Has Psyker Been Fixed?

[Eguzky]

I think I had the wrong mindset for it; I always saw it as ‘The Unique (Unique/Boss/Other Named) Killer’.
Like, the windup and the initially-high damage made me loathe to use it on anything except Trappers, Snipers, Dogs, Flamers, other ‘named’ mobs, and bosses.

So when it started falling off against all of them because they got more health and it’s damage was locked; It felt like it was not keeping up with the increased difficulty.

[Elodie]

Well tbh imo BB does suck now. It’s not the dmg but the slow charge speed. The class overhaul on Oct 3:rd considerably transformed the meta of the game to one where there are way more enemies, and gear and classes can (and are expected to) kill them way faster than before. Meanwhile BB is the same as ever, but lost its many synergies including talents like Cerebral Lacerations (BB makes target take +25% dmg for 10s from all sources in your team).

Even Kinetic Flayer (10% chance to BB target on hit, 15s CD) is so RNG even highly specialized builds barely even notice whether it’s there or not, and since it can proc on Force Sword push attack is actually team wipe levels of dangerous against bursters.

But that’s just BB. Now BB isn’t useless mind, it has a place in many builds and I do use it frequently on the ones that have it. But compared to the other blitzes which are fantastic, it’s really not any kind of great either.

But disregarding BB, so many other things on psykers are amazing! Not just the blitzes but ults, talents, gear & blessings, their unique mechanics and all of the massive synergies of the above. And that same lack of scaling you find problematic on BB is actually responsible for the opposite issue at large, particularly with how overtuned Assail is on lower difficulties. It was a huge issue the first few months after the class overhaul and afaik still kinda is. I haven’t played anything under T5+ in a year so idk myself but knowing how it all works I can certainly imagine.

And you’re right. My post was, well, not good. Like I said I’ve had a bad day and I’ve seen all too often how this goes. I meant it when I said I apologize for that. I rarely ever respond as bluntly as this. It’s not an excuse ofc, but still.

I suppose part of the reason I did is just because about every time topics like this move into a direction where people want to change psykers to be easier and more accessible. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but as we’ve seen in the past, if that happens then it will lead to nerfs to our core tools. Just like how we just lost the Force Sword’s infinite dodge around 2 months ago. If a class is really strong when played really well, and you make it easy to play it well, then it becomes OP. So obviously: nerfs.

Those tools and tricks and gimmicks are why I love this class. I don’t want to lose them.

Also regarding @Khorne_Dawg 's response which you replied to after me, they likely referred not to you but Assail specifically. It has a… well, reputation. It’s a good ability, and definitely can be useful on T5+ too. But since it’s so easy to climb and play lower difficulties with it, T5+ used to be (and still is a bit) full of newer psykers relying on it as a crutch, and failing miserably because they never learned the basics. Compared to T3 (Malice), T5 enemies have twice as much hp, and esp. on Auric modifiers there’s probably 4x+ as many of them and lots and lots of specials & elites.

Since it’s super late here, I’ll try to get back to you tomorrow and post some actual tips & builds to hopefully help you on the way. Regardless of how much I love psykers, the game doesn’t tell you even a fraction of how things really work and it’s not really summed up anywhere at all. So one thing I think we can all agree on is that it isn’t doing any favours for new and learning players either. And that is something they and you do not deserve.

[zsautoman]

Well sorta my friend, I’ll let screenshots do the most talking, on the left you can see mission type and map, on the right match data, I used purgatus and BB for all.

Keep in mind I’m not even a psyker main, only 180 true level, these matches are selected from yesterday’s 25 sessions or so where I realized I got only 20k heretics left to kill to get the skull hoarder frame
so I basically just copied a meta build, picked up psyker first time in months and started farming… on auric, mostly malestrom but some HI shock troop too. In all of those 25ish sessions whether a win or loss(mostly win oc) I basically dominated almost all of them either with highest dmg or highest score or both.
If you are interested I can share this meta build in detail, gears, skill points etc.

