Brainburst/Brain Rupture is by far the worst blitz for the psycher to have at this point. I’d venture the vast majority of the community would agree that brain rupture is not viable as you crank up the difficulty, leading to high failure rates, and severe underperformance compared to Assail and Smite.
As well as a general feeling of not being strong enough.
The main culprit in my opinion is the charge time. The charge time heavily restricts the potential of the psycher to be an effective team member. Assail outperforms brainburst easily in most situations.
Even with Kinetic Resonance (talent), targets are not cleared quickly enough compared to other methods such as secondary weapons, and wears off before you can really take advantage of it.
Another perceived problem is that teammates often slay a specialist before the psycher can charge Brainburst, forcing the psycher to either abandon the attack or find another random enemy to dump the attack on before peril raises too high. In turn, this causes Brainburst to become a liability in high intensity situations.
Again this becomes especially apparent when there is another psycher in the party using Assail, and outperforms you, leading to more wasted Brainbursts, and therefore more wasted time and focus the player could have utilized elsewhere to better support the team.
Kinetic Flayer (talent) is almost useless:
I suggest a buff to Kinetic Flayer by either reducing the cooldown time dramatically or increasing the trigger chance.
Honestly I’d rather see this perk removed from the game completely and replaced with a new idea. Ideally, you want kinetic flayer to take down a specialist or high health target, which the player has little control over at 10% chance to trigger. I’d rather see a talent like being able to brainburst multiple targets at once.
Ideas: I think there are several paths to make Brainburst viable compared to Smite and Assail. Below I’ve listed some things I would like to test if I were able.
-Reduce the charge time to 0 or 0.5 seconds, and see how well it performs from there.
-Change damage from instant to ‘increasing over time’ so that instead of dealing instant damage, it deals high damage over time. I think it would be interesting to be able to instead “lock-on” Brainburst to a target, and the longer you hold it, the more damage per second acclerates exponentially until the targets brain “pops”, (as well as accelerating peril generation). This way, no damage or time is wasted if a teammate kills your target before you do.
Replace or rework Kinetic Flayer
Allow it to instant kill
add explosive damage in a radius surrounding the target that dies to Brainburst.
Assail is busted so I think comparing BB to it is not very charitable. Currently its only downside is that you get locked out of the CDR node.
Smite is up for debate. I personally think its great albeit a bit boring, but others think its absolute dog water because it does no damage.
As for BB itself I think it just needs a 10% faster charge rate, and maybe some small AoE.
The way it works currently is that it’s essentially the most reliable pick weapon/ability in the game. You spot something in the far distance even for a quarter fraction of a second you just hold left click till it dies even while it’s out of LoS.
The problem with it being a channeled DoT is that you’d have to design around a % based damage model with some enemies in mind to make sure you aren’t just instant killing packs by constantly quick ticking things, and spreading massive soul blaze stacks everywhere.
The model you are essentially suggesting is basically just an autogun with no recoil, ammo, or ranged fall off (or aim requirements for that matter).
Kinetic flayer is kind of crap. I never pick it up. It’s a wasted point imo. I’d like the proc to let you store a charge that gives you a 66% faster charge BB, and give it the chance to proc off itself, and make the ICD 7-8 seconds instead.
Could be the only way to get the AoE portion would be to have this attached to the proc.
Either way this guy makes it work to great success.
I copied him with some changes to the build for my own personal preference it worked amazingly well. Absolutely destroyed the matches I was in.
Though maybe I’m giving too much credit to BB, and it was just trauma staff being a beast.
It should be able to lock onto any enemy marked by the team ignoring terrain. Give it 6 dodges. Make brain bursts have AoE effects related to the target type that gets hit. Infested splatters and slows, armor splinters for bleed the others just knockback in 3m.
Assail is a bad comparison still being grossly tuned (lol like 40% of your ‘gun’ psyker damage output) and Smite is boring but Brainburst is so very close. Also the charge time is still 3s? Make it 2.
The comparison to Assail is a huge factor, and yes I would probably agree it’s busted. However, even if Assail were nerfed accordingly, charge time would still be a liability, for reasons already mentioned.
“The model you are essentially suggesting is basically just an autogun with no recoil, ammo, or ranged fall off (or aim requirements for that matter).”
With respect, I’ll clarify that I did not suggest any model of that sort. I simply listed different modifications I would test, which neither you, nor I can do…I am also limited by my own experience, which I humbly admit. Do not assume I am suggesting all or some of these modifications be mixed together or have any particular model in mind. Feel free to present your own though. Brainburst already has “no recoil, ammo, nor range fall off.” The factor of significance is the charge time. and how this creates a liability problem. I don’t think any player would get much satisfaction from an autogun. It still has to be challenging/skill based which I’m sure you agree.
I grouped the instant charge suggestion with the DoT model in which case it would work like the current BB, and just channel damage directly into something instantly because you happened to make awkward eye contact with it at 100 meters away.
I think keeping its long charge time is fine. It’s hard to pull off, but the issue is that its not quite rewarding enough. Though I do think its actually close.
