Psyker Brain Burst / Warp Charge Rework

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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To start off, this post is not all-inclusive, but merely aims to rework the base mechanics of Psyker’s abilities. The rest can follow as needed, but feel free to throw in any ideas as well. I would also like to stress ththe exact numbers of anything mentioned here are fluid, the important thing to carry across is the idea.

Blitz: Brain Burst
Left-click instantly casts the ability at your target, expending all Warp Charges and dealing damage based how many Warp Charges were consumed. Right-click charges Brain Burst and may be cast without consuming a Warp Charge, dealing one Warp Charge’s worth of damage.

Iconic: Warp Siphon
Whenever you kill an enemy, gain 5% of a Warp Charge. Whenever you kill an Elite or Specialist, gain 50% of a Warp Charge. If an ally in Coherency kills an Elite or Specialist, gain 25% of a Warp Charge. Each Warp Charge grants +3% damage. You can store up to 4 Warp Charges.

Level 15 Feat: Psychic Communion
Whenever an ally in Coherency kills an enemy, you gain 3% of a Warp Charge.

Level 15 Feat: Cerebral Lacerations
Reworked as Warp Discharge
Gain 1% of a Warp Charge for every 1% Peril Quelled.

Level 30 Feat: Quicken
Psykinetic’s Wrath expends all Warp Charges, increasing radius, stagger, and reducing Cooldown by 12.5% for each Warp Charge expended.

Level 30 Feat: Ascendant Blaze
Psykinetic’s Wrath expends all Warp Charges and applies Stacks of Soulblaze to Enemies Hit based on the number of Warp Charges expended.

Gain 2% of a Warp Charge whenever an Enemy dies with your Soulblaze effect (from any source).

Level 30 Feat: Kinetic Barrage
Reworked as Warp Overload
Psykinetic’s Wrath prevents Peril from rising for 10s.

You Brain Burst charges 25% faster. Brain Burst charged casts now deal damage equivalent to the number of Warp Charges.

Gain 0.75% Peril per second for each stored Warp Charge while not actively Quelling.

Your Perils of the Warp explosions deal damage scaling with the number of Warp Charges.

Notes
Someone on this forum before mentioned the idea of consuming Warp Charges for Brain Burst. This post runs with that idea, and then some.

As stated, this does not cover every facet of the Psyker’s arsenal that would have to be changed in order to effect this rework, but it does include some of the more important Feats to go along with it. The exact numbers of anything mentioned here are fluid, the important thing to carry across is the idea.

The general idea of this rework was to give Warp Charges a purpose other than to be hoarded. They no longer decay, and while they still provide a passive effect, their main purpose is as currency to instantly cast a more powerful Brain Burst. The idea is to incorporate the gaining and losing of Warp Charges as part of regular gameplay, and that just keeping it at max stacks is not necessarily the most optimal way to play.

Brain Burst

Brain Burst received a lot of changes. Left-click instantly casts the ability, consuming all Warp Charges and dealing damage based on how many it consumed, with the same Peril cost. You can still charge up a Brain Burst like usual if you see no reason to spend your stacks on that target, or have none, but damage will remain at a base level - unless you’ve got Warp Overload, more on that below. I leave the exact numbers on Brain Burst damage and it’s Warp Charge scaling to better people, but safe to say it should follow a series of breakpoints.

Warp Siphon

Speaking of, how you gain Warp Charges has changed, and the Warp Siphon Iconic by extension. You now gain percents of a Warp Charge whenever you fulfill a certain requirement - by default, whenever you kill an enemy, Elite or Specialist, or when allies in Coherency kill an Elite or Specialist. This can be modified through various Feats, like the changed Psychic Communion, the new Warp Discharge, Ascendant Blaze, or others. This eliminates some dependency on personal kills by the Psyker player, and also removes a heavy RNG factor.

Level 30 Feats

The Level 30 Feats also received some changes. Quicken has increased radius and stagger in addition to cooldown reduction for each Warp Charge consumed, while Ascendant Blaze has had some much-needed QOL done to it.

Then there’s Warp Overload, the replacement for Kinetic Barrage. This is the live-fast-die-hard talent that turns your Warp Charges into Warp Grenades - with the pin lost and the spoon already flying through the air. Charged Brain Bursts scale in damage the same as instant cast and don’t consume Warp Charges, but at tremendous cost - you’re constantly fighting the buildup of Peril, both passive buildup and through Brain Burst. Do you want to take Warp Battery for 6 charges and yet greater damage and danger, or Mind In Motion so you can move and Quell at the same time? At least when you inevitably blow up, you’ll take your enemies to Hel with you. Choices, choices.

Overall I feel like this design makes for more meaningful choices and gameplay paths than before, not to mention Psyker being just more fun to play.

2 Likes
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Would the right click in your scenario be equivalent to BB’s current damage?
Also how is aiming for left click supposed to work?
What happens if I target the wrong enemy? Can I cancel the cast?

Psychic Communion:
I think with that percentage, the feat becomes pretty underwhelming in smaller skirimishes.

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Yup, this would be another good rework that would take the concept of warp charges as a limiting resource for powerful brain bursts, and since it also includes a way to use brain burst without charges it doesn’t break the class mechanics on characters that have no force weapons.

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@Sarumane
I’m not the one to ask about exactly how much damage it should do, leave that to the number crunchers. However, I feel using the current damage values would be fine since it would still be useful to pop the heads of the more common ranged elites and more elusive ranged specials, while giving purpose for instant casts on the more difficult targets, being both instant and dealing more damage.

