You’re kind of contradicting yourself here, with saying Psyker can shine as bright as anyone, you just need to know what to do. Then, in response to the fact that Vet is incredibly better in most ways, you say that Vet players can’t play. That’s… not the discussion we’re having. It’s pointless to discuss class balance/class fun if we’re just going to assume that X class is always played by someone underperforming.
Anyway, it seems like you’ve had very, very different experiences than myself and some others. I do think perhaps you’ve not seen a lot of good Vet players with good builds/traits and blessings on their weapons.
You know how some people in FPS games makes you wonder about aimbotting, because they’re just that frikking good at clicking on heads no matter how frantic things are? Yeah, those are the people who should be playing Vet, and let me tell you, they melt any kind of Elite, inlcuding Ogryns, in a very short amount of time.
I’m saying Psykers can shine just as bright as the other classes. Psykers bright shine is their complete and utter horde clear and CC control. That is where they really shine and they do that better than anyone else nothing short of a Bulwark/Crusher gets past you, but that one gets past everyone.
Vets are the best elite and specials snipers at range, their purpose is to kill ranged threats - including those Dreg and Scab lasgun mobs. Hands down.
MOST Vet players are insanely shite and run around just with power sword instead of you know - dealing with ranged threats as they are meant to.
None of that is contradicting myself, but you tried.
See, unlike you I do have a Vet in my static team. He is insanely good with an Accatran VIIa Recon Lasgun and head shots most of everything. He also knows that I can single handedly cover one area against a horde so what he does is sit and pick off snipers, bulwarks/reapers/crushers and other threats that don’t enter my stream of purging fire. As he should be doing.
Now, unlike you, I play Damnation and unlike you I do know that the best clear speed are 2 Psykers and 2 Zealots. So we can argue about how shite Psykers are all day, but I don’t really see the point.
I’ve said many times that I wish our feats were more tailored around staffs rather than the useless BB talents there are and I wish our BB worked as it was intended to work, but it’d take some serious redoing to be worth using BB on Damnation. It is what it is.
I also know that is extremely unlikely to happen. It took Fatshark what, 4 years to rework Shade and that mostly ruined the best talents.
After leveling up the psyker, playing it almost exclusively in closed beta and being much saddened by what they did to it.
My conclusion is : it’s not so bad. Mostly because of how awesome the pointy in the head dueling sword is.
The things I would like in a near future, beside a more in depth rework of warp charges somehow, is :
fix the targeting behind stuff
make brain burst switch more reactive and less prone to not switch to it. If you hit brain burst button, you go to it period. At the moment you get locker out of it by the end of some random staff animation and it should not happen for using brain burst
shave a couple tenth of a second to the stagger effect of brain burst.
shave a tenth of a second or two to brain burst cast
allow to vent on any melee weapon you hold
have your best weapon vent bonus apply to vent without weapon equipped
I’m curious if your vet static mate has used the mark 8 braced autogun before. Because, I can tell you from using it myself that Vet Marksman is actually one of the more versatile classes in the game in its ability to deal with hordes, specials, and anything short of a crusher (and bulwark depending on exactly how you deal with it as vet) with a mark 8. In a way I’d describe it as a simply better heavy stubber (very high damage, heavy horde penetration, fast reload, large enough clip to be manageable. It beats out heavy stubber in everything except mag size and total ammo capacity).
While not quite as strong as a voidstrike and having limitations, especially on enemies at a range in excess of about 40m or enemies in cover, they can kill elites on the far side of a horde better than a voidstrike and simultaneously mow down hordes as well. With skilled play it can almost match a voidstrike in sheer power on a vastly more powerful class. At least in a general sense.
I am expecting a rework to be a little faster because Psyker is simultaneously more common, 1 of only 4 classes so far, and everyone is bitching about it to some capacity or another. While many people, including me, will admit its weapon selections are okay to great (I, too, am a fan of the voidstrike, then again I loved the fireball staff in VT2 and this is just that, but merged with a bolt staff,) there are very few, if any psykers who think the actual class built around its weapons are anything short of complete trash.
Given that there’s only 4 jobs, it should be a lot easier for the devs to actually take a look at it and try to do literally anything to it. But, we’ll see. Fatshark does like to trip at the last mile in a marathon, after all.
