I made so many attempts to answer this in detail and the thing is… I just don’t know how. There are just countless different things to consider. Psykers have so many tricks, so many unexplained properties and mechanics, so many different ways their talents & blessings create emergent properties all of which play into it all.
Apologies, but this will be long. And not enough, and possibly a bit disjointed. But I hope some of it is helpful.
I remember reading some dev design blog about the design of Black Mages in Final Fantasy XIV. How, if you play it just perfectly - and its insanely hard to do, bc you have to know & anticipate every single step of the fight while handling some of the most complex DPS rotations in the game - you’ll get ~10% more DPS than any other ranged DPS can. But if you mess it up even a little, you’ll fall far behind the others instead.
Psykers are like that, in a design sense.
They’re super squishy & have no real passive defenses. They have more tools & tricks than the other classes put together so nearly every second is about using the right tool in the best way. Most of their talent structure is entirely performance-based: the more you crit / weakspot / kill etc., the faster and higher your buffs, toughness regen and so on. The more peril you have the higher your crit & dmg & SB stacks on Vent etc. Besides peril they have several buffs like True Aim, Scrier’s Warp Unbound, etc. that must be tracked to make the most of them.
The more skilled you become with psykers, the faster you’ll move, the less time you need to spend defending, the more dmg you’ll do and the more enemies you’ll hit. It becomes a kind of cycle where if you’re good enough, you’re just constantly blasting non-stop and your overwhelming offense becomes your defense. Because the enemy simply can’t force you into defensive. And that’s where the insane dmg numbers come from.
Ofc builds play into it too, but those builds work on the same premise.
For example, take this one:
You’ll notice it has very low toughness regen, nerfed even lower thanks to Empyric Resolve. It’s also 1 talent short on Disrupt Destiny. Why? Bc even a single talent point away from anything else means a massive nerf in dmg or utility. You can ofc swith auras or skip Empathic Evasion to get that 1 talent back for DD etc, but the build makes for a good example for how little room there is for compromises when you go pure offense
First a few basic psyker tips & gameplay:
- You can slide while charging & firing any staff or blitz. Doing this means constant high mobility while dodging ranged.
- Works even with smite, letting you reposition & defend while channeling
- Staves & Assail can be animation-canceled with fire → quell → fire for ~3-4x faster RoF. This can be macroed.
- Psykers are ALL about maintaining high peril to get:
- Warp Nexus, +0 → 20% crit
- Warp Rider, +0 → 20% dmg
- Vent, +0 → 6 stacks Soulblaze & +stagger
- One With the Warp, 10 → 33% dmg resistance
- etc…
- Bc crits & kills stack other buffs, the real sustained DPS & survivability difference on low vs. high peril is much much higher than just 20%
- Micro-quell constantly
- Tapping quell even briefly has a small “DoT” that quells more. This means you can consistently micro-quell while dodging & sliding or between shots, to stay in that ideal ~70%+ peril range while maintaining constant DPS without breaks
- Quell Speed is NOT a dump stat: The difference of 60 vs 80% in Quell Speed is massive, and a huge drop to not just your DPS but mobility & survivability as well
- Track your buffs. For example True Aim 5 stacks means you know your next shot will crit
- With Surge that’s 2 crits, so put that shot where it counts.
- Surge shots have a small delay, you can sweep to fire into 2 directions at once
- Learn the breakpoints, at least roughly
- If 50% charge is enough to cleave flak hordes, and the specialists at the end with headshots:
- Charging too little → the shot stops at the first horde, wasted
- Charging to 100% → 2x more time wasted than necessary
- Charging just right → does the job with max DPS
- It’s not just dmg, but stagger too:
- If you know you don’t have time to charge a kill shot, staggering will buy that time. But charging too little or too long there, is just gonna get you hit. But switching to melee when you didn’t have to is likely just going to dump your DPS.
- Primary fire is fantastic for staggering, easy to spam while sliding around just to buy some room & time
- Enemies have different dmg resists to blast (AoE) and direct dmg
- Dogs & muties in particular die much faster to primary spam than secondary
- Dogs are also easily staggered by primary, making it your go-to for dealing with them quickly & safely
- General strategy & tactics
- This cannot be stressed enough: Positioning, awareness and placing your shots where they do the most dmg (including headshots, Void does 2x dmg on crits or headshots so each headshot is basically a crit… on top of powering True Aim) is absolutely essential for psykers
- Always move with a plan, sliding & firing constantly not just forward, but into positions where:
- You’re safe & the enemy can’t get behind you
- You have cover from ranged if needed
- You have the best possible angle to cleave through as many enemies / the most important priority targets as you can
- When random stragglers melee you, don’t focus on them only or switch to melee yourself if you can help it. Instead, dodge & slide so they’re positioned between you and your real target, then cleave through both groups at once.
- When you do have to melee, don’t get stuck on that. Just push / push-attack through, dodge-slide away, get back to ranged to fire those high-dmg cleave shots asap.
