There are better ways to apply the lighting stun in the game and you need to start using them
Surge staff
New shock mauls2.
Use these for big single target stun locks and do actual damage at the same time so your not just slowing games down
Also in my experience ive found having the soul fire staff with the suppression on kill in a radius blessing is better for hoard stun lock if thats why your primarily using it not to mention how soulfire is actually useful for the team on visually obscured missions as well as dealing good damage
Hopefully in the future weāll see a smite rework to be a more interesting ability (maybe a skill shot?) but until then it ultimately serves as a crutch for new players to fall upon instead of learning the gameās mechanics to deal with enemies and ultimately becoming what you now see in aurics when a mission takes an hour without any difficulty.
Frankly this whole thing sounds an awful lot like the discussions around shields in Vermintide. Either youāre playing the game with the fastest weapons, with the highest dodge chances or youāre ānot playing as intendedā and are considered a handicap to the team.
Disclaimer: I havenāt played V2 since before Chaos Wastes launched, so I can only speak for the state of the game at that time.
Axe and Sword shield variants were great. Top-tier solo capable, and Iāll fight anyone who says different. Smite is also great, but OPās complaint is legit because so many people just do it wrong.
Spamming smite constantly all round and holding it until peril forces you to drop it works just fine (even if itās pure c4ncer when someone on your team is doing that) until the top difficulties. At that point you need to be smart about using it unless you want to be a liability to the team. Once you start being smart about using it, it completely and unquestionably bodies OPās suggested alternatives at all difficulties.
The blue spooge staff useful to the team? its the one weapon i hate to have to fight alongside so much i might actually just leave the mission. it blinds the team makes it harder to kill the trash and gives amazingly good cover for any long range elites and specials .
surge staff is limited to 2 targets and fills the range slot so you could take both but your using surge to kill ranged targets not cc.
you could use a shock mace but im not sure why loosing the melee slot to stun one target is considered a good trade.
smite competes with assail and BB and frankly i dont think either is in a great place
Dear god no, itās pure visual noise. In lights-out all it does is blind everyone to anything that isnāt on fire, and makes it near-impossible to tell what those things that ARE on fire actually are.
Even in regular-visibility missions, it mostly just creates camouflage for enemies.
One of the major problems that sparked the debate way back in VT 1 is that we didnāt have the stagger bonuses, and those were added pretty late into VT 2ās life so that debate lasted through that game until stagger bonuses became a thing, then the debate died. So anyone knocking around the rats isnāt adding to the damage or actively killing them. Online discussions and the discussions in game were all about playing āoptimallyā with perfect ping so never getting hit by dodge dancing/baiting big attacks and mostly ignoring any CC like big knockdown/push weapons in favor of just killing stuff.
Heck, there were even people debating about great hammer because it didnāt cleave damage through all the things it hit.
Smite can be incredibly powerful when used appropriately and people need to stop pretending that itās just a universally bad choice of blitz. On a flame build with venting shriek you can melt a HISG horde, elites and all, in a handful of seconds. Thatās hardly useless. Obviously there are people who use it stupidly (which is to say, they use it all the time) but there are people who do everything stupidly in this game. Itās hardly the Smiteās fault.
I regularly play with Smite users who average 800k damage a run in Auric Maelstrom. They frequently are the top damage dealers in said runs. My guess is the people complaining about Smite live in a bubble, big fish in a small pond syndrome, thinking they actually know anything about the game in general, when in reality they are very mediocre at best.
When this game is regularly duoāed in all modes, why are you worried about the Psyker who supposedly isnāt doing enough damage? Sounds like you need to get better at the game and worry about yourself?
Edit:
For clarity, I just wanted to add I beat x5 Auric Maelstroms in a row tonight playing on Vet, playing with all randoms, using a Recon Lasgun and Medicinal smoke grenades, working on my penances. My build was unironically terrible and I still had no problems winning games. Seriously, be better at the game and worry about other players less.
I am almost 100% certain at this point, that most people who are complaining about psykers specifically, simply lack the awareness to notice the mistakes of people who play the other classes.
Many of the psyker attacks are quite visually distinct, so it is quite easy to see what a psyker is doing.
As an Ogryn main really dont like smite.
Main reason is that i smack everything arround and they land on their butts and need time to get up.
Then a psyker with smite makes a 360 and everything gets from my heavy stagger into a light stagger. Instantly standing up at ready to hit players.
Also the fact that all classes have āBlitzā that is a quick pull out and those good Dmg to multiple targets or high dmg to a single Target (hehehe rock).
All those Blitz need ammo or have with perks some cooldowns.
Then you have psyker that can have his āblitzā out and ready almost 24/7 and only need to look at a %meter. Dafuq???
That is not a āBlitzā anymore.
But its funny how all where against the insane Early Vet Class, Zealots oneshot boss builds and Ogryns Bleedbuilds.
But as soon someone says something against the Psyker class. This Forum goes apesh*t.
Like Elden Ring Reddit ppl that defend ROB to the end.
