Talents
Title.
This is uncontrolable. Any mob can walk with dots and die near a dh, applying soulblaze to it and even proccing brain burst. Also, venting shriek should not awaken it.
Play psyker. Have any elite or specialist die near a Daemon Host. This can happen randomly, when mobs flee or try to take cover.
Constant (100%)
PC - Steam
As a main Psyker, I’d guess that this is an intentional risk of the talent. I usually try to be extra careful with my attacks and abilities around a DM.
I’d argue that any interaction that forces you to avoid killing specialists or elites for fear of a passive talent triggering in a way you have no control over is not good game design.
What is a psyker supposed to do? Just sit there and not contribute?
Just play more careful. I’ve Perilous Combustion + Wildfire + Brain Rupture + Kinetic Flayer + Venting Shriek + Creeping Flames on my main Purgatus build and I can’t remember having triggered a DM in the way described by the OP ever.
This may sound like an interesting mechanic, a trade-off for the talent, but on 30+ Havoc there’s simply too much chaos for any player to manage this. The issue is that you don’t even need to fight near the Daemon Host.
Again, mobs can walk, flee, take cover while affected by DoT and any of them can randomly proc Kynetic Flayer near a Daemon Host. Even Perilous Combustion can proc it on sleeping DHs. Venting Shriek can also apply soulblaze to things you cannot even see, and those things can move and die near a DH. I don’t see how the game benefit from this besides forcing me to run a Dueling Sword to parry her whenever random chances decide to awaken a DH 30m away.
I disagree immensely. I think FS has intentionally nerfed various things that could proc daemonhosts when they’re not supposed to, like Ogryn taunt going through walls and triggering them.
Darktide is already an intense game where you have to prioritize targets or drown in enemies. Having to manage not killing enemies near a specific target makes it at least ten times worse, especially when you could try to kill them at a safe distance only for them to run close enough to pop it.
The rest of us have learned to put our guns away and be very careful about how we interact with things within the area of the very clearly telegraphed Daemonhost.
These things aren’t even remotely the same. With a gun you have to intentionally shoot at a DH to wake it up. For psykers our psychic abilities can spread in ways well beyond our ability to control.
And no, DH aren’t always clearly visible or telegraphed. That’s why you can hear them before you know exactly where they are and you have to locate them before proceeding. Hopefully in that time you haven’t shrieked through the wall or floor and activated it.
>says daemonhosts aren’t clearly visible or telegraphed
>describes daemonhost telegraphing
Reminder that they also emit a certain haze in their immediate area.
I hope you play psyker on Havoc some day.
DHs absolutely do not clearly telegraph their location. There is a big difference between a DH and, say, a sniper, that clearly shows where exactly they are in relation to you. Or a crusher that gives an audible warning that they’re about to overhead you from behind. DH whispers are directional, but take a moment to pin down exactly where it’s coming from. You can hear it to the left, sure, but is it above you? Below you? Around a corner? Hidden behind a spot of terrain? You don’t know until you look, and even then it takes a bit to spot especially with low visibility modifiers. In that time flames can spread unpredictably and have disastrous outcomes.
They are, by design, not easy to see.
I figure that High Havok players are the minority of Darktide players. In my experience up to Auric Maelstrom and Havoc 20, I never had an issue with DH and said Psyker powers (edit: after I realized their danger and changed my behaviour accordingly). So, the real question would be to me if the game should be balanced for end game difficulty which is meant to be the ultimate challenge for the most experienced players. And so far I’d say that it shouldn’t.
Correct, they are designed to be obstacles the players have to work with and change their fighting routine around them.
I generally agree that the game shouldn’t be balanced around the most niche difficulty, but I’m also not sure if thats the right design philosophy to apply here.
To me the question isn’t should the game be designed around high havoc missions. It’s should there be an interaction, in this case between PC and Knectic Flayer, that can completely remove the player’s ability to mitigate risks and change their behavior.
I also have never triggered a DH in the way the OP describes, but I also don’t run brain rupture and I can easily see how the interaction between the talents can cause undesired outcomes. The problem is that given the way flames spread, the distance between the initial instance of damage that starts the flames spreading and the undesired outcome can be large. You might start by killing a trapper that sets a horde on fire. The flames spread down the hall where a buster catches fire and gets passively brain ruptured from KF, spreading more flames which eventually reach a bomber. The bomber moves next to a sleeping DH and gets BRed, spreading stacks of flames to the DH.
Unlike shooting at a DH, at this point its too late to modify your behavior. Once the flame stacks start ticking, its all but guaranteed that it will activate and come after your party, which might still be down the hall in another room.
I don’t see this happening often. There’s a lot of rng that has to go wrong to get to this point, but in a game that generally lacks rng elements, should this be one of them? Should there be a potential interaction that can end a run purely by chance? I’d argue no, that things that take away player agency aren’t good game design and this interaction should be changed for that reason, but I also doubt that it happens often enough to be a real problem.
It’s still going to feel really bad when it does happen though.
Just an edit to add that one thing I have experienced is smite activating DHs. I might start by smiting a crusher and the lighting spreads through a horde to a DH nearby that I didn’t see initially. I think this interaction is fine, though, because you can immediately turn smite off and the DH won’t activate further. Its the fact that you can’t put out flames once they start spreading that makes the PC/KF interaction potentially sticky.
if daemonhosts are such a problem, just kill them, they arent scary
I get your point, it’s just that from my personal experience as a main Purgatus Psyker with all of the talents in question, it happens so rarely in all but the higher Havok difficulties that I don’t think it justifies changing the game mechanics for everyone. I’ve played around 15 hours a week for over 1½ years, and I can literally remember just one single situation where my fire may have woken a DM around a corner, and I’m not even so sure about that. It’s anecdotal of course, but so is everyone else’s experience here.
I suppose my feeling on this is that it shouldn’t happen on any difficulty, even though its more likely to happen in high havok matches where mob density is rather extreme and more pathways for this interaction exist.
The talent was intentionally designed to wake DHs, and its that intentionality that I take issue with because it seems like an unnecessary penalty that can’t be fully mitigated or controlled for. But at this point this is clearly outside the realm of bug report and more a criticism on psyker game design.
Agreed, and thanks for the nice conversation. 
Thank you as well! I enjoyed our exchange 
