Have a 30 Ogryn and 30 Psyker. My Bullgryn feels right at home in Heresy/Damnation, my Psyker however, just dies all over the place. I feel out of place. What is my role in those difficulties? Is BB or Smite preferred? Just stand there and put bubbles that go down in 3 seconds? Any good instructional videos out there? Many thanks.
One more if I could. I was a Sienna main in VT, but swapped to Footknight/GK Kruber, would that be the Zealot in this game?
I’ve mostly played my Ogryn and Psyker too. I’ve been through the “both characters contribute, one dies a lot more often” feeling. I don’t claim to have great advice, but I’ll tell you what seems to work for me anyway.
First, I dive into just about any situation head-first with my Ogryn. My Psyker does a lot more tactical retreats. Especially if everyone on the team is kinda off doing their own thing, sometimes it’s easier to just get out of there when possible. Of course you don’t want to get disabled too far away from your team and when you get more comfortable with some weapons you can wade through horde too.
Second, as with all classes, it’s of course a lot easier when you have a good melee game. It matters a lot less with Ogryn (not saying it doesn’t matter at all) when you can take so much abuse. With Psyker if you can key off of backstab sounds and such you can often dodge with just about any weapon/ability out. Before the force swords I also used to like the Catachan Mk1 sword (especially with good blessings) for CC and mobility. Now there are even more options.
Third, I’d probably try to focus on either a Purgatus or Trauma staff. Trauma preferably, but personally it didn’t feel good to me until I had played a lot longer. Either way, stagger and CC help me a lot. Shields and such are great for the team, but more often than not if it’s just me I’m worried about I’d rather focus on moving around the map, good positioning, etc.
Anyway, probably just common sense I guess, but these days I feel like it’s rare for me to go down in Damnation without involving a silent Trapper and/or me knowing when I was just getting sloppy. I don’t think I could pull out of some of the bad situations I get myself in if I was using the new Surge staff… Voidstrike, maybe? Purgatus, probably. Trauma, definitely.
And of course I think most people in Damnation should probably be able to handle any amount of horde that isn’t mixed with elites/specials by themselves with melee (albeit not as fast as say an Ogryn). If you can’t do that, you’re probably going to get overwhelmed periodically. If you can do that, then patience, awareness, and repositioning should make it easier to handle the elites/specials, IMO.
Just my $.02
Step one:
Don’t constantly use your Blitz.
Assail can sort of still be used like that sometimes, especially on Maelstrom missions with enhanced Blitz, but, in general, use your staff. Competent Psykers have insane ranged stagger and good horde dps, though if you don’t feel at home with finesse weapons, your boss dps will suffer.
Most Ogryn Melee weapons are slow, with good cleave and/or stagger. Exclusive Psyker-Melee weapons are usually quite mobile, with high finesse multipliers, but little stagger.
Abilities:
You can put down shields for your team that are extremely useful (or buff yourself into a half-zealot, half veteran, minus all of the survivability, for 20 odd seconds). I don’t think there’s a point in using the push unless you focus on soulfire or you use a staff very aggressively.
Whatever you do, however, Psykers will always be squishy. It’s certainly a stark contrast to an Ogryn.
Ogryn is incredibly forgiving in melee, Psyker requires a lot of good timing and skill - and even with that, it will never ever be as survivable as the other classes.
Get a Duelling Sword Mk4, maybe step down in difficulty for a bit, and learn dodge timings etc. Trauma Staff can be the most forgiving staff because of it’s stagger, and it also allows you to stay out of melee most of the time.
This is a tough question to answer as each team comp (and players) will be wildly different each play through.
These 2 positioning strategies above will do justice when trying to stay in the fight and help the team at the same time.
As far as target priority its generally the same for everyone. Kill the specials and kill the shotgunner/gunner first, then mop up the rest.
Kiting! Identify who likes to melee and kite mobs to them. This can pair nicely with the role of taking out the range targets and dropping off the mob/trash with to the melee class.
This can also work the opposite way, if you see a vet constantly focusing range or a zlot with a pistol avoiding melee trash, try and take the role to assist them by attacking the melee.
Generally, If you prioritize making things easier for your team everyone will be more efficient.
IMO people going down are struggling with kiting. (I.E. positioning) They ran out of room and get stuck or are not utilizing pushing to create space effectively.
Thanks for taking time to read and good luck!
