Brainburst needs a rework badly

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
21

BB feels like something the devs balanced around Malice without consideration for how Damnation is an entirely different ballgame.

Actually let’s be honest a lot of the game feels like that.

But yeah BB suffers hard. It’s a sniping tool too slow to actually snipe. Revolver gun Psyker feels more satisfying, and is quicker for pick elimination while also being better at handling crushers with Hand Cannon slotted in, which for a class really lacking in gear options for bosses and ogryns is important.

BB should be something that justifies psykers existence as a glass cannon. Assail currently shreds hordes and does BB’s sniping job quicker and with less cost tbh.

What I think is that either the charge time and peril cost need to be dropped hard, or it needs to be something that is a guaranteed one shot on everything not a boss while also doing heavy damage to bosses.

2 Likes
22

Assail is next to useless for a proper gunker build with scrier’s gaze. It doesn’t do anything your bullets can’t accomplish and you want your peril to be as low as possible when you pop the ult. Plus taking assail prevents you from using wildfire & psykinetic’s aura.

That’s also way too many buffs for BB. All BB really needs is to just not target anything but elites, specials, and bosses. Having a pocket sniper rifle that only needs line of sight for the barest moment is a good ability. The biggest problem with psyker blitzes is that Fatshark has no grand vision for them. That’s why they put out meme garbage like smite and broken **** like assail.

23

A good player can usually achieve just that, with the way that BB already works, so your suggestion would usually be a nerf.
For the situations where that is not the case, why not simply give it a prioritization instead of making it ignore other enemies completely?

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24

Sure whatever. Just something to help with target acquisition when under pressure. Maybe a UI element to show what enemy you’re focused wouldn’t be amiss either.

25

And today, that bot is Skynet.

26

My idea back when was to use the ‘special’ button to toggle between ‘favor anything over a pox walker’ vs ‘favor everything.’

Actually a tad suprised there isn’t a brain burst aim mod yet.

Another good idea is to make the ‘burst’ so powerful it’s considered an AOE and the head of the victim goes off like a small grenade.

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27

Absolutely agree. I thing the best way for buffing. Currently we need same amount of time to kill a pox walker and a gunner. It is too much overkill.

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28

The only change I feel that BB really needs is to make Kinetic Flayer not proc on regular enemies. I don’t think there’s any situation where such a proc is not a waste. Maybe even improving lock on prioritisation - if there’s a regular enemy and elites/specialists in the crosshair, the regular enemy should be the last resort for making a lock on. Having to jump around to try and get a reliable lock on vs man sized elites is a bit daft

Charge time is a bit contentious for me. The upgrade/EP feel good and reasonably fair speed-wise but I know that doesn’t gel with a lot of people. If I don’t have the buffs, I’ll pre-charge when I expect a fight.

If you boost the base speed, what do you do with the existing speed talents? Keep them to allow ultra fast casts, nerf them, replace them?

As for of ways to rework it, should it be deemed necessary, could you spread the damage across the charge - say 25/25/50% of the total damage/Peril spaced evenly throughout the cast? RMB could still retain its current function of pre-cast fully → 100% damage

Having a truly fire and forget capability (Assail LMB gets wonky if you look away, and RMB only guarantees first hit if you look away) is probably the biggest selling point that makes the other options less appealing to me

2 Likes
29

Speed is really the issue with Brain Ruputre for me. Its only real niche is counter sniping at long range, when the AI decides to spawn five or six snipers at the edge of a map that pin you down. Otherwise, It is faster to kill anything with anything other than BR, even when empowered. This really limits when it’s even viable to use it in higher difficulty content.

I think the base speed could be kicked up to the boosted speed of EP. EP can then make the cast instant. I don’t think this would be OP, given EP is a charge based buff, and not a duration based one that would let Psykers just machine gun everything with head pops.

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30

EP would also then combo very well with BB to allow Psyker to actually pose a threat to armored targets absent RNG winning (aka getting Hand Cannon, Uncanny Strike, etc).

31

I use empowered BB all the time. It’s awesome. No rework needed.

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32

I’ll preface this by saying there’s a bit of brain dumping going on here, so a lot of what I’m saying here is not directly related to your last comment :sweat_smile:

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d find instant cast mixed with non-instant cast very weird. While it would be semi-predictable (mainly if you take the Stack on Elite Kill upgrade), going back and forth between non-instant and instant would throw me off.

I get the argument of “Base speed is really slow, you shouldn’t need an upgrade to make it bearable”, I’m just uncertain if going all-in on speed is a good way to tune it.

Finding a nice spot for BB/BR in the big picture is kinda tricky, in a way - it’s a Blitz, so I don’t think it should be highly competitive with melee/ranged weaponry; on the other hand, considering how it’s pretty much always ready, I don’t think you can go wild and make it do crazy damage. If we break it down to pros and cons

Pros

  • Fire-and-forget
  • Affects enemies who break LOS
  • Readily available (no effective cooldown outside of Peril management)
  • Long range

Cons

  • Slow
  • All-or-nothing; ‘stolen’ kills will waste the cast

If you have any other additions, feel free to call them out

I’m not sure whether damage should be pro or con; I think its damage numbers are pretty good, but plenty of people think otherwise, so I’ll leave it out. I’ll just list off the numbers from the Psykhanium and determinations can be made from that

