Dreg Psyker: Blessed by the Lord of Pestilence, he would passively heal affected allies within a 5m radius.
Why:Because Specialists currently lack a designated healer role, Encroaching Garden spawns on bad options that don’t make sense (Bulwarks and Captains), the character model already exists (Heinous Rituals), it fits the lore (Chaos Psyker), and finally it freshens up all difficulties with a mechanic that isn’t just “more damage”.
This Specialist would take on the Encroaching Garden modifier and would be the only enemy to spawn with that ability. He would appear across all difficulties, so newer players could grow accustomed to developing a counter for his role
Behavior: Upon spawn, the Dreg Psyker would gravitate to the nearest group of ranged allies. When he is within 5m of a Gunner, Reaper or Shooter he will activate his Dome and stay with them until death.
Health: Same scaling as a Scab Bomber.
Abilities: Telekine Dome - drawing on the Warp, they will periodically (tox bomber grenade frequency) create a Telekine Dome that protects allies within a 10m radius from all projectile based attacks initiated outside the Dome.
Attack: Periodically they will attack with a weakened version of Assail. (Same damage and frequency scaling as a Scab Shooter, not very threatening, more for thematic effect)
Effective Counters: Bull-Rush, Fury of the Faithful, and Brain Burst. Anything that gets a player into the Dome quickly for melee attacks, or BB since it is not a projectile attack but based on line of sight.
I don’t want specials that would enhance enemies, especially not healer types since it would result in transforming many situations into either DPS checks and putting even more emphasis on specialist removal - which is already a top priority - thus likely rendering many builds and ranged weapons that are not so proficient at it (eg. braced autoguns) even less enjoyable. I think it would have especially high impact on clutching, making it overtly difficult to pick up teammates without dedicated CC tools when it’s already a challenging task.
It has been the case with Dreg Tox Bomber which is already an immensely oppresive force multiplier. I don’t like this direction for specialists and would prefer more double-edged area denial instead (like VT2’s Blighstormer, for example).
There’s already healer types in the game, Bulwarks and Captains with Encroaching Gardens.
I could see this being an issue, a Dreg Psyker locking down a choke point with Telekine shield whilst Gunners and Reapers make counterattack very dangerous.
Isn’t that what the Ritual Demonhost is? Not double edged sure, but similar function to the BlightStormer in that it must be tracked down and eliminated promptly or it will begin hunting players.
The Psyker could be added without the Telekine Shield if it’s too much, or maybe instead of shield it could grant Nurgle’s Blessing to enemies in proximity.
With the health of a bomber and the behaviors of a Scab Shooter, it would be a relatively easy Specialist to knock out.
And I dislike those as well, especially Bulwarks since they’re designed for a duel type of combat but spawn in groups. But I didn’t mention them here since getting existing content fixed/changed/removed (for whatever reason) is incomparably more difficult than blocking ideas before they make it into the game.
It’s only in Havoc though. You explicitly stated that your suggested new specialist would be present in all difficulties:
So let me make myself clear here: if you’d like it only in Havoc, then it’s fine, this mode is meant to be somewhat off-the-rails. No issues here in such a case and it sounds fitting then.
But outside of Havoc this is an extremely invasive change to enemy behavior and capabilities, one which twists the formula in a way I don’t find fun - there’s no thing exactly like that in Darktide but there are other games in the genre with enemies based on this kind of principle (for example Deep Rock Galactic and Killing Floor) and the result is always similar.
On a more general note: In my opinion, the ranged enemies in this game are already very threatening and influence the gameplay in a bad way. They were probably meant to encourage closing in on enemy line in order to engage them in melee, but in more intense encounters they cause the exact opposite to happen instead - pushing the players away and forcing them to backtrack in order to engage from an advantageous position instead of charging ahead. If you don’t already have enough momentum to break through - for example, you might be two men down or there’s two flamers following behind Bulwarks and you just happen to be out of hard CC options to make an opening in this formation - it’ll likely be preferable to withdraw instead, slowing down the gameplay and punishing teams without hard CC even more harshly.
The higher the difficulty, the more common are those situations where you’re out of momentum to break through enemy ranks and such an enemy would exacerbate the issues that arise in those situations to significant extent.
Once again, though - it’s fine on Havoc. On standard difficulties it’s too invasive and would twist the formula way too much for my liking. A bunch of ranged enemies (including Gunners or specialists) inside Pox Gas are already a significant threat to many melee-focused builds which are kinda the expected counter here, but this would be even worse.
