Tbh as great as TWBS is, it is somewhat devalued when used on a crit CDR stealth build. When you can just drop aggro every 10s or so stun immunity doesn’t mean as much as you might think. Especially with a fast as hell weapon like the knife.
I wouldn’t say I under value it. I think its very strong. But I find that most things in the middle there are so bad it’s not worth traversing that path or spending 3 points to move into from the left or right sides. Not when any crit build requires the 4 nodes in top right at a minimum and Faithful Frenzy and Sustained Assault (and the 5% melee node required to get it) give such large bonuses. Knowing that TWBS apparently ignores the “melee only” wording, I would even attempt that first if points allow. It’s is just the Benediction line is stacked compared to getting Shield of Contempt or TWBS with ok auras and nodes that for the most part are not needed at all. 5% melee damage 5% movement speed Until Death/Holy Revenant combo and a teamwide 15% toughness DR with 100% uptime is a lot.
Then you missed something…
All auras give you something… and the 3 talents behind them are not negligible.
Until death + holy revenant + faith’s fortitude is one of my favorite combination… and not just with martyrdom.
Shield of content is great. Benediction permits me to put different curios (i always use +15% corruption resist, so with benediction I can go for something else)
Thy wrath be swift is really essential with slow melee weapons (TH)
Good balance is great for critic templates
Loner is great if you want to play the explorer that will check all chests
Seriously… so many things in these talents around the auras, that if you did not see any interest in them, then you obviously not have the full vision of what is a zealot.
For Fatshark (yea I know that it is pointless): Please don’t mess the zealot tree. I tend to play less and less, mainly cause of vet tree… if you mess the zealot tree, then I will have to leave…
I am not saying its BAD I am saying it is a mess. The middle and and right side aura paths are extremely underwhelming, having one good option each. All of those other nodes provide minimal or extremely situational impacts. Beacon of Purity is a nice aura and you get Shield of Contempt. But that is it. The extra impact is nice for some weapons but in my experience it is definitely not needed. Loner you get TWBS. Grievous Wounds again is very situational on what weapons really make use of it. Loner itself is just silly lets be real. It has low uptime unless you are actively avoiding your team, which you shouldn’t be doing. I don’t want the nice options removed, I want the other options to be useful so I can actually have a real other option here.
If you aren’t pathing through these auras already you have a very high point cost to pick them up, or you pick a different blitz than may be ideal. I, personally, don’t mind throwing knives because it pairs well with my preferred ranged weapons. But if I wanted to run a BAG or an IAG or a revolver, knives would be rather pointless.
I love zealot, it is my favorite class. I even have 2 of them. It is very strong too. There is just this constraint that I feel when building zealot that the other 3 don’t seem to really have.
That just happens when you play a class a lot. Over familiarity with a career gives you a high level of insight into their strengths, and weaknesses. Unfortunately we have a negativity bias a species (unfortunately for our happiness anyways; we wouldn’t have made it this far without one).
I feel the same way about Veteran. It feels insanely constrained by weapon choices, its low survivability (a lot due to the lack of stun immunity), and frankly disappointing keystones.
I feel free, and limitless on Zealot. Perhaps its a long honeymoon phase.
EDIT: Grammar. Found a place for the rare proper use of a semi-colon. Could not be passed up.
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I don’t have any particular opinion on what it should change to, but it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense as-is (and there’s other talents that fail in the same way)
If I’m not mistaken, Stalwart only procs when you initially reach 25 stacks (as opposed to refreshing it), so it’s just impractical to actually benefit from it. You can’t really predict that you’re going to need the toughness regen as soon as 25 nearby enemies have died and in most cases, you’ve naturally replenished a lot more than 50% Toughness by killing enemies to build those 25 stacks.
As for the shared buff, spreading the full buff is probably a bit much. 33 - 50% of the original buff, I’d consider it a reasonable option to take, but I can’t bring myself to pick Stalwart to reach it.
Through talents and curios, you can reach 6 stacks I think… which is still not max stacks 
I think what qualifies as a successful dodge is currently a bit unclear. There’s been occasions where I’ve dodged an attack (by reacting to the sound effect), but haven’t gotten any stacks for it; I don’t think the ability itself needs tweaking, so much as that successful dodge mechanic needs clarity.
While Unremitting is purely for convenience, I’ve found Sainted Gunslinger to be very helpful for both Revolver and Bolter builds. I typically run Chorus so it finds its way into all builds (and it is useful IMO in any build), but those 2 weapons in particular, it really smooths out gameplay when you need to swap to ranged. In most cases, I have at least a few stacks ready to go for when it’s needed.
