THE BEST ZACIAN BUILD GUIDE - POKEMON UNITE

About Intrepid Sword:
Before we get into how you play each moveset, it’s going to be really important to go over Zacian’s Intrepid Sword passive. Zacian lives and dies by this passive. Much of the character’s difficulty comes with how you manage your resources and when you choose to use them with this passive.

By pressing the score button, Zacian begins consuming Aeos Energy (points) you have in tow in order to temporarily gain access to an empowered version of its skills and empowered auto attacks.

– The minimum amount you can consume is 8 for a 3 second boost, which you can get by just tapping the score button for a short time, which I’ll call a “tap boost” for the rest of the guide.

– Holding the button for longer will let you consume more points for a longer boost. The second tier consumes 12 points and lasts 6 seconds. The third and highest tier of boosting costs 15 points and lasts 10 seconds. You can continue to hold down the button after reaching this point to stall when your boost starts, but you won’t get a bigger boost for it or anything.

– The 8s cooldown for boosting begins the moment you consume points. This means that if you do a full 15 point boost, then you will be able to immediately boost again after it wears off.

– While you can only use one empowered skill during a boost period, these skills are on their own separate cooldowns and pretty much act as a cooldown reset. Position yourself wisely and choose smart boost timings to make sure you don’t end up using the wrong empowered skill.

– Your auto attacks are also empowered with a powerful % max HP damage bonus that can also crit, which lets you do some insanely high DPS. These empowered autos continue to last the full boost duration even after using an empowered skill.

Basically, you spend points to gain access to broken autos and moves. As long as you are getting kills off most of your boosts, farming well, and don’t die, you will probably always have enough points to go around.

Life isn’t always so simple though and things will go wrong. A lot of proper points management comes down to following a bunch of little rules that you should follow in order to minimize waste. While it might be tricky at first, it’s not too bad with some experience and using your head a little. Here are some of the basic rules to follow:

– Know your limits and your openings well to ensure that your engagements will lead to kills (and dropped points) as often as possible.

– While Sovereign Sword can deal bonkers damage, it’s also very pricey and can be disastrous if you aren’t able to get an objective secure or big kills out of it. Use it wisely.

– Don’t take pointless fights where you aren’t likely to get a profitable kill out of it, especially if you’re not already swimming in points. Even if you survive, you’ll likely have wasted a bunch of points trying to do so and value has been wasted.

– Don’t. Die. You should be valuing your life anyway as a carry, but Zacian especially cannot afford to die and has the natural statline and tools to help make that happen.

– Unless the farm is contested, it’s not worth expending points to farm faster. It costs 8 points minimum to boost now, and most mobs will give you 5 points for clearing them at most until final stretch where their point yields double. You’re also still running negative even after clearing a full set of birds, so it’s also usually not worth boosting for them unless you’re on a time crunch or they’re contested.

– Avoid scoring if you can help it. Depending on how close you are in timing to a big teamfight or objective, how much farm is on the map, and how much points are already on the ground (camera check around the map for points!), scoring can heavily set you back on your point stash. It’s just generally not worth it unless you’re getting a big overcap or a lot of EXP and you can get enough points again in time for the next fight right after. If you score right before a big objective or before Ray fight, you’re literally throwing.

– Especially on the Sacred Sword set, tap boosting will often be sufficient for getting the kills you need to get if you’re smart about choosing your openings. Longer boosts are only really worthwhile when maximizing objective rip speeds is a priority or for more extended fights where you have to swing more autos or chasing people down with Agility or Play Rough.

– A common bad habit I see is Zacian players just holding a a max boost before a teamfight starts while waiting for it to begin. While this can sometimes work out, it can often be a waste of points because you may end up only needing a tap boost. It also leaves you prone to wasting your empowered skill use on Agility or Play Rough to gap close instead of being able to get off a juicy empowered Sacred Sword from more reactive points consumption.

– During laning phase, using empowered Slash after the nerf to point costs is generally not worth it anymore since you no longer will be able to boost again right after securing the farm. Albeit much more contestable, a single unempowered Slash is still quite good secure, especially if you’re using it in tandem with Razor Claw. The boost during early laning is usually better off being used for killing enemy laners that are foolish enough to try to fight you and your empowered Slash, good autos, and insane statline.

– You should aim to have at worst 30 points for the final fight at the 2:00 mark. Ideally though, you should be shooting for a full 40-50 points in tow. This means that starting at around the 3:30 range or a bit later, you should be extra conservative about how your spend your points and start farming for points or looking around the map for them. Even if you’re already at a good amount, more is better and you still want to be as high level as possible as a central carry.