If you find my perspective sensible then I can offer some tips as to what changes would help alleviate those issues without just removing those core abilities of the enemy you envisioned, but if you don’t see it as an issue in the first place then I don’t think it’s worth your time.
I’m open to suggestions. I do agree, there are certain combinations appearing in even Heresy and Damnation that force withdrawal because without heavy stagger it becomes an untenable situation.
There are a few core rules that I think should be true no matter how you balance the shield and healing factors separately:
Dreg Psykers shouldn’t be able to heal nor shield each other no matter the case
Enemies should never be affected by both shield and healing, even if it’s from two different Psykers
One Psyker should only project one of those effects at a time, having to switch between shield and healing
With that in mind, there’s a couple of ways I could see to make this enemy reasonably interactive. For the shield those could include:
The Psyker could be exposed both through the shield and enemy ranks by floating above the ground
The shield could have health, thus making it possible to break through. In this case it should also affect enemies negatively when it’s broken to provide players an opening to use, eg. by staggering enemies in a significant radius. The health could regenerate but at a slow pace, to ensure low-DPS weapons can also break through it when focused (eg. Zarona Revolver).
The healing is much more problematic since it would empower even those enemies which are not actively engaging the player. For example: you could withdraw from a room filled with Gunners due to pressure from eg. a pack of Ragers. Even though the Gunners are no longer engaged with you, they are being sustained and thus you cannot chip away at them as effectively. I think there should be two avenues used - attrition and vulnerability - with one weakness being used from both. For attrition, I think those could work:
The Psyker could damage itself when healing. If he dies while doing so, it should likely result in some damage being dealth to the enemies around him - it’s to prevent a perpetuum mobile of new Psykers spawning one after another and thus providing the enemy with continuous supply of healing
Units healed by the Psyker could have their max HP permanently reduced. The more they are healed, the less effective it ism eventually rendering them impossible to heal further. Enemies reduced below a certain threshold in such a way (eg. ~5% of original max HP) could be killed, but it’s optional simply to ensure that a force on the brink of death isn’t clogging up the spawn limit - such situations happen in normal gameplay as well, but the scope is much more limited.
In order to provide vulnerability:
Damaging the units healed could make them vulnerable by staggering and damaging them (perhaps removing the amount healed), as well as making them impossible to heal again for some time (likely a few seconds).
Interrupting the Psyker could create an opening by staggering the units healed (when he’s just staggered or damaged), or knocking everything around him down similarly to a barrel explosion (when he’s killed during the process).
Enemies healed could be debuffed or prevented from attacking altogether.
At least one such weakness should be used for both the shield and the healing abilities at once. I also think there should be some kind of special case for the units affected by Dreg Psyker’s abilities and Pox Gas at the same time since otherwise it could become an obnoxious combination - even without a shield, the lack of visibility and damage mitigation of Pox Gas would likely result in making enemies healed while being inside of it effectively impervious to ranged attacks.
Not so sure about the stagger all enemies part, but the shield should definitely have limited health and the Psyker wouldn’t be able to do anything while generating the shield. If the shield gets destroyed before it finishes the duration of it’s protection, it would stagger the Psyker.
Yeah, healing each other could present a problem but with the health of a bomber they could get bursted quite easily. There would definitely need to be some type of code though that prevented them from spawning a shield while inside of another Psyker’s shield.
I suppose that prevention code could go for healing and shield while inside another Psyker’s shield, leaving the second Psyker with just Assail attacks.
That’s the point of the Specialist, to create an obstacle that needs to be elimimated quickly. Unlike the disablers, bombers and flamers the danger is in the ability to reduce player damage against protected allies.
That’s also why they would only have the health of a bomber, because bombers are easy to burst and stagger.
Yes when I saw those dreg psykers in the new mission and later in havoc I felt like they cold be made into an interesting enemy type - something new something unique. I wouldn’t want them to be healers - in havoc we have the purple enemies that do it just fine and in lower difficulties probably there’s not too much need for this at all. I would make them similar to our psykers (an elite enemy type rather than special) - obviously not as complex but they cold have some of our psyker’s abilities or weapons. Things that come to my mind are the Telekine shield (this could be similar to the green flat shield in the new mission - we coldn’t walk through it, it would last for example 15sec. and could have X amount of HP so we could also break it if don’t want to wait 15sec. for it to disappear) this ability could be combined with a ranged weapon like a voidstrike staff or the electrokinetic staff. Then there could even be a melee focused psyker similar to Rinda but weaker ofc - with some sort of force sword/inferno force sword, dash ability + venting shriek.