Can we get a look on psyker's talents and keystones?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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While psyker is (and always was) pretty good, there are still issues with his builds.

  1. Warp Siphon doesn’t do ANYTHING for Scrier’s Gaze. You just lose your warp charges aaaaand that’s all.

  2. Empowered psionics is a keystone that works ONLY in conditional situations ONLY for using your blitz. That’s incredibly narrow for a keystone, and doesn’t compare at all with any other keystones. Basically you either spam your blitz extremely regularly - which might be okay for Assail & Malice, but is a no go for Damnation, or your keystone simply sits there in your build doing a whole lot of nothing.
    This is more in line with what vets have for grenades (several perks applied exclusively to them) than a keystone.

  3. Disrupt Destiny has a number of issues:

    • All stacks of it are lost at once;
    • Marks actually stop appearing for you once you at max stacks, making it absolutely inevitable that you’d be losing your stacks pretty regularly even in target-rich situations;
    • It disrupts teamplay as it disregards coherency, if someone else kills marked target, you don’t get anything out of it. This causes unhealthy obsession with killing marks rather than killing important enemies first;
    • Enemies are marked with no regards to real proximity, the game can easily mark something beyond a checkpoint and behind a few walls at the edge of 25m radius while there’s still tons of enemies in the current section.

It’s not nice for a keystone with stacking system when it feels like immediate toughness & speed bonuses are actually more important than long-term stacks. It still works nice for a limited number of weapons with high finesse (well, better than WS), but it has way too many “quirks” to fit it into more generic gun-psyker builds.

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yeah, FS thinks DT is a coop game, but I can only find it in useless aura and the toughness gaining. Many effects will only be taken when yourself kills an enemy.

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Coop does not mean “all of your buffs are shared” or anything like that.

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All psyker blitz abilities are effectively a 3rd weapon and can be used a lot.
That is also the case on higher difficulties.
Brain Rupture and Smite actually are much more useful on higher difficulties, than on lower ones.

If you are unable to regularly use your blitz on damnation+, that is probably a skill issue.

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Yeah I reported the warp charges with Scriers on the bug section about a week before the patch or so.
I was surprised and not surprised aswell that it didn’t make it’s way into the patch.

I agree with above that psionics is useful all the time. Especially Assail and toughness replenish.
But at the end of the day, warp charges affect all base damage and gives you cooldown whilst psionics only affect blitz so why would anyone not pick warp charges? At least that’s how I see it. Unless you exploit with surge of course.
BB with psionics is marvelous though for the faster charge and extra damage!

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Being unable to use it and not using it because it’s more impactful to use your weapons are a two very different things. Are you saying that EP is this way specifically to cater to the people who don’t have good equipment and/or too lazy to actually employ it properly?

I don’t think it’s a good idea for a keystone perk implementation as well.

It’s also not really that good if a keystone made to improve one of 3 blitz abilities only seems fine with one of those and not the other 2. Aside from meme Assail+EP runs in T3 and aside from Surge staff bug.

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Now that I think about it, I’d totally take EP being remade into a few regular perks instead of soulfire perks, and a new keystone built specifically around soulfire instead. That would be a lot more fun.

(that’s, of course, only if Fatshark would manage to make soulfire reasonably useful, which in the current game isn’t really a thing…)

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Not entirely accurate.

Empowered Psionics is actually good in conjunction with Brainburst and can be a viable T5+ playstyle.

You pick the talents for brainburst speed on ult, brainburst gets extra speed, damage and 0% peril cost from empowered psionics three times. You stack that with Scrier’s Gaze.
You wind up having a lot of Single Target damage in a short span of time.
You just don’t see this build around a lot, because people haven’t experimented with that much yet.

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I think Empowered Psionics is great! Many of my builds don’t really need Warp Siphon, which in itself is a massive talent point investment unless you’re going for the 30% quell buff anyway. But Empowered Psionics makes BB and Smite both far more viable than they are otherwise. The builds I’ve used that take EP don’t generally spam blitzes at all, rather this gives them support utility for when the need arises. For example if you have Psykinetic’s Aura and Venting Shriek, you already get tons of CD reducton and peril management, while Creeping Flames handles a ton of horde. With all of the staves but especially Purge and Trauma, what you’re missing is the ability to quickly and accurately take down priority targets that are either resistant to the staves or too far off, like dogs, bombers or snipers. With EP you can do that virtually every time it matters. It’s niche but it’s an important niche.

Disrupt Destiny meanwhile is just horrible to me. It has such poor synergy with everything. You need to be close to the enemies for it to mark them, which severely limits your positioning. It will mark a random enemy so you need to almost always choose between that one enemy in some random direction, or any of the real threats like priority targets or big groups where you can do the most damage. It wears out between fights so you want the talent that gives more stacks on weakspot kills, except the only staff that does weakspot kills is Voidstrike (many regular weapons don’t specialize in that either). So the whole ability is contradictory to itself since it’s supposed to give you more power, but the mechanics make sure you’re constantly prohibited from using that power where you should.

I think the whole thing should be reworked tbh.

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Disrupt Destiny for me works very well with Gun-psyker. Specifically, me using the revolver. I snipe targets with lightning speed, use assail to clear things out, and pull extra buffs. That said it’s not a particularly consistent playstyle and definitely needs some work in how markers are applied.

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Well, indeed BB+EP is a reasonably good option when you’re a big fan of Purgatus, as otherwise it’ll leave you massively helpless against armored enemies. Trauma is a very different thing because you’re relegating yourself from damage-dealing duty to CC duty anyway, and so it’s often more prudent to keep using your staff and let teammates actually kill priority targets.
(I’m not very good with Trauma myself, but I watched a bunch of psykers who are)

For voidstrike you’re using voidstike. There’s exceptionally little reason to ever switch to your blitz in this case. Even if you take BB for Kinetic Flayer, with voidstrike you’re very likely to never touch BB itself, with EP or without it. They’re doing very much the same thing.