Also, I’ll gladly take tips on how to better murder Crushers and Bulwarks as a veteran, they seem tricky to how I play the class, so I’m sure I’m doing something wrong that isn’t, strictly, running a power sword against them.
Headshots !
Weapon with +40% damage on weal point or stagger on weak point help to manage them with that for me.
Easier said than done in all circumstances.
My Vet mate runs a Plasma gun… Don’t ask me how he does it… But he is insanely good with it and he could be using it on hordes, but he prefers to just sit and snipe every troublesome elite and special out of my range - sometimes he will fire through a horde to get to an elite/special tho. If he’s not running Plasma Gun he’s running the Kantrael Infantry Gun.
It does wonders against Crushers and Bulwarks according to him. That or you get the uhm… Rending blessing that let’s you bypass x% of armor…
Another problem is that most of the Peril-related bonuses are baked into staves only, and purging Peril with hands only doesn’t benefit from it at all. So when you’re high Peril, you need a clunky switch to the staff, and sometimes the switch just doesn’t happen. So the staff bonuses should apply even when the staff isn’t currently equipped. An alternative solution would be adding Psyker related stuff to trinkets. Trinkets are pretty bland anyways, considering they have like 3 main stats (health, toughness, wounds) and only a few different secondaries.
All in all, I agree with most of the criticisms, especially when it comes to Brain Burst; it needs to be faster, it shouldn’t be a waste of time if the target dies during the buildup, and Warp Charges shouldn’t be that fickle to manage.
I also find the talents underwhelming. Most of them don’t really feel like they’re contributing that much, because of the problems inherent to the current design (ie. the reliance on Warp Charges, which I ignore due to their fickleness).
I’m only playing Malice atm, but it’s weird how many Psykers there are… Like literally 50% of my games have 3 of them, myself included. And those rounds are just… puzzling. Very seldom does one of them equip a melee weapon, even when they’re surrounded by a horde. Guess they never played Vermintide, or at least not for very long. Either way, I become the Almighty Psyker Tank at that point to give us even a chance of succeeding (but there’s only so much a lone psyker with an axe can do, so unless it’s a group of 25+ rankers, it’s not enough). I’ve even tanked for Ogryns!
I have to agree, this is one job that really just… isn’t very smooth to play. Unlike say Sienna in Verm2 (yeah lets not kid ourselves that’s where the basic play comes from) there’s a lot of things that just are very awkward and one of them is Brain Buster.
The Skill tree is built entirely around this and it’s just not a very good thing to use and there’s just no way to smooth it out.
You have to flip conpletely off your staves and melee weapon just to use it, and even then about half the time landing it is quirky anyway.
I think you may have to rework the Skill Tree and Brain Buster as a whole. Its not very intuitive.
Staff Wise, Void Strike is really good, so is Surge Force.
Purgatus has some stagger issues to where things just run through it anyway to come clobber you so you need a good front line just to use it.
Trauma Staff needs a little work. This one is based on the Conflag staff of Verm2… but here’s the kicker and why it doesn’t work well here… This staff was only usable to it’s true potential by only the Battle Mage class of Sienna. But that required 2 specific Skill Tree feats to be used… one was fast charging which reduced the Charge Time by 10%, then the “Peril” equivalent that speed charged it again by another I think up to 30% making it very fast. not including the continuous burn skill feat.
BUT… in Darktide… there’s no way to kit this out, so the Trauma Force Staff just doesn’t work. You’re going to have to seriously increase the Charge Speed on this one if you want it to be usable.
One more thing…
You probably want to make it a feature to add the Block Ranged and Melee Attacks Blessing on the Power Sword. It swings like the Fire Sword from Sienna, so its ok at hordes, but not special. What really makes it shine is the Knockback/Knockdown ability of the Force Push and… the Blessing that blocks both Melee and Ranged. Its a little underpowered without that. Or Perhaps this may be a Skill you can add to the Psycher Tree when you rework that Brain Buster fiasco.
I like the cc option (lightning staff) but the damage options are limited ground target staff is just harder to use and not really rewarding at all compared to the explosive ball, the fire staff is alright but I like my zealots flame thrower more, to me the only things psyker SHINES at is killing targets that don’t show themselves for long (hidden behind things) and ccing elites, not saying they suck just saying I prefer other classes for the rest. (unlimited ammo (with downtime) is one of their perks I guess)