Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of Psykers in the habit of just constantly spamming Smite at literally everything they see, and not really contributing much other than that. It’s frustrating that they have more powerful tools available that aren’t just Smite, but because it’s so easy and powerful to use, they just default to it.
It has its place - it’s a great panic button to shut down enemies when things get a little too close for comfort, but the amount of time you can hold it for is simply too much, and results in encouraging braindead behavior where all you do is stun and no damage, to the point where I think it actually rots people’s brains - I keep seeing them tasing 3 trash mobs off to the side!
It needs a change, but I wouldn’t necessarily say a nerf, although that might be warranted. Its damage and effectiveness is fine. What I think needs to change is the amount you can spam it - it should be a thing you channel for a couple seconds like the other abilities, or the fire staff.
Some ideas:
Limit max channel time to 3 seconds and increase charge time
Make it generate more Peril while casting, or have it ramp like Scrier’s Gaze does
Make enemies resist the stagger after a couple seconds of being shocked - it’s a little ridiculous a pack of Crushers can be rendered completely defenseless for an indefinite amount of time from a little guy with a magic taser
Have the stagger not trigger immediately, but gradually ramp up. Ramps faster on weaker mobs, elites will take much longer to begin being stunned
To much channeling psychic powers on a Nurgle infested planet with active demons will do that to you!
I would also like to see the 2 different channels be well, more different. Maybe have one of them only stun/damage one target but deal significant ramping damage.
As for the general conversation I believe the Psyker tree needs a rework, or at least a soft rework. Maybe just give them 10-15 more skills and change a few of them around. Psyker to me is by and far the most boring class, and I feel they don’t have a ton of variety as far as their tree is concerned.
Probably doesn’t help that I hate assail and smite (please make assail work more like Zealot throwing knives that would be cool to spawn psychic shards while shooting or swinging a sword).
Left mouse click Smite needs an actual purpose ; like you said, it could be a DPS tool that doesn’t actually stun anything and debuffs affected enemies (slowed movement, or take more damage, or deal less damage…)
I’ll quote the Dragons’ Den (Shark Tank in America) on this one. For that reason, I’m out.
On a more serious note, I think the ability is fine as is. With your suggestions, you may as well just remove Smite altogether. It’s rarely used in T5 Auric/Maelstorm, but you do see it, by myself included (especially against those 3 trash mobs in the corner! COVER THE FLANKS GENTLEMEN!).
It’s a good tool that offers different gameplay, and it most likely help less good players to overcome great odds with teamplay. So my vote is that it stays as is. Either that, or make it like Palpatine’s force lightning in Ep.9.
most likely help less good players to overcome great odds with teamplay.
My problem with this statement is that while it’s well-intentioned, it has a problem that any kind of crutch will have - people will become too reliant on it, and miss out on a lot of the rest of what makes the class fun.
Tools that are easy to use yet still effective can and should exist - in fact, pretty much everything in this game is intuitive and easy to handle! The hard part is learning “taktiks”, positioning, priorities, and resource management.
However, when the tool is too easy to use, and simultaneously extremely powerful, what you have is a “degenerate strategy” - something boring yet horrendously effective. This is bad for both the game and the player, since the game becomes less fun for all involved, and the player doesn’t gain experience, and might get bored faster.
Additionally, your point about it not seeing much use in Auric is just flat out wrong - I play aurics by default and I see it all the friggin time, players just constantly tasing. That’s part of why I made this post!! What it SHOULD be is a temporary solution to a horde being too much to handle, not a catch-all “I win this engagement” button.
A DPS kind of smite would intrude on the point of Brain Crush or the Surge Staff IMO. Those are already high-damage single-target tools - Smite is supposed to be crowd control. Frankly, I don’t even know why left-click Smite exists in the first place, considering it does basically nothing, but I don’t think having left click deal more damage is the way to go here.
I agree with OP’s post and following comments entirely.
The ability is a terrible crutch that not only harms the user by making them learn bad habits (and you can see this by how often Smykers will just stand and shock without even noticing enemies coming from behind), but it makes the run boring for other players.