As for how aiming would work,

Now we're getting into the nitty-gritty of UI and UX stuff.

Could borrow the right-click head highlight and make it always happen whenever you have your Blitz out. Left click would be the instant cast. Holding right click would begin a charge, but doesn’t actually cast it until you left click (like currently). If you hold left click while holding right click, you lock the target and will cast BB as soon as you finish charging (like currently), but with this new functionality if you let go of right click while still holding left click, you’ll instant cast on that target (currently you continue to charge on the selected enemy). So you can instantly deal with a problem if things go south, or accurately pick which target you want if you’re willing to spend a little Peril.

Concerning Psychic Communion, like I said, the numbers aren’t as important as getting the idea across - if it needs a buff, that’s easy. Do you think the idea of generating partial Warp Charges over time is sound?

@Aetrion
Making the class not reliant on Force weapons or staves was an important factor this design, yeah. You could specialize in those depending on what Feats you pick, for example the reworked Warp Discharge would pair nicely with many of the staves since they tend to generate a lot of Peril in a short amount of time that has to be quelled. And, you could still benefit from that by just BB’ing a lot.

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The damage for right click is important for in so far as it replaces the current left click whose damage is already falling of on damnation. If you now were to give the current BB damage to your 4 warp charge empowered left click that would leave your right click with measly 250 damage on a 4s cast, which is abyssmal. If we give your right click the current left click damage profile, then I am fine with that design idea.

As for Ui:
My idea for changing BB so far has been:

  1. Left Click:
    Make BB deal a portion of its damage linearly spread across its cast time so you deal some damage from the get go, can bb trash faster and it does not feel as bad when someone pops your target (cause you did no damage).
    The below mean: From percent x to percent y cast time you deal z amount of damage.
    Cast time: 0-80% Damage: 50%
    Cast time: 81% - 99% Damage: 0%
    Cast time: 100% Damage: 50%
    The reason for dealing the remaining 50% at the end being, that you get rewarded for risking to perform the full cast.

  2. Right Click:
    This one feels pretty useless atm as it just f***s with your peril economy. So my idea was to let you precharge a BB with right click using 40 peril. Upon reaching 40 peril you have a BB stored, that can get cast instantly. Here we also have the issue of how to aim with a BB that gets cast instantly.
    My approuch here was to have rmb be for aiming - if a bb is stored - and have it be released upon pressing lmb while holding rmb.

The way you designed your left click is cool on paper, but I fail to see any sensible way to aim with it like the above.
Other than that and some numbers crunching I think your design ideas are pretty good.

Some feedback of how you like my ideas would be appreciated.

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I think you expressed yourself incorrectly in the previous post, since I got the idea you were asking about the charged cast which doesn’t cost Warp Charges (and would retain roughly the same damage profile as BB currently has). A left-click instant-cast BB with 4 Warp Charges should easily kill a Mauler on Damnation (and therefore every non-Ogryn, non-Boss enemy). To kill Ogryns on Damnation in one go, you might need the Warp Battery Feat at Level 25, so 5 Warp Charges might be needed for Crushers & Bulwarks, 6 for Reapers. It doesn’t necessarily need to scale linearly either, just hit the important breakpoints.

Giving right click charges the left click instant cast damage profile would be the territory of the suggested Warp Overload Feat at Level 30 - your right click charged BBs now deal left click instant cast damage without costing Warp Charges, but they take time and you’re constantly fighting Peril. Live fast, die hard, leave a good looking corpse. Or maybe a Chaos Spawn. Heh.

I’m generally against the idea of having BB deal damage over the time of the cast. Would be too easy to deal with rifleman hordes since it requires minimal aiming and skill, and cost less Peril to boot since you don’t need to eat full charge cost nor the final cast cost. Besides, BB isn’t really intended to tackle trash enemies, neither in vanilla nor in this presented rework - you’d need a different rework idea to support that.

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So you view the frustration that comes along with not being able to complete the cast on an enemy, that you started to burst, as a necessary evil so to speak?

I mean it makes no sense to me that the cast for a scab stalker takes the same amount of time compared to an Ogryn for instance.
I think there needs to be an upside to starting a cast beside the eventuality, that your teammate does not manage the kill and you come in as a closer.

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I mean, this rework does give you the opportunity to just bypass the charge time and instantly crunch a head. It’s just not recommended to waste that on regular enemies, you’ve much more efficient ways of dealing with those. And besides, with this rework you don’t really lose anything if your charged cast gets interrupted - Warp Charges don’t decay, and depending on your build you might actually gain a Warp Charge depending on how much Peril you Quell afterwards.

Even in the current system, if you precharge your cast to 50% before locking a target, you’ll never lose - either the BB finishes and you pop a head, or someone else beats you do it and provides you a service by granting you a Warp Charge in less time and at less Peril cost.

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Imo they could just make it so you can hold left click to highlight the target you are aiming at and then on release the cast goes off, just like how the Zealot’s charge lock-on currently works.

As for Op’s post i think this sounds like a great idea, this would give psykers an option to keep the charges for that relatively low damage boost, or to use it up to take out a significant threat to the team quickly and efficiently.

A small change i think could be made here, rather have it stay as the current kinetic barrage but with different functionality, so when activated your charged BB charges faster for maybe 10-15 secs (speed increase to be determined) BUT at the cost of constantly generating peril (amount also to be determined) during that time giving a high risk/high reward damage burst that the psyker needs to be careful when using otherwise they gonna go boom. Damage of the BB would of course be the same in that it is tied to how many warp charges you have.

Sorry for the wall of text.

1 Like
10

True that could work.