Emperor’s Bullet is okay, provided you’ve running the original Revolver or a shotgun, since you don’t need to fully reload the weapon to trigger it. I can reload from empty, shoot a special, reap the benefit. But ye, it’s fairly niche.
I like that the top row is loaded; there’s a lot of good stuff there doesn’t cost the extra point that lower sections of the tree would (Thy Wrath Be Swift is nearly always going to cost me 1 or 2 extra points to reach, because I don’t like Loner).
Crit builds do have that slightly awkward layout because you either (a) take knives, which is not to everyone’s taste, or (b) spend 3 points, I think, to get those good crit talents, before doubling back into another branch. Would moving those talents around just introduce the same “problem” for other builds? For me, the inconvenience is that the crit talents are a prerequisite to knives (I generally prefer the other 2 Blitz options) rather than the cost of reaching the crit talents themselves.
I don’t think I’ve ever found myself starved of talent points. It typically comes down to there’s one, maybe two, nice-to-haves but I’d have to sacrifice a different nice-to-have in exchange (which feels like how the talent system should work, IMO - you can get a solid core build, and have to make decisions on what extras are worth it for you)
I wish the zealot knives came out faster, even if they didn’t fly faster.
I’m generally not a fan of talent trees that have 3 horizontal lines with 3 small nodes on each of them. They make you pay a huge toll for moving from one side to the other.
(I think it’s more punishing in Vet’s tree but not good in Zealot’s tree either. More about it here: Vet's talent tree is good but not great)
In my post I simply suggested removing 1 small node from every horizontal line (I drew a new talent tree so feel free to go and check it out to have an idea how it looks with 2 nodes only). Since it works for Vet it might work for Zealot too. This change in most cases saves about 1-2 points in the top/mid part of the tree that can be invested elsewhere.
The removed small nodes could be moved to different places and taken optionally.
I think it was necessary on the Veteran because of how many talents it took to reach the bottom (so that horizontal cost locked you out of quite a bit). You had very little room to spread it within your major branch, not to mind jumping to other major branches.
For the Zealot (which never had that problem) I think it would take away from the interesting decision making of the talent tree - I personally enjoy seeing what choices I have, giving them a whirl, seeing if I could make up the difference in other places, until I’ve settled on something I like. If there’s an additional 2 points to spend, then a lot of those decisions just go away - I don’t have to take A or B, I could just take both. The build would probably be stronger, but I don’t think it’d be as fun to build (nor do I feel that any of my builds are weak for having made those decisions)
For the Zealot, I’m mostly settled on what choices I prefer, but coming to those conclusions and deciding “if I had to choose A or B…” was the interesting part.
For instance, could I drop TWBS since I have the other uninterruptable talent, and put those points towards getting more damage? In my case, I much preferred having TWBS, even if it meant I did less damage, and I didn’t find any tweaks to make up for the loss of TWBS.
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I feel similarly. Mostly I blame it on a few quirks of the zealot tree.
- Not having free choice of blitz like the other classes.
- Second wind & vicious offering being the only two major toughness regen talents and each being much deeper into the talent tree than the major toughness regen talents of the other classes. There’s also a curious lack of a toughness talent for weapons that don’t synergize well with vicious offering.
- As you mentioned, the middle of the tree has several stand out talents (until death, shield of contempt, TWBS) amidst a slew of mediocre to bad talents. Pathing to grab as many as of the good talents possible eats up a lot of points and sometimes saddles you with garbage tax talents. Looking at you emperor’s bullet.
- There’s one clear winner for cooldown reduction: invocation of death. Which drives a lot of weapons towards crit builds. Either via blessings or talents/blazing piety.
I can empathize with that, not having the maximum benefit off of something always feels worse, but when it comes to the competition I think it’s a necessary evil so to speak.
Piety is also more of a build piece take than a proper damage buffer. Not to say that it doesn’t help with damage, but if invocation didn’t exist it would be way less popular. Essentially the cost for piety is running a crit build with very specific requirements, hence your laments in the original post. As a result though, the buff is easy to keep up, and
Fairly being the operative word here lol, but low hp is still a cost of sorts for the power at hand. Total cost to run martyrdom goes like:
Minimum 3 wounds to match IJ on damage
Minimum 5 wounds to match attack speed
Arguably higher skill requirement/ceiling since you have to be at low hp which means few to no mistakes
No ranged benefits
No stamina curios
No toughness curios
No health curios
For in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only wounds
For this suffering you gain unparalled buffs to your ptimary form of combat.
Then you look at IJ which requires:
Cha Cha slide on some mfers
The others have complete uptime due to large backend cost, whereas IJ provides a consistent boost almost for free.