[JanZamoysky]

@Eguzky

Mostly because Psyker (My fave class) was absolutely horrible at high difficulty play.

Eh? Psyker was more than fine before, now it’s a better vet.

@Eguzky

I tried Smite on my Psyker; It felt like it did little to no damage.

Damage dealing isn’t the Smite’s purpose. It’s a utiity to whip up if you get jumped in a bad spot by a meat wall of elites: Crushers, bulwarks or ragers. Don’t use it on your average horde. Do you even need it? That’s another matter.

[muscarine]

@JanZamoysky

Damage dealing isn’t the Smite’s purpose

This is not entirely true

There’s a trend right now with people saying Psyker is a support character, or Smite is downright bad, or Smite is just CC

Smite + Venting Shriek Creeping Flames is what you want, they complement each others extremely well
Smite RMB is just enough to tip VSCF DPS from slow to fast

Then it’s up to you to decide if you want better CD and spec into Warp Siphon, or slightly better DPS and spec into Empowered Psionics - although better CD translates into more DPS too (having tested both i highly recommend Warp Siphon, just take Psychic Vampire not In Fire Reborn)

With that setup and whichever Staff you like expect Purgatus (you want a long range LMB for versatility), you’ll consistently break past 1M damage per game without even trying,

Smite is only bad if for some forsaken reason you’re trying to use it to kill isolated enemies with it, which i’m pretty sure nobody tries past Sedition difficulty

[Elodie]

Yeah that would explain the misconception. BB is intended to be the tool that does all that, and back before the overhaul it largely did too. Anyway…

Once again, I apologize for my tone yesterday. I’ll try to deliver on what I said and give some tips now. However it cannot be overstated that there is just so much stuff to psykers that I couldn’t possibly sum it all up even if I had a full day to type this. So instead, I’ll just share a couple of beginner friendly (I hope) strong builds summarizing the basics on how to use them, followed by some details on why it works. Hopefully those details will help you understand the underlying mechanics so you can use them to make your own builds.

Darktide doesn’t have any one “best” build for any class, so please change stuff around as you like. There are countless builds and variations to each for just about anything in the game. Just be aware that there’s so much hidden info in the game that it’s easy to trade off a talent or a blessing that seems pointless, without realizing it was actually essential for the thing to work.

I’ll do the builds first, then some basic & advanced T5+ psyker gameplay tips in the end.

Crit Void

Build #1: Build Editor for Darktide - Create your own Darktide Builds - Darktide WH40k - Games Lantern
Variant #2 (talents only): Build Editor for Darktide - Create your own Darktide Builds - Darktide WH40k - Games Lantern

This is an all-rounder build that can deal with just about everything easily and from range. Aim for cleaving headshots, keep track of True Aim if you can (mods help a lot if you use them), keep the peril as high as you can for extra dmg & crit, use Vent on high peril to clear hordes.

Its biggest weaknesses is horizontal enemy presence since Void cleaves in straight narrow lines, and big groups of oggies & maulers too many to CC with Void alone (or if you can hear disablers or bursters behind them where Void can’t penetrate). For these you can use Smite to buy time and reposition, while again using Vent on high peril to clear and reduce peril to help with that.

Variant #2 focuses specifically on precision & crit dmg making it ridiculously strong. But it depends much more on those headshots, has a lower ult CD, requires more peril management, and ofc needs you to stack on Disrupt Destiny all the time.

