I think a significant part of what makes psyker mid in comparison to Sienna simply comes down to the weapons available. None of the meta staves from VT2 made it into DT. While Sienna also had better talent selections with each of the specs trees being more focused, she had the beam staff, Bolt staff, and Corfuscation staff which allowed her to rapidly deal with all manner of threats. Currently the best staff seems to be the purgatus which is admittedly better than the flame staff from VT2, but the other ones are just bleh. Other than purg, they all use the same quite bad left click attack. The shock has good cc but poor dps, the void is a worse version of fireball (because it doesn’t lob or pass through heavy targets you cannot easily get the double hits), and trauma is just conflag which was never a great staff to begin with. The decision to include none of the previous meta staves is a bit confusing, leaving the psyker immediately weaker than Sienna before considering talent trees and active skills. The divide only grows worse from there, with Psyker having a 0 damage version of unchained ultimate but at a faster cooldown and directional focused. The level 30 soulblaze dot effect could just be part of the ultimate, and then the 30 talent could just do more stacks and give the 10% warp charge chance.
Surge staff could use damage buff, this is fairly visible on the higher difficulties, however all other staves seem to be in a fairly good place, even if I personally roll with the voidstaff 99% of the time. It would be nice to have different light attacks.
This is all made worse by the fact that non-staff options aren’t viable due to a lack of synergy with Psyker’s feat.
I personally really like the Voidstaff. I know it doesn’t have crazy damage, but the key to using it IMHO is to use partly charged RMB bolts. This is similar to Sienna’s Bolt Staff, in that you can shoot partially charged bolts really quickly, it doesn’t generate much peril, and you get the advantage of being able to cleave through a lot of targets. It’s awesome IMHO for thinning hordes at range. You can also use it to target the ground and use it’s blast radius to stagger enemies.
The Purgatus staff is pretty good - but you really need to be on point with your positioning. A big flame attack leaves you exposed to attacks from behind, so you just need to be careful. A nice mitigation for the Purgatus limited range is that Psyker has BB to deal with ranged threats.
This is just not true. There re some pretty interesting synergies. I’ve been running a Gun Psyker with a Headhunter Autogun and having a blast with the following:
Deflector Force Sword + Vraks Mk VII Headhunter (single shot) Autogun
- Essence Harvest (Lvl5)
- Psykinetic Wrath or Wrack & Ruin (Lvl10)
- Cerebral Lacerations (Lvl15)
- Kinetic Deflection (Lvl20)
- Kinetic Flayer (Lvl25)
- Kinetic Barrage (Lvl30)
Also remember WARP CHARGES add damage to all of your weapons (up +16% with a max of 4 warp charges)
The general approach with this build is that you can use BB to get up to 4 warp stacks for the damage boost. Kinetic flayer will also trigger on ranged kills, which helps with keeping up Warp Stacks. It’s awesome sniping an elite with your autogun and proc’ing a BB to insta-gib them. You can switch to BB and pop your ult in fire off a bunch of BB’s to gain warp charges and thus boost your Toughness regen. You can mitigