Nerf Staff Psyker

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
1

Why this change?

With Warp Unbound and abundant CDR allowing Shriek or Gaze to have remarkable uptime, Overloading through Perils of the Warp is no longer the balance for staves that it used to be. The risk for using staves at high Peril is not nearly as high as it used to be and this negatively affects weapon balance in a significant way.

Corruption falls perfectly in line with the dangers that Psykers face using the warp to attack their enemies. The more they reach into the Warp, the more their sanity slips away, until their physical bodies can no longer bear the weight of chaotic corruption.

Thankfully, the Emperor has forseen this and equipped his faithful servants with the means to cleanse the corruption from the mutant, resulting in their salvation through His mercy.

These numbers I have provided are just a starting point and could be adjusted in the future depending on gameplay feedback. The point is, using Shriek and Warp Unbound to remove the drawbacks of Staves is unbalanced, Corruption is a means to rectify that.

This also creates a new opportunity for Beacon of Purity Zealots to ground their Psykers in the Emperor’s Light as the forces of Chaos relentlessly pull them towards damnation.

With that said, here are the suggested changes:

Venting Shriek: Unleashes a wave of warp energy that Staggers Enemies in front of you. Quells 50% Peril. Using Shriek while Overloading from Perils of the Warp applies 20% Corruption to your current Wound.

Warp Unbound: Scrier’s Gaze now also prevents overloading from Perils of the Warp, during its lingering effect. For every percent of Peril generated over 100% during this period, 1% Corruption will be applied to your current Wound.

Beacon of Purity: Heal 1.5% Corruption from the current Wound for you and Allies in Coherency every 1s. Corruption no longer consumes Health.

:down_arrow::down_arrow: Leave your thoughts down below, I look forward to reading your feedback: :down_arrow::down_arrow:

*Edit: Added another option to poll

  • Yes, Corruption Would Be a Step In The Right Direction For Balancing Staves
  • No, Applying Corruption In This Way Is Not A Good Way To Balance Staves
0 voters
Second Option
  • Yes, but Psyker Needs a Talent(s) That Can Cleanse Corruption Through Some Active Methods (Get Crits or Melee Kills For Example)
0 voters
2 Likes
2

Zealot mains are by far the less cooperative of the playerbase, even when facing havoc puddles or tox gas they are reluctant to let their benediction go

i agree that corruption would be the appropriate stat to apply for peril mismanagement, but on a gameplay prospective it would be more fair to just drink their toughness like plasma gun venting currently does, with psyker’s already limited toughness cap and their lack of iron will it would be harsh enough

same discourse with health drain, since psykers don’t have anything similar Sienna’s tranquillity talent

Another idea would be to revert the buffs to base peril venting, in the past it used to be way slower with everything

it was buffed because back then (we are talking pre patch 12) staves kinda sucked

3 Likes
3

The thread title doesn’t seem to match the topic well, as you appear to be speaking more about venting shriek and scrier’s gaze capacity to prevent peril overload, than what staves do in particular?

4

I feel like this is another issue with elite-difficulty mission design rather than a larger problem, where huge numbers of tightly packed enemies are thrust at players in ways that empower players that just doesn’t exist at the game’s “normal” difficulties. In normal Damnation, you just aren’t fed enough CDR to have things up all the time.

1 Like
5

I’d add to calculations, Scriers Gaze vents similarly to Venting Shriek now reducing peril 50% baseline.

Otherwise, I think just manual venting at critical levels for some corruption would be more balanced once your below say 75% no corruption generation. Ability peril dumps seem balanced as is and should bypass any corruption generation. Ability spamming… on other hand (CDR talents) I think are on the radar for nerfs so it won’t be so much of an issue when adjusted.

6

Maybe if picking beacon wasn’t a 3 point tax aura it would be picked a lot more

2 Likes
7

You had my interest until your suggested balance was taxing another class entirely to make up for the space witch’s new power balance. Rethink your plan and put something to mitigate the corruption in the Psyker tree and you might have an idea worth consideration.

1 Like
8

Peril overload is a notable part of how staves are “balanced”, the two CAs with the biggest effect on Peril Overload definitely do change how balanced staves are.

When Psykers can spam Voidstrike secondary at max peril for 10 entire seconds in addition to getting +20% Crit Chance, +30% Finesse Damage and +10% Damage, it becomes a balancing issue.

