1000+ hour psyker main. This is a rant about havoc, not psykers power level.
While havoc does force more ‘meta’ builds, every other class has a decent amount of flexibility with weapons. Not on psyker.
Due to the massively reduced toughness + increased melee damage taken, trash mobs will delete your entire toughness bar AND some health with a single hit. That is with THREE toughness curious too. I want to play darktide, not dark souls.
You have essentially 1 viable build, which is flamer/trauma with bubble/shriek. These are insanely strong builds but a total crutch because you just perma stagger everything on your screen and thus never get forced into melee, or reposition, or really engage with the game on any level.
What if I want to play voidstrike or surge staff? These are so useless in havoc its not even funny. Melee? Forget about it, death sentence. Gunker? Nah, out of ammo by the 2nd room and you wont be getting more.
The class was not designed around havoc and it shows, the lack of build variety just sucks and its killing my love for the game.
and everyone else except ogryn are just bar from enter if they choose a melee thats not saber
Zealot and Vet are expected to bring their shout or book or else
Psyker has more build varieties than them, i’ve seen psykers ploughing trough with a brain burst build and empowered psionics
You die in one hit just as your next veteran or zealot that doesn’t bring untill end
and so what, the hard game mod wouldn’t be the hard game mod if it would allow you to breeze trough with every build
this psyker is bringing his surge staff and shriek, you should ask him if he thinks psyker is the worst class, got 3 staves as ranged options, if that isn’t more variety than bolter or plasma gun, or bolter and flamer, or rumbler and heavy stubber
There’s hardly any build variety in Havoc because it’s balanced around the most OP power creep stuff in the game. Asking for buffs to do Havoc will make the pipe dream of a balanced Darktide more unobtainable.
Kinda making my point for me. Its the exact same talent tree, doing the exact same thing as the other builds. Spamming shriek on cooldown to stagger everything in front of you.
Saying vet and zealot die in one hit like psyker is just ignorant. Lowest toughness class is going to feel the reduced toughness mod more, that is just facts. The reduced toughness mod is applied before curios. That means youre getting EVEN LESS toughness back from curios compared to other classes.
psyker is the only class that can sustain its ranged damage without being affected by the ammo pickups nerfs, that is a huge advantage over the other classes, considering its damage got equalized to the other ranged classes after patch 13
complaining you can’t bring your voidstrike which is 1/4 of the staves just tells you how spoiled your class has been
if your point is that you can’t bring gun psyker or you melee build you don’t realize how much spoiled that class really is, we are talking about 2 builds over the 4 he has, against the one build everyone else have period, not just havoc
about psyker thougness cap, it got balanced lower because he is literally swimming in thougness regen compared to the other classes that have to actually work to regain their thougness, not because of his offensive capabilities
also you can choose to make a little sacrifice and instead of getting 6 stacks of of Warp Syphin you can just pick that very affordable +15 flat thougness
and psyker is so spoiled to have not one but TWO of those
The main problem with psyker toughness regen is that you’re mostly relying on killing or critting large volumes of enemies in a very short time to refill toughness fast. If you’re only hitting a few and they take some time to take down, that toughness generation is suddenly extremely slow.
Which works fine most of the time since on Havoc you’re likely bathing in poxwalkers. Or you’re depending on team mates being there to burst up your yellow toughness so you can hide in your bubble.
The toughness-from-peril-and-quelling talents are practically of no value because they regen toughness so slowly they’re just never going to be something you can count on to save your life. Especially on Havoc where you need a full bar to even survive two hits from a poxwalker. Taking one hit and then another, those boy-I-got-3-toughess-back-in-between-hits thing might aswell not exist at all.
The important thing is the total toughness buffer, and the ability to quickly restore it should you take a massive hit that goes through it. This is last part comes mostly from vet shout and zealot chorus. If these guys are not around to increase your buffer or quickly refill your bar, the fact that you CAN in principle generate small amounts of toughess from crits, kills, perils, and quelling is so slow it’s basically worthless.
That doesn’t make sense. If the class has basically one viable build for high level havoc, and the non-cookiecutters are so challenging nobody but the absolute best can even play them half the time, then it isn’t spoiled.
You call it spoiled but it’s actually cope because health and toughness are so low it’s extremely challenging to stay alive without them. Spoiled would be if you had high base toughess and still had multiple straight toughness buffs from talents.
Ironically alternative psyker builds only really become viable if there’s already a purgatus-bubble psyker on the team. That way you can hide in his bubble most of the time and rely on his ability to clear chaff around you.
psyker puts 31 flame stacks on all enemies he’s flamering so long as there’s elites (ogryn had his 31 fire stacks nerfed this patch for good reason)
psyker gives the entire team 4% CDR on elite kill (ogryn had a version of this for just himself, which was just nerfed because 4% CDR on elite kill is too strong)
psyker is arguably the best cc class in the game, able to blast (and kill) infinite amounts of enemies and stunlocking them even at range
psyker has an extremely powerful team benefit via bubble too, which allows him to shield the entire team from havoc instadeath ranged
even if he doesn’t do bubble he can kill shooters through walls and cover in a wide cone or spam his staff endlessly via scriers
the singular tradeoff psyker makes is that he doesn’t have much in the way of melee tankiness, which if you pay attention can be negated fully by dodging competently and being good at meleeing.
he sure has it bad. to be fair that last part does filter 90% of psyker, no, darktide players. the build variety is on par with all other classes on havoc, that’s just the gamemode having bad balance for variety
The biggest problem are the staves themselves. The charge-up on both voidstrike and voidblast takes too long, even with the blessing that reduces the charge-up time. The damage and stagger on attacks not fully, or almost-fully, usually doesn’t cut it. With the enemy volumes, speed, and intensity on Havoc, you can be swarmed and killed in between charges before you even get a chance to fire off the 2ndary attack, and a half-charge won’t tip over ragers or kill dregs.
Combined with psyker overall squishiness it puts a huge strain on the player to never make mistakes.
To do either you’re absolutely dependent on being in a bubble because any random shooter, or just two poxwalkers hitting at the same time, can murder you in between attacks.
It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s just an extreme increase in difficulty compared to purgatus-bubble. Playing these builds requires that you play with literally no mistakes and complete situational awareness. Never get caught in the open, never miss a dodge, always know what’s behind you. Even at my absolute best I do make a mistake here or there, and then I just die instantly. Then you get to sit there and watch your 3 team mates make numerous mistakes (fail to dodge captain overhead swings, survive a poxbomber explosion at close range, eat a sniper shot in the mouth etc.) and survive them.
And sure everyone has a “best”, or cookiecutter build for havoc, but it’s certainly not equal in terms of how much worse the 2nd and 3rd builds are compared to the best, for other classes. For psyker alternative builds require peak-extreme gigasweatlording on high level Havoc.
The only class that can regen thougness to save his life on a whim would be Ogryn, all the others needs to rely on their class ability (the thougness regen ones mind you)
if you are smiting you just do it in your bubble, if you are venting shrieking you have access to the best thougness regen talent in the game
I have been taking the toughness nodes you pointed out. But how many nodes to I need to sacrifice just to un-gimp my class? Not to mention the additional peril generation means i’m already spending more time quelling, thus lowering my dps even further (unless of course im on flamer in which case I again dont have to think about it because of battle meditation)
Idk man. I think havoc should have been designed in a way that allows build diversity for all classes, not just psyker. But unfortunately psyker is more adversely affected by the current design than others, and its really frustrating to play sometimes. I dont think that warrants calling it ‘spoiled’.
Unless Fatshark gets serious and implements a major balance overhaul, Havoc is inevitably going to become a dead mode. Every class is locked into specific weapons and builds, so players get bored incredibly quickly. You can see this clearly on Steamcharts—the peak player count is now less than half of what it was after the update at the end of last year. Even with new game modes being added, there’s barely any excitement, and casual players won’t bother touching Havoc. In the end, even if there are 20 weapons available, only a handful are actually viable. Naturally, people get bored and move on to other games. That’s why no matter how many updates this game gets, people always quit playing soon after. Fatshark never makes any statements about balance, and the community manager just ignores questions, which honestly has been very disappointing lately. In fact, I’ve found myself barely playing the game anymore.
speak for yourself, challenge > variety for many of us
i was playing a single game a week back when we had ‘‘variety’’, now? i’m risking my level 40s 10 hours from week reset and getting demoted just to try new builds for every character
Yes, but they do have those abilities. The issue is really that the Havoc game seems to have been designed around these abilities being necessary, and as a psyker you are more strongly reliant on your team mates having those abilities than they are on you having bubble, or venting shriek. Both of which are useful to your team mates too, but nowhere near to that same extend. You simply rely more on them than they do on you, is that I am saying.
The capacity to emergency restore your toughness beyond it’s base maximum while also stunning/staggering nearby enemies, while having greater health pools and similar or higher toughness is what creates this significant difference in squishiness.
The meta seems to be that psyker compensates for being squishy with a higher ultimate damage potential with massive AOE dmg and stagger ability from purgatus primary spam (or trauma explosions, let’s not bring lolsmite into this), but given the intensity of combat on +35 Havoc this difference seems to have put psyker play into a zone that requires considerably more of the player than it does from players of other classes. The margin for mistakes is smaller. It also makes other builds comparatively less viable, as this greater pressure on the player just makes the necessity for cookiecutter purgatus+bubble builds all the more required for most players.
Just to be sure, I’m not saying other builds can’t be done. What I’m saying is the spike in difficulty for effective psyker play seems higher, in my experience. I think OP is right in the overall message. From what I am experiencing playing +35 Havoc games, psyker players seem to be dropping more easily now, and I almost never see anything but bubble+purgatus builds. There are exceptions but they’re more rare than exceptions for other classes. I think the new Havoc hit psyker harder. The hp+toughness nerf hit some sort of threshold. Deaths happen more often.
i don’t think a game will stay engaging for long if you’re just chasing challenges with almost the same build every time.
at the very least, even if a game is meant to be challenging, I’d get bored and quit after a few games if I’m just spamming Chorus and poking enemies with DS in every playthrough.
also, the current state of Havoc places more importance on builds and weapons than on player skill, which is far from what i personally consider a real challenge.
well, I think what I said will probably become clear after seeing the player numbers and the state of Havoc a month from now
the remaining hope is that, like the recent Ogryn update, they’ll revamp the skill trees for the Veteran and Zealot, and make balance adjustments to weapons, Gold Toughness, cooldown reduction, and so on
Before new havoc build crafting was so shallow that all the players, myself included, could get away with being ignorant about whats good or not on their builds
its true that havoc build are not meant for normal play, but at least i’m getting a sense that buildcrafting is actually back in the game, when you have to figure out whats working or not, what gives you the most value or not
they might look the same build to you but the details are what makes the difference to me
if every build gets you the same end results you are playing a shallow game when all the fun just got filed away with every balance patch
