On Zealot I run 4 builds, the core of them is identical.
Path down through scourge, taking second wind, enduring faith, blades of faith and thy wrath be swift.
- Second Wind alone is the single strongest toughness regen passive in the game
- Scourge allows enduring faith to have an almost 100% uptime in aurics and high havocs, giving you at base, 50% toughness damage reduction.
- Thy Wrath Be Swift removes all stun from the game.
- You can, and on one build I do, also take Good Balance, for a 25% extra total damage resistance, not just TDR.
I then path left through to take duelist and until death.
- Duelist is a flat 15% minimum damage throughout the entire game, this of course dramatically scales finesse stat weapons beyond reason, especially knife and dueling sword
- Until Death, quite frankly, is the single strongest passive in the entire game, it allows a good player to survive all but disablers.
From HR, I path to one of two keystones, IJ and Piety.
- Piety comes with invocation of death, which means you will always have fury of the faithful back within 15 seconds, halfing your ultimate cooldown for free.
- Piety also comes with the sub-node Stalwart, which gives you 25% TDR when Piety is active, which is always, it, in addition gives 2% extra toughness on melee kill.
- Blazing Piety has a niche interaction with the Flamer blessing, Everlasting Flame, which gives the flamer 100% uptime on Blaze Away, a free 50% damage boost.
You are able to take multiple CDR sources, which dramatically boost the uptime on all three ultimates. This is fundamentally overpowered.
The tree is poorly designed because all of the good stuff is together and there is really only 4 variations of the same core build available from a meta perspective.
I did not include how poorly stealth is designed, and from a meta perspective, insanely overpowered, or how Relic is insane in how it works, given that you can stack cdr on it. Nor did i cover how the Relic Blade, Crusher or Flamer are insanely overpowered.