The operative I’ve played the most is the Psyker. I mostly played on Heresy difficulty after hitting level 30. I’ve read posts & comments saying that Psyker is weak & I disagree. Psyker is not Sienna level strong but it’s not weak.
The Psyker is incredibly strong thanks to its arsenal of staffs.
Voidstrike outshine them all. The charged attack cleaves through hordes like a hot knife through butter.
The Surge, Trauma & Purgatus staff share a second place. Surge is good for stunning enemies you can’t easily kill that poses a threat for the group, like the armoured Dreg Rager. Feeling like a Sith Lord while doing it. Trauma is also a good choice for staggering threats but it also throws enemies around so you have to watch out so an enemy doesn’t fly outside your vision, ending up attacking you in the back. Purgatus can be good in a soulblaze build because the flame counts as soulblaze. The downside is that you have only your Brain Burst ability for range.
Brain Burst. From difficulty 3 & down it’s very strong. It kills everything with one burst except a handful of enemies. On difficulty 4 (Heresy) it becomes a bit weaker. Losing its one shot kill on a few specials. Which makes it easier for Sharpshooter to quickly take down specials. You can however one shot them again with some Warp Charges stacked up. However, the strength with Brain Burst is that you only need line of sight when targeting an enemy so you can dodge into cover making it safer for you to take down specials when the Sharpshooter is not able to.
The huge downside with Brain Burst is that it’s hard to target a specific enemy in a crowd or when they’re behind cover. Even though you can see their head clearly & could make the kill with a gun. Even some fences & staircase rails block your line of sight. Weapons can shoot through them but you can’t target anything on the other side. Putting you in an awkward position where you are jumping trying to find an angle. Intended or not I think it needs a fix so you can target through staircase rails & fences. Also improve the targeting line of sight on enemies behind cover & terrain.
Psykinetic’s Wrath. I’m not sure if it’s a timing issue on my part. A Stagger Power vs hit mass/stagger resistance or another behind the scene numbers. But it feels like it’s a dice roll if I can stagger a charging Pox Burster so it falls to the ground or not. Same thing with freeing a player from a Pox Hound. Sometimes when I use Psykinetic’s Wrath it frees the player & sometimes it doesn’t.
Warp Siphon (aka Warp Charges). On difficulty 3 & down it can be hard to keep your warp charges up. On difficulty 4 it becomes much easier because you face much more enemies so the feats (talants) like Psychic Communion “Whenever you or an ally in Coherency kills an enemy, you have 4% chance to gain a Warp Charge” trigger more. There’s also a lot more targets for your Brain Burst.
Builds. I mostly played around with soulblaze builds With the goal to keep my Warp Charges maxed for the majority of time so Kinetic Overload “While you have maximum Warp Charges, gaining a Warp Charge instead applies 4 stacks of Soulblaze to a nearby enemy, prioritizing Elite enemies” keeps triggering with help from Ascending Blaze “Psykinetic’s Wrath expends all Warp Charges and applies stacks of Soulblaze to enemies hit based on the number of Warp Charges expended. Enemies killed by your Soulblaze effects (from any source) have a 10% chance to grant you a Warp Charge.” & Psychic Communion.
Is it the most optimal build? Probably not. It’s fun to play though & with a Purgatus staff you can easily keep your Warp Charges up, especially during hordes & events.
Final Words. The Psyker shines in a crowd control role & as a backup for killing specials & elites when the Sharpshooter can’t. You can also solo Plague Ogryn & Beast of Nurgel with ease while the team takes down hordes & other threats. It can use some adjustments to the line of sight & the damage scaling on higher difficulties for Brain Burst. Also the stagger on Psykinetic’s Wrath could use some tuning. But other than that it’s a solid class in my opinion.
Surge and Purgatus staff is generally the way to go on 4+ as they bring much valued utility. Voidstrike is the weaker of them - great horde clearing capability at range, but otherwise not particularly good. Doesn’t stagger a lot of important enemies.
Surge is obviously the king of the staffs, because it enables your entire team to simply not have to worry about damage in most aspects. It will prevent troops from hiding behind terrain, it will stop all elites dead in their path… It is in general an extremely strong staff.