Details:
(Note that Perilous Combustion and the Soulblaze stuff will be explained in the Purge build below)

• Warp Rider & Warp Nexus depend on high peril, try to get used to dancing around 80% or so, quelling between every 2-3 shots. High peril has other synergies too on many builds so it’s good to get used to it.
• Many talents depend on performance, the more specials you kill and the more crits you hit with, the more dmg, faster CD’s, more toughness regen etc you’ll have
• True Aim is amazing! It procs on headshot hits so a cleaving Void can cap it with a single good shot, letting you effectively get 100% crit as long as you do. Since crits trigger Surge, that’s 2 shots both of which can stack TA. On 5 stacks you know the next shot is a crit, which with Surge means you can put that shot exactly where you want it, so TA is one of the very few talents worth keeping a track of (mods help tremendously here, I recently got into modding and moved TA right next to my crosshair so I always know). Melee also stacks TA.
• Voids narrow attack makes it vulnerable melee from strays. Learn to dodge and put those between you and your real target and cleave both with one shot.
• Because of the Warp Siphon changes, burning an ult always dumps your Warp Charges taking away your dmg & peril efficiency bonuses. So don’t waste the ult on simple peril venting but make it count when you do.
• Venting Shriek (with Creeping Flames) applies its cap of 6 Soulblaze at 80%+ peril. 6 stacks kills all horde, with Warp Rider snipers too if you maintain ~50%+ peril after. So try to only use it at 80%+. It goes through map (walls, floors, everything) and has a huge AoE, making it a literal hall-sized anti-horde nuke on demand.
• Bc of the above, Vent is often best used in the direction of the biggest horde instead of just into whatever you’re currently nuking. Turn to face where it does the most dmg > blast the ult > turn back to whatever priority target you were focusing on.
• Note that Psykinetic’s Aura reduces your CD’s, and Warp Siphon stacks on specials, so sometimes it can be worth it to dump it early if you know you’re going to get tons of special+ kills and recharge the ult in seconds anyway
• Quietude procs on all peril reduction, passively or on using Vent. So if you’re in a pinch you can use it on high peril to generate toughness on top of everything else. As said earlier, staying on high peril has many perks.
• Primary fire is cheap, fast, and accurate. It’s great for finishing off wounded targets, quickly interrupting specialists or random melees, and also stacks TA.

Support Purge

Build: Build Editor for Darktide - Create your own Darktide Builds - Darktide WH40k - Games Lantern

I’m bringing this build up mainly to display some psyker curiosities it uses in the details. But it is definitely an extremely powerful support build. The idea is simple: burn everything and bubble up when your team needs it. Spam primary to prioritize CC (ragers & non-crusher oggies), secondary to prioritize damage. As long as you keep burning things and stacking up on Warp Charges and proccing Psykinetic’s Aura, the bubble will typically recharge long before the previous one even ran out. But the overlap is good, since a ton of ranged ofc breaks the bubble sooner. All in all this is a very safe and very team-friendly build that’s really hard to overwhelm.

It doesn’t have any big weaknesses, but it can get boring.

First I want to talk about just Purge & Soulblaze in general, because it’s a whole topic of its own and SB talents in general are imo poorly understood when they can add so much to any psyker build, not just Purge. Then after, I’ll sum up the remaining particulars of this build.

Details - Soulblaze:

• With both Purge and flamer, Burn and Cloud Radius are the priority stats
• Purge is 100% a crit staff: Crits apply 2 stacks of Soulblaze and do ~30% more stagger.
• SB has a logarithmic dmg curve. It exponentially increases the dmg of each stack doubling the dmg, slowly tapering down the higher the stacks go
• On Damnation 5 stacks barely wounds horde, 6 kills them & snipers, 8+ starts killing specials, 10-12+ elites etc. The more you go over the breakpoint stacks the faster they die too ofc. (for reference a similar build with Vent instead of the bubble can reach 21 stacks for over 400dps on monsters passively from SB alone, ~300+ without Vent)
• SB lasts 10s, then decays by 1 stack per second. Any new SB will stack and refresh the timer. It’s surprisingly strong against bosses, especially in long fights with lots of adds if you just stack it, do anything else for 10s, refresh, repeat. 1 minute of that can do about half the bosses hp in dmg passively.
• Purge SB stacks cap at 15, but the global cap is 31. While Purge can’t go over or refresh SB above 15, other sources like Vent or Perilous Combustion can and do refresh it.
• Wildfire is bugged and doesn’t work as advertised, but it still helps especially with In Fire Reborn
• Perilous Combustion means killing 2 specials+ near each other takes out the horde around them through SB, 3+ and now it’s specials too, 4-5 and now elites join the party. With Purge ofc this lets you reach SB breakpoints faster, or stack it past 15, making it crazy strong against all groups with specials+ around.

