Brain Burst and Warp Charges are a bit finicky to tune. On one hand, you don’t want it to be too strong/fast because it makes the Psyker one dimensional, aka a one trick pony. Making it do more damage now runs the risk of that. Increasing Brain Burst head pop speed also makes it too strong, particularly when paired with the lvl 30 25% faster brain burst talent… One way to mitigate it could be to just make the stacks expire one by one, but that might end up being difficult to code/fix on FS side which is why they haven’t implemented it yet (maybe).
So how else do we resolve it? The issue is not really JUST with brain burst in my opinion, it’s how active warp charge generation is intricately linked to brain bursting. Generating Warp Charges requires enemies, specifically enemies who’s brains you burst. If an ally kills the enemy who’s brain you’re about to burst, you don’t get the charge. If you don’t get a charge, you lose out on a portion of your talent tree which relies on warp charges.
My suggestion here is quite simple, just add a weapon special to brain burst. When you have your hands out ready to burst, instead of bursting, you could just use your weapon special for 4 seconds to generate a warp charge. While it has limited utility, it at least will allow you to keep your warp charges topped out throughout the map without needing to be reliant on enemy targets.
Long stretches where there’s no enemy? Not an issue anymore. Teammates killing that lone ambient enemy which you sorely needed to keep your stacks up? Also not an issue. Warp Charge related talents forcing user to use the passive warp charge generation or the passive brain burst just to be able to keep warp charges up to make those useful? Not an issue anymore, as this gives the player more diversity in their builds, and doesn’t directly buff the Psyker, just gives them a QoL change which lets them use the rest of their talent tree better.
In my opinion, brain burst’s damage should be balanced around a fair level for fighting ogryns/monsters/lords on damnation difficulty. Regardless of what that damage value is, IMO it should just be a scripted kill for everything smaller than an ogryn.
As much as I’d like that to happen, I don’t think that’s going to help solve the issue with Psyker. If that change would occur, then the meta would just shift to 4 psykers for everything as that’s just too strong. I didn’t want to focus on the act of brain burst specifically though for my suggestion, and wanted to focus on adding a QoL improvement for Psyker rather than a tuning fix. Simply by letting Psyker be able to actively generate Warp Charges without relying on brainbursting enemies would significantly help flesh out the feel and gameplay of Psyker.
If an ally kills the enemy who’s brain you’re about to burst, you don’t get the charge. If you don’t get a charge, you lose out on a portion of your talent tree which relies on warp charges.
But you do get a charge if the enemy dies. Once you hit the 50% charge bar it’s a guaranteed charge, even if the target dies.
Not disagreeing with the post theme, we do need more reliable alternative ways of getting warp charges. Maybe just in a way different from this suggestion.
I found the perk that gets you charges when others killed enemies worked really well. I would like to see brainburst a little faster (or something we could do to speed it up, like maybe at 4 charges it is 25% faster) to make it easier to stay charged, maybe something to make the last charge last longer so we aren’t micromanaging them so hard.
Where is that stated? I’ve been observing it, and I’ve never found that guaranteed charge you’re saying. It doesn’t grant you a charge unless your brain burst kills the enemy right now. There are alternative ways to get warp charges like through the lvl15 perk 4% coherency trait, lvl25 perk 10% passive brainburst (but only if it kills the target), or the lvl 30 perk soulblaze chance to get charge, but aside from that, there’s no other way to get warp charges, hence my suggestion to add the weapon special so you can do emergency warp charge generation even if there are no enemies around.
Like I mentioned in the other post, I’m trying to veer away from the usual suggestions of increase brain burst damage, or make it faster by a little bit, or increased warpcharge durationas those suggestions have been around since PreOrder Beta has come. I’ve always found it odd that every ‘weapon’ in the game has a special action, but not the brain burst of the Psyker, which depending on the Psyker, use it way more often than any other weapon.
As it currently is, I play my Psyker very aggressively without even bothering to do brainburst except for very specific circumstances in higher difficulties (like if there’s a sniper or a bomber far away that the team can’t kill, or if the room is full of gunners and the team has no grenades, I’d pick them off one by one).
TBH, I’m a bit irritated by the lack of useful specials. A lot of them aren’t specials at all, they are micromanagement buttons, but I don’t want to derail too much and I have other threads to complain about that in.
I’ve linked the video. Hound dies to the ogryn, I still get the charge. And no, I don’t use the 4% charge on kill perk, I’ve opted to use Psykinetic’s aura instead. Screenshot of my build is uploaded with the video.
That’s interesting. I’ve not had that happen to me, and I think that’s actually a bug. Can you consistently replicate that every time? If it IS intended, then that’s pretty awesome.
