@OP
This poll is pretty badly worded. The jump from “It’s the best” to “Ehhh… it’s okay” is huge. And then you have 4 more options for degrees of negative/trash responses. What about “It is pretty good overall” ?
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It’s really not. Not after reading topics upon topics of negative feedback about how terribly designed the Psyker’s standard class is. What’s next, a new subclass whose Blitz is a warp skill that makes an enemy turn on their friends for 2s, but the talents grant you 1 ammo for everything the “confused” enemy kills with subsequent talents granting +1 ammo?
No, I’d say it’s worded just fine considering the circumstances.
That’s like, your opinion man.
I swear the “psyker community” here has fallen into some collective groupthink of one-dimensional thinking.
I’m level 30 with decent gear and having a blast with the psyker and holding my own and doing just fine on Heresy difficulty. I get plenty of special and elite kills, and feel I’m getting a totally reasonable amount. Comparisons to veteran need to be taken with a gain of salt because veteran is probably overturned relative to everyone else.
By level 30 you have three different ways to get
Warp charges. During fights I look down at the status bar and I’m always sitting at four warp charges and therefore getting the damage buff. Force sword is INCREDIBLE for infinite dodge, blocking ranged attacks, 1-hit killing most specials with the special charge attack. The void strike staff is incredibly satisfying snd can work as both a head popping machine or you target the ground and stagger. With deflector, +stamina, and the feat where blocking goes to peril it the tankiest build outside of an ogryn with shield. I can tank a demon host for a long time. The bottom level 30 talent let’s you BB like a maniac. Who was the one who killed the big shielded ogryns in the hallways when the vets flashlights did nothing? Or right, me the psyker.
I think most of you complaining need to git gud (or finish leveling up and get your kit in order).
Frankly I’m terrified of all your complaining causing FS to try and rebalance the class and ending up making it less dynamic and less fun to play. Which is what happened with the incredible force sword push that people bitched about because of its peril cost (which incidentally was key for maintaining a high peril build). If people don’t like dealing with high peril you probably shouldn’t be playing psyker.
2 Likes
Psyker has too many talents and too much focused around BB which I almost NEVER use on Heresy/Damnation. This limits the scope of my build basically the only thing that sets a Psyker apart is Staves, and almost every Psyker will be pigeon holed into the same feats. Can you do well as Psyker and clear Damnation? Absolutely. But when I leave 75% of my kit ignored, it creates a feel bad moment, and I think it needs to be addressed. BB needs a buff, and the feats need another look. Free headpopping on hit, yeah that’s a good one and I never use the others at that level. I also never take anything other than 4% chance of warpcharge while in coherence. For my final tree, while I want to like the first 2 option, i find giving up stacks more troublesome and a step back for my overall performance (soul blaze on ult is pointless/and getting ult back faster would be fun, but when i do that my stacks are forever 0)… so I just take the option to speed up BB so I don’t lose stacks/instead of something that would actually forward my build. Too much works against itself.
3 Likes
I love having to collect stacks. I gather six, get into melee for one horde aaaand they;re gone! Better do two bursts on trashmobs, then vent and do two more and then vent again and then do two more and then keep your eyes glued to that timer, cause you need to keep those stacks up so you can get 3 hits in, with a damage increase that doesn’t reduce the amount of hits needed to kill even on the strongest weapons. It’s absolutely not tedious and a lot of fun! I get to use my other weapons so much!
I posted a build that’s generating some good discussion on r/darktide:
Long story short, I’m having a blast with this build.
Overall, I feel like psyker has a few different logical builds:
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You can do something like the build above, which is focused around melee damage, voidstrike, and tanking. High peril build to take advantage of +15% damage.
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There is a build focused around having more (e.g. 6) warp charges and relying more heavily on surge staff spam and stun-locking. So peril reduction feats/blessings is important.
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In theory there is a build focused around purgatus staff and soulblaze - although soulblaze feels underpowered to me (personally I don’t like flamer thrower weapons either).
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Then there can be a build focused around boss-killing, using the third level 30 talent and +15% non-warp damage to boost your team more.