Smite is so misunderstood on so many levels one could ride a book about all the misconception posts made about it.
Many complain that it sucks and makes the game āharderā bc it keeps the hordes put instead of funneling them into chokepoints. Now obviously smite isnāt something youāre supposed to use against the horde, but everything else. Yet even then an enemy that canāt fight back with their heads held high is the easiest target in the world to put those cleaving headshots through. A single good player with a good build can literally solo (or duo, in this case) everything if thereās a smite spammer around on T5+, it completely trivializes the entire game. Whether the smiter is using it on hordes or anything else is completely irrelevant to how easy it makes everything.
Others then complain it sucks not because of the CC, but because of its dmg. Yet smite with Empowered Psionics & Vent with Creeping Flames for dmg, and Battle Meditation for extended use, will kill every single thing except oggies & muties in the entire field on top of that CC.
Smite is by far the most powerful blitz in the entire game, and especially in the endgame meta. That unreliable single-target crit stun from the peril hog that is Surge, or the melee single target special from a shock maul donāt even begin to compare. The real threat is never just one enemy, but dozens to a hundred of them all at once. Smite is the only thing in the game that addresses all that easily at the press of a button. They could nerf its reach & no of targets down to a fraction of what it is now and it would still be a good blitz.
I get the distinct impression that most darktide players havenāt even tried every class and donāt understand the abilities of anything that isnāt their main. If you actually play psyker and try to use smite in auric and maelstrom you will rapidly gain an appreciation for its limitations.
Smite isnāt that powerful in the grand scheme of things. It can stun a whole screen of enemies but not kill them very quickly, it prevents you from moving, has a limited range and it costs peril to use. Do you have any idea what kind of carnage a psyker can do with 100% peril worth of void surge staff attacks? Or purgation staff? Or assail? All of those things can deal with ādozens to a hundred enemies with the click of a buttonā, and yet no one complains about them as much as smite because all they see is the flashy lightning and not psykers murdering hundreds of heretics in subtler ways.
I mean Iāve mained 2 psykers since release so yeah, I have a pretty good idea. As with my earlier post Iām talking purely from T5+ perspective with massive, aggressive spawns all over the place.
Smite doesnāt stop you at all. You can freely dodge & slide while charging or channeling it just like with any other chargeable ability.
As for your stavesā¦ T5+ games are filled with situations where one moment everything is fine, then an instant later thereās a group of 6+ bulwarks, 10+ crushers, and 100+ mixed hordes right up in your face. At the same time you can hear bursters, dogs etc. somewhere in that big blob of a mess coming right for you while a flamer or two start firing at you from within. What do you do?
Surge is barely more than a single target staff, it wonāt do squat. Purge stops at the bulwarks, but the crushers would just ignore it anyway. Void canāt deal with anywhere close to that kind of pressure, especially if the enemies are spread and make for more than 1-2 targets.
Not a one of those weapons will either stop the enemy advance, nvm deal with the those real dangers like the flamers, bursters, trappers and dogs hiding inside. But smite will stop everything from front to back, and every single special hiding inside, ALL of it in 2s flat. While opening up the bulwarks in the front btw. With even smaller groups, purge primaryās stagger spam or Void can only handle lines, not groups of horizontally spread enemies. Smite handles them just fine too.
Sure, itās great support for your teammates. But itās not even about them. Even solo smite will give you 10s+ to just leisurely dodge+slide backwards, assess the situation, make a plan and retreat to a chokepoint (while killing those bursters ofc). And if you end the smite before 100% peril, that knockback and distance is more than enough time for you to switch to your staff, quell, charge, and fire before the blob is even moving again. So even solo it offers a complete, total reset where you can reposition and prepare no matter what was about to happen.
The only staff that could possibly deal with a situation like that, to disable a large mass bulwarks, crushers, nvm the specials hiding behind that meat wall, is Trauma. But even Trauma - as great as it is - canāt hit the entire area all at once, nvm the specials inside which you can only hear but not see.
Only giga scrubs would have said that. If you played Cata+ and the likes and had an armadillo Bardin with a shield, heād basically hold position by himself making the team do damage. A stagger machine and also as somebody already mentioned some variations even did good damage.
Also these threads make no sense to me, Smite can be used well or sh*t, just as any good (in this case) weapon/skill. Also what need do you have to be in the plume of a Purgatus staff? The guy is already clearing the chaff. You either go do something else on another flank or ping for elites if you really have to be in such a position to be behind or slightly in front of the fire spewing man. Before fingers are pointed, I play and enjoy all the classes and have none sub lv 300, so Iāve no skin in the game.
Kill em all faster than you will because Iām not running smite? Itās a great force multiplier donāt get me wrong, but smite on its own is not much of a killer. It can buy time, but only in exchange for the opportunity cost of not dealing damage with another weapon or blitz. Over the course of an entire game the time you spend smiting instead of killing will run up the clock and cause more enemies to spawn that you wouldnāt have to deal with otherwise.
