What I am proposing is a slight rework for staves and perhaps other weapons with a charge mechanic. A big problem I see with the weapon selection in the game as is, is the lack of defined niches for certain weapons or weapon families to occupy. Though I’m sure there are at least a few more cases for weapons on other classes, I main Psyker and this is what I have the most experience with/ most confidence speaking on.
For the most part the Psyker specific weapons hold good niches. Force swords have representation as horde clear, single target, and well-rounded melee options. Force great swords trade the quickness of move set and movement for more range and more burst damage/horde clear. The flame staff is god tier in its niche of clearing vast hordes and applying DoT effects in a short range. The trauma staff is good a horde clear but stands as one of the best stagger tools in the game barring one of the modifiers that reduces or immunizes enemies to CC. Though I think there re some tweaks that could be done to the previous 2 staves the ones I want to focus on are the remaining two: the Voidstrike and the Surge staves.
The voidstrike is in a weird spot. It is by no means bad and can still perform very well up into havocs if played well. My problem with it stems from its lack of identity. It pierces a line like the plasma gun, albeit with a much slower projectile and much lower cleave cap. It explodes on impact with entities that it can’t cleave through, but the explosion is so small and unimpactful it might as well not exist save for staggering larger targets like bulwarks on a high charged shot. Its horde clear is weird because it only shoots in a thin line. Its single target damage is pretty good but only if you spec heavy into crit with the surge blessing. Overall my problem is this staff is the most skill-oriented mechanism of damaging opponents among staves but is the most middling in returns. I don’t think tweaking numbers would help as it would either be as it is where it is middling and not worth taking over the trauma and flame staves, or its ridiculous and is the only viable choice. I think what this staff could really use is a rework of its niche. I have 2 ideas for how this can be done. Two that have relatively little impact on the way its current mechanics and one overall mechanical change that is a bit saucier.
Voidstrike Rework 1: Lean into the AOE explosion in both size and damage. It has a stat for blast radius that does next to nothing, so why not put that to use. By going this route, it would solidify it as a longer-range trauma staff with more of a focus on AOE burst damage instead of stagger. This is my least favorite as it essentially just makes it trauma staff with a different hat on and doesn’t really give it a niche.
Voidstrike Rework 2: Lean into the piercing aspect. Make the projectile larger and pierce farther (not be stopped by a single carapace enemy) and make the explosion just inflict stagger on the end perhaps. Though there would have to be concessions made to ignoring certain map geometry like the force great sword warp slash does, to make it not so dependent on the environment to work at all. I like this version a fair bit more than the first as it’s lack of DOTs would make it somewhat separate from the flame staff.
General Staff Rework: I think a little more depth could be added to staff gameplay to make it more interesting. The psyker as a whole is a class that asks you to juggle multiple different timers, buffs and perils sources to be effective and having their signature range weapons not add something to that stack seems like a missed opportunity. Instead of just charge longer to hit bigger area/do more damage what I think could be cool is a timing mechanic like the perfect reloads in gears of war. What I have in mind is a small section in the last 75% of the charge for the secondary attack that if hit properly could give reasonable boost to the output comparable to charging a bit above 100% ( maybe like 120% at the absolute most) and gives a bit of extra effect like more cleave/ faster projectiles for the voidstrike, subsequent explosions around the initial impact for the trauma, or much more chaining for the surge. I’m not sure how it would play into the flame staff perhaps more DOT stacks but the staff already does that so well I don’t know if that would matter. The idea is now you’re not only thinking of how much time do I have to charge but if I can pull off getting a perfect charge in the heat of the moment. This could easily be balanced out by having the perfect charge create more peril or even making it so there is a penalty for going over the perfect charge limit/breaking a chain of perfect charges. This by itself would be enough to flesh them out as you could make each staff more or less suited to perfect charging and have blessing that synergize with it better on some more than others.
The surge staff honestly just needs a sizable damage boost. It’s already the single target staff but it honestly does it so poorly often the best way to run it is just with primary spam. This should be the boss killer staff and right now it’s tedious to kill anything more than a mauler with it especially when there are 15 of them coming at you.
Foreseeably these changes could be applied to any weapon that uses a charge mechanic to make the gameplay more hands.
Also, Fatshark please rework the Psyker Veteran and Zealot skill trees to be like the Arbites’ and Ogryn’s in terms of lack of tax nodes, no split paths/locking decisions unnecessarily, and encouragement of build diversity.
TLDR; Flesh out the niche for the voidstrike by leaning into one of its properties explosion or piercing. Flesh out the niche for the surge by making it actually do decent damage with its secondary. Add a timing mechanic for staff secondary fire charge with the end goal to raise the skill ceiling beyond just spam as high a charge as I can whenever.