- Smite cleaves & staggers when stopped before 100% peril
- Even untalented, it’s the best tool for dealing with bursters, trappers, dogs, oggies etc no matter where in that enemy mass they are
- By paying attention, you’ll know a burster is coming far before you see it. Even if there’s 20 oggies in the front, a simple 2s smite deals with it and whatever else was it exploded on, while you go back to spamming your staff
- Soulblaze general
- All DoT’s have a logarithmic dmg scale: They do nothing up to 4-5 stacks, kill all horde at 6, specialists at 8+, most elites at ~12+ etc. So all DoTs are about reaching the breakpoint stacks asap.
- The global cap for SB is 31 stacks, it’s massive
- Perilous Combustion (talent, AoE 3 stacks SB on special+ kill) means focusing on a few specials+ near each other stacks so much SB on everything nearby, they’ll die to that alone. Always try to make use of this and get those dominoes rolling.
- Vent & Creeping Flames (ult, 6 SB at 85%+ peril) is almost always best fired on the largest horde mass wherever that is. Except, sometimes it’s the difference you need with Perilous Combustion to get the dominoes started.
- WildFire (talent, up to 4 SB is spread to nearby enemies on enemy death) isn’t in this build, but worth mentioning how fantastic it is. Many think it’s weak. But bc DoT’s are all about reaching the breakpoints, Wildfire means any SB builds will effectively start stacking at 4 SB minimum in group fights. Which means half as much time to reach breakpoint SB stacks on any fresh spawns & reinforcements.
- Purge Staff
- Is 100% a crit staff: Crits apply 2x SB at once
- Empathic Evasion is a must for most Purge builds, secondary’s RoF guarantees range-immunity in crit builds
- The primary spam is fantastic: It permastaggers & eventually kills an endless group of everything except crushers & muties. It’s just slow to dmg, so only use it when that stagger is needed.
For the build:
- Knife
- Knife has insane mobility and psykers are all about evasion & positioning
- The bleed adds to this, since it means you can add DoT → disengage into range no matter what you’re fighting against
- Knife 3 has a fantastic push-attack for instant “heavy” headshots, I use it all the time. More stamina means more access to that too.
- Empathic Evasion (talent)
- Crits make you range-immune
- Both knife and primary spam on Void are very fast & have a high crit chance, so you can deliberately use those to force crits when anticipating being fired on rather than charge Void and get shot. Note that Mettle (talent, +5% toughness & +movespeed on crit) procs per attack so only once no matter how many you hit, so spamming fast crits also procs that far more often than normal.
- Between EV, dodges and slides, if you time them right you almost never have to worry about ranged
- Psykinetic’s Aura (talent)
- Killing specials+ decreases ult CD by 5% each
- You can plan into it: If you’re about to release a True Aim Surge doublecrit and kill a ton of specialists, why not ult first bc you’ll get it back in seconds anyway?
- Vent (ult)
- Goes through the map, does its max 6-stack Soulblaze at 85%+ peril, and 6-stack Soulblaze with Warp Rider & around 50%+ peril is so strong it kills all horde & snipers
- Stagger stacks: If your staff / melee / vent alone isn’t enough to stagger something like a crusher in your face, both at the same time almost certainly will be
- Because this is about dmg specifically, always put your Vent where it does the most dmg. Since it literally kills all horde & snipers through the map at the press of a button, don’t just put it on the 2-3 gunners or crushers you’re focusing on. Instead, turn to the biggest mass of horde, pop it, turn back & keep blasting.
- Stamina curio
- Psykers have 2x shorter (faster) stamina recovery delay than others, but psyker base & knife both have only 1 stamina, so 2 total
- The curio means 2.5x more stamina, which with their fast sta recovery means almost infinite mobility in practice. Stamina esp. for psykers is NOT about blocking, it’s all mobility & utility like push attacks.
- Empyric Resolve (talent)
- Some people think it sucks, bc it makes it harder to build peril & has a double negative impact on talents like Quietude & Warp Expenditure (regen toughness based on ±peril)
- Most of the real issue is not about building peril, but maintaining it. This talent means ~40% less time spent quelling and just doing raw DPS instead (exceptions exist, like Purge which is already far too peril-efficient)
As a final note, don’t get stuck on that build. It was just an example, one of the usual ones I tend to play. But there’s countless ways to build, and tbh I too would recommend a Purge SB build for you since they’re a lot easier to play.
But as a main psyker of 2 since release and as one of those who basically always tops the dmg often by 2-3x, these summaries here is why I think it happens: You play it right, and you can play so overwhelmingly totally offensively, that the dmg simply follows from that. These things are much harder to achieve on other classes bc. they can’t push themselves into the kinds of extremes psykers can, at least not without running out of ammo. 
Even after 2 years I’m still learning something new almost all the time. If not about psykers, then at least the mechanics in general. But there’s just so much!