Details - Other:

• With Purge’s fire speed & crits Empathic Evasion makes you immune to ranged as long as you keep burning enemies. You can freely navigate the field and stare down 50 gunners, as long as you dodge or slide between the charges.
• In Fire Reborn (under Warp Siphon) works on anything that has your SB on it and is killed by you, they don’t have to die from the SB. With Purge it lets you reliably stack Warp Charges without depending on specials or the RNG of Psychic Vampire.
• Purge primary fire spam seems weak at first, but it can CC almost everything and 5s+ later they’ll die from SB
• Many think Purge is weak against Crushers. It’s not, just a bit slow to get there. Deimos with Uncanny Strike can deal with a few on its own, but with large groups you can stack SB on everything with Purge > use Deimos headshots or push attacks to stack Uncanny Strike and control the Crushers > switch back within 10s to refresh the SB real fast > back to Deimos before Uncanny runs out, and done. It does take 15-20s, but done right you can solo any number of Crushers with a few dodges in there.
• Bulwarks are easily staggered by primary without their shield. Circle around them or bait an attack, spam primary, and lock them in CC until they die.
• The bubble, or Sanctuary, is a fantastic ult. It blocks all ranged, snipers, trappers, flamers, and bombers and gives a huge passive toughness regen while lighting up dark zones (great for power outage mod) and seriously encourages even pubs to stick together where otherwise they would not. Use it accordingly.
• The recharge stimm is great on any non-Scrier’s psyker, but especially this one. Most of the time you can maintain the bubble indefinitely on your own, but not always. The stimm lets you bridge that rare gap when it really matters.

General Psyker Gameplay Tips

I’ve been adding to this around the day and really getting tired now, so I might cut this a bit shorter than intended. But I promise this stuff is useful.

Bare basics:

• Everyone, especially psykers on T5+ must master dodging, sliding, pushing, blocking and positioning
• Dodges avoid every attack but have a limit. They refresh in ~1-2s of not dodging, any attempt to dodge during this will reset the timer making you wait the full duration again. If you can’t dodge, use push or block until it resets.
• Sliding has no limit but only works against ranged. Dodge + sliding uses 2 dodges, but avoids everything and lets you move really long distances.
• Pushing uses stamina like blocking, but pushing 10 enemies is a lot cheaper than blocking them. Push also staggers & buys time, letting you instantly go back to offense or move away from the enemy.
• Blocking is important, but only use it when you have no other choice. It’s passive and doesn’t fix the problem, where dodging and sliding lets you attack at the same time, or just hitting with enough stagger lets you ignore defense entirely.
• Positioning is vital for psykers. Offensively it means lining up your shots for max dmg while staying out of sight or reach of the dangerous enemies. Defensively with the psyker’s low hp/toughness/dmg resist, getting surprised or caught without cover likely means going down instantly. All the time I see psykers go down on T5 because of a mistake they did 5-10s ago, letting themselves get surrounded or surprised with no cover.

A good practical example of the above is getting caught by surprise by ragers and horde just about to wail on your back. Block > turn around > push > dodge + slide backwards > switch to ranged & charge secondary during the slide > start blasting while picking distance, dodging or dodge + sliding again if needed. Do it right and you’ll easily focus them all down and come out without a scratch. But paying more attention or positioning better, you could’ve avoided the close call entirely.