MOVESET 1: Sacred Sword + Agility (BEST)
Items: Rusted Sword, Muscle Band, Razor Claw
– You are literally forced to run Rusted Sword, an item that does nothing, because it allegedly helps “balance” this character out.
– Due to the drastic lowering of Zacian’s base crit chance, Scope Lens has now, while still valuable, been surpassed in output by other items, namely Razor Claw. Since majority of your output now lies in your burst combos, Razor not only helps your early game power with Slash secures, but makes your double-Sacred + boosted auto more lethal and difficult to escape from with the extra proc damage and slow.
– Muscle further augments the early power of basic attacking both wild farm and enemies, with more atkspeed giving more chances for crits.
– Weakness Policy is an honorable mention here in place of Razor Claw if you see yourself doing more longterm duels or against targets that aren’t readily burstable.

Battle Item: Full Heal, Eject Button, or Shedinja Doll
– Full Heal helps you continue to swing autos and get your moves off through any possible CC obstacles. Consuming points via Intrepid Sword can also be interrupted by CC, so Full Heal is a nice safeguard against that as well. Agility is already pretty sufficient mobility as well.
– Eject Button is a great alternative to people that don’t like Full Heal or don’t find themselves needing it. While Agility already provides great mobility as is, having the extra instant gapclose or reposition with Eject Button lets you more easily hit some big Sacred Swords or be used to reposition and realign Sovereign Sword.
– Shedinja Doll is a great way of avoiding huge damage or CC while you’re in the thick of it while your Sacred Swords are going off.
Emblems: 6 Brown 6 White

– Attack and HP are going to be your best stats here. You’re free to spec more into flat HP or flat attack depending on your preference.

This is the monster set. This is what drove this game’s playerbase to insanity. While harder to pull off to broken levels than before, this set is still potentially the strongest character in the game. Insane statline, AoE burst damage, unstoppable, stuns, great mobility, and access to sky high rip DPS may make this the perfect melee carry when played well.

General Combat Flow w/ Sacred Sword:

TL;DR: Look patiently for a good opening, then use Agility to gap close, then tap boostout an empowered Sacred Sword and a regular Sacred Sword before or after it to explode your target(s) with the staple Double Sacred Sword combo plus a few empowered autos. Longer boosts can be used if you’re anticipating a longer fight against bulkier opponents or in tandem with boosted Agility’s shield with a potential double Agility if you need to chase down more mobile targets with auto attacks.

My main tip for people that are new to this character or are struggling is to treat this moveset as an assassin of sorts when starting out. While you can definitely opt to flank and position like one to be very effective, you just want to be able to play patiently to wait for the right opening where your enemies expended their defensive resources or your defender gets an engage going. While Zacian can technically be an engage with Sacred Sword’s CC and AoE, it’s usually not ideal and can be a flop if the enemy team just rips their defensive options to null out a lot of potential devastation.

Despite offering no damage of its own, Agility is an excellent gapclosing tool and the sheer damage output of Sacred Sword and empowered autos are more than enough to make up for it. It’s a dash that gives Zacian a 30% movement speed bonus that decays over time, and that decay is slowed down if you’re hitting auto attacks. The fact that it’s a dash with a speed boost is overall very nice for helping you close the gap enough for a double Sacred Sword.

Remember that during a boost, you only get one empowered skill, so whichever skill you use next in its duration will be the one you use it up on. Ideally, you want this to be for Sacred Sword and not on Agility, which is why you want to be able to activate your boost after gapclosing. Should you opt to run it, Eject Button enables you to preemptively set up a boost before going in without being forced to use up your empowered move on Agility while also being a great extra gapclosing tool in general.

Giving the enemy team too much time and/or space to kite you away will still make it very difficult or not possible to nail them with the tap boost Sacred Sword right after. This is why it’s important to keep spacing, if enemies have time to react to you and kite you out, and other CC engages in mind when trying to pin down more mobile enemies. This is also where doing a double Agility with a mid or max length boost can also come in handy, where the sheer mobility can help you stick to more mobile backliners and shred them with empowered autos instead.

Boosted Agility is also no slouch. It provides a very significant 20% max HP shield for more staying power, which works very nicely for letting you get out of many bad situations or in tandem with longer boosts for when you need to rely on your ridiculous empowered autos for combat and aren’t able to nail them with a boosted Sacred Sword for whatever reason.

Sacred Sword is where most of your damage will usually be from once you’re in. While the unboosted version is a bit underwhelming, due to its long time to activate the stunning flurry of slashes, it’s still helpful to drop here and there to deter enemies or as an extra bit of damage while fighting. Empowered Sacred Sword is where things get ridiculous, as the flurry attack activates significantly faster with a larger AoE while doing great burst damage and stuns. This also enables you to weave in an unboosted Sacred Sword right before or after you go for a boosted one. Because it’ll be activating in tandem with the stuns of the boosted one, basically makes the unboosted one also connect and do even MORE damage for the notorious Double Sacred Sword.