Surge is broken at the moment, so talking seriously about Surge and EP build validity is pointless until it’s fixed. At the moment you take it together to simply abuse a bug.

I also tried to use EP Smite in a bunch of configurations, and honestly I don’t see any reason to ever use that. Smite itself is a panic CC button, and if you’re using it regularly, EP or no - you’re basically trying to “make yourself useful” with a build that’s outright weak; with stronger builds your simply kill instead of CC (with the exception of Trauma because its CC potential is exceptionally good). So using Smite at all is very questionable - it’s not good at anything but getting yourself out of sticky situation if you’re not good enough or strong enough to get out of it with more direct means.

And finally Assail + EP is just a meme joke.

So out of 3 blitzes only 1 is unarguably useful with EP in some specific builds, and other two are very questionable.

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I completely agree with Voidstrike and Purge, but not really with the rest.

I’ve mained Trauma staves on both my psykers since Jan/Feb or so, and am pretty confident in my skills with them, using both primary fire for distant targets and secondary with different charge levels for different melee to mid range needs. Before patch #13 BB was always really good as utility, but since the patch all of the talents that buffed it have were nerfed, changed for worse - from BB’s PoV I mean, looking at Warp Siphon here which is great but for different reasons now -, or even removed like Cerebral Lacerations. On top of that everyone now does way more overall dmg, so the kill times are much faster. So I find BB too weak, slow, and expensive to be of almost any use on its own over just using staves instead.

Trauma has very, very few weaknesses. But it’s not good for hard to reach long distance targets that take more than a few primary shots, dogs (it staggers them well, but takes forever to kill them), and it’s extremely taxing on peril. BB with EP can address all of those things in a near instant, and ignores peril completely. With EP you can just weave those BB’s into your slides and dodges and the space and time Trauma blasts give you to take out priority targets. Like I said it’s niche but I find it’s an important niche. Since Trauma is killing tons of things constantly, you’re basically always stacked on 3 EP’s so you always have this super fast BB available when you need it. :>

Surge is bugged rn, but without the bug it has the same weakness as Trauma in ranged, but is way weaker in close range because it really can’t handle groups of elites all at once. It’s also quite peril intensive. Being able to thin those groups out or soften them up before and during the fight again for no peril cost could be really useful.

I agree that Smite is in a kind of weird place. But the dmg & spread speed increase does make it better for a few builds I sometimes use. While I usually combine Smite with Venting Shriek & Creeping Flames so the damage increase from EP is pretty pointless, it does kill things noticeably faster than before. But it can work great with bubbles. I also like the spread increase on principle, since it rewards more skillful use of letting you just apply short staggers between quells quickly. But idk, I just really don’t like that Smite is stepping on Assail territory with the damage buff. Smite is supposed to be the definitive CC skill, so I’d rather if EP just buffed that. Maybe reduce peril cost, or just increase the spread speed and stagger even more to a point where it can instantly stop even groups of mutants like Surge used to? Still it does have a place.

And Assail I can’t really comment on. I don’t like it since it basically does exactly what the staves do except staves do it better and are more fun, so beyond trying it out in the last patch I don’t use it. But from the description EP would seem to be really good for it thanks to ammo, dmg and peril. But since it’s spammable idk if it matters that much, or if the secondary for example could reach some big breakpoints with it.

Sorry I kinda just started yammering here but, well. There it is. :smiley:

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for Warp Siphon, on top of that bugfix for SG i think the cooldown reduction aspect should be changed into an optional node

i understand the value of dumping siphon stacks to reset the cooldown of one’s shriek or shield faster but most times i just want the passive buffs offered by it’s other nodes and it really feels like that should be a way to play with it rather than holding off on using my skill just to save my stacks when i’d rather just have my normal cooldown while keeping said stacks

make the Inner Tranquility talent the base effect of the Warp Siphon stacks, in it’s place add the node that makes it eat stacks to reduce skill cooldown

as for Smite, they clearly want it to remain mostly a CC tool, i think for that all it needs is lowered peril generation, i personally dont see much sense in it’s EP effect being x2.25 dmg, it’s only gonna be killed chaff that is already stunned at best…feels like they should have made it be another debuff instead, maybe make shocked enemies have increased chance to be critically hit?

personally it feels like BB/BR feels worse the higher i go due to breakpoints(particularly crusher more than most) and EP management(dont quite get why overpowering soul only guarantees stacks on elites and not also specials) plus the increased density of targets i’d like to take out with BB/BR increasing with difficulty makes that worse, furthermore, the lack of any AoE aspect to it(be it dmg or stagger), the current glitchyness of the pre-cast, the INCREDIBLY slow base charge speed that makes you rely on conditional bonuses to make it feel good, the fact that neither of it’s upgrade nodes gives it a direct passive benefit(counting the incredibly unreliable kinetic flayer under conditional here)… idk… smite still a great panic CC tool tho, even with its high peril generation(personally prefer running WS with it cause of that… and the boost to my other dmg it gives me)

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Really?
I find them even worse in high difficulties.

BR takes so long to cast that no matter the situation I can complete it only if I’m alone and nobody else has seen the enemy I’m targeting.
…And I’m using it ONLY because I’m doing the penance, in every single situation melee or staff would deal with enemies way better and faster.

Smite works only if you have a group that stays next to you and actually kill the things you’re CCing, otherwise you go full peril and the enemies will then attack you.

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