Outside of penances I always have and always will use Brain Burst despite it’s state but it is really lacking on anything above Heresy.
At Damnation, Brain Burst fails to instakill some of the enemies that it can on Heresy or lower. I wouldn’t mind that, but pairing it up with a 2-5 business day charge time before you can use it should get a pass on killing all but the most resilient of humanoid enemies in one hit.
Second issue is that unlike any other Blitz, Brain Burst doesn’t have a usable secondary attack:
(Lightning has a huge spreading crowd control as a secondary and Assail has an aim function to snipe specific, highlighted enemies and slow your firerate so you don’t burn through your crystals too fast.)
Brain Burst has a secondary that takes a bit longer to charge, costs you 5% extra peril (provided that you let it go the very first moment you charge the secondary up) and you can’t even hold the thing at the ready waiting for an enemy because it makes peril rise pretty much as fast as charging a staff secondary. (Except the staff slows down once charged, BB just keeps on going.)
And for all of those negatives, the secondary fully charged attack doesn’t even do more damage or something. It’s basically the exact same thing as a left click but equal or worse in every way. And there isn’t even much room to actually increase the overall damage outside of shoving resources into it for a usually single use damage increase.
I’m sure someone has already suggested talent tree options to increase warp damage and a variable charge time change so that if BB deals e.g. 1700 damage with a charge time of 3 seconds, if I target a 300 health enemy it should charge in (3/1700)*300 = 0.53 seconds and ideally bump the full charge time and damage so that a long, full charge actually deals significant damage and isn’t outperformed so much of the game.
But the most simple change I would like to suggest is to allow BB kills to gain a stack of Empowered Psyonics when a kill is made with Empowered Psyonics. (Currently you do not gain a stack if you already have a stack. I don’t want it to not expend a charge where killing at 1 charge would leave you at 2 charges. Just make it so that you gain a charge on any specialist/elite kill regardless if EP is on or not.) That way the playstyle of chain-picking specialist/elite enemies in hard to reach places becomes much more viable than only dealing damage to every other one.
The EP change still wouldn’t really fix all the problems it has but having it reliably kill threats across all default difficulties would make it feel much better as a start. For the charge time I’d bite through having to stim up/activate my ability (Double shield for the purpose of more fast-cast uptime) to do any noteworthy damage to a pack of crusher ogryns or monstrosities.
yes because you are using a stack to get the kill which leaves you at net 1 stack and even without ep it kills everything except armor, and maniacs (with EP kills dreg rager)
Brain burst isnt that bad its main issue is that it falls off with density, you can charge it while its locked onto a target from cover you can kill things from 90+m freely without seeing them its not that bad
HOWEVER
Empowered Psionics is fine as is with Brain Burst.
Brainburst itself does need a damage buff. Either it one shots anything less than an Ogryn on Auric Damnation without help from damage Talents/Blesdings or it gets a reduction in charging time. I’m more inclined towards the first option. It’s literally a head explosion.
Hounds and Gunners surviving a head explosion is ridiculous.
Ok I had to go and double check it because I couldn’t believe my eyes from the video and it seems that I wrongly believed that EP is granted on Elite AND Specialist kills. Turns out it’s just Elites for some reason…
Could have sworn it were for specialists as well…
Also coincidentally thank you for providing the dog example because I swear I saw a dog survive a brain burst during a game while most just died without any prior hits.
Glad I’m not crazy… yet…
Would be nice to get a bit more damage out of it so that it can 1 tap things across difficulties to be honest. The damage increases that are available are still just pretty small…
Enemies in Auric are not harder than in normal difficulties.
The only difference is: Auric has ALLWAYS an High Intensity Modifier.
To the rest I fully agree.
In my mind it should be a reliable special/elite killer (with Ogryn exception, as they are to small brained ), that would justify the chargetime and be more fun to work out a build to go arround that charge time (as there are some good ones out there), but but wasting a second fast charge to kill one enemie is annoying …
The subject of BB’s damage in higher difficulties comes up so often that I sometimes wonder if it should be recoded to % of enemy HP instead of a flat damage number and be done with it.
Such as always 100% hp of: fodder, roamer, special, gunner, shotgunner, radio operator.
50% hp of muties, orgryns, maulers 12% to monsters, captains, lieutenants
Maybe even it should do 68% hp to certain enemies so builds and power based on peril still matters.
Crossed my mind as well but I believe percentage damage is a bad idea especially for situations where you get more health on enemies. It would make it weaker in lower difficulties where a single BB would do more damage and more powerful in difficulties where it would do less. The health increase is meant to make the enemies more difficult to kill and I do get that on big/armored enemies but with the extremely long charge up compared to other blitz abilities I think it’s fair to ask for it to be able to one shot dogs and all but the most heavily armored enemies even at the highest difficulty. To get a single kill with BB you already have to invest 3+ seconds of your life to doing nothing but holding down left click for a single kill… And even takes two-three times as many to kill an armored ogryn while the veteran can just toss a single krak and move on before you even get your second cast off.
As Psyk said, having ‘kill flags’ on BB while having an underlying damage value for monstrosities I think would be fantastic. The rock doesn’t actually do enough damage to 1 shot ragers, but it has a kill flag that just nukes them anyway on hit because it’s the rock.