From a gameplay perspective, these crutches are the worst thing about the game, and they need to be brought down a bit. Players need to be encouraged to engage with the core mechanics, not circumvent them.
It is too bad that Smite can’t be made into something with good damage, because I for one really wanna do the whole UNLIMITED POWER Palpatine thing and fry dudes to a crisp. The smite staff is a little closer but still frankly kind of lame.
Psyker is in a sorry state, and there really needs to be some thoughts put into making them a little more complex. All staves are boring as hell, and Peril is basically non-existent as something you need to manage.
My best thought is that Psyker needs to have Peril still but also a limited amount of Energy that they recharge only after all Peril is gone. Hitting zero Energy could give a debuff for a time, perhaps, so you don’t want to just dump it. It would mean that (with certain talents) you could gain bonuses for high peril, but still have to dump it to regain energy at times, so management becomes a little more complex. Recharging Power is done the same way as venting Peril, though you could also put a talent or blessing that lets you recoup some in melee.
Might be a terrible idea; just the only thing I’ve come up with. For sure, though, Smite needs a change.
I agree partially. I don’t agree with your assumption that it will become a crutch that people rely too much on and “miss out on other parts of the class that makes it fun”. That’s just made up. I’m sure there is a player or maybe even two, that Smites 100% of their gameplay. But, I don’t think it’s a problem. If that’s the way they want to play it, fine. They don’t need to be forced into other aspects of the class or other classes. It’s there for them to enjoy if they look for it.
Again, I agree. Though I don’t think this applies to Smite. It’s good, it’s strong, I’ll even call it easy to use. But no more than most other things. I can do what Smite does with my Purgatus staff, and kill everything at the same time. Smite is an inferior skill compared to Purgatus, or even Trauma, in terms of CC and damage. My opinion of course. This doesn’t mean that Smite is useless, or doesn’t have a place.
In the right group and wielder, Smite is near unbeatable. The same goes for any other tool. I consider myself a pretty decent Psyker, but even I have fallen many times, with Smite as my weapon. Because when I Smite, I notice a huge lack of damage being dealt. And at other times, when you have 3 good players, Smiting does nothing as everything is just annihilated before it can chain off targets.
Okay, my experience is different. I play many hours per day, I see Smite in maybe 1/20 games.
I tend to see Smite a lot more than 1/20 games. And when I do see it I see people using it almost constantly. I often have to end up asking them to stop smiting every single horde waves, because it’s quicker to let them come close to get killed. Not to mention how boring and long it makes each run . . .
Perhaps if it just had a cooldown. Like, ten seconds or something like that. Then it couldn’t be spammed, but could still be there for SHTF moments.
No guys you are all wrong. What we need is another button mash use for power sword that makes it more and more annoying for the people to use. Don’t you read the hot fix/patch notes?
I feel most who consider smite to be a problem likely have never played Psyker and realized that literally ANY form of damage drops you out of your smite, so any form of flank from the enemy cooks you.
But yeah, at the end of the day smite’s used due to a particular set of factors:
it’s in the middle of the tree, so gives the widest variety of capability when it comes to talent selection (cause hahahaa we Psykers don’t get lines in our tree ahahahah).
it covers a base that the other two don’t cover, that being ‘effective add clear that has no hard limit on how it can be used’.
by extension to point two, it synergies well with Voidstaff and Surge staff, which both absolutely suck at close range add control and often need smite to make up for that weakness (though surge can make assail work due to it’s inherent stun, but Voidstaff flat out needs smite or else you’ll forever see your Psyker at ‘sniper veteran’ distance).
also it’s just nice to have an ability that won’t inherently kill you when you swap to it/activate it.
So, if you want to ‘fix it’ to make it less painful for you specifically to deal with, main thing I’d say to make it still keep all these points while not also taking 40 year’s to kill everything (there’s a reason the good Psykers that use this use it with Scream so that they can set everything on fire and actually kill stuff at a reasonable clip with wildfire and Perilous Combustion).