Purgatory is like the surge, except it doesn’t stop mutants and ogryn’s. Everything else is melted. It is also super strong, but the big downside is the range. You really need to rely on your team a heck of a lot more - especially to take out ranged mobs.
Builds are fairly simple:
3 | 1 or 2 depending | 1 | 3 | 1 or 3 | 3
Those are your options you get 1 if you are focusing more on Purgatus and 3 if you are focusing on Surge.
Those are of course meta builds and may not exactly be… As fun. Soulblaze is near useless unless you can maintain stacks through staff procs, which is debated if it is possible as some report them not to crit so the blessing is useless (for now).
BB is near useless above heresy aside for the odd Sniper you can take out safely (if people bother to ping it).
Psyker was my favourite and the class I was most excited for. Played over 1000 hours in VT2 and before DLC classes Sienna was my fav. Void staff was like fireball staff and I liked BB on difficulty 3, felt about right. However, as soon as I moved to 4 and 5 I quickly found the biggest issue. BB does not scale. Having to do 2 bursts on dogs, ragers, and flamers, 3 on maulers, 4 on mutants, and 4 ogyrns, just makes it pretty much useless. I think they need to scale the damage on “grenade” abilities in general because as far as I have seen there are no curios that up that. As a level 30 veteran with a 435 bolter on difficulty 5 I can 2 shot armored ogryns. With reload speed perks, as long as there are elites to shoot my ability is up, I get ammo, and I reload faster. If you aren’t focusing on elite killing on high difficulties as a psyker, and more crowd control, the zealot and ogyrn are better at that as well, with more health. I love my void strike staff but the flamer on zealot does a better job. Even the bolter on veteran is good. Plus the psyker has the lowest base toughness and health amongst all the other classes. I want Psyker to be good, but at this point if I am playing difficulty 4 and 5 with friends, I switch to another class, it just isn’t as good nor as feasible.
I think the targeting for brain burst is a problem when it was rained in from the closed beta it was “nerfed” far too harshly. If I can void strike a mob hiding in cover for a head shot then I should be able to brain burst them as well and there are far too many situations where I can’t brain burst through a catwalk I can shoot through. There are chainlink fences a sniper can shoot me through I’m
but I can’t brain burst them? I am very glad you found the purgatory staff to be fun, builds u can make with soulfire are neat. They changed my opinion on a lot of the perks are class has by far though more work on brain burst is my overall QOL desire to be addressed. Sure it could do more dmg on higher difficulties at that point, I’ve seen on 4 and 5 what it feels like you defiantly need your team to deal with reapers and other ogryn mobs not just alright the Psyker has the elites covered gg horde mode go, but a stack or 2 of soul fire might work I don’t know maybe they could make it so wrack and ruin drop on the target if it is not killed, but only once per mob and maybe even specifically the ogryn elite specifically because of there health pool. my only other gripe for the class is warp charge dropping off all at once. Rather than stacks diminishing over time. In the lower end
it would make the search and loot part feel less of a time waste while on higher difficulty maintaining inertia in fights and the ult uses the stacks anyways. but I get why they don’t it’s just consistently a damage buff. I like the purgatus staff but I feel like all Dots do too little damage and I don’t think that’s a dots problem I think the game only lets so many stacks on a target like Ogryn has 2 max bleeds with heavy attacks if I remember and the vet’s grenade I think can get up to 10 but I have no idea what soulblaze can go up to or burn from the preacher’s purgator. there are a couple of other things perk-wise. Things that need some love like quietitude could give a little more toughness or the peril quelled needs to stack with things like the weapon perks that vent peril better or basic diminish. If it already does then it’s either not enough or bugged or doesn’t work while you’re in a broken toughness state. I mentioned wrack and ruin I don’t think 2 stacks after a brain burst is too high, The dmg is pretty small. Especially with such a large health pool on Ogryn mobs on t4 t5 I’ve even played with it in the psykanium lots of small tics and it falls off quickly. Kinetic shield could be a little better if the charges stayed as they are but honestly It would be nice if there was synergy with warp battery. In all brain burst not being able to see things in noticeable terrain and warp charges feeling like a chore to micromanage are bigger issues.