Psykers and oggies are opposites when it comes to gameplay, so it’s no surprise you struggle. Oggies have massive hp, their weapons tend to have tons of cleave and stagger, their melee has insane toughness recovery. They are fortresses and afford tons of mistakes like failing dodges, pushes, taking multiple hits through toughness or even tanking critical hits like snipers, bursters, etc. Even if you merely spam your melee and pay little regard for anything else, you’ll be mostly ok (by mostly, I mean you’ll still struggle on T4-5 difficulties when things get tough but otherwise).
Psykers meanwhile are the epitome of the high skill ceiling class. They have the worst and weakest passive defenses. Low hp, low toughness, lowest toughness recovery from melee or physical attacks in general. What they have to compensate is a huge number of tools to deal with anything the game can throw at you. But the thing with tools is that they don’t use themselves, you need to know which tool to use, when, and how. Failing even a single dodge as psyker, tanking even one of those critical hits the oggie can just shrug off, will often end the psyker then and there.
If someone with a poor grasp of the basics like dodging, sliding, blocking, pushing, push attacks, positioning, and awareness were to play both - ie. new players in general -, they would naturally find oggies strong and comfy while thinking psykers were weak and fragile. But once you learn those things, it’s rather the other way around.
Psykers can charge & fire their staves and blitzes while sliding, staying mobile while dodging ranged at the same time. Through their various talents, Force Swords, staves etc. they have have insane blocking that works against ranged, massive CC, huge AoE cleave and damage, ultra wide and deep pushes and push attacks, incredible toughness recovery through warp attacks, and so much more. There are tons of little tricks like that charge & slide thing above. The Deimos sword uniquely combos into 2:nd heavy from push (making it great when you want to control hordes & take down any special+ in there with virtually no risk), the 2:nd heavy headshot knocks down or staggers every non-boss enemy in the game including muties and crushers. Smite can CC every non-boss enemy, Assail can wipe swathes of non-oggies in an instant, BB can stagger & kill anything and can be pre-charged to instantly take down any priority threats you hear coming from behind a corner no matter the distance. Vent with Creeping Flames once fired at over 80% peril (with Warp Rider) will kill every single horde including snipers in a massive area through the map, and knock down that dog that grabbed your teammate 2 rooms above you too should you hit it.
And these are just the tip of the ice berg. I’ve mained psykers since release and they are absolutely fantastic. But they really take a while to grow into because of being so uniquely dependant on their tools, and knowing the basics. :>
Keep at it! You’ll get there OP!
Out of all the classes, the psyker is the one where you should swap weapons the most by far. Get used to it.
Most players of the other three classes basically forget that their blitz ability even exist.
As a psyker, your blitz ability is your third weapon.
Make sure to combine 3 weapons that allow you to deal with any threat.
You are made of paper. Be mindful of your positioning and learn how quickly you can deal with all of the enemies.
Learn, which attacks of your weapon can stagger which enemies (If a flamer starts blasting, you can yeet a quick assail at them and they get staggered, giving you enough time to get into melee range. If you use the purgatus staff, you can stagger a lot of specials and elites with the quick primary attack and then follow up with melee attacks or a partially charged secondary attack.).
Try to keep the enemies in front of you. Sometimes that requires you to stand with your back to a wall, or to run back a little bit, to get into a better position.
If you are new to psyker and have trouble staying alife, make sure to pick multiple toughness regen talents. Maybe bring the „blocking builds peril“ talent (bottom right branch).
If you have trouble managing your peril, take the venting shriek ult, since it can be used to stop yoruself from exploding.
If you often take damage from ranged units, maybe take a force sword with deflector blessing (the block angle for projectiles is pretty narrow).
Force sword pushes and push attacks have strong stagger that can even knock over berserkers and stagger crushers (just be mindful of the timing).
If you struggle with mobility, maybe take a duelling sword. Mk IV seems to be the most popular right now.
They are also great against carapace armor, if you have the „gain rending on headshot“ blessing.
Vet with a side hustle in weekly psyker melk currency farming here and normally running damnation quickplay for that, so take it for what it’s worth.
Going to echo another post and simply say each class has ranged and melee, we all have to use them.
Some are better than others at one or the other, sure, but everyone needs an answer for both.
That said, Smite should (imo) be used to give people a little bit of a breather if things are about to go pear-shaped, but it really isn’t needed every time a pack of crushers/bulwarks/ragers or hordes show up.
I’m not going to claim any real expertise here on psyker, especially not on multi-mod aurics or t5 maelstrom, but for quickplay damnation with the odd HI/HG mixed in, seeing chain-smite makes me twitch a little when it’s a pack of trash or a couple of crushers or ragers.
In short, common sense goes a long way towards application, but the general idea is “don’t think it’s your primary skill” much like assail.
