Zealot Inexorable Judgment

I main Zealot and primarily use relic blade. For other weapons like knife or rapier BP is pretty straightforward and quite good, but for relic blade BP feels a little sluggish although hitting a crit does great damage. Martyrdom is usually my higher difficulty build but I am wanting your opinion on IJ. I’ve used it with relic blade and it feels better to use than BP with the added movespeed but all around seems weaker than BP and martyrdom. There is the fatmangus build but it seems like a meme so I haven’t used it.

The mobility is nice for diving backlines. I would prefer martyrdom if It’s a melee seeded map and IJ if it’s a ranged seed. For both builds I take the 10% sprint speed node as personal preference because movespeed is king IMO and feels really good to have.

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Martyrdom seems king in most ways due to being tanky and having good attack speed with the risk of being low hp, but wouldn’t IJ have better burst damage? I will have to also try out the fatmangus build to see just how tanky it is.

Martyrdom has 30% more melee damage and better attack speed but it doesn’t affect ranged like IJ does, and doesn’t have the dodge buffs. Health build is very tanky and has some crazy effective health but it’s not my cup of tea. It’s there if you really don’t like dying.

Piety is great for survivability and team support. 10% crit aura for the team, potentially combined with a Hive Scum / Psyker 5% crit aura is pretty insane value. And the crit sounds when you’re cleaving through a horde is actually so peak.

For me, I think IJ averages out to 14 stacks.

So between 14% and 20% attack speed and damage. It’s okay. The talents above it are fine. Don’t take it without inebriated poise

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Really I think BP is noticeably better than IJ with the relic blade, but that’s really only at higher difficulties. If your swinging into Mobian hoards you can actually start stacking scourge with the relic blade and hit basically 100% crit chance plus BP. But at lower difficulties there just aren’t enough enemies to keep BP going all the time, and everything dies in one crit hit so your not getting anything from scourge.

But that being said if your doing havoc your probably better off with martyrdom usually. I just like running BP because it’s a bit more laid back. If I want to try hard I just run scriers force great sword psyker instead lol.

In case anyone is not in the know, here is the Kuli guide entry for IJ. It has hidden dodge buffs not mentioned in the description.

This came up in another thread so I’m just gonna say the same thing here. Buff Inebriate’s Poise from 3 stacks to 4 or even 5 and now I think it is a legitimate alternative to the other keystones. As it is it is ok if you really hate the Martyrdom playstyle (being on low health all the time) but the uptime makes it feel kinda bad.

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It’s really the dodge stuff that makes IJ better. Being able to dodge between packs and through hordes so much more easily gives it so much more maneuverability, and with the relic blade or crusher’s reach, you can more easily and quickly kill priority targets.

It doesn’t translate to psykhanium damage so it doesn’t look good until you actually use it.

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What do you mean it doesn’t translate?

As in it looks like oh it only has a minor buff, where the crit from piety means more consistent one shots on tac axe or knife, or martyrdom means much higher damage and toughness DR and attack speed, so clearly the numbers aren’t as good. And if you don’t know the dodge stuff, and haven’t experimented with it, it won’t be immediately apparent that it’s not all about how much harder and quicker you can hit, but also how much more maneuverable you are in dodging into and out of combat.

It has substantial benefits that aren’t immediately obvious in terms of straight damage numbers.

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I see what you mean, and I’ve been trying different IJ builds and have to say that it actually feels very strong. Maybe not quite as damage resistant as Blazing Piety but the added attack speed and damage on top of mobility does make it a little safer than martyrdom.

I’ve always heard martyrdom is hands down best, then blazing piety for fast weapons and that IJ is much worse than both but I’m beginning to question that a bit.

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Yeah it’s entirely dependent on build, weapon, and playstyle.

I think it’s fair to say IJ is overall the worst keystone, it’s just that the margin is smaller than many make out, and a lot of people don’t factor that Martyrdom’s whole game plan simply isn’t to many people’s tastes.

I do want to see some improvements to IJ though. At least getting the damage bonuses on the attack that triggers your stacks would be nice for consistency. I do think Inebriate’s should be buffed to at least 4 stacks per dodge, and I do question if 6 seconds is a reasonable base duration.

Most keystones have mandatory sub nodes, but it does feel like IJ in particular just doesn’t really function at all without Inebriate’s and Eternal. It’s a bit too stark how mandatory those are for my tastes.

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IJ is dogshit, always has been, always will be. You will never have it working at max capacity (stacks) in elongated fights, where you would need it the most, unless using it with inherently mobile weapons, that also happen to have high finesse, at which point why bother, piety will perform significantly more consistent.

Arguably, the only weapon for which it can be considered the best keystone are the devil’s claws, but that means using a dc to begin with, handicapping yourself from the get go.

IJ is just too inconsistent to be any good. It’s also bad for backstab build as it doesn’t buff the attack that procs it.

I guess it’s difficult to dodge to keep stacks (the lower IJ is an actual buff). But I agree that FS can improve the keystone a bit by making it apply to the first attack and, maybe, make Inebriate’s Poise baseline to improve talent economy.

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I’ve blessed the tac axe with Agile for infinite dodges. Seems to work quite well for Inebriate’s. I prefer IJ with knife or taxe because they already have high crit, so that BP seems a little redundant if you also boost crit via perks. I mean how much more crit do I need. Stalwart would be the reason I take BP, and perhaps Infectious Zeal in havoc. And Enduring Faith works just fine on knife and taxe without BP, for instance.

This is where I’m at with IJ as well. I was actually really shocked by how people talk about it online since I started using it without looking up stuff online, and I could’ve sworn it wasn’t that bad! Especially since I don’t really like martyrdom’s playstyle

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