I agree that smite needs a full rework to become what the surge staff is now but as a larger shock that does big dmg, it should fill somewhere around 70-75% of your warp meter and shoot a lighting beam where you are looking for more ways to deal with monstrosities, that being said, brain burst is absolutely fine where it is rn, you can 2 shot a crusher on all difficulties with the right setup and it has lock on mechanics so you can lock on and take cover, assail used to be broken but it’s damage was nerfed pretty good after patch 13, if you nerfed it again then what would we do when 40 gunners come around the corner with their bulwark to cover half of them. Psykers just dont have enough going for their guns to compete without scriers gaze, and then you can’t use bubble to protect your team or use push to vent for more assail, it is implemented as intended with you killing more specials to keep the chain or force needles going.
Not even to mention all the other classes having as strong if not far stronger grenades, and before you say it, theres a regenerating grenade for all the classes and they are all strong. Pretty much what your asking for is psyker to be less useful then they are now.
Agreed.
This would just make BB worse. From the ability to lock on to targets moving behind walls or cover, using the charge time to dodge & slide around while checking the field (instead of fixating on staring at the target for that QTE), not to mention using the secondary pre-charge - which, if done right, merely costs 50% more time but no extra peril for an instant strike - etc. are all essential to how BB works.
Your suggestion would interfere with most of BB’s current strengths while doing little to address its main problem. The problem of being being ill-suited for a meta centered around fast-paced kills against massive enemy numbers, where the other blitzes are extremely valuable and address the meta precisely even with no talent investment.
Imo the fix is simple: They should bring Cerebral Lacerations back (targets hit by BB take +25% dmg from all sources for 10s), preferably incorporating it directly into the core BB. Even a nerfed version like +20% dmg for 5s would be fantastic for solo & team both without overpowering it.
one of these abilities… Smite I reckon, should be used to charge up your force weapon. Give it massive damage and cleave, as well a flame thrower ability bound to Blitz. put it on a timer, but allow carnage to recharge it. Bam, proper melee psyker.
You have that as weapon special on the illisi force sword.
You have that as staff.
You pretty much have this as ult ability…
Congratulations on being the first person in this thread to actually offer feedback on my ideas.
I can see what you are saying, but . . . Literally none of BB is changed except adding an optional new interaction. This only raises the skill ceiling on the talent; being able to correctly time the event and still scan would be a learned skill. You could still do the secondary (without a timed press), so literally nothing is lost.
They’re straight-up bad. I really am shocked this many people crawled out to defend some of the laziest-designed things in the game. And aside from being lazy, Smite literally breaks the game. Assail to a lesser extent. And before “other stuff is broken, too!” - yes. But you can’t NOT fix things because other things also need to be fixed.
EDIT: I mean, seriously, no one has offered a single reason why Smite turning off the AI of an entire wave of enemies is good. How does circumventing the core mechanics of a game lead to a good thing?
Maybe the blizes are not to blame.
Should stagger not be a thing either?
Or knockdown?
How long can an enemy be effectively disabled, before “making use of a core mechanic” turns into “circumventing the core mechanics”?
I’m not opposed to adding new skill mechanics, far from it. But I still think your idea basically just adds extra that doesn’t synergize with the way BB is intended to be used.
As for smite & assail bad? Just… no. I can’t comment on lower difficulties and I imagine a lot of things have a lot of problems there, Assail certainly. But on T5+ where I exclusively play they work fantastically well.
Smite is extremely strong once built into it, in theory. But doing so and ofc channeling it severely weakens your build and makes you unable to clutch or carry. And Maelstrom ofc has the greens, which makes smite more risk than it’s worth. Again in theory, a single good smiter can make basic Aurics a boring super easy slog, but only with highly skilled teammates. Doing that role is so boring however that in practice I rarely ever see anyone play that role.
Meanwhile the vanilla smite most builds that even have it use, doesn’t have enough spread, dmg or efficiency to work beyond special circumstances. So the base smite is little more than a very situational utility. Even in extremely strong friend teams I occasionally play with, no-one wants a smiter, because a good player is just far more valuable doing dmg instead. To say that it breaks the game is just a massive, huge hyperbole. The shield dome for example is even ‘lazier’ and often makes an even greater difference, yet it likewise has its weaknesses and limitations. Btw after the latest patch, the enemy oggy’s increased stagger resist regularly lets them momentarily break through smite. Personally I find that an extremely welcome change.
As for assail, it’s a special tool fit for specific builds and situations. Your primary is almost always going to be far, far stronger and more peril efficient. It likewise requires a heavy-ish talent investment to really shine, and even then has severe downsides and limitations.
Anyway in a game as complicated as Darktide yours seems a weird hill to die on, considering a crit Surge Void can lane x10+ more of anything than assail, including oggies etc. assail doesn’t work on at all. Trauma can perma-CC basically any number of anything indefinitely while doing insane dmg & brittleness to boot, easily surpassing smite on almost every level. There are so, so many ways to do crazy strong stuff in this game that go far beyond the little smite or assail, no matter which class you’re playing with. Yet despite that, DT is a team game with a lot of RNG elements, so in practice T5+ is still plenty challenging and fun.