Being primarily a void spammer these days during my runs, I’ll just share what i run with, just tweaked a little for more personal survival and you can tweak it if things like blowing up isn’t an issue when it gets hectic.
Regarding survival, you (with this setup) get toughness back fast from both active and passive quelling, so you want to be generating and dumping peril to keep yourself a live as much as killing things.
Not being condescending here, just explaining it in case the mechanic is unfamiliar.
Unless you’re 99% sure you’re not going to run into anything, always pre-charge if you can too.
Ties in to having peril to dump for toughness, but primarily that you have a blast ready to go if needed, so just start charging as a habit as you’re about to round a corner or go through a door etc.
Also remember passive quelling counts for toughness regen, so in the build above i included shriek rather than go for bubble + 5% crit aura (which is what i normally run with, but swap it around if you like, everything else stays the same on points) as it also serves as a quick toughness bump as well as a panic button on peril.
It’s easily argued that bubble/wall is better for survivability not just for your party but you as well, but if you’re not comfortable with quelling under pressure you might want to start with shriek so you have a safety valve, your call.
That said, combined with left side keystone and elite kill perk your shriek cooldown is very very fast, and it doubles up as excellent horde clear in a hurry, decent CC if you’re about to get clubbed, and a good clearing tool for gunlines.
It’s even pretty solid chip damage in a mixed horde, especially if you can pick off an elite or two as they come at you with wildfire.
If you don’t have surge you can also drop true aim and movement on the lower right and put them into either warp expenditure and battle meditation for more survivability, or one of those and warp battery for more overall warp charges.
Now, as far as the actual void staff goes, I’m going to say something silly.
“Just go get a void staff with nexus and surge”.
Already got the surge blessing? Excellent, moving right along.
(it works without surge too, just not nearly as much punch against harder targets when those crits go off. which is fairly frequent with nexus and the +crit from the skill tree sadly)
Anyway, you’re going to want to be aiming for heads when possible with the void staff, the good news is you absolutely mulch hordes as well as tougher things with the staff once you get a little peril ramp-up.
The projectile overpenetrates, so you can mow down rows of trash(or bigger things with fully charged hits and a proc or two) if they’re obliging enough to line up for you.
Just remember for trash you barely need to trigger the charge animation to kill something once your charges are up, so just barely tap that charge animation and spam to blend a lot faster than normal (not just straight lmb mashing to be clear, need to trigger the charge).
For anything else, charge up if you can, softer elites can be killed with less charge once you have warp stacks or other buffs going, you just have to get a feel for that.
Edit: Forgot to add, charged void will also stagger bulwarks/crushers on a full charge headshot when you don’t outright kill them.
It’s not as reliable as a trauma staff for CC, but it’s still very very useful for obvious reasons.
Weakness of the build if you can call it that is monster damage speed and/or when you don’t have room/time to charge attacks, and you might want to pick a melee weapon to cover that issue.
I included a mk5 force sword with deflector in the build as it gives you some leeway on the squish side of things and gives you a charge attack for burst, but if you don’t want/need deflector there’s a lot of good options so just pick what you feel is solid for covering the gap.
Another non-psyker main opinion, but at least you have an opinion on void too.
This is what I use on psyker^. Requires some specific blessings but
Voidstrike most of the time, duelling sword for defense and mobility or when high peril in a horde.
Blitz is mainly for the innate chance to proc when using staff and melee but I use it on far away fast moving targets where void would be hard to hit or on bulwarks or bosses when at high peril to do some damage before moving back to void strike.
Also brain rupture counts as a headshot for getting those guaranteed crit stacks.
Depends on what weapons you use and that sorta thing.
I use the Purgatus and MK IV Force Sword. I usually stun the scarier enemies with Smite so that I can run up to them and take them out with my Mk IV Force Swords’s special attack. Apart from that, I usually just let everything else burn.
I’ve been considering making the switch to either a Mk IV or Mk II Duelling Sword and the Voidstrike, though.
just play gunpsyker, bro. Preferably something on the “tanky” side of psyker builds. Get used to his squishiness and positioning. Dodging and avoiding attacks. After that you can try adding more complicated stuff.
Here, you can try out this build. Dont bother with blitz. Dont bother with Peril. Just shoot and spam shields. You pretty much can have 2-3 domes active at the same time.
+25% base toughness dmg reduction +50% tougness dmg reduction if you stayed in shield when it ends.
