My highest gunker run was a 40 minute director going absolutely shizo monstrous mael at roughly 1 mil.
Trauma is great at stacking damage though. Especially if you lean into soulblaze. I just despise the way it handles. It’s dreadfully unfun to me.
I enjoy running it with transfer Peril + Warp flurry (Venting shriek and DD) and I find it very powerful even without going for some max crit surge build. I wouldn’t call it OP tho. If anything the class is OP and not the weapon specifically.
I don’t play much with headhunter autoguns (find them too non-40k), but I tried it on gun Scrier’s Gaze psyker and it wasn’t terrible at all.
People keep saying that, but I can’t see how Psyker has any more meaningful damage boosts than anyone else. The peril damage boost was nerfed and is really bad, for instance. Plus it’s glass.
It’s pretty bad. Even with the best blessing set up the mk 3 is very inconsistent in killing unarmored elites in one burst without scoring multiple crits/headshots, and that just gets worse on the armored ones. Headhunters also have terrible maniac damage which makes them pretty bad at killing several priority specials, aka trappers.
All in all the headhunters perform significantly worse than an IAG will do while having much less ammo. Doesn’t even need to be the coloumnus IAG specifically, the graia & agrippina will also generally outperform the headhunter basically in every facet. Which is the same issue the brautos face.
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It’s not glass, it’s more like plastic with all the toughness gain, easy to squish, but if the squeeze isn’t hard enough it pops back. I find it way more “survivable” than Veteran without VoC.
If we put aside the current madness that is Surge Smite + Empowered Psionics the core builds are still very powerful.
Ult: Creeping flames is a huge nuke, while Scrier’s gaze is basically a largest longest lasting damage boosting Ult (that comes with TDR and movement speed too!).
Keystones: Warp Charges line is +24% general damage on top of all the bonuses. DD has general damage boost on top of the insane weakspot and crit boost.
Auto include Nodes: On “Warp” builds I always run Perfect Timing which is always up so that’s +15%. Warp Rider is still a big damage boost that is always up (since generally you want to stay on high peril for the TDR anyway).
Extra Damage Nodes: Perilous Combustion is superb and probably pulls a lot of weight together with Wildfire.
My bog standard left side build is sitting on 50-60% bonus damage constantly with warp attacks and just 15% less with DS, until I pop my ult and it drops for like half a second before I gain all the charges back.
The ult that is more or less a screen clear, AoE Stun and gives me at least 25% toughness back if it doesn’t kill anything (if it does it’s a full staggered refill even under fire) and also reduces my peril generated for a short time.
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When the ammo nerf first released I made a post titled" vet is worthless now". A lot of stupid ppl jumped in and started to argue oh iTS nOT tHat BaD, some one named@Jack_O_Neal even straight up insulted me. What they didn’t get is I meant the class(or perhaps the game) is worthless to play now not about how vet is still effective or not, but in their defense I didn’t really illustrate the problem well enough or at all because I just couldn’t bother, so I want to say you did a good job here haha
You’re including all of it, and there isn’t room. You don’t go for crit with all staves/builds, nor would you possibly be able to take the crit and crit warp damage talents, and also take the other things you need.
DD is completely unreliable, only works on super specific builds, and also mutually exclusive with warp charges.
Warp Rider is a tiny damage boost, because most people are not at 90% peril all the time.
Scrier’s Gaze isn’t enough to bring Psyker even remotely close to other melee builds on other classes, and for ranged it’s ‘OK’, but it’s not really doing stuff I can’t do with other classes.
Warp Charges 24% damage is what other classes can get for free, and with attack speed options on top, which Psyker doesn’t have.
Your bog standard left side build is not sitting at 50-60% bonus damage constantly. Even if you fit it all in, and crit made sense for the build you’re on, the crit bonus damage and the peril bonus damage are anything but constant.
I would hardly call crit voidstike sweaty. If anything I would compare it to plasma vet; basically infinite cleave and makes things go away. Difficult part is mostly just getting surge to make it work. But maybe the several hundred hours I spent playing Sienna has something to do with my perspective.
A sweaty build to me is doing something like a creeping flames spam build where you constantly stroke your force sword to keep warp rider & unstable power at max stacks. Bloody annoying.
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Also, what? This is super weak. Smite is pointless. I will fight anyone who says different!
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I’m specifically talking about running it with Nexus + Surge, and Shield. There is no peril mitigation anywhere, and you can’t ult out of peril. Charge time is slow, you need to (slowly, with no quell speed buff) microquell all the time. I consider it pretty sweaty.
Damn, meant Smite, I mix them up constantly.
I meant Smite, too!