All I’m saying is that the +10 seconds Unbound is active should have a drawback of some sort to balance that strong of a buff to Staves. Electrokinetic, Voidstrike and Purgatus all benefit from Scrier’s Unbound. 1% current Wound Corruption gen per Peril % generated in Unbound is not unreasonable

9

quelling in vt2 it wasn’t free, even if having thp build up
the fact they made quelling in dt free is just bad, cause they can be spammy a lot.

they should at least make quelling slow like it was before.
cause when you are at 100% if you hold R for 2 seconds, you are already back at 0%

3 Likes
10

Also if overloading last wound Psyker should just sit down and become a daemon host maybe lower health in case they sit in choke point… would be so fun / funny

11

That would be a hilarious event modifier. Overload Psyker = Weakened Daemonhost.

1 Like
12

Well if it’s a modifier… only psykers always chance on peril use to start becoming daemon host fighting for team before slowly loosing control to AI that attacks team, once killed the cycle repeats

1 Like
13

Suggestion to pay attention to howitzers

14

So the point is to make psyker more fragile?

15

@Cheturnadcatii

No, the point is to use an existing mechanic to punish both the spamability of staves and the use of Venting Shriek or Warp Unbound that completely circumvents the Perils of the Warp check (balance) on poorly managed Peril through stave spam; but I guess it’s the same thing, said differently depending on how one looks at it.

Anyway, I understand why people dislike the idea in it’s current form - it relies too much on Beacon of Purity. Experienced Zealots strongly dislike Beacon because Beacon has mediocre Talents directly above it and why take Beacon when you have a +15% TDR through Benediction for the entire team?

I will stand by my suggestion that Beacon should be buffed, at the minimum to include “No Health damage from Corruption” but as for the idea as a whole, it’s back to the drawing board. Psyker would probably need a Talent or two to cleanse Corruption somehow in order to make the original idea more palatable.

1 Like
16

I beg your pardon?

17

But that could negatively affect Quietude through the even slower passive Quelling that would be needed to justify slower active Quelling. I still like the idea of Corruption, but Corruption has it’s issues and relying on Beacon of Purity for cleanse in order to use Shriek to get out of Perils Overload isn’t a good take in hindsight.

18

So what about bubble psykers?

They can reach peril above 100 and not blow up due to nodes.

Why we need this type of mechanic?

Why not do this:

We have veil

If u reach 100 peril the veil is start to thinning.

The veil stops thinning when peril is low enough.

Like from 0 to 100, but without any possibility of “cooldown this”.

When u reach " Breakpoints" Like 25, 50, 75 - something bad happens. For the whole team. Ragers spawns more, stronger bosses, more regular enemies.

When the thinning of the veil reach 100 - deamonhost spawns from the psykers dead body.

1 Like
19

why it would be needed? it is not true
psyker if wants, can melee 100% only, even in havoc
seen many melee psykers in h40 using melee weapons only

you don’t need a passive to make viable quelling, quelling could be slow, which is good because it makes staves not spammy, it makes psykers to use more melee weapons, it promotes better interaction to the game, because there are psykers that just rely 100% only on their staves, and aren’t mechanically good players because they aren’t good with melee. a psyker that is good at melee, it will be a good psyker overall.

1 Like
20

I don’t think this is a good way to try to reduce what you call the “spammability” of psyker abilities when enemy numbers are high, because it’s going to have inadvertent side-effects.

For one people are likely just going to avoid shriek and scriers to begin with because they will become a liability for lower skill psykers, which kind of defeats the purpose of these talents in the first place.

Another is you’re probably going to incentivize psykers from hogging cleanse/heal stimms and med stations even more than they already do.

A third possible problem is it’s going to inadvertently affect brainburst, smite, and assail builds (regardless of whether they also use staves) that rely on shriek or gaze to manage excess peril in intense situations.

Ultimately this issue with spammability appears to come primarily from the CD reduction given by the Psykinetic’s Aura talent. But this talent has the same effect on everyone in coherency regardless of who gets the elite/special kills, so everyone’s combat ability becomes spammable at sufficiently high elite/specialist concentrations.

And it’s just not clear to me this is the issue it’s being made out to be in the first place. In the way difficulty is scaled currently in game, at the higher difficulties players sort of need this ability to concentrate damage on chokepoints and chain high damage abilities and CC.

An alternative approach is ultimately for fatshark move away from the mass-stronger-enemies philosophy of increasing difficulty, keep lower numbers of elites/specials, but develop new and interesting enemies that increase the difficulty in other ways. Perhaps adding enemies that sit somewhere between monstrosities and crushers/reapers in terms of health and damage output that put more pressure on player ability to avoid their attacks and use their cc abilites/dodges to stay alive, rather than the current meta which actively promotes funnelling enemies into chokepoints and massing high dmg/spamming combat abilities on them.