I know there are tons of psyker balance threads. However, too many of these are calling for drastic re-works to the class that I don’t think are reasonable. The psyker has some cool ideas that need refinement and little fine tuning, not a full rework.
So here are my thoughts on some basic tweaks to the psyker that I think would get the class in a better spot. These are concise tweaks predicated on keeping the general abilities and skills of the class as they are now.
BRAINBURST Part 1: The charge time and peril cost of BB should be tied to the health of the target unit. BB on weak trash units would then be quicker to go off and less likely to have your allies kill it first. Against tougher enemies, this would max out the BB damage and would take as long as it does now. Maybe up the max damage a little bit or for units that have more health than the max damage, have the damage be a % of maximum health.
BRAINBURST Part 2: Without increasing the maximum damage, BB should instead start to stagger/stun the target much quicker (eg 1/4 of the way through the attack). It worked this way in closed beta and felt much better. This way, while BB might not be the best at killing high HP units on high difficulty, it would help to stun the enemy and make it easier to support your team in killing it.
FORCE SWORD#1: I like the force sword where it is. The special attack is awesome. However, the force swords push attack should function more like the older normal push, in that it costs more peril (than it currently does) and does a wide AoE knock back. That would be awesome to have that back.
FORCE SWORD #2: Killing Elites/Specials with the force sword should generate a warp charge. This makes thematic sense and would allow antler way to get warp charges and give more flexibility in perk selection.
SOULBLAZE: All talents causing soul blaze need to do more damage to have any utility on higher difficulty. Soulblaze could be modified to do a % of the units maximum health for X-seconds (health 2.5% health per second for 5-seconds per stack) or something like that.
WARP CHARGES: Currently, all warp charges go away after 25 seconds. I would change this so that warp charges are shed one at a time every 15 seconds. It would take a minute to loose all four or 1.5 minutes to loose all six of you had that perk.
MOVEMENT: I would change the perk that eliminates the movement cost of quelling to instead reduce the movement penalty for quelling AND CHARGING either BB or ranged attacks. Could be just a 50% reduction of the penalty too. The psyker has very few defensive abilities and it’s limited mobility is a problem when trying to use its core attacks. It’s not so much that psyker needs a long wind up to their attacks (compared to a vet instantly shooting), but that the psyker is a sitting duck that whole time. Give us some more mobility to compensate.
STAVES: Peril needs to not continue to rise when holding a full charge and it needs more audio/visual clues for when it’s fully maxed out. I think the base charge time speed for staves could be quicker as well.
Level 30 Feats: These feel boring to me. The first feat that reduces cooldown, what if it reduced cool down (less than it currently does) and also restored x-toughness per warp charge to everyone within coherency to get some more team utility/support. That would make it a compelling choice versus the Soulblaze fest (assuming SB gets a buff) or the BB focused fest.
Those are my core suggestions, and they would seem fairly easy to implement. Mostly it is just tweaking things that are already in place (or were previously). Contrary to many, I feel like psyker is fun and has a cool kit. I wouldn’t want to do a “drastic rework” because I think it had some great and fun ideas. It just needs a little boost and distinction.
Brain Burst still needs to go off quicker for a max charge. It is currently super ineffective against any units on higher difficulties outside of some fringe cases where it still kills them in one go, even so… A Vet will likely one shot it all before that happens.
It is still the best way to kill Monstrocities, Snipers (if people would damn tag 'em) and open up Ogryn’s so the party can damage them… The rest… Meh.
Soulblaze stacks with Purgatus stacks so, on a Purgatus staff it is insanely good, but that requires a very specific purgatus staff setup.
Staffs have a charge stat, the higher it is the faster it is to charge. An 80% in this is really good and let’s you charge to full in 1.5s. I don’t see it needing a change, it obviously tends to require a 380 weapon and those… well… Yeah… Those are almost impossible to get with the current shop system.
The rest is spot on tho.
But they know all of this are much requested and it ain’t going to happen because even the Devs don’t know what Psyker is supposed to be anymore.
The situation with feats and especially soulblaze needs tuning, but I would rather we get a quick fix for BB before any other changes because it’s such a core feature upon which other feats depend on.
I already suggested a minimum of 2 changes after which we can see what other changes or re-balances are needed.
Formatted version:
BB damage that scales with BB charge time which scales with target HP, is also an interesting idea and would help BB remain viable in higher diff tiers.
BB should simply execute its target under a certain HP threshold.
That way, aiming for an enemy whose head is blue no longer is penalizing the Psyker but actually helping them (and yourself and the team, presumably).