There are only a handful of skills that don’t seem worth considering, and most of those are tied to soulblaze. If soul blaze was better I think a lot of the feat “problems” would be diminished.
I also think that there are more subtle synergies in the psyker build than people give it credit for. I just face palmed realizing that your ultimate ability, which sheds 50% peril, instantly restores 25% toughness if you take the first feat. That opens up the first level 30 feat to have some interesting possibilities (for example).
The Psyker class is definitely broken. Not in a “It’s unusably bad” kind of way, but in a “It does the exact opposite of what you want it to do” kind of way.
Right now the most powerful way to play a psyker is to grab a Surge staff and a dueling sword or axe, along with the trait that allows you to generate peril while blocking instead of losing stamina.
The result is a character whose ranged attack stuns enemies very easily, and is basically really good crowd control, and whose block meter refills so quickly (non force melee weapons have extremely fast passive peril regeneration) that the character can give an Ogryn a run for their money in terms of defensive power.
If you run a force sword with deflector you can’t quite block as much because its passive regeneration is much lower, but you can also block ranged attacks except sniper shots.
Both staves and Brain Burst are really bad in terms of DPS, so the moment you hit the difficulties where their total damage dealt over time starts to become more important than their damage per shot they are woefully inadequate.
So, what everyone wants out of a psyker is a glass cannon who is fragile but capable of dealing tremendous amounts of damage, but the most powerful way to run a psyker is actually as a tank/CC.
3 Likes
It’s a build that works, if you get super duper lucky on stuff from the lottery store, or from the craft upgrade lottery. Even so, it’s a build that kind of works in spite of the talents and the base class, and still doesn’t even get close to the glass cannon the Psyker was ‘supposed’ to be. Instead it’s a CC bot with some off-tank utility.
Fun fact, as others have demonstrated, you don’t get 5-15% damage increase from peril. It looks like it maxes out at 8%. So… not amazing. Not that the % increases from warp stacks are particularly useful, either.
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Has the 15% thing been reported as a bug yet?
as a psyker main my problem isn’t with brain burst directly. it’s how stacks themselves are linked with the buff. I have to have stacks of something to do more. for example, getting an effect from
warp charges for some effect. The stacks are difficult to maintain when it takes 3 seconds to BB. Ware a sharpshooter or zealot can close the gap and just kill the target and deny us a stack or keep the momentum going forward. Something we just lose when there’s a lul in combat anyways. To be frank some of those synergies with bb aren’t even great like Soulburn from an elite kill causing stacks of soulburn on potentially 2 other elites sounds cool until you realize 2 stacks of soulburn is almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. Ascending blaze has the same problem especially when you realize the purgatory staff can apply full stacks in seconds When charged and fired. To make matters worse we still have a good array of perks that sort of work well with are not class-specific weapons. Thinks Like our Forcesword or staffs. BBing a random target or getting a stack from coherence kill is good but their synergy pales in comparison to a build that uses force weapons. Force sword is very good it lacks cleave but has a powerful push as was stated and yes arguably the best in the game. a lot of our staff bring a lot of utility, as well as horde clear and a surprising amount of dmg depending on the situation. the toolbox so to speak could arguably be called incomplete. Whether it is intentional or not is probably a development decision it’s not perfect but things rarely are.
The only issue with Psyker is that Brain Bust needs a way to scale. The damage just doesn’t keep up on Heresy and Damnation.
Personally, I think that there should be passive stats on ALL staves that increase Brain Burst damage (and possibly give it effects) and a stat on Force Swords that reduce Brain Burst cast time (and possibly reduce the Peril it generates).
That way Psykers would be encouraged to use “class” weapons, and Brain Burst could be improved with gear.
Remember: Brain Burst is the Psyker’s main advantage over other classes. This is the ability they have traded off a lot of survivability for.
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My thoughts on BB at higher difficulty is that it’s use is more situational, but the situations where it is useful are actually more impactful.