Sacred Sword doesn’t even end there. The inital circle draw of the move also has a moment of unstoppable and damage reduction, allowing you to use it as a pseudo full heal or means of reducing big damage that you can’t avoid if you have good timing. Once a flurry attack hits, you also gain a 3s 20% attack boost and ignoring 15% of enemy defense so your other Sacred Sword and follow up empowered autos do EVEN MORE DAMAGE.

As alluded to earlier, your empowered autos during a boost are probably also just as broken as Sacred Sword with their % max HP bonus damage letting you shred anything, especially if you crit. Another helpful thing to know with your autos is that the 4th and final auto in a cycle has some extra range that has Zacian dash towards its target. You can whiff autos before a fight to prime this 4th auto, then use it as an extra gapclosing or sticking tool.

About Sovereign Sword:
In terms of sheer one hit burst damage, this Unite Move can easily be the most powerful attack in the game in terms of sheer damage. Because of you being unstoppable during the entire charge duration and during the final swing, you’re also pretty safe from CC during this move.

However, it’s not exactly easy to use and very point hungry. Here’s how to control and take advantage of it.

There are 4 damage stages to this ult, which are at worst very good burst options and at best a weapon of mass destruction. As you charge up Soverign Sword, you will steadily consume your points and the strength and size of it will grow depending on how many point are consumed by the time you release it. The prices are as follows.
– Less than 10 points for stage 1.
– 11-20 points for stage 2.
– 21-29 points for stage 3.
– 30 for stage 4.

You have very limited manual control over where you start aiming this move and cannot readjust the aim once you start charging it up. If there already are targets in range when you start charging, you’re pretty much forced to auto target and face the lowest HP target nearby that the game thinks you should be hitting, so you have to be very careful about your positioning and spacing to enemies and wilds before pressing this move. If there’s nothing to auto target though, the move will face the direction of whatever direction you happen to be moving in.

Eject Button can be huge for helping you correct any scuffed targeting. Similar to Urshifu’s Eject Wicked Blow, activating Eject Button immediately after releasing the ult button and before the move hits will reposition you while also make you face towards whatever direction you just ejected towards.

Massive burst damage is the name of the game here. To truly maximize damage, you can try to use it in tandem with Sacred Sword’s stuns and buffs for what is mathematically the highest range lategame secure with unstoppable in the game even without perfect optimization like that. It’s also still very good as a combat tool, as the unstoppable lets you bruteforce through CC and deal massive damage in a large area. You also get a sizable bonus damage on things that have their Unite Buff active. Just remember that the charge time is pretty long and also very expensive if you want to really tap into the high damage, so adjust your timing and resource management accordingly.

You can also still cancel the charge of Soverign Sword and the cooldown of it is reduced to 70% instead of 0, so there may be moments where you will cancel it to save points while still starting the charge for a bit to leverage the unstoppable or if it’s not looking likely that you’ll hit.

Flipping Objectives and Triple Sacred Sword Tech:
Because of Zacian’s obscenely fast objective rip while empowered and access to great burst options with Sacred Swords and/or Soverign Sword, Zacian is also fantastic at flipping objectives. Simply just do a long boost for maximum empowered auto uptime, and start whaling on the objective.

It’s usually not ideal to drop your Sacred Swords early into the rip since you’ll lose out on what’s probably your easiest to use and most reliable secure option. While the damage does come in ticks, tick diffs aren’t super common with Sacred Sword and it’s still a lot of burst damage that happens in an instant.

Sovereign Sword is also a numerically obscene secure if you get a good amount of points into it, but the long charge time and extra delay before swinging may sometimes make it awkward to get off in hectic flips where the objective is being shredded at high speeds and bursted really hard. In those types of situations, be ready to start charging a bit earlier than your actual secure range and reactively releasing it early depending on the damage coming onto the objective.

Because of Sacred Sword’s temporary buffs to attack and defense penetration on hit, it’s technically possible to get off a Sovereign Sword under the effects of those buffs for some truly sickening burst if you drop a Sacred Sword then immediately starting to charge it.

Triple Sacred Sword is also possible for even bigger secure and/or faster rip, albeit it’s often overkill for Regi objectives. While it’s also applicable to combat, it’s a bit unrealistic.
– Have at least 23 points.
– Get a max boost going with 15 points.
– Swing your empowered autos, then drop double Sacred Sword once the empowerment’s duration is about to end.
– Tap boost with the remaining 8 pts again and immediately use another boosted Sacred Sword.