With no talents (other than Brain Rupture), it does the following

  • one-shot Flamers, Bombers, Trappers, Snipers, Shotgunners, Scab Gunner
  • two-shot Poxhounds (1350 damage per cast), Dreg Gunner (1350 damage per cast), Dreg Rager (1722 damage per cast), Scab Rager (1148 damage per cast), Mutants (2025 damage per cast)
  • three-shot Scab Mauler (1350 damage per cast), Bulwarks (1688 damage per cast), Reapers (1688 damage per cast), Crushers (1350 damage per cast)

With EP, the changes are

  • one-shot Poxhound, Dreg Gunner, Dreg Rager
  • two-shot Scab Mauler (1 EP proc required), Bulwark (only 1 EP proc required), Crusher (2 EP proc required), Reaper (2 EP procs required; otherwise, they survive with <100HP)

leaving Scab Ragers and Mutants as the only enemies who do not see a change in breakpoints. I don’t have Creature Spawner installed, so I’m not sure what the numbers for Poxbursters are.

If it could reliably kill Dreg Gunners and Poxhounds in one shot without EP (which translates to +50 damage to Unarmored/Infested), I believe it fills a really solid niche as a sniping tool; with EP or Kinetic Resonance, the speed problem goes away (IMO), but you kinda need to pick at least 1; does that makes it “mandatory talent tax”* or “really strong synergy that would be a mistake to pass up on”?

Do you happen to know what the cast time of BB/BR is, by default? I saw someone mention 3 seconds, but I don’t think it feels like 3 seconds (more like 2 - 2.5 seconds, but I’ve never measured).

*I hate the term “talent tax”, time to go wash my mouth out with soap :joy:

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33

I think it would cross an ethical line and what FS would allow, mind you they’ve been surprisingly lax with some mods.
That being said FS should implement the alt-targeting behavior via “special” you suggested, that’s a great idea.

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34

What if it was 50% faster?

35

Then it would be busted. Empowered psionic BB builds wreck gunner packs very quickly already. Not awful vs rager packs either. Venting shriek is a short cd you can pop for the faster cast already.

I think 10% faster would be enough.

4 Likes
36

If an enemy is one shottable they never get stolen. Of course at this point I only use BB after firing off a pre-emptive shield, and I have two of those. The empowerment is nice too. I’d prefer more damage to make it better on damnation, but 10% would be nice. The thing is, this build is kind of the only build I like using because BB is basically unusable without 75% of it.

37

No, I would not agree that at all.

Brainburst is the preferred Blitz of many top-tier psykers for whom Auric Maelstrom is childs-play.

The reason being that, while it may not be as flashy as the other blitzes, it is supremely reliable at dealing which things which a purg/surge/trauma staff cannot. Its a difference of mindset: do you value racing against your team-mate for kills when you’re under zero pressure and it literally doesn’t matter who gets kills other than to stroke your epeen, or do you value being able to reliably clutch when you’re the last person alive?

It could use a little bit of quality-of-life improvement, sure, but the claim that it is “not viable” and “leads to high failure rates” is just not true, and is suggestive of being carried through lower difficulties by aimbot Assail. It also suggests a mindset of thinking “I must use my Blitz like its a primary weapon” and not as a situational grenade, exactly like everyone else’s grenade. Assail will get far more kills over a mission than veteran/zealot/ogryn grenades… does that mean they’re all not viable as well? No, it just means that we understand that those are situational and aren’t a substitute for a primary weapon.

Compare BB to Rock. It trades slightly longer cast (when you consider rock’s draw time + aim time) for infinite ammo and much easier aim. Rock hits harder on mutants, but BB hits harder on armour. It’s a pretty fair comparison.

3 Likes
38

True. I think assail is in fact op, but mainly for gunpsyker since you already have single target covered in spades.

For my trauma build there’s too much overlap in their roles so I very much prefer brain burst as a long range or anti single armor utility.

2 Likes
39

Its a difference of mindset: do you value racing against your team-mate for kills when you’re under zero pressure and it literally doesn’t matter who gets kills other than to stroke your epeen, or do you value being able to reliably clutch when you’re the last person alive?

Just wanted to make this clear: I don’t think myself or anyone else was suggesting that Brainburst is a replacement for a primary weapon. It is a highly situational ability, and I think everyone here understands that perfectly. And I doubt any mature person would care about “racing against teammates” when it serves no purpose. That’s a categorically poor insinuation that frankly has absolutely nothing to do with my conclusions.

I think you misinterpreted my statement when I said “This way, no damage or time is wasted if a teammate kills your target before you do.” I couldn’t care less if a player “steals” a kill. The issue I had was that I wish I could have spent that time and focus on something else to support the teammate(s) that killed it. Hence ‘oppurtuninty cost.’

That being said, I have changed some of my thoughts on this topic, which I expressed above. My main issue at this point is the ‘oppurtunity cost’ of the charge time. I think there needs to be a better way to account for the percentage of time spent charging Brainbursts that do not land on the intended target.

Your comparison to rock is sound. I agree with this. But for reasons already stated I think it still needs an adjustment. For example, something as simple as a change to Kinetic Flayer could more than compensate for this.

@alsozara, @Ragnarok101 and Dumlefudge had insightful things to add in regards specifically to this. I think they stated it far better than I could. So I’ll leave it at that. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts!

1 Like
40

Reloading? Building peril? Having a blitz that is legitimately more useful than the ‘shoot here’ marker or smite that is depending on teammates? True aim interaction? Being able to use Mind in Motion?

You’re right they only do a ton of damage and clear trash and even weaker elites/specialists for free, you should definitely run brainburst…