Advanced tricks:

• You can slide while charging any staff or blitz, and fire during it. This is absolutely essential for T5+ psykers, since it lets you move at sprint speed while dodging ranged, charging and nuking at the same time. Sliding forward costs nothing, so you can do it as long as you like.
• Force Swords have super wide and deep pushes, and their push attack has a 9m range and always counts as a weakspot hit (proccing talents like True Aim and blessings like Uncanny Strike). Since Kinetic Deflection uses peril for blocking, you can use all your stamina for sprinting or pushing without worrying about defense. You can recover peril while pushing, and the Force Sword push can control all horde and most specials 360 degrees around you just spamming it forward and back, making it amazing for just buying time, moving through enemies, defending a decrypting teammate etc.
• The push attack can knock down anything aside from muties, even crushers with 2. It works while sliding or dodging, so it’s a fantastic tool for interrupting or knocking down specials, bursters, etc from range while moving around.
• Deimos comboes into 2:nd heavy from push or push attack. That 2:nd heavy is crazy strong and staggers or knocks down every non-boss enemy on headshots. So you can do things like walk up to a firing gunner while blocking it, push attack them down from <9m, charge heavy and dodge in their direction, and finish them off with 1 strike. Or push a mixed horde, pick out a special with the heavy while they’re staggered. Or push attack to stagger Crusher 1 > heavy to knockdown Crusher 2 > push attack 1 again to knock it down > heavy on 2 again and likely kill it, and now your rending is capped from Uncanny Strike IV. Etc.
• Quelling has a small DoT-like effect and can be done while sliding, making Mind in Motion useless as you can move faster while dodging ranged and still quell more than well enough. Even when I’m forced to pick that talent to get from Assail to a non-crit aura or Vent, I virtually never quell in a way that would get any use of it.

I have to stop now. But I hope you or others find this helpful. Sorry for the typos but I’m not going back to fix all that.

Edit: One final addition. I only got into modding a few weeks ago, but if you’re at all considering it I must recommend it so much, especially for psykers. There’re many good mods but especially Custom HUD and Buff HUD Improvements. Moving the peril counter right to the bottom of the crosshair, and True Aim right next to it so I can keep track of both was huge. The peril wasn’t an issue before, but after the class overhaul and Scrier’s that really changed. (I experiment on everything all the time so almost every mission my peril works completely differently)

[wcchaa]

The pro-gamers in this forum just don’t want to admit that psyker is the weakest of all classes in the current patch and still trying to prove their point with their scoreboard. Throw in the fact that it’s just proof of their own experiences and skills, not psyker itself.
In any other game’s community, that logic would be absurd. Imagine if a grandmaster yasuo used his scoreboard to prove that yasuo is the champ that counters renekton

[Flawless]

@wcchaa

The pro-gamers in this forum just don’t want to admit that psyker is the weakest of all classes in the current patch and still trying to prove their point with their scoreboard.

It also could be, that the psyker is not worse than the other classes, but a bit more difficult to play well.

[IgnacM991]

@wcchaa

The pro-gamers in this forum just don’t want to admit that psyker is the weakest of all classes in the current patch and still trying to prove their point with their scoreboard. Throw in the fact that it’s just proof of their own experiences and skills, not psyker itself.
In any other game’s community, that logic would be absurd. Imagine if a grandmaster yasuo used his scoreboard to prove that yasuo is the champ that counters renekton

Define weakest.

On difficulties below Damnation he is pretty easy to play in my opinion, due to his easy toughness regen with plenty of perks that synergize well with each other. On Damnation and Auric, where the blue bar can be drained within 2 seconds, he gets exponentially more squishy.

