DoTs are a design problem that plagues DT in general, not just with Psyker. Psyker is just the class that applies dots most efficiently and has the best statistics regarding them.
If you think about it, of course an exponentially stacking damage mechanic would be very OP if you let a class apply it to an unlimited amount of targets in a horde game. The exponential part makes sure it it scales with elite HP, the unlimited aoe makes sure it scales with large amounts of enemies.
When Ogryn was distinctly falling behind the other classes and the game kept spawning more elites and made them higher HP to compensate for those, Fatshark most notably decided to make his batter passive (which already existed in a near-useless form before, I’m aware) which bandaid “fixed” all of his weapons by just giving them bleed dots so they all do the same amount of damage: Exponential bleed damage to everything they hit. Disregarding that bleed dots don’t make a ton of sense thematically for a 10 foot ogre swinging a club around, this introduced the balance problem of giving him a “static” cleave value, giving every enemy hit a flat amount of damage taken via bleed.
While I don’t want to distract from how Psyker is far stronger at applying dots, this is problematic in that context too, because it effectively removed one dimension from weapon balance for Ogryns. In general, for cleaving, Fatshark seems to make a few distinct archetypes of weapons, which are:
- cleaves well, staggers well, but doesn’t do a lot of damage to all but the first things it hits (hammers, clubs, “crowd control tank” design. Example: wide club swings)
- cleaves well, doesn’t stagger well but has a VERY good cleave distribution of damage, which allows them to kill a crowd faster (swords, blades, “lawnmower” design. Example: wide cleaver swings)
- doesn’t cleave well, but kills the first few things it hits (axes, crowbill, “singletarget” design. Example: ogryn doesn’t have one, but combat axes.
Now, aforementioned dot design is problematic because it destroys the dynamic between the “club” cleave profile and “sword” cleave profile. If the club just applies bleed stacks to kill everything it hits too, then what does the sword have? Now it needs MORE cleave to distinguish itself. Now you’re looking at a weapon that kills hordes way too well. Now you need to “upward adjust” spawns and just non stop spam tough elites that can take being cleaved a bit, so basically 40 ragers all the time. This isn’t just an issue with armor pen and combat sword, it’s also an issue with these dot mechanics.
It doesn’t only do this to cleave distributions, it also completely turns breakpoint design upside down. Non-dot damage can miss breakpoints. Dot damage, on top of everything else, ramps up and thus doesn’t care about breakpoints much, inherently. Exceptions are slow deliberate applications like the needle pistol primary fire mode, which while strong, isn’t just indiscriminate dot spam.
I think that balance-wise, this game would by far benefit most if Fatshark first and foremost stopped crutching on exponential damage stacks as a bandaid balance measure and redesigned dots entirely. Shock is a great example of a dot that actually is unique mechanically and makes sense. Bleed, burn, toxin, soulblaze are all just the same unhealthy “exponential stacking damage” concept, just with different visuals, and all of them need to be redesigned to not destroy the game’s balance so fundamentally.
This post ended up being very long but I rarely see the topic of dots brought up and I think it’s inherently a very bad concept for Darktides balance health.