I think probably you don’t run Trauma. You can stack all the crit you want on that, and it still won’t, on average, crit once every 10 seconds. So the buff from Perfect Timing just doesn’t exist for Trauma. (Not to mention building Trauma for crit is a bad idea anyway, it has almost no crit modifier).
I’m curious with which loadout you run a ‘standard’ left side build, that crits anywhere near often enough to have good Perfect Timing uptime. Surge would work, obviously, but that staff sucks no matter how much bonus damage you stack on it.
There used to be a meme build with the crit soul blaze blessing allowing you to light the entire map on fire all the time. Something about every damage instance applying it’s separate stacks when used with trauma.
I just don’t remember if it was nerfed/destroyed or not.
Never seen that. Blazing Trauma is… terribad, in all my experience with it, desperately trying to make it worthwhile. It just doesn’t crit nearly often enough, no matter how much crit chance you put on it.
Who knows at the end of the day it might have been a similar situation like the close range bug. I vaguely remember people dominating damnation with it before maelstrom was a thing. Never played it myself.
I was just listing them, I know you can’t take all of it.
About the build… I’m talking about this
With purgatus +5% crit and Warp Nexus. The hit rate is so damn high you will be constantly maxed. It ain’t half bad with Voidstrike either, buff lasts 10 seconds.
That’s their problem, I’m constantly above 80% and only drop below 50% if I’m stabbing Crushers/Ragers for a prolonged period. It’s easy to manage.
I actually find it easy to stack even with voidstrike with the node the prolongs duration to 10 sec. sitting around 8-12 stacks is pretty normal. Randomly some bruisers come up and you just stab them for 3 stacks each.
On a side note I love DD and I absolutely despise Marksman’s Focus. I think it’s because there is the added minigame, and upfront reward. IDK.
Scrier’s Gaze… Well it’s my new love and that damage, defense, speed, and crit steroid that last for… 30 seconds? With a 15 sec downtime (or even under 10 sec depending on Elite special kills if you take Psykinetic Aura).
IMO it’s quite unique even when I played it with just DS. Flow of empowered and non-empowered state is something I really like, and oh boy it empowers you a whole lot. Only thing the build is missing that other melee specs get is maybe some attack speed, but that’s just makes it different which is good.
I can’t comment on a balance in an educated way haven’t played it enough, but DS does deal 2k+ damage to crushers with DD and Gaze…
Strangely enough it’s quite reminiscent of old Volley Fire, in the feels department for me, and it instantly clicked something in me… but it probably deserves its own separate topic some time.
You are right, I don’t play Trauma, but I know some people can play it in a way that makes them invulnerable (or used to? I’m not up to date on trauma balance).
IDK how my above build would interact with the weapon, and you might just drop crit stuff with it for something else. 
I played like 5 times to get the penances and it’s the ultimate easy mode since the buff. Smite, Empowered Psionics (with charged up) and Creeping Flame. You gain the stacks at the beginning of the game and just never lose them. I mixed it with Voidstrike for far targets and DS for mobility/crushers as usual.
It isn’t even hard, seen a bunch of people doing it. Thankfully not that much, probably because it’s quite boring.
BTW I don’t think Psyker needs a nerf necessarily. It’s not like Solo (Knife) Zealot, or Ogryn that due to the mobility/durability just can run solo and doesn’t care about the team. I have a lot less issues with Psykers currently than with that 2 (apart from some duo setups I’ve run into a few times and the new Smite).
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Ah yeah, I don’t tend to Purge. Never impressed me much, plus I generally find it boring.
It really depends. There are situations where it won’t have any targets for you at all. Other times it will only tag enemies that your allies are already engaged with and about to kill, or behind you, or wierd things. Other times you get 15 stacks in 2 seconds and seem able to keep it for the whole mission. I find it unreliable. Not to say I don’t run it on void and gunker, I do. But it’s absolutely not a sure thing to have meaningful stacks.
It’s not bad, but Psyker is uniquely unqualified for melee in the first place 
If there was a build where you could build more tank, it would make more sense. It’s fun, but it can’t/shouldn’t be run with a staff, and really shouldn’t be run as a mostly melee, either. It’s very niche - just like Empowered. Empowered is whack. Everything on it should just be a bonus node for the respective Blitzes.
All in all I feel Psyker got shafted on the keystones - two of them are super, duper niche. Empowered is arguably worthless.
Kinda, yeah.
There’s a wonky interaction with soulblaze, yeah. But even then… I’d rather have a bot than someone running Smite. They’re just not contributing.
IDK haven’t played it enough, but I heavily lean on it being hybrid.
I’ve seen enough Gun Psykers just overtaking Vets with sheer firepower (even me which is incredibly rare on anything else than a martyrdom Zealot or your standard Ogryn), but it’s doubtless that it’s also miles ahead with melee than any Shooter Vet build.