Yeah, you cannot facetank two bursters, allow yourself to get jumped by a dog for 1 second in the horde or position yourself with your back to the spawn door. If you make an error, then you will be most likely dead in no-time. Still, psyker has strong, consistent and rather indiscriminate damage output across all boards, strong toughness regen and some decent defensive/utility options. Cornered by the horde? Release your peril and watch the world burn blue. Crusher patrol? Just let me whip out that Trauma Staff with rending shockwave and watch them roll around like tumbleweeds. Gunners far away and far between? Brain Burst from behind the wall all the way, and remember, your ammo never ends! If you look at those options themselves, then they are not very challenging to use, Trauma is a huge circle, BB locks on targets and ult just goes off in front of you. Except the infamous gun psyker, his kit options are rather intuitive to use. The biggest challenge is positioning, target priorization and situational awareness and that is what might get you like a bomb with delayed fuse.

I started my adventure with Darktide as psyker and while with time I grew to prefer other classes and my psyker game is mediocre at best, I cannot deny the potential the psyker has. I would rather say he has a bit higher skill floor and high skill ceiling, but you do not need to be a grandmaster at the game to enjoy this class.

[StrawberryMerp]

@Eguzky

oday 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?

Nope none of the devs buff anything with psyker just nerfed it over and over and ended up making it the worse class in the game for dmg, along with it’s wet paper hp

[hgjw]

I’m personally starting to wonder what people really expect from psyker at this point. Like even IF i were to agree that it was the weakest of the 4, the marginal would be so minimal that it would not matter in the slightest.

[Tempest_yo]

They want their AoE staves to also be good single target DPS if we go by the steam forum psykers.

[hgjw]

I get that most staffs light attacks are extremely bland compared to their v2 counterpart and could use tuning, but blanket single target dps additions just sound eh …

[Elodie]

Imo they should just buff the primary fire rate to what it can be with the fire > quell > fire trick (esp. macroed) by default, and get rid of the quell cancel thing altogether. That way they would make it truly viable but for everyone and not just those who both know about it and made a macro for it. Or the opposite, buff its power per shot and disable that trick (ofc this would affect some of the blessings that can take advantage from those consecutive hits, but the advantage from those is so minor it hardly matters anyway).

The same macro issue applies to other stuff too ofc, not just psykers. Like making sure the weapon & equipment changes, ult etc. actually fire instead of being routinely ignored as it is now. Mods are one thing but locking basic functional gameplay behind macros has no excuse.

And speaking of mods being one thing, there’s exceptions there too. Plenty of them add essential gameplay elements that really should’ve been added to the game by now. The UI mods I mentioned before letting you track important buffs or peril, even QoL stuff like locking items so you can’t delete your best gear, quickly selling bad gear en masse, showing missing blessings on crafting screen, extra comm wheel options, chat block, inventory stats (like crit & mobility), showing remaining charges on deployed ammo crates, the contracts overlay, remembering your last choice on Auric vs. normal in mission board or even difficulty in the psykhanium etc. should seriously be in the base game by now. Ofc most of these go far beyond just being a psyker issue.

But then ofc. there’s the bugs: With the psyker’s squishiness and dependence on awareness and positioning yet no VoC like vets (or even the potential vet toughness dmg resist), psykers are by far the most vulnerable of all classes to threats you can’t prepare for. So the soundless bursters and disablers, especially spawning instantly behind you hit psykers the hardest.

[Lucceia]

It never did good damage. The bug youre thinking about is the bug that let it cost no peril and could cast forever.

[Elodie]

I have to say though that using Smite with EP & other dmg & peril efficiency buffs, and comboing it with Vent & Creeping Flames does make for a very good dedicated CC & horde / special clear build that’s perfectly usable even on T5+. It’s just really boring and depends on the team to finish the elites or deal with ranged.

EP’s +125% dmg buff to Smite isn’t enough on its own, but combined with Vent’s Soulblaze it does extremely respectable damage as a whole while controlling everything for a very, very long time. But like I said, not my cup of tea.

[Molonious]

There are issues with some Psyker stuff (Disrupt Destiny, Gunpsyker team logistics, Brainburst not one-shotting Ragers on Damnation, etc), but on the whole I’ve never sat on my Pysker and gone “man, I just feel so much worse than my Vet/Zealot/Ogryn”. Every class has some wonkiness, Psyker is no exception, but I don’t see where Pysker is at any real disadvantage to any other class.

