PSA For Psyker Players

[Akulvo]

STOP USING ONLY YOUR BRAIN BURST!

The amount of people I see in Malice and Heresy who just spam nothing but brain burst on every little mob they see because they want to keep warpcharges is insane. They are beyond useless using it on normal pox walker enemies. I’d rather have a bot than a 2nd pysker on my team using nothing but brain burst because the devs made it seem like you HAVE to spam it.

Just use your staves on hordes and brain pop on elites. Its that simple. Ignore the whole warpcharge mechanic, you are screwing over yourself and the team by killing 1 enemy at a time every 3 seconds when you could spam staff surges/bolts/aoes/flame into a horde and be much more useful for the team.

I have had several teams with 2 other pyskers doing just brain popping and we ALWAYS get overrun because they cared so much about the awful warp charge mechanic that they forgot that they have to actually kill stuff in the game apparently.

Why do you gain warpcharges? To deal more damage, right? Then why would you use that extra damage to pop the guys that you can already kill in 1 hit. Getting even 6 warp charges doesn’t meet any break points. 0 warp charges kills ogryn enemies in 2-3 pops (depending on difficulty), maulers and mutants in 2 pops, berserkers in 1-2 (depending on difficulty), and 1 pop for everything else. 6 charges doesn’t change those numbers at all no matter the difficulty. If it took 3 head pops to kill a reaper, it will still take 3 head pops to kill one (unless you’re using the 15% extra damage on head popped enemies but that is it’s own thing).
As for the peril resistance feat on your Warp Charges, even at max resistance its not a huge difference because you will have to head pop 4-6 people to build it up. By the time you’re built up, you’re already doing the 100% → 97% → head pop combo. Extra quell resistance literally changes nothing on this. Even at max warp charges, you can only get 1 extra head pop off anyway, it takes about 2 seconds of quelling to be able to go below 97% peril to get safe head pop off while at max. Its just not worth it.

Stop being useless by playing with an awfully designed mini-game and just be useful to the team. Its infuriating having essentially an AFK player on the team popping guys that die in 1 hit so they can build up bonus damage against the guys that already die in 1 hit.

Warp Charges are useless.

[Fraxinus]

“Warp Charges are useless” he says, despite the fact that Psyker’s entire kit and half of their talents are built around them. You do realize that 2/3 of Psyker’s max rank talents require Warp Charges in order to function, and the third only buffs Brain Burst?

I’m not saying that Psykers should actually do nothing but BB, but it seems really unfair to be mad at the players for engaging in behavior that the class practically forces on them. Four stacks of Warp Charge gives you +12% damage and, with the right talents, -24% peril generation, which is pretty huge. Not to mention the fact that with the max rank talents, having full Warp Charges makes your active way better (either makes it apply 4 stacks of DoT or reduces the cooldown by half).

Eventually people will get the hang of the rotation and how often they have to BB in order to keep their charges going, but for now it’s understandable that some people are going to obsess over it because the game is incentivizing them to do so. I think that the class is a bit too reliant on the mechanic, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is. Unless the player is running a Psychic Communion + Kinetic Flayer build, they’re going to have to use Brain Burst at least once every 20 seconds for the entire match if they want to be playing optimally.

[Akulvo]

I agree with that, however theres a few problems.

I already mentioned how -24% peril generation isn’t too big in the grand scheme of things considering it takes a lot of peril to get enough warp charges to get to that point, meaning you’re already at 100% so extra resistance doesn’t mean anything.
However, its useful if you can maintain the stacks between 1 encounter to the next so you can get a 1 extra cast off of your brain pop before hitting 100% peril. Absolutely insane. If you’re using Surge Staff though, its really nice cause of the insane build up it has.

The +12% extra damage was also mentioned. It might help out in melee combat tbh, but with ranged weapons and head popping there is legit no difference. It will require the same amount of attacks with ranged weapons and head pops to kill the same enemies no matter how many stacks you have. Though I did also mention that on Malice you can just BARELY squeeze out 2 head pops on reaper with the perk that makes them take 15% extra damage while being at max warp charges. But legit everything else still stays the same at requiring 2 head pops. On Heresy and higher, it has no other benefit. The only time that the extra damage comes into play is against melee enemies so instead of requiring 2 head shots or 4 body shots, it might require 2 head shots or 3 body shots. OR Against bosses for a bit of extra dps. Problem is, if you are using head pop against the boss, you only really get a few casts off before your warp charges are completely gone because you have to KILL something to get them. So you maintain the charges for a solid 5-6 casts before it drains out and you’re down to 0 again.