AoE might be the solution, or making it a better niche sniping tool through walls as has been suggested would be better.
The additional dodges also suggested are quite good. BB feels relatively mobile already, but if its going to ask you to channel something that long then making it much safer would be a good choice as well.
Personally, I think small(ish) numerical boosts to see how they feel are better than massive sweeping changes.
Assail is the only valid comparison as this topic is focused on the psychers’ choice of Blitz. Smite wouldn’t be a very good comparison for obvious reasons. Assail absolutely has problems of its own. But to your point, yes there are other methods outside of the Psychers’ Blitz choice that also could serve as a valid example.
edit: Also I love the idea of locking on to tagged enemies. That’s brilliant and at least partially solves the issue I feel it has
I really don’t think making BB/BR appealing is that complicated. I’d hesitate to even use the word “rework”. It screams to me as being the potential anti Ogryn elite tool you can pop into your build to cover such a weakness for your weapon loadout.
Two things I want to see for it:
Cerebral lacerations brought back in so it gets its previous utility of upping your whole team’s boss DPS, as well as helping with point 2. Probably just make it a new 3rd sub node for BR.
Crusher 2 shot achievable for both warp siphon and EP builds. Can’t remember its BPs for other Ogryn elites but it should be able to 2 shot all of them with either WS or EP.
There are other things you could do for it that would be nice like make flayer more appealing somehow (lower cooldown and/or some measure of control over when it procs ideally) but I think the above 2 points are all that’s really needed to make it appealing and give it its own niche.
agree 100% with everything you said. Also I’m reconsidering my thoughts, thinking I may have let Assail skew my perception a bit more than I intended. Thus a small numerical change would be a much more logical route. I do like the charge model, but maybe I’m trying too hard to bring it up to par with Assail, instead of the other way around!
There’s too many enemies it needs to one-shot that it just barely does not (like Ragers), and its lock-on/targeting is too often disrupted by intervening stuff in ways that don’t necessarily impact shooting weapons.
If it reliably one-shotted anything that wasn’t a Mutie/Ogryn/Boss, and would lock-on to the guy hiding behind the box across the room, I’d be a lot more inclined towards it.
I like the ideas here and I think something like having Brain Rupture (maybe change the name to Kinetic Flayer and come up with a new talent) charging up a set amount of damage over time (say like 1000/s, scaling with damage/power bonuses) and instanly killing the target upon reaching the necessary amount of damage (or upon the target’s health reaching the charge level, due to someone else’s attack) with a stagger on nearby enemies as the target explodes in a pulpy mess. This would allow the player to pick off a lot of specials rather quickly while also helping to CC any nearby regular enemies. It also scales the charge time to the health pool of the target, so you wouldn’t have to worry about a single Psyker taking out a squad of Crushers in two seconds.
So, I’m a Veteran main, Psyker is my secondary, and I primarily play a GunPsyker build. I say this to contextualize my question, because I’m sure I’m going to be showing my ignorance right out of the gate here.
Is this a shortcoming that’s pretty much a damnation-only concern? I tend to stick to malice and occasionally heresy with my Psyker, and I’ve been able to make pretty effective use of Brain Burst. What am I missing?
I also like the idea of it dealing damage immediately and scaling up to a brain pop. Larger targets just mean you have to hold your charge for longer - and obviously as the damage is scaling so is the peril.
If not possible to implement - then yeah, it’s current version should be able to reliably 2-hit kill a crusher without some kind of mega-specialized build. That’s probably 3-4 seconds of concentrated ‘fire’ as it were, and you’re likely going to need to quell between crushers. Whether it should be able to one-shot elites… dunno; would have to test it in play to see if that’s op. But with the single charge+hold idea, I guess that’s much easier to balance.
I also think the old warp siphon stack system, where you could kill any target to keep charges going, wasn’t particularly overpowered. Now that it’s specials/elites only it’s hard to keep high damage stacks going unless that’s literally all you’re doing, and not particularly great for sniping the odd target.
I liked kinetic flayer too, Quicken, and getting random charges off team mates within coherency.
Basically on damnation and especially auric while it can still one shot most specials it struggles to keep up at all with their sheer numbers compared to other tools you could be using. Personally I think that’s fine and special clearing shouldn’t be its niche.
However the breakpoints on Ogryn elites are a bit shy of being good enough to warrant taking as an effective solution for those enemies either. When you have a patrol of 6+ crushers bearing down on you 3 casts per crusher (no way to currently achieve 2 shot) really doesn’t cut it especially when you consider how vulnerable you are while trying to chain cast it. Pre patch 13 it could 2 shot crushers and bulwarks on damnation fairly comfortably and pair that with the fact those enemies now come in WAY more abundance than they used to, and a lot of other tools have been made way more effective against crushers than they used to be all in all it makes BR feel… well like its struggling for a niche even not compared to the other blitz options.
Hence my suggestions further up focusing on Ogryn elite breakpoints and bringing back lacerations so it has its old boss debuff utility back.
I also think it’s the best. The useable builds are few though. I just shield and start bursting, no problems, then shield again. Wish it was a bit stronger, but the charging is a non-issue for me.