You’re never going to outsnipe a sharpshooter with BB. But when there are three bulwarks lumbering towards your team and you BB one to stagger it so your team can shoot it, and then pop your ult and throw out three more BB’s in 6 seconds on another one and kill it you may have just saved your team. Similar for starting a BB on an enemy special and ducking back behind cover to pop it from out of sight. There are great uses for BB still, it’s just more situational.
I’ll be posting the Poll results on Saturday afternoon, EST. The more votes the better.
The way Psyker does well in is endgame pre-made teams who know to target trash mobs and leave the elites and special for the Psykers. For quick play and random matches it’s poor as all the other classes do everything so much better and can tank everything.
I’ve actually stopped using Staffs and switched to a lasgun for malice runs and it is so much better.
It needs quicker charges, more dps so it doesnt take 3/4 bb to kill hard target and more toughness to bring it in line with other classes.
Dito, because I think Psyker is quite great, but I am just playing on diff 3 so far with this class, so it is not mayhaps the best POV (and therefore had hoped for more questions, to make a better differentiation).
Interesting. To me, that sounds like you’re a discount-store veteran. Lasguns are awesome, but they’re even better in the hands of the class built to optimize them.
I am all for people playing gun-psykers or whatever makes them happy, of course 
BB just doesn´t scale well on close-range elites. You´re still able to oneshot sniper, trapper, gunslinger with BB and it´s still good against crusher / bulwarks given to their armor / shield.
That you can´t oneshot mauler / rager and flamers is fine in my eyes. Zealots and Ogryns wouldn´t have any reason to be in the party if BB would be way stronger against them and there wouldn´t be much of a fear left in the game especially when you run the lower CD on BB build. Same with bosses if you increase the damage…
It´s fine as it is. You use it to get ride of range-elites or to stagger Ogryns, so you team can take them out easily with melee or push against the gunners. Also it´s always nice to have a Psyker, so the team have more grenades overall.
It’s absolutely not fine as is, stop spamming this thread with nonesense
BB being that weak is the reason why you don’t see Psykers using anything else than a staff
And the seldom Lasgun Psykers are essentially bad Veterans
The entire Psyker tree offers absolutely no synergie towards running anything else than force sword + staff
And the reason for that is also tied to BB being terrible
If you could reliably use BB as backup instead of that one anti sniper 2 times per games, then people would consider using one of the dozen other weapons accessible to Psykers
If feats had more synergie than “use force weapons and stack warp” too
Soul blaze is ridiculously bad, stop pretending it’s such an amazing tool
On Ascendant’s Blaze, it’s weaker than a flamer but with massive cooldown
On Wrack and Ruin and Kinetic Overload you’re downright wasting feats
If you decide not to use force weapons, then your entire 2nd feat line has 0 good pick
And in pretty much every case, you’s practically forced to pick Pyschic Communion because it’s literally the only reliable way to build warp stacks consistently
Kinetic Flayer is hilariously badly designed, seeing as you take it not for the burst, but to get an occasional additional warp stack instead
There’s so much contradiction and lack of synergie within the feat tree itself i could go on for an hour
Pretending BB is fine because you have fun’s not going to change basic facts
It sucks
It doesn’t do its job properly, it doesn’t synergize well with the core rotation and passives of the class, it pigeonholes the character into using only a couple weapon types
Yes you can equip something else, say you want to run Devil’s Claw + Laspistol, good combination of crowd control and single target burst
But it’s the equivalent of saying i can still play without using the feat tree at all, because that’s literally what you would be doing aside from the occasional Ascendant’s Blaze that’s not going to make any difference whatsoever
If you’re afraid at what a stronger BB could do to bosses, then i invite you to take a look at what every single other class can do in 0.2 seconds to their health bar when it takes 12 seconds for a Psyker to do the same
3 Likes
“What’s my purpose?”
“You pass butter.”
Yeah, psykers leave more resources for the other classes. That’s not a compelling reason to enjoy psyker
BB needs to scale. All other forms of damage scale with better gear. BB needs to scale somehow, too, either with total gearscore or difficulty level. It shouldn’t scale in reverse as you advance in the game.
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NewTypeBTW on twitch pretty much proved that Psyker is an extremely powerful class, it’s just that most people either don’t understand the Class, or suck at playing it.