And you also dish out some pretty good dmg with ranged weapon. I suggest headhunter rifles. But free to use anything you like
Scrier’s Gaze + Mk IV Combat Knife + Mk XIV Revolver build (I’m mentally insane)
It is pretty good it’s just close to what I use on vet and zealot so I want to diversify my classes.
Honestly, same here. I only use Gun Psyker for Scrier’s Gaze and even then my Vet or Zealot would probably be a better match for it.
I would recommend using the Illsi force sword over a dueling sword if you are not familiar with psyker melee, its a bit more forgiving due to its good attack speed, its high damage even without charging it up, and its sweeping attacks on lights and heavies.
You can potentially pair it with a voidstrike staff since its very consistent, does good damage, can stagger most things, and overpenetrates.
No, saltzpyres zealot class is the closest you are going to get to Darktides zealot class.
psyker, more then any other class, has its play style seriously dictated by blessings.
I use Force Sword and Revolver/autopistol with BB and Fus-Ro-Dah; to do this i need a sword with Deflection(block bullets with sword). that was very rough until I got Unstable Power to buff my damage by 30%. This is a very mobile DPS/specialist killer that can lead a push against heavy gunfire but needs room to dance about a bit. if I try to swap anything on the weapons this whole build sucks.
this plays nothing like a staff psyker. this is still more then viable on auric missions
I would tool around a bit to find a style for the psyker you like
Staff psyker is very difficult to make work without team support in my opinion. You are very squishy, and you spend a lot of time managing peril even in high stress situations, and unlike every other class you don’t have a truly good “OH SH*T” button which is mostly the grenades on every other class.
It’s classic Sienna from VT2 balancing where she caught every nerf early in the games life cycle (and knowing fatshark why I decided to not main pysker in this game), fortunately unlike Sienna you can use ranged weapons that aren’t staves on Psyker.
Gunpsyker is in a great place right now, and you have 2 options to play that are very strong, and viable even in Auric Damnation.
This is the first one I’d recommend. You can change the active combat ability to be Scrier’s Gaze, and pick up the Precognition node for even more damage. With Scrier’s fully stacked up you can 2 shot crushers with the MK IV duelling sword quite often.
I prefer shield though because it comes in clutch for the team, and you can use it to deny bombers/flamers.
With all the crits you get you will keep your toughness up very easily especially when the MK V Columnus is brraapping heretics. Make sure you land weakspot hits, and you will have 100% crit rate with it.
Assail is there to build peril to get the damage bonus from Warp Rider, delete shooter packs including shotguns packs, and to massively soften up rager packs.
You can also use it to give yourself space during hordes if you really need to, but the MK IV duelling sword will mostly take care of those.
Next up is a full support team baby sitter gunpsyker build.
A squishier psyker stats wise, but you will almost always have a bubble dome available with 10% CDR on your aura, 12% from curios, and 5% every time an elite dies near your team, and an average of at least another 22.5% CDR from spending Warp Charges. That’s a 49.5% CDR if just one elite died near you, and you got half your possible warp charges which means by the time first dome goes down you’ll have been ready to drop a new one for over 5 seconds.
Enough dome though. You’ll be smiting. A lot. This is what you will primarily do locking down hordes, and armor. Since you don’t need to look at what you have locked down you can also keep your head on a swivel, and mark specials.
When too many specials start showing up, or your team just isn’t doing its job that’s when you - the babysitter can pull out your gun.
If the revolver isn’t your style then you can use a MK I Agripinaa autogun which has sniping capabilities, and decent enemy piercing. You can use the exact perk and blesssing build I had on the MK V from the previous build.
This is an incredible build with a very high skill ceiling. If you want to be a support player I can’t think of a more support oriented build in the game.
If you are good with this you will 100% carry almost anything. The scoreboard won’t reflect your hard work, but I’ll know ya done good kid.
EDIT: Being a silly billy.
As everyone already stated, Psyker is very squishy and relies on dodge/mobility only (absolutely opposite to Ogryn).
Illisi Force Sword is the best choice against the hordes.
Duelling Sword Mk4 is best in single-target elimination (elites/armor).
So pick the one that counters your biggest struggle.
Just don’t play Disrupt Destiny, it’s garbage and needs either a 2x buff in both duration and bonuses, or a plain rework entirely
It does nothing Warp Stacks and Empower don’t do better
Get a voidstrike staff and dueling sword. Line em up and knock em down at range. Stab things that get close in the face. Use your staff for killing hordes and your melee for managing them and movement. If done right you’ll be an endless source of destruction without concern for ammo. I like the shield. Im too busy killing with my staff to BB or smite. I usually take the passive chance to brain burst for extra random damage. I like warp charges personally.