With Assail, a good Voidstrike Staff, a Deflector force sword, Mind in Motion, Warp Siphon, and Shriek, I’ve got practically no significant downtime and can just constantly keep putting out firepower without needing to scrounge or compete for pickups that the rest of the team needs. Nobody blaps hordes or groups of specialists/elites (pox hound packs, shotgunners, etc) as well as I can, I can still fight heavier stuff, can still blap the Sniper on the other side of the map if I have to, etc.

[Jonboy]

Feels like a good place to ask this: is anyone else struggling a bit with the “new” surge staff?

Primarily in how fast it builds peril vs damage output in general. I find I’m venting frequently (vs eg purgatus) and not really feeling like I’m getting more damage from it than surge of old, which at least had a broad stun lock.

Maybe it’s my my stats on it: I have a high rolled one with the exception of Warp Resistance (which I didn’t worry so much about in the past).
Maybe I just don’t remember clearly, and it’s just a case of not playing as much on the front line as I used to so I’ve a bit more time to learn it again.

I switched over to Purgatus and felt much more in control of things. Esp as I followed the above guide via YouTube with the rending sword push.

[Elodie]

Surge is in a bit of an odd spot right now I agree. It’s really good though, just that it requires very specific builds to get proper use out of. I remember struggling for quite a while to make it work, until eventually getting there after following some of the advice on Steam with my own twist.

I never saved the exact build I used but I just logged to check the weapon and probably got the build right too:

Build Editor for Darktide - Create your own Darktide Builds

I don’t remember how much difference Warp Efficiency makes here, but Quell Speed is massive on about all the staves. Like, literally 20% difference in Quell Speed if the stat is even 9-10% worse. Also that +crit dmg perk is locked, woulda picked something else for it otherwise.

The key points here are:

• Perfect Timing because crit staff ofc
• Smite & Vent are enough for hordes, BB isn’t worth it since you will really need the CC
• Soulblaze perks because 1) Surge is now specifically a single target killer, so you will be proccing Perilous Combustion all the time, 2) Wildfire not for damage but because it helps tremendously with 3) In Fire Reborn. Remember this talent can proc on any target that has your SB on it, as long as you kill it (doesn’t need to die from SB). So all in all it lets you stack Warp Charges quickly and reliably.
• All of the above and Seer’s Presence synergize to give you maximum uptime with Warp Charges for peril efficiency & dmg, keep your ult CD as low as possible to frequently make use of its AoE burn and peril vent both, and ofc as a side-effect also help tremendously with that weakness of Surge: big numbers & hordes. You don’t want to be shy with the ult, instead aim to use it frequently.
• Battle Meditation to help address the peril issues. Since Vent burns a ton of horde and after popping it you won’t have Warp Charges, that’s also the moment you’ll be spamming Surge on the priority targets while needing all the peril reduction you can get. This helps a ton elsewhere too, whether you’re spamming min charge Surge on trash or get freebie hordes through the SB from Perilous Combustion, Battle Med tends to proc constantly here and there.
• When using Surge, remember to use minimum charge only when dealing with trash or wounded specialists. It’s much faster & cheaper, does enough dmg, and the speed makes it more likely for you to proc your many talents

[BongoSkaggs]

@Jonboy

(vs eg purgatus)

Purg generates way, way less peril than any of the other staves. So they’re all going to feel a bit like that in comparison.

That being said, I loathe the current surge staff and don’t think it’s in a good spot at all. It’s not weak, but it is tremendously boring. The weapon can’t really reward skill, the charged attack isn’t amazingly good, and it doesn’t even have any great monke brain spectacle like old surge did and staves like trauma & voidstrike have.

I only begrudgingly use the surge staff to proc perfect timing & generate peril for my venting shriek warpfire build. Because it is the best you can get for those purposes.