The talent in its current state prevents a player from going down for being actively bad at the game, i.e. not managing peril properly. Compared to every other talent in the tree, this is something that exists purely to help new players, and doesn’t factor itself into a “proper” build.
Considering it’s right below Warp Rider, which is a talent that increases damage the higher your Peril, I think we should do something similar.
Crystalline Will: You no longer overload from being at maximum Peril, and instead gain +15% damage. Every 5% Peril generated at Maximum Peril Corrupts 1% Health.
The Warp Unbound add-on for Scrier’s Gaze prevents the latter from triggering, but you still gain the damage bonus.
This means that, theoretically, at maximum health, you have 500% Peril to work with before you kill yourself, and further incentivizes the player to toe the line when it’s needed most. If you simply don’t have time to quell, you can instead opt to continue casting spells and spend health instead. Imagine boosted Brain Rupture spam on a boss, and how much damage it would deal to it - and yourself!
Adding another layer of risk/reward gameplay to Psyker would be a lot more fun IMO.
I call Crystalline Will in its current form both a crutch and a noob trap. How hard is it to simply keep an eye on their Peril and hold the R key when necessary? I see so many Crystalline Will Psykers who constantly vacuum Medicae to remove their Corruption. Why not just occasionally quell their Peril in order to prevent themselves from getting said Corruption in the first place? In short, Crystalline Will actively enables some extremely toxic and silly behaviour right now.
It also means that if you lose some hp, you can just stop quelling and spam away. Corrupting lost hp does not matter anyway, unless you were planning to heal with a medipack.
And a zealot in the party (with anti corruption aura) could massively reduce the amount of quelling required, without even getting corrupted for more than a few %.
It sounds a bit busted. Especially for…
Smite.
It would also be a much more powerful crutch for bad players with bad peril management, than it currently is.
Yeah, I don’t see the point in Crystalline Will ; I mean, we’ve all exploded by mistake from time to time, but there’s a gazillion ways to manage Peril very quickly and effectively.
Just keep your Peril up high manually while ensuring you don’t go over 100%, it’s NOT that hard to manage.
I’d rather lose the extra 0.000001 damage because I quelled to 95% Peril in a pinch instead of giving myself Corruption and hoovering up all my teammates’ Medicae.
I can play veteran or zealot in auric without problem. Can play ogryn also on damnation (not played it in auric, if I remember good, but as I do the penances I will surely try it to accelerate their completion)… but as a psyker, I suck absolutely.
Must say that to complete the smite penance, I have activated this talent.
Cause you need to kill and make killed so many enemies that you want spamming smite. Even with spamming it it takes forever (I try to do every days one mission with smiting from the beginning to the end to get rid of this stupid penance)… but guess what happen to someone that hate playing psyker and that sucks at it? I make me exploding pretty often. Surely cause I hate having to spam smite during 30 minutes to just up a little the penance count.
You’re right. It’s a crutch and a completely wasted point for a competent psyker player.
BUT according to a recent dev stream that was deliberate. They felt that peril management was scaring off new players from the class. So in goes this talent to help new psykers that they then drop from their spec once they achieve basic competence.
I get it. Fair enough. It’s the same logic as all the guides etc recommending baby psykers equip a wound curio while they learn. I also think that you learn faster by making mistakes and this talent (and wound curios) are a noob trap.
Edit: It’s also at the bottom of the tree. If you’re still afraid of peril at that level then yikes!
Then why does it take so many levels before the talent is unlocked?
They could instead remove the talent and make its effect the default.
If you overheat, you explode but do not get downed.
Then at some point in the talent tree (lvl 20 or so), all talent options would have „you now get downed upon overheating“ as an additional effect.
Basically a wall of talent options that can only be passed by returning the overheat mechanic to the current default.
So the crutch would only be available to psykers who are low lvl, or those who cripple themselves by not advancing down the talent tree.
I don’t agree!
You can argue as much as you want that Crystalline will it’s a “crutch” or “noob trap” and i would agree with you.
Warp unbound purpose is to allow the player to actually get to use the benefits of the lingering effect freely with something else that’s not a gun. It’s fine as it is.
Cristalline Will is quite a waste of a point in my opinion but I see as a very low priority reworking it.
Brother, I’ve seen 200+ level psykers explode themselves from time to time (including me). A new psyker who’s just getting to the bottom of the tree for the first time probably does it 2-3 times a run.
Lmao. That’s just really funny to me since they have buffed ease of peril management over and over to the point it’s completely trivial even before adding this talent.
Psyker was probably my most played class pre patch 13, but over time they’d made its core resource management so risk free it completely sapped my enjoyment of the class.
I feel like not every class has to be for everyone, I really wish FS would be more brave with their design choices.
Would also consider just a flat corruption damage instead of percent on the chance that opens up some build options with +hp and corruption resist curios as well as team synergy with anti-corruption zealot auras.
The purpose of the suggested effect from Warp Unbound is to prevent the bonus corruption from triggering while you’re immune to exploding. I don’t think it’s a crutch at all, I think it’s a great addition to let staff gaze really shine.
About my experience, peril management has always been the biggest turn off for me to play Psyker.
Not because it was difficult but simply because it’s not fun. That’s why I mostly play gunpsyker when I play it.
Now, I don’t think that a playstile that revolves around Cristalline Will can really be viable, especially in high level when you have only 2 wounds but I can’t think a way to partially rework it in a way to make it useful but not OP, so I prefer to leave it as it is.