum giving us retarded amounts of CDR.

 

[Swine Schwein]

Haven't tried the new gamemode yet (shiiet, haven't even tried the mortis...mordus trials?) but I can now handle Malice with randoms pretty confidently. It's still early but I can see how upping the difficulty goes; less ammo, more enemies, more incoming damage, git guder or die trying. I like it.

Also, now using the shock mace on my Veteran. I suck with it, but it's strangely fun. I would do better with anything else but at least this one forces me to really pay attention to the moveset. If I want to get sweep attacks against hordes, I got to start with either the heavy attack or the push attack, followed with a light attack. 1on1? Just electrocute+spam heavy overhead like a fucking retard. I always hope the enemy doesn't die right away so I can just keep bashing like a crazy piece of shit

So far my favorite mission has been the "raid" one. Campaign X or so. Very straightforward, feels like billions of enemies and the map is nice too.

How's the new mode, what's it called, expedition? Feeling good about it?

 

[Asian tech support]

How's the new mode, what's it called, expedition? Feeling good about it?

I thought it was going to have random boons n sheeit but it turns out you just get currency junks to spend for supplies. Not quite as cool as I had hoped. At least it's short.

e: Played a couple more and I think what they were going for is a response to HD2 and isn't a Chaos Wastes redux at all. The way objectives are pinged on the scanner is functionally the same and it even has the same evac sequence. Because the mode is new and no one knows what they're doing, lobbies suck. Once people figure out how to split up/solo objectives, it'll probably feel better.

 

[latinlover]

Because the mode is new and no one knows what they're doing, lobbies suck. Once people figure out how to split up/solo objectives, it'll probably feel better.

Played the shit out of it since it released, unlocked multiple nodes with a pretty good 4 man premade team in comms - it's still extremely bland. I don't think I will ever touch this particular gamemode again, I think Mortis Trials are miles ahead in fun factor and that's pretty telling. It really isn't bad, having these big open maps for long-range firefights is a cool novelty for like half an hour, but after it wears off it's all just boring and serves no real purpose.

Like you said, it's like Helldivers 2 if it was ass. Anyone who expected Chaos Wastes vol 2. is delusional, to be honest I have no clue what I thought it was going to be but I'm disappointed personally.

This would be an alright foundation for something they could build on, but since there is no precedent of them expanding on these secondary gamemodes past release I don't think they will. To be frank Fatshart being already world renowned for its glacial speed of development I don't think they should waste resources on this anyway so I'm not too mad about it. Splitting the already dwindling playerbase with extra non-temporary game modes competing with the original game is also a choice you can make as a live service game, I guess.

 

[Mister Fister]

Somehow I managed to get JudgeDread for my arbities pass the censors.

 

[Asian tech support]

This would be an alright foundation for something they could build on, but since there is no precedent of them expanding on these secondary gamemodes past release I don't think they will.

Aside from it aping Helldivers, I think it's the product of level designers of level designers messing around with outdoor tilesets and new interactables rather than something conceived of from the ground up. The mode itself was probably thrown together fairly quickly despite all the time it took to actually get here. I agree that as a mode it's not going anywhere. They might add a node here and there sort of like how they added the third mortis trials map but it's never turning into anything it isn't already. Ironically, havoc which I still think is unnecessarily partitioned is the best mode they've done imo.

 

[latinlover]

havoc which I still think is unnecessarily partitioned is the best mode they've done imo.

The thing is, havoc doesn't suffer from any of the issues I mentioned earlier because in the end it's just "base game but harder", a mode like that was necessary for the health of the game.

Expeditions: I obviously wouldn't mind if it was a passion project the level designers threw together in their free time over the course of a few months, the thing that bothers me is that in FS communications this patch was and is lauded as the BIGGEST CONTENT PATCH TO DATE and the second coming of Jesus Christ, which it clearly is not. As of now all signs are pointing to the fact that we aren't getting anything significant besides this pile of dogshit for the next x months, which is a shame.

 

[Asian tech support]

The thing is, havoc doesn't suffer from any of the issues I mentioned earlier because in the end it's just "base game but harder", a mode like that was necessary for the health of the game.

Which is why it's the best mode and should be incorporated into the regular mission table. The proverbial "mutator mode" was something often asked for during Vermintide and now it's so very close, yet so very far. Eventually the sweatlords got tired and modded it themselves which is how we got C3DWONS (basically vermintide havoc).

Expeditions: I obviously wouldn't mind if it was a passion project the level designers threw together in their free time over the course of a few months, the thing that bothers me is that in FS communications this patch was and is lauded as the BIGGEST CONTENT PATCH TO DATE and the second coming of Jesus Christ, which it clearly is not. As of now all signs are pointing to the fact that we aren't getting anything significant besides this pile of dogshit for the next x months, which is a shame.

The hope is that a bunch of the time since Dark Communion was spent creating one, maybe two outdoor tilesets that could then be used for more regular maps. Not holding my breath though.

 

[Swine Schwein]

Was getting a little frustrated by the tougher non-ogryn melee enemies, when 2-3 of them get close to you it's pretty much one mistake and you're done

Then I tried the spearhead boltgun for the first time. Problem fucking solved. What is this retarded weapon? It even fucks up the shield guys. It fucks up entire groups. You shoot one guy in a group, he explodes into shit and guts and the rest of them either die too or suffer from some mega suppression effect. Sometimes I'm sure I'm missing my shots by a good margin but everything still fucking dies out of respect and fear

 

[Asian tech support]

Now that the marker mod is fixed, the new mode is slightly less aggravating, though its absence showed just how ass the readability of the map is. The map would have worked better if it wasn't about resource gathering and completing semi-rng events. The sheer amount of clutter on the map makes tracking down tech scrap and salvage all but impossible and it's hard to figure out what kind of event a setpiece is at a glance because from a distance, some of them look identical. Even when actually getting on top of them it's not necessarily immediately apparent if it's a servo scan event or a decode event or maybe it has a power cell, etc. Honestly, the only ones I can consistently recognize from a distance are the mine breech ones. The map being beige and more beige doesn't help its case either, it's ghastly during the day, ghastly at night, and ghastly with sandstorms.