Now as far as stacking goes, would I take easier/cleaner stacking? Yes, but do I think it’s either necessary or warranted given the ease of use? Eh, I certainly wouldn’t mind it (maybe an extra tax node for generation on elite kill would be cool) but its too easy of a buff for me to say it’s deserving of a change in such a direction, however annoying random stack numbers are.
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Maybe it’s because I’m bad, but I’ve always viewed an upside of Martyrdom/high wounds getting rezzed with a good chunk of HP 
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My biggest issue with the Zealot tree is that it has a lot of “tax” points to get to the good stuff. I often have to take talents that offer my build basically nothing to get to something really good.
Thy Wrath Be Swift and Enduring Faith are two top tier perks, and they both take 3 to 5 points to get to depending on your build. Hell, Enduring Faith almost locks you into taking Blades of Light.
And for this reason, Dance of Death might be one of my most hated talents in the game, lol.
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I think this is a big one that, dare I say even makes people over value crit build. Definitely would be happy to see some buffs to Martyr’s purpose. I don’t agree with trying to squeeze in crit cooldown on Martyrdom builds but I’m completely sympathetic as to why people find it appealing. Pious cut throat is fine for stealth builds I’d say, though I think it still has the weird bug where it won’t register backstabs for CDR unless you also have backstabber in the build. That’s not the biggest issue since you’re pretty much always gonna have both those in a build that takes either but would be nice if they fixed that regardless.
Personally for my Mk IV Chaxe Martyrdom build I’ve come to favour giving up on all cooldown talents to instead get a spread of all the good stuff around the middle (shield of contempt, TWBS, and naturally until death + holy rev down through benediction). Also getting both vicious and bleed for the emperor. It’s insane just how survivable it is plus the insane team survivability boost from shield of contempt negating most burst damage.
I’m kind of a certified fire nade hater for these two reasons combined. Middle path leading to it isn’t even that bad just miss out on too many things I’d consider essential.
I really don’t think they needed to nerf EWEW TBH. It’s so mediocre post talent trees it borderline feels like a tax node. Being able to dip into it for another toughness source would go a long way but it’s too meh for that currently. I think this also helps making IJ more appealing for any weapon where you don’t spam heavy attacks most of the time. I’ve come to super appreciate the regular bursts of toughness you get from it even when counter firing oppressive shooter squads.
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I’m not sure why you guys chat about this and haven’t acknowledged inex judge is currently bugged making 1 out of 3 useless
First I’ve heard of it. How so?
I mean, it’s kind of undeniable it’s an objective upside. How much it comes into play determines whether you are less, or more experienced though.
I think all 3 are very strong
Blazing:
25% crit feels like the least and most impactful stat
It affects all weapons
But also triggers the 50% TDR (Toughness DR), and the cooldown on crit.
Highly build dependant
Martyrdoom:
Bonkers once you get down to 2 wounds (no reason to thread the needle)
40%+ Melee dmg, 20%+ Melee Attack speed, 25%+ TDR
Skill dependant, but highly effective when combined with the rest of the kit.
Still feels like a bit of a meme in the absence of White THP.
Judgement:
I’ve not played much with it yet, but probably the strongest keystone:
20% damage & attack speed
Great uptime, can be triggered with ranged, don’t think it needs to be at full uptime all the time for free though. Make the player work for it a bit more.
40% toughness regen on an 8s timer
Extremely good imo.
I agree with banishing light:
It is a mandatory node to progress down the tree since you can’t path anywhere else.
This is just a point gobbler (maybe as a balance factor but imo, not here).
This should never be the case, again imo.
Benediction is strong, and right after very powerful survival nodes, and leads into Fury.
I’ve yet to see anyone ever running Beacon. It’s just not good. Corruption sources are few (poxwalkers shouldn’t hit you in the first place), and who carries grims nowadays?
Loner is loner. I see the intent, but there is no i in Team.
I think the zealot tree is mostly fine. There’s enough points for you to have a bit of flexibility in your build, while still having some pretty steep requirements to make some builds work.
My main issue with the zealot tree, is how mandatory Thy Raft Be Fast is for a zealot.
It’s a night and day difference having it, and the moment it gets “fixed”, I’m out.
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The general issue with the zealot tree is that the mid-path is not competitive enough. Some early investments are good, such as extra ranged dmg and infested/unyielding dmg. With the exception of those few talents I barely ever invest there.
The Martyrdom keystone is also meh, even if I’m sure it has some fans, its a risky playstyle, which is nowhere as good as it was on the VT2 zealot.
Requesting the talent be officially renamed, please and thank you.