About Play Rough:
This is not a bad move by any stretch and in fact, it’s quite good. Very respectable dash distance, damage, stun, and 25% damage reduction from enemies that get hit by it that makes it a still solid option for gapclosing and general combat that isn’t as reliant on empowered Sacred Sword for damage. While the regular version of Play Rough only hits the first thing you hit, the empowered version hits everything you pass through. The stun also helps you land Sacred Sword more easily if you hit.

However, Agility is generally considered the superior choice because of the speed boost making a surprising amount of difference for helping you land boosted Sacred Swords and sticking to targets while chasing people down when you aren’t guaranteed to hit your target with Play Rough. It’s also a far better move for general safety and utility because of said speed and the empowered version giving that fat shield that can bail you out of a lot of tough situations where Play Rough might get you folded.

Should only really be played with Sacred Sword too if you really want to play it since it has significantly less synergy with Metal Claw than with Agility. This move might need to be explored more, but we’ll see.

MOVESET 2: Metal Claw + Agility
– Because of the more auto attack heavy nature this moveset, Muscle Band gains a lot of value for more attack speed and damage from its procs.

Battle Item: Full Heal or Eject Button
– Full Heal gains more value here relative to Eject Button compared to the Sacred Sword set. General mobility and longer scraps with auto attacks is more emphasized with this set, so Full Heal’s protection against CC becomes pretty valuable.
– Eject Button is still a great choice for helping out Sovereign Sword, extending the range of Metal Claw, and general gapclosing or escapes.
Emblems: 6 Brown 6 White

– Attack and HP are going to be your best stats here. You’re free to spec more into flat HP or flat attack depending on your preference.

Generally inferior choice to Sacred Sword, but Metal Claw is still an insane move in its own right. Might be easier to play against more ranged heavy comps for some players, but being good at Sacred Sword will also get the job done arguably just as well in those matchups. The lack of hard CC on Metal Claw also makes it less safe than Sacred Sword for front to back style shredding with empowered autos.

General Combat Flow w/ Metal Cla:
A lot of similar concepts that I mentioned from the Sacred Sword section still applies. Take an assassin like mindset to pick your openings and targets carefully, and taking advantage of flanks and bushes is good too.

Metal Claw as a move is less reliant on Intrepid Sword for good value, but you still want a large stash of points to be very effective. As a raw dash, it can be a bit clunky to use because of the initial windup that sets up the shockwave and the boosted version’s bigger hitboxes and distance helps alleviate that. This shockwave blocks out any projectiles that attempt to go through it as well as doing as good damage as the actual dash, letting you use it as a means of powering through some ranged enemies without getting hit.

Most importantly though, both versions of Metal Claw also gives a very big temporary auto attack speed bonus to your that lasts 4s or for 6 autos, whichever comes first that lets you pump out your crazy autos even faster. There’s also a slow on hit, which helps with sticking to people with said autos. Because of this, you’ll have better output than Sacred Sword with zero points while also gaining insane amount of value from longer boosts that let you keep your empowered autos for longer. In a sense, it’s both less hungry and also more hungry for Aeos Energy.

You can opt to play like an assassin here to pick off backliners while being able to possibly ignore their projectiles. Tap boosting Metal Claw is still quite good. Double Metal Claw is still huge burst damage that can badly hurt or kill a lot of things, or you can use it for the empowered Metal Claw’s extra damage and gapclose to clean up with the followup autos.

Remember that even unempowered Metal Claw also still gives the same amount of attack speed buffs as the empowered version, so you’ll still get your full attack speed value if you happen to lead off with an empowered Agility for the shield, speed and more reliable gapclose then hit an unempowered Metal Claw right after. Feel free to mix and match which dashes you use, when you use them, and how you use them accordingly to the situation to kill things more efficiently or staying safe.

If you want to try to shred through frontlines with this set’s amazing rip potential, you definitely will want to try to wait out enemy CC options before going in. Have your Full Heal ready and be prepared to have your Agility or Metal Claw ready to reposition or continue chasing. Metal Claw in general will more often want you to start a long boost before going in, then using empowered Metal Claw to open with some burst damage and maybe block a projectile or empowered Agility for the shield to help you take more hits.

• You can greatly extend the reach of Metal Claw by timing an Eject Button in the same way you would with stuff like Garchomp’s Dragon Combo or Urshifu’s Wicked Blow.

Favourable Matchup:

These are Pokémon that our team has determined ZACIAN is strong against. ZACIAN will generally be able to shut down these opponents playstyle's or have the advantage in a one on one fight.

Unfavourable Matchup:

These are Pokémon that our team has determined ZACIAN is weak against. These Pokémon will have the upper hand in a fight or be able to exploit ZACIAN's weaknesses.