Ah, so you don’t play on maelstrom with Nurgle’s blessing.
i want my force sword turning into a flaming blue brand of the emperors wrath, so using a gun isn’t the best option for a psyker… just anything that can make up for the utterly crap everything else in the game
Just to make sure that there are no misunderstandings here:
Are you trying to say that all psyker weapons that are currently in the game, are bad?
As I said. His ideas are balance from a low difficulty perspective.
One random modifier is not a counter, don’t pretend otherwise.
Yes, to go into all you said - it’s a newb trap. It breaks the game until it doesn’t, encouraging bad behavior among players. This is bad in that it’s a problematic design.
Exactly. I’ve been pointing out these same problems this entire thread. What if the ability was reworked somehow?
I really didn’t think I’d have so many people crawling out of the woodworks to argue that these abilities are just fine. I thought I’d get engagement like “well I like this idea, but that idea could be bad because . . .” or “what if this instead?”
Absolutely agree there’s a lot of other things like problems, pretty sure I even mentioned Voidstrike, and of course Plasma Gun is utterly busted. Psyker’s whole kit is terribly designed, frankly, and Ogryn needs a total overhaul.
But just because x is a problem doesn’t mean y can’t be addressed.
Personally, I only play as a psyker, and right now I don’t have a decent staff (I know all of them are playable, don’t say anything against them, it’s just my opinion). Before, BB was decent in terms of damage, but even so, by the time you charge it, anyone will kill your target in 80% of the cases. It’s very pleasant to see rare cases when the target isn’t touched, but again, if I see that the target is not affected and BB starts charging, I will kill the target, I’m sorry.
Based on this, I would only increase the charge speed of BB by 5-15% and possibly introduce in one of the talent modifiers: automatically applies to the nearest elite target within a 15m radius (approximately)
As for Smite, I don’t see any problem with it immobilizing the target. On the contrary, experienced players start to enjoy the massacre after a couple of minutes. Charges for Smite are pointless; it overheats quickly in non-specialized builds, but it’s not boring to play with it (I’ve been playing it for the last 2.5-3 months) and I remember only one complaint word for word: “Are you going to do anything besides Smite?” - said by a person who fell for the 3rd time in 5 minutes.
Assail - they are a nice addition to the builds with automatic weapons, I don’t play them myself and can’t say what’s missing there. However, considering the recent patches - they have been buffed nicely, not at the level of the 13th patch, but it’s already nice to play.
All that psykers need is to justify their fragile nature with damage (yes, to increase it so that when a person tries, the numbers are impressive), and new staves.
Although everyone needs new weapons, but who among the developers cares about that…
Ah ok, it’s only feedback if it’s some form of agreement huh?
No, it’s feedback if it actually has critique or thought. Saying “NU-UH NO!” without anything else, like why turning off the AI for ten seconds is a positive thing for the game, then that’s not anything useful.
Of course, I understand everything, I would like to balance the Psyker again, but initially, let’s start by making smite an ability in the form of a staff - that’s how it was until the 13th patch, just keeping you updated. I also want to point out that if there are 2 psykers in the game, and they both use smite, then it becomes a problem, and yes, it’s ineffective, just like with the old lightning staffs. And by the way, as previously noted - smite and some other psychic abilities are too strong at lower difficulty levels. As an AM player, I can say that I didn’t feel negative about facing psykers with smites - on the contrary, I enjoy it when enemies are held and I can eliminate them. However, I don’t completely rely on smites, I know how to interact with them - if they’re there, great, if they’re not, I won’t die. But again, if you complain about the psyker being unbalanced in some way - the smoke grenade completely disables the shooter, what should be done about it? Fix one, then the others need to be addressed as well.
w/r/t Smite, what you describe sounds more like a player issue than a blitz issue. While you can technically use it as a primary weapon, it does a pretty rubbish job at it (and you can do the same with BB/Assail, the former would suck even more tbh). Have you tried suggesting “Hey, using Smite all the time isn’t very helpful”?
w/r/t BB, one change I would like to see (although I’m not sure it’d ever happen tbh) would be either (1) it would prioritise elite/special targeting over basic enemies if they were in close proximity, or (2) it didn’t target basic enemies (groanera/poxwalkers at least). Maaaaaybe a small bump in damage to improve one or two breakpoints it misses during Empowered Psionics (I think it falls like 100 damage short of a 1-shot against Dreg Gunners/Dreg Ragers with EP active)
Assail, I can’t say much on - I’ve never particularly liked it, so can’t comment too much on it. I remember originally suggesting pausing ammo regen for a short period after firing (to prevent near continuous spam, without impacting controlled spam) but FS went another route with the nerfs
I used to think this, but I see it in more games than I do Plasma or Voidstrike - I think some are starting to feel those are too OP, but I get Smykers all the time who seem to just rely on it. My second AM of the day had TWO smykers in it, it was absurd.
When I had a surprising number of people react in agreement with me after I said things like “hey, could you smite less?” (yes, I have asked; people usually just ignore it), I thought that it may be widespread - at least a common opinion, if not the only opinion. When it’s negatively impacting a lot of player’s fun, I see that as a more serious issue.
That’s why I was trying (with my opening post) to suggest ideas that kept the core concept, but brought them more into line, and hopefully incorporate a little more player interaction, and therefore challenge and agency.
Playing with smite just makes me want to take my hands off the kbm. There’s already a mode where I can whack away at target dummies: it’s called the meat grinder.
I’m saying the power fantasy in this game is severely lacking