As for the level 30 feats; they are all horrible. The faster head pop is really nice against bosses though simply because you can cast them fast. But the other ones DRAIN your warp charges so guess what, right back to building them up by popping some guys that already die in 1 hit anyway so you can get a decent burn effect on people. The Soulblade DoT is actually pretty solid if you can get 4 warp charges for it and it will give you a chance to get them back, but the one that shortens the cooldown is kind of useless. The only reason why you’d be desperate for more force shoves is if you are building an extreme amount of peril from head popping but the 3rd one already reduces the peril build up as if you were at max stacks so its kind of made redundant by that one.

All the perks that rely on warp charges are poorly designed, you are in a loop of wanting to gain and spend warp charges, which I think is really good. The problem is GAINING those warp charges. You have to KILL something with the head pop to get them. So you are either constantly head popping something here and there, spamming head pop throughout the match, or just ignoring the feature all together and letting the warp charges come in passively.
Since you have to kill something, you have to pop a random guy that you can kill easily enough normally; making you build up peril and slow you down when you could just… ya know, pop the elites and start damaging the real threats quickly.

The way I’ve been playing psyker is I slap on the 4% chance to gain the charges on kill and have fun with that. The charges come in, i pop elites here and there, and I hit some guys with a soul blaze ult for nice horde clearing or sometimes I have the barrage and just get a lot of fast pops on the big boys.
The problem I have is when a horde is coming and the other pyskers decide “Ah yes, I’ll kill them all 1 by 1 in 3 second intervals because that way I can maintain this 12% extra damage! It makes killing these guys that I can already kill in 1 hit so much easier!”.

(Edit) Forgot to mention that my issue isn’t with the feats and such, its with how you have to gain warp charges. Having it solely on kills with head pops forces you to use the 4% chance on any kill feat in the first place, making any others in that line objectively bad. The issue just requires a more reliable way to gain the charges rather than having to pop mook enemies. I’d suggest about a 50% chance to gain a warp charge on USE of head pop so you can gain them from head popping elites even without killing them. Then you are still required to pop people, just players arent heavily incentivized to pop generic sword scab #7213.

[Thunderbird]

yes, the psyker is too reliant on BB for charges

yes, the mechanic is annoying to deal with

yes, players will need to figure out their optimal cycle

its a learning curve, it will take getting used to… but i will say this:
while im learning to deal with all of this, people shooting targets im actively trying to pop “unnecessarily” really screws with my rotation, if you see a psyker popping a normal mob, or popping a special that doesnt actively threaten you that you can easily evade… do something else other than killing that mob
during this, the psyker needs cover because getting caught while actively trying to pop something (or subsequently venting) means losing a good chunk of health - not to mention that “stealing” a psykers pop means he will gain peril while not gaining a warp charge, and also wasting the farily long amount of time he already spent charging up the pop on that target

dont be that guy

[Akulvo]

Can’t forget you gain toughness back for killing stuff with your head pop.

It seems like people actively shift to target people with the glowing blue aura around their head because they think “Oh thats an easy target now that I can see them, better start shooting.” I don’t get pissed because I understand that they just wanna kill but… yeah. It’s kind of annoying.

[Nrazthul]

I don’t WANT to rely so heavily on my BB as a psyker, but the game FORCES me to do so because virtually all of my talents revolve around it. At this stage I’ve just given up on trying to actively keep my stacks up and see it as a side buff that’s nice to get but unrealistic to expect to have all the time. I can’t tell you the amount of times per game I’m about to run out of my stacks, pick a target off in the distance to try and BB to refresh and some veteran snipes it the moment his head lights up. I just gave up trying.

If they allowed us to gain stacks or allowed my talents to be affected by something other than BB I’d happily switch my playstyle. I actually enjoy the Psyker after the last patch and grinding my way up to the level where it actually starts to get fun, but for now we’re basically a BB machine with weapons we might want to use instead but do so at our own peril (kek).

[Fraxinus]

WTF do you mean there’s “no difference” with the 12% extra damage on ranged attacks? With pretty much any staff, 12% extra damage can - in some situations - mean the difference between killing a group with a single charged activation or just staggering them all and killing one or two. You don’t get Warp Charge stacks so you can continue head-popping, you get Warp Charge stacks to make your other stuff better.

Also, -24% peril generation is big because the majority of Psykers don’t (or shouldn’t) just ride that 97% peril line any more. Especially because it (effectively) stacks with the Psyker’s innate 10% chance to quell 10% peril on kill. Meaning it costs less to cast and you kill more enemies per cast for more chances to auto-quell.

You seem to have missed my entire point. I’m not saying that it is ideal behavior to just spam brain burst. I, in fact, agreed with you that it was sub-optimal. I’m saying that so much of the Psyker’s kit is reliant on Warp Charges to function that it is understandable for new people to develop an overreliance on it. It’s a flaw with the class design, not necessarily with the playstyle.