Disrupt Destiny encourages the player to focus on random targets that, most of the time, are not important to deal with right now. In order to keep the bonuses up, you have to focus on this random mini game which encourages bad habits and is not helpful for your or your team’s survival.
In addition, these kinds of mechanics create a ‘race condition’ as you have to compete for kills. It is very unrewarding for the player to go for that one target to not drop stacks only to see it get killed by someone else, causing you to drop all those stacks you gathered. You can’t blame your allies since in a horde game you are supposed to kill things.
Furthermore, the bonuses it brings somewhat compete with the Warp Siphon keystone benefits, as that also brings damage upgrades, however, it’s very easy to passively get those while removing important targets without dropping them all if you don’t land the killing blow.
What would be a better design then?
Change Disrupt Destiny such that it highlights specials and that it can be upgraded to provide more Monstrosity damage, which currently is missing as an option from the Psyker tree.
An example for the basic Disrupt Destiny keystone:
Gain a charge of Disrupt Destiny. Whenever a special enemy is within 50m, consume the charge highlighting the special unit for yourself and your allies until the target is killed. The charge regenerates back in 20 seconds after the highlighted enemy is killed.
This provides the team with some utility and then allows room for upgrades such as:
- Allow stacking of multiple charges, making it possible to highlight multiple targets at the same time. The charges are on separate cooldowns.
- If a highlighted target is killed by any means before harming the Psyker or their allies, the charge is generated back immediately.
- Give movement speed for the Psyker whenever there is a highlighted enemy.
- Greatly increase the Psyker’s critical hit chance, weakspot damage and critical damage against targets highlighted by Disrupt Destiny.
- Disrupt Destiny can also target monstrosities and bosses. Disrupt Destiny prioritizes monstrosities and bosses over specials, and monstrosities and bosses take greatly increased damage from the Psyker while highlighted by Disrupt Destiny.
This would help the player and their allies in noticing and focusing those dangerous targets that have the potential to end the run, naturally rewarding the player for making actions that benefit the team instead of throwing them off into some kind of mini game. It would also provide the option to increase that monstrosity damage which is currently lacking from the tree.
This way, we would have three very different options for the keystones, as we would have Warp Siphon for general damage boost and cooldown reduction, Empower for better Blitz and Disrupt Destiny to provide some team utility via increased awareness and emphasis on a special or monstrosity killer role.