Make it so that Smite ‘ramps up’ like Scrier’s Gaze but also make it’s damage ramp with it, so that it does the same amount of damage collectively it does now but over a shorter time span. To the same effect, make it ‘jump’ that much faster as it ramps, allowing it to still hit the same number of enemies in the wave without needing to hold it for longer.
This keeps it in it’s ‘full peril generation add clear’ roll while making it do it faster to match the current game climate, while also lowering the length of time you can stun the wave/hold high value targets at bay so you aren’t just a ‘one stop shop’ for wave stun and Surge staff gains that little bit extra used case.
That’s I think the main thing that would ‘fix it for you’ while also not completely gutting it’s usefulness. Gotta remember Psykers are still flimbsy weirdo’s, and we spam this partly because of the points above, but partly because if we get touched we tend to fall over. So we need to either make sure everythings dead or nothing can touch use until it is dead.
How to fix it? Remove it and replace with something which doesnt remove a player and a sea of enemies from gameplay. I’m not a fan, similar applies to Chorus.
A teleport like dash with really high peril cost?
A personal force shield which stops ranged attacks at cost of peril?
A force wall, which moves forward from where you stand and pushes back / knock down enemies doing some damage?
Ignite like ability which applies a lot warpfire stacks to a single enemy, enough to kill a Crusher?
This one is already the case. It does so much impact per second and only actually staggers once they hit the stagger threshold. It is most notable with mutants but certain elites won’t stagger immediately either. Especially if they are in an attack animation where they have a significantly higher threshold than their baseline.
Dude, two of those are already ultimates, and the fourth is not really different from Brain Rupture.
And if you don’t like Chorus, I don’t know what to say. It is one of the most useful abilities in the game. Yes, it helps if your team plays as a team, but you can storm any enemy position in the game with it, top yourself up, and buff for the coming slaughter.
So… just because people use Smite badly you want to nerf it to the ground?
Smite is perfectly balanced, really fun and you have to use it wisely… otherwise it becomes counterproductive. So it’s not something passive (as said it’s players’ fault, not Smite’s fault)
No, thanks. That would destroy the fun of the career. Darktide gameplay is meant to be much more “ranged” than Vermintide… so it’s totally fine that Psyker is able to “spam”. Fine and fun. Indeed even with “bullets weapons” you can shoot a lot (Veteran for first, but the others careers too)
The gameplay design itself wants that
Plus “tide” games are cool exactly because their characters are pretty intuitive… the classic easy to play, hard to master. It’s the whole gameplay that makes the game hard
Smite isn’t OP (it can be if used a certain way but I won’t go into that), it’s just terribly designed and unfun. In a game where 100% of the fun comes from fighting enemies, does it surprise anyone that using a skill thats near infinitely channelable and permastuns enemies with a big aoe and decent range is considered anti-fun? Like leave aside using smite, have you considered what it’s like playing with a smite psyker who makes the decision that you’ll now be fighting target dummies the entire mission for you?
Watching Smite spamming psykers I often wonder if they themselves are atleast havign fun, because playing with them I sure don’t
Imo it needs a redesign from the ground up as others have mentioned. What exactly it should be, I’m not sure, could be a lot of things, could be different entirely, but the current design is completely unsalvageable.
Smite isn’t overpowered in the traditional sense of the word, it’s just terrible game design. Frankly there’s simply nothing fun about fighting a screenful of rag dolls. Smite completely removes the need to interact with enemies, which is where the fun comes from in the first place in a game like Darktide.
In fact, the current design is so bad that it’s genuinely difficult to think of a way to improve it, assuming you wanted to. It’s one of the places where I think the game is genuinely best served with a redesign from the bottom up.
Conflicting topic. On one hand, you’re right about the behavior of many players here. They don’t really “get” what Smite is about.
On the other hand, you really can’t balance an ability entirely around the chosen playstyle of some of them. That’d be akin to asking for a Stealth removal / nerf, because some people “use it wrong”.
Smite is fine as it is. But maybe the game design needs some adjustments to communicate better to players what it’s main intended use is.