I’d absolutely adore this being implemented into BB, just kill flag anything that isn’t an Ogy/Monstrosity, balance it’s damage around doing half a Crushers health bar in damage at Damnation Difficulty (or as you say, maybe a bit more so damage buffs can come into play to make up the difference sometimes when fully stacked), then BB becomes fantastic. One of the worst things I remember dealing with when it came to BB (when I hard cast it more often beyond just the random thing here and there that was currently out of my reach), is Psyk’s dog example, as there’s literally a penance for killing a dog mid flight with BB, but you have to hurt it first on damnation plus in order to get it and it’s like what the actual heck. Would be so much nicer and easier on the dev’s for future updates if it was just ‘these sets of enemies die to BB full stop’, and would make using it without EP actually decent.
On a side note, I think it would be nice if the right click only targeted specials/elites/monstrosities and such, would give it a purpose. You’re ‘concentrating and taking on extra peril to make sure you hit the target you desire’, verses right now where it’s literally useless. I’d accept a longer charge time if I new I was hitting that gunner trying to beam me through the poxwalker wave, verses right now where it’s better to just not even try and dodge away into cover, clear the wave, then deal with the gunner/s with quick casts.
Another thought was giving back the whole ‘explodes into soulflame’ upgrade, I’d be totally down for left click to do that too (though potentially needing to remove/nerf perilous combustion, which should probably be hit anyway given the stupid stuff it does atm). Be nice to have ‘wave clear but kinda’ back into BB’s wheel house again directly.
BB has unlimited uses by default limited only by Peril and Vet requires Talents to have “unlimited” grenades. Krak grenade cannot snipe Specialists and weaker Elites on the other side of the battlefield.
How the heck did you manage to quite literally spell out the issue and not understand the issue…
If a default BB today does 1500 damage then changing it to 100% on a 300 hp enemy makes it 5 times weaker while 100% on a 3000 hp enemy makes it twice as strong. Scaling up health which is a common way of increasing difficulty will just become irrelevant for BB.
“Oh, Havoc 40 001? Rager has 10 million HP and takes 2 hours to gun down with the rest of the team? Nope, 3 seconds and it’s dead. Moving on.”
A single krak can also kill or nearly kill a group of crushers while BB can at most do in a single one. Also Krak grenade doesn’t need to snipe Specialists or weaker Elites on the other side of the battlefield because:
They are most likely not a threat yet.
The veteran has a gun that can kill it - likely faster than BB. (And can have an ability to generate ammo out of nothingness by killing.)
Doesn’t matter if the actual damage output is 5 times weaker or 5x stronger because the target being bursted is dead. BB has no AOE, it does not stagger nearby enemies, whether I lose or gain actual damage numbers because the difficulty is Malice or Damnation is absolutely irrelevant to me as long as the target is dealt the percentage of damage relative to health for the target’s specific classification.
Great example of why higher level difficulties shouldn’t require massive increases in enemy health, albeit as extreme and ridiculous as that example is. These are the numbers default BB should be hitting, regardless of difficulty:
100% of Health on BB - Human sized Elites, Specs, and fodder.
50% of Health - Ogryns and Muties
12% of Health - Bosses
BB is a single target high damage tool, with no AOE at all that requires 3 seconds by default to burst a target. A scalpel.
Congratulations, you discovered Krak and BB have two entirely different purposes. That deserves a standing ovation.
Bombers, Snipers and Gunners are always a threat.
Yes, and that’s fine. Veteran can’t be everywhere focusing on every target at once. Guns have mag size limitations, mobility penalties and recoil. Nice contradiction to the outlandish “Oh, Havoc 40 001? Rager has 10 million HP and takes 2 hours to gun down with the rest of the team?” argument btw.
That requires an Aura and is irrelevant to the current discussion of changing Brainburst to a percentage based damage system.
(I would also like to point out/add to this conversation, Krak grenades also have a kill flag for anything they stick too/at least for sure have it for Crushers and Bulwarks. This is actually what makes them super useful in Havoc if you can stomach dropping Shredder grenades/your team can afford you doing so, because even an un-upgraded Krak grenade will 1 shot a super buffed puss hardened enraged mega Bulwark charging at you, as it’s coded to just ‘kill it’ while still doing it’s regular damage to monstrosities.
This is yet another point in the ‘BB should have Kill Flags’ bucket to me)
Yeahhh, something I learned when discussing Havoc things a bit ago as well. Though it made sense to me, the flag I think is ‘on stick’ so if you miss/the grenade hits the ground the damage still matters, but on stick you’ll wipe anything it’s stuck too, with the damage only hitting anything else that isn’t stuffed into it’s hitbox.
I still use tinkerer with it on some builds (mainly because most builds I use with Krak also usually don’t have an immensely powerful Unyeilding option, so I like the damage against the bosses, even with that being progressively unneeded these days with our power creep), but one can definitely forgo it if they have boss killing potential otherwise and are just using it to kill Ogies and armor. It’s nice in some respects, but is unfortunate in the sense it’s a ‘dead talent’ if the kraks are used exclusively for their intended purpose.
I feel like BB dmg is fine as is, it just needs perhaps a slightly shorter cast time (maybe 15-20%), and for pre-charged brainbursts to NOT take more time to cast than on-target casts.
Empowred Psi brainbursts could either take a small buff to damage done (another 15%, say), or an additional effect like a small shockwave that gives a light stagger/suppresses to target and nearby enemies.
If they want buffing it, they should play with the time needed to use BB.
But tbh, I feel that this is a pretty strong ability that has a big pro… the fact you can kill with taking cover a special / elite if you lock it. So convenient to kill snipers…
), that would justify the chargetime and be more fun to work out a build to go arround that charge time (as there are some good ones out there), but but wasting a second fast charge to kill one enemie is annoying …