While trying to play with the Psyker, I went through the full range of staves, looking for one that felt best for crowd control. To me, flame felt best, with the lightning one being second as far as feel. But I think the effects and damage should be a little more powerful in both cases.
Both flame and lightning very briefly stagger enemies and inflict damage. Fire does DoT after that on varying scales, and I’m honestly not sure about lightning, but I assume it’s the same. These are both best used for crowd control, and I feel like as such, they should do more than an eighth of a second stagger.
It might be a little hard to imagine, but try imagining fighting while your entire body is on fire. I don’t care what demon is possessing you, certain things would happen. For one, you’d have a hard time seeing your target. A second one is you would have to fight to ignore your body’s urge to not be on fire in order to keep attacking.
For these reasons, I suggest the flame affect (both for Psykers and Zealot flamethrowers) cause an increased miss chance in enemies who are on fire. It should also have one or even more of the following effects: slowed movement while on fire; fear effect that can temporarily make enemies set on fire flee instead of just continuing to attack, or go into whatever defensive stance they might have, or distraction/confusion where they’re in too much pain to think straight and try to fight anything nearby, including other enemies.
Now imagine trying to fight someone while being heavily tazed. I know it happens sometimes where someone can power through being tazed and continue to move and even try to run off, but the effect is usually slow, jerky movements. I can imagine trying to fight the electric impulses can cause muscle tearing as well, and extreme levels of shock can cause internal burns to organs or literally short out the nervous system.
For this, I suggest one or more of the following for lightning based weapons: a chance to paralyze the target, causing the enemy to fall and twitch uncontrollably instead of continuing to attack. I also think making it so that lightning attacks are more effective against armored enemies due to them being wrapped in metal is a fair concept.
In all cases, I feel the DoT should be increased a bit for all types, though nothing too huge; my tests showed as little as 1dmg per tick on some enemies even with sustained fire, which is just pointless, especially when it doesn’t do anything else to them either. The other thing I’ve thought is that it should be possible to just hold the button down to continuously fire off these kinds of attacks. When I first saw that the Zealot’s flamethrower wasn’t the kind of weapon you could hose enemies down with, I though, ‘Wha?! But that’s how you USE those!’
Since a well played Psyker is one who is able to effectively crowd control hordes AND large enemies, making their job a little more effective seems like a good idea. And since it’s in the game, the flamethrower, which shares a lot of the same features as the flame staff, should also be able to spread similar crowd control and disruptive effects.