I understand it is a bigger change than just tweaking numbers, but it would bring so much to the class.
Also a good fix. Way cooler then my “if more then 50% BB charge…”, but I’m afraid that this would mean that Psyker would get almost all special/elite kills, so it would potentially hurt other player’s weeklies (which should be changed btw) and team spirit in general (generate more toxicity).
Give the kill credit to whatever made the enemy pass below the threshold if that really matters… or share kill credit… or don’t show the kills, also doesn’t matter.
All weekly progress is shared by everyone on the team, so it doesn’t matter who gets the kill.
Right now, the only “kill” effects that cause problems from sniping other’s kills are Warp Charges and Veteran Volley resets. Volley has a short enough CD that it is not a big problem
Rather than massively change soulblazes damage values i would rather just see more realiable way of applying them first. The damage actually gets pretty respectable in the higher stack counts, its just kinda unrealistic to get there without using purgatus.
I agree and disagree; I agree that there should be more ways of applying soulfire without Purgatus, but I disagree that soulfire should remain unbuffed. Soulfire as it stands is anemic and takes virtually full stacks to do any significant damage on t3 and up. Meaning, I have to dump almost 50% of my peril into one slow charging and slow firing blast (without being interrupted) to start doing decent DoT damage once the stacks start maxing out. Buffing soulfire somehow (perhaps a small increase to damage or how fast soulfire stacks can be applied) would go a long way to bringing the staff up to par with Surge and Voidstrike.
Purgatus has enough of its own issues that i don’t think that just flat out buffing dots massively is going to make it any better. Tough i never said i’m fully against buffing the dots either, its just impossible to accurately judge any level of power from it when the application is so limited and barely supported by the talent tree either.
Preferably i would just see talent that increases dot damage and make the talent tree have an entire build around spreading and applying powerful dots.
Hey, no argument from me, I’d love to see a talent line which revolves around DoTs and make them viable. But, I think at this point it’s far more realistic to expect numerical tweaks rather than new talents. For the time being I still maintain that increasing the strength of the soulfire DoT would alleviate some of the pains of using the Purgatus staff.
… Ahem… Not that I want to be… That guy but the fastest clear speeds are 2 Psykers running Purgatus staff build with 2 Zealots on Bolters on Damnation.
Soulblaze and Purgatus is fine as is. It will literally melt a monstrocity and since you free up your Psychic Communion you can grab the 15% non-warp damage which is also applied to your staff and all other damage done by the team.
I use it to great effect in Damnation, don’t even need to use the 4% talent 'cos the level 30 feat provides all that I need. Remember all Purgatus damage is soulblaze damage. So yeah, don’t need the remaining soulblaze feats, they are absolute trash…
It obviously depends on your staff, if your staff sucks, and I suspect it does then no… It ain’t going to do well. If you, like me, have an 80% damage/burn/cloud and a 60% warp resistance/charge speed it is insanely good.
I did some missions last night with purgatus staff and it felt pretty weak to me. Then again, I’ve never really liked flame thrower weapons or DOT type builds. I main’d Sienna in VT2 and barely even touched the flamethrower staff.
You’re more than welcome to be that guy, that’s why we’re here right? I, at least, don’t like talking in an echo chamber.
But, to your point, I’d say that any weapon which relies on itself being almost god rolled to be good isn’t a viable weapon in the first place. Purgatus doesn’t perform well when just an average rolled staff. Sure, it doesn’t perform badly, but it certainly doesn’t perform as well as a similarly rolled Surge or Voidstrike.
But, I’ll openly admit I have only ever gotten one gold Surge staff and have yet to get any other gold staves. That being said, should I have to wait to get a gold Purgatus before it begins being decent?
Quality on a staff is less important I mean - sure if you luck out like me with good perks/blessings great - but not particularly necessary, what you want are well rolled ones with a 380 base rating which feels more or less impossible considering how much that damn shop likes to roll rifles… I used a grey 380 Voidstrike for the longest time, but it simply doesn’t handle hordes as well as Purgatus and those are my main concerns on Damnation, so I swapped fora 360 Purgatus with decent rolls and the difference was insane from having a trickle of enemies and not being able to kill the elites/specials to killing all enemies.
As for non-hordes I usually just waltz in with my Force Blade and not take any damage (gotta love Deflector) until it’s either forced into melee or my team has murdered it all.
It of course require that your team is willing to play with the team, if it is 3 lone wolf turds that rush straight into a horde swinging their melee weapons like maniacs whenever and where ever without a care about good positioning then - you’re screwed anyway and may as well just block them and move on as the run wouldn’t succeed regardless of your loadout.