Has Psyker Been Fixed?

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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Today was my first time playing in…about a year and a half. Mostly because Psyker (My fave class) was absolutely horrible at high difficulty play.

The problem was that most, if not all all, of his skills and bonuses were flat numbers & buffs, which fell off hard when your average trash mob had 5X the HP, and the Psyker was doing…100 damage more.
Like, Brain Burst got no boost from gear, and did flat damage, making it literally worse as the player went up in difficulty.

Has he been fixed? Is he viable at higher levels?

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Yes.

BB one shots most human sized enemies on damnation, although its a bit dependent on damage stacks or other talents that will increases damage.

Edit: Psyker has more ability options now as well, and if you want to do heavy single target damage the surge staff is also a decent choice after they reworked it to be more single target/high damage since “Smite” covers the CC aspect the staff used to have.

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I tried Smite on my Psyker; It felt like it did little to no damage.
I know the staff version has a ‘snap’ at the end, but the Psyker version does not, lacking the actual high-damage part of the attack.

Basically, the stun does trash damage, and the ‘snap’ the staff has is the heavy damage. Which the non-staff version lacks.

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Yeah, smite is basically just a really good CC ability.

I heard it did pretty good damage before, but got nerfed, but dont quote me on that.

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Depends on what you mean by “Fixed”. I have a litmus test to see what type of psyker player we got on our hands.

Go test the new blitz Assail.

If you think it’s not good in Damnation because it doesn’t receive scaling and doesn’t one shot stuff then no. It’s not “fixed”.

If on the other hand you can see reality and appreciate how insane assail is then yes. Psyker is perfectly viable. Great even with the correct loadouts.

As 1 of the 2 ranged classes its also on the higher end of the spectrum for effort to result ratio, but it’s perfectly good at any difficulty including auric maelstrom where trauma staff can go absolutely beast mode. Surge is also great.

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Going into the Meat Grinder at level 16 set to Damnation; Assail does decent damage, has massive stagger, and 10 throws can melt uniques just through DPS.

It’s weak against Armor, but no skill/attack should be a great all-rounder.

My only real complaint with Psyker in the past, and this applied to Brain Burst, was that everything about it was flat damage in a game where enemy HP was multiplicative and most other sources of damage increase were percentile-based.

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I mean Brain Burst is very high flat damage, and does get some scaling from your talent tree depending on what you pick up.

There’s Warp Charges, or Empowered Psionics.

Warp Rider as well.

Not a massive number, but enough to reach important breakpoints.

Personally, I think it’s a great blitz with Empowered Psionics as you can take out massive gunner packs quite quickly in perfect safety.

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Fair enough. :slight_smile:

As I said; It’s been a long while since I last played. Last time I played, I found myself not touching BB at Malice with friends, as the damage was not worth the long windup.
Either they burst down whatever it was before I could pop it, or it just was not going great damage, and I was better off just using staff or sword.

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BB can be aggravating to use while in low pressure situations.

It’s good when sh*t hits the fan though. Your cast won’t get interrupted by your own team mates murdering the “weakpoint highlighted enemy”.

Tip for getting off BB while in the middle of stuff is to just dodge slide with it. It has a decent dodge distance as any blitz does. Make sure you use it.

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Thank you for the advice.
I’m going to give Assail a try next time we all play, and if I find we’re lacking damage against boss-types; I’ll switch back to BB.

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If I understand that right, then I can tell you, Lvl 16 Psyker would be atrocious on Damnation. Malice should be doable with no stress, Heresy would depend on your skill level.

Psyker is pretty strong and is very versatile damage dealer, with awesome toughness regen. He has only one issue on Damnation+: survivability. He has no talents that give him easy damage reduction or big mobility boost, so if you end up in a bad place at a bad time (surrounded by shotgunners, poxburster to the face and so on) then you are toast. He can go down very quickly. The old tactic of blocking everything with force sword and abusing the infinity dodge is over…

Current meta tends to Trauma/Voidstrike/Surge staffs builds, but I think all skill-trees are viable and offer different playstyles.

Still, I play all classes and consider the psyker personally the hardest on Auric/Maelstorm missions. Do not feel bad if you are struggling with him, he is unforgiving. Awesome all-around damage, good support to the team, very versatile kit, but it is just pretty squishy.

Also:
For me, Brain Burst is OK but only, if you spec for faster casting after ult + take Blitz Empowerment Keystone for it. It gives you moderately fast and very safe way to eliminate specials (majority of them will be one-shot) and is also a quite good way to get some anti-armor capabilities if your kit is more oriented on CC. Basic BB takes ages to cast and deals damage by boring enemies to death.

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I really, really don’t mean to be rude or inconsiderate here. But I know that’s how this is likely going to come off, so I apologize (and I mean it).

