Infinite ammo aimbot infantry lasgun vet in your back pocket that costs practically nothing to summon whenever you want.
+Killing elites/specialists without switching to your gun.
+Saving massive amounts of ammo.
+Free bons damage for doing practically nothing.
+Staggering dangerous enemies.
-Slightly less ability use.
Basically blades of faith but 10x easier to use, way more damage output, works on maulers/plasma gunners, with way more ammo, and you still get to bring a pretty good grenade.
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In all of my auric games so far I have only seen maybe 2 people running Noospheric Command. I feel like people are seriously under valuing the damage this does considering it is almost entirely free to use. Now yes if you just want to spam Chordclaw as much as physically possible its not ideal, but I dont feel like you actually need to spam chord claw as much as possible generally.
Noospheric Command turns your servo skull into a infantry lasgun veteran for 2 seconds. Dealing ~300 damage per shot with a good fire rate and applying fire stacks. It also penetrates certain enemies hitting up to seemingly 3. Oh and it has very high stagger able to knock gunners out of attacks and even slow down ragers. Oh and it seems to prefer targeting elites.
For this the cost is 25% capacitance. This seems like a lot if you are used to normal abilities, but then you realize you can easily generate that back in 2 seconds under many circumstances.
To compare this to Arbitrator Dog, well, arbitrator dog can kill one enemy in ~2 seconds plus travel time, meanwhile the servo skull can easily kill 3+ elites in one activation, and all you need to do is click your ping button every few seconds while doing melee. The capacitance cost is negligible and unless you are using it fully on cooldown you will barely notice the hit to your capacitance.
And all that by itself would already make it a useful thing to consistently use. Essentially spawning a infantry lasgun vet for almost free. But then you realize it doesn’t use ammo. You have a entirely infinite ammo infantry lasgun with aimbot sitting in your back pocket and all you need to activate it is spam the ping button while looking vaguely in the direction of any elite you want deleted.
This is incredibly useful when using a plasma gun or even a arc rifle or galvanic rifle. Saving ammo and time switching to your gun when you just need to remove a sniper or bomber, or even just getting a gunner to stop shooting at you. If you consistently use Noospheric command instead of switching to your gun you will save at least a ammo bag worth of ammo on the low end. I really cannot think of a situation where not taking Noospheric command is a good idea.
Its like 8s of capacitance to use, which if it gets a kill (likely) and you’re playing Darktide is likely to be refunded before it ends. Its an amazing blitz. Too bad the other servo skull ones are so janky/weak (flame skull). And the other 2 blitz, but arc grenades are at least powerful even if they take a year to throw without quick toss and then another year to blow up.
The flame skull doesnt do massive immediate damage no, but it can build up burn very well, its radius is also suprisingly big. Yeah its pretty redundant if you have a flamer on your team, but if you don’t it can work as a pretty good replacement to just throw at a massive hoard and soften them up. At the end of the day it still a very large AOE DOT so not sure how you could call it bad, sure its not hive scum but only hive scum is hive scum.
Also being able to revive/rescue AND give a massive toughness bonus to team mates is just the ultimate clutch tool. Now sure skitarii isn’t exactly the prime candidate for last alive, really the class is probably one of the most likely to die. But being able to just revive someone for basically free is still very powerful.
I said janky/weak. The flame skull is janky and weak, but the revive skull is just janky for targeting. Flame skulls are a waste of a grenade and a candidate for one of the very worst ones in the game.
Over the course of the effect you can stack up (at least as far as I have seen) ~150 damage per tick worth of flame in a massive AOE. One use can net over 100k damage without even hitting that many enemies. Sure your probably not actually getting that due to people killing enemies before the ticks fully finish, but still that is pretty solid damage potential if you just place it in the right spot.
It’s not as good as hive scum obviously, but it’s about the same as zealot fire grenade, at least in terms of potential. Sure you don’t want to actively use it and take grenades to do so, but if you see an opportunity to just toss it into a massive hoard it will do work. I usually just keep 1 skull reserve for a important save and use the other 3 when the opportunity comes up throughout the game.
I’m actually grateful that so few people are running it. The ‘tag’ sound cue is and always was obnoxiously loud, there’s nothing worse than a player non-stop double tagging stuff.
But yeah, if your ears can live with the pain, it’s nice.
Yeah but its a grenade, so you end up comparing it to other grenades. Compared to the other AoEs it has a very small range, no crowd control at all and skuffed flame you need to servo a taggable to hit max burn with. Pretty meh, but if you like it power to you, experience in the game tells me its gonna get some soft buffs in the inevitable Skitarii mini-update that follows all DLC launches…
Yeah, I’ve been using the setting to double-tag with one ping because of laziness, but maybe I need to switch that off and try this blitz. Seems like it has potential.
I have a macro on my mouse to double tag when I press a side mouse button. Highly recommend that at least until they actually let you rebind the companion attack key.
Unless you mean you accidentally double tag enemies and your not trying to use the single tag attack option. In that case you could set the mouse wheel click as a macro with a .2 second cooldown to prevent you from accidentally double tagging with it.
Yeah that is always the issue with grenades. Especially since hive scum just has the default claim to any and all grenades. Really the grenade system needs to be reworked in general.
Maybe they could give the servo skull a like 4 minute recharge and cap it at 2 charges. I feel like that would make it more viable to use without making it more powerful.
Really skitarii could get away with having a grenade regen perk just in general, but it could be problematic.
Maybe though I feel like capacitance is so easy and fast to generate, if your not literally just spamming claw the entire game its practically free and available at all times. I mean with just 2 of the capacitance nodes you can generate a full charge easily in under a second just swinging transonic into a hoard.
It could work if the servo skull took 3 charges to deploy maybe. But I still feel like you could have it up the entire game very easily. Maybe if it had like a 2 minute cool down period and took capacitance to deploy it would work.
Yeah can definitely agree there. 3 charges, regen 2 minutes, deploy it and it drains 25% capacitance on hit or something. Using grenades for a 8 second shield is just a extremely confusing decision and I’m not sure how its supposed to work. Like I genuinely am wondering if I am missing something and you can regen it somehow.
I personally haven’t been using it much - not because I don’t see its potential, but because I’m trying to do other penances that have required me to use other blitzes. Making me want to go play it right now . . .
