It’s really nice that they made it so the 25% bonus damage feat applies to all weapons, but with the new peril changes (despite being a psyker buff overall) maintaining this is super inconvenient if you arent using a peril generating weapon. Gun psyker is essentially forced to bring a warp sword, and probably brings ilisi 100% of the time because you can spam weapon special without qq swapping. So before you shoot your gun, you mash weapon special 5 times so that you can get a few seconds of bonus damage, which quickly peters off to zero (usually before you are finished shooting).
It’s not unusable, it just feels really awkward to maintain.
Not exactly sure how to go about fixing it though…
The real reason you always bring Illisi is to have a horde clear weapon. I recommend a one with Slaugherer. If it also has Deflector on it you can be absolutely crazy with your positioning and not really give a damn what’s happening in front of you.
For a gun psyker I recommend to use cerebral lacerations so you can open up a tough enemy and then blast them away with the weapon. Warp Unleashed gives a flat +10% anyways and a single BB will generate 45% peril for you.
If you plan your build right, you don’t need the full +25% against regular mobs. Make sure you reach a one shot kill on ranged units with just the +10% or perhaps that and a couple of warp charges. Damage bonuses greater than that does not matter as it’s just more overkill damage. Then when a beefier enemy comes you BB them and if they don’t die, finish them off with your gun.
Use Kinetic Flayer for warp charge generation and you don’t even really need to care about keeping up your charges.
The best ranged weapon currently in the game is the shredder with pinning fire. If you use that and Ascendant Blaze you will just melt everything except crushers in a 30m cone in front of you every 30 seconds.
Point of Gunpsyker is to ignore most of the peril stuff and get a better weapon that pretty much does what BB does, while adding Kinetic Flayer and Cerebral Lacerations for bosses/fatties. Though I still prefer having Psychic Communion so my warp charges are always topped off, as I’ve been using warp charges to get toughness when gunpsyking.
however, with a deflector/force sword you can probably keep quietude to gain toughness and go Cerebral if you want.
The New Quicken Feat with 6 Warp Charges is also a very nice mix with Gunpsyker, since you only need 3 BBs or warp procs to get to full, and this means your psyker push can be used quite often during the mission. Here you’d have to sacrifice Kinetic Flayer for 6 Warp charges and Cerebral for Psychic Communion though, since you probably want that passive warp charge proc.
I’d say the point of warp unleashed is to try and only give a minor buff to guns, while giving a bigger buff to staffs/BBs and melee switching.
Which imo is rather nice, but they might’ve gone a bit far, as Warp Unleashed at the moment is simply just a better choice than the other choices at that level. Wrack & Ruin for instance would’ve been better if they tweaked toward gunpsykers instead… so BBs and Guns procced it maybe? similar to Kinetic Flayer.
Autopistol Psyker was already dummy strong before the warp unleashed buff TBH. Having bare minimum an extra +10% damage is nothing to complain about.
I used to run it with dagger now I’ve been running it with Deimos and I really don’t think it needs further buffing. Maintain 4 warp charges and even with 0 peril you’re now always getting +26% damage on your guns, more if you do want to generate some peril before unloading. I fail to see any issue with actually needing to do some peril management if you want to push it even higher.
I could be sarcastic about this, but I wanted to play a ranged build that wasn’t yet another Sharpshooter, but was seriously underwhelmed by all the staffs having a mediocre primary fire.
The present state of the game heavily dissuades me from returning to my original Sharpshooter character, as I would have to do a heap of equipment grind to get any kind of equivalent gear on them (since the changes to the armoury, the available curios have been distinctly mediocre - it’s become seriously rare seeing a blue I can buy with a max blessing and Lvl4 perk, and grinding greens to hope their first perk isn’t awful is a massive drain of plasteel).
Moreover, if I want to change the grating Sharpshooter personality I unfortunately picked on creation, I would have to start over entirely.
Would I be better off playing sharpshooter? Possibly, although I do like some of the other unique/semi-unique class features of playing Psyker (deflecting bullets is neat, and seems to get less salt than shield ogryn), but I simply don’t have the time and patience to commit to grinding more characters up with the game in the state it is at the moment.
If Fatshark wants to implement some kind of sweeping change to remove gunpsykers on the basis that some players get stuck on “Oh, you’re a waste of a psyker if you use ammo”*, it’s just going to drive players away.
*Also, to be blunt, I’m not being lectured on ammo efficiency until I no longer regularly see Sharpshooters at 97-98% ammo (I run the Numeric UI mod to get the more detailed info) grabbing all the pick-ups, even when other players are down in the orange.
The core of anti-gunpsyker arguments is “You’re a bad player because you’re wasting ammo the rest of the team could use”. All the other factors are pretty much brushed aside.
(The other argument that maybe exists is “veteran can do that better”, but frankly, the “veteran can do that better” argument has been used for absolutely everything.)
But when I’ve seen players picking up ammo packs with such wasteful abandon as to summon the Prince of Excess… I can’t actually remember the last time I saw that be a gunpsyker.
Just going to put this out there… Ammo is never really a huge issue regardless of how you mix the soup of the mission.
Gun psykers make me sad because you have 4 staves that literally change the landscape of the mission.
Surge is the only thing that will stop a mutant in their tracks.
Purge is a flamer that never needs ammo, AND staggers everything hard.
Trauma is massive displacement and crowd control.
Void is like dropping a nuke on your target… It is a plasma gun that needs no ammo and does not hurt to vent.
Your feats all work around your staves, and instead you do another role’s job poorly. Like vets with shotguns… Everyone has a role to play, and you enjoy the game how you want to. I am never going to tell someone in the mission to get out or that we failed because they brought a gun instead of a stick. Fact is, I have cleared missions with all sorts of builds with me… so that would be a weak ass statement.
You do not need to defend your choices this hard, or try to throw shade at people who might not know someone else needs ammo. Communicate… If they still hog, then kick em.
Bottom line is you play what you want to play and have the fun you want to have. I do not have to like it or understand it. I just have to not be an ass about it.
Same goes for everyone else.