I’ve played Darktide since release day on Nov 2022, maining 2 psykers and playing 1 of everything else exclusively on Damnation (and Aurics / Maelstrom since they were added). And the reason I’ve mained those 2 psykers since the start (for ~1.5k+ hours just them), is because they’ve always been by far the most fun, varied, and rewarding of all classes. They have the highest skill floor & ceiling, a million little tricks to learn, depend more on the basics of dodging, positioning, movement and enemy prioritization than anything else to counter their worst passive defenses… but played right they are ridiculously strong and capable. I know all this, because I have that experience, since release, and know plenty of other psykers and friends who know it too.

Which means I also know what you’re saying is just not true. It may be your experience, but it’s not the reality.

But what has been my experience (and I really do stress, I’m not trying to be toxic here), is that so far every single time someone has come out with a post like this here or Steam or anywhere, where instead of asking for advice or acknowledging they have to learn, they simply state that “psykers are bad” as if it was a matter of fact, every time it’s been people who don’t understand at all how psykers work or how to play them. And virtually every time, they’re not interested in learning either. Instead, they then go on to complain about various abilities or weapons or blitzes and demand they be changed to what they expect, instead of expecting themselves to learn. And I learned the hard way that there is no sense discussing anything at all with such people.

I’m not saying that’s you, maybe you were just frustrated and used a hyperbole you didn’t really mean in your OP. And that’s fine, I have bad days and bad moments too (today is one in fact). But psykers are not horrible in high difficulty play. They are the best at it. But they do require a whole ton of skill, experience and knowledge and ofc gear too.

I hope you will have an open mind and desire to learn. If you do, ask what you struggle with and I and others will do our best to help. If not, then it may not be the class for you. And that’s ok too. :smile:

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Last time you played psyker needed to kill targets with BB for their warp charge passive. Now this is no longer the case because warp charges are optional and decoupled from BB as well. Most of my psyker builds still take BB, but nowadays I rarely use BB more than a handful of times a mission. And when I do it’s because the situation is appropriate to the tool, not because I need to arbitrarily use it to generate stacks.

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Fixed? No. He’s been altered.

And the new psyker works, but consider it a whole new class with some of the old weapons.

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Psyker in the entire history of the game was at worst kinda mediocre. Back then high int damn was the highest difficulty and honestly Psyker still crushed it there if you had any idea what you were doing.

They were massively buffed before the auric board was introduced and have a fair bit of build diversity and general power post talent trees, with boss damage being basically the only thing most Psyker builds won’t have a great answer for. If they’re not good enough for your tastes now they probably never will be :person_shrugging:

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Ah s***, they got him.

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I mean, I get what you’re saying, but most guides on Psyker say, and I will quote one:
The base damage of BB is set per enemy type and it does not scale with the difficulty.

That, right there, is why BB sucks (Or used to suck) at higher difficulties.
If it does 1125 damage to a Beast of Nurgle, but the BoN has 35,000 health on Damnation (BTW: Fandom wiki sucks, and I can’t find any health values for Sedition tier), then it’s going from doing large damage on Sedition (Again; Can’t find health values for Sedition to do proper math) to 3.2% damage on Damnation.

That’s just showing how bad flat damage is, and why BB may have felt horrible for me as we climbed in difficulty. Because it was literally doing less because it was fixed damage.

But that was in the past, I guess? Folks are saying BB is good at Damnation difficulty now. So the values may have been tweaked.
Which is what I wanted to know.

And…I have an open mind? I mean, I thanked people for their input, and accepted what they said, and accepted advice.
No offense, but your post reads like you were trying to talk down to me and being rather condescending.

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Got me with the whatnow? o.o
Just from being in Meat Grinder; Assail looks like it does decent damage…Not massive damage, but I get ten uses on a restock timer, so the damage-per-use with the idea of spamming them in mind is good.

If they had 2-3 uses on a massive cooldown, then I’d think their damage was bad.

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So to sum up:

Surge Staff got changed, I think to specialize more in high single-target damage? Don’t use it myself so…yeah.

Psyker now can run Assail, Smite, and good old Brain Burst/Rupture. Smite is god-tier crowd control, stuns muties, all sorts of fun stuff. Assail is horde clear and can clean up gunners and the like with 2 ‘charged’ knives from across the map. BB is still kinda the weakest imo, and is still flat damage, but empowered psionics as your keystone or the old warp charges can fix the damage up to be truly dangerous, and it’s been tweaked so it’s more usable than before on Damnation.

Speaking of, warp charges now by default have that ‘use your ult, lose your charges’ option. Keep that in mind when building, especially with your new shield ult.

Gun psyker is now much more viable with a Scrier’s Gaze ult that rewards you for minimizing peril.

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BB is an amazing tool on damnation/aurics. It’s “flat” damage is perfectly fine on damnation and you’ll one shot nearly everything outside of ogryns and bosses. BB benefits a lot from empowered psionics as it boosts the damage quite a bit. It’s totally viable.

BUT - BB isn’t your “main” weapon. It’s a blitz ability to be used to kill elites, open up bulwarks, chase specials, etc. it’s amazing at that job. For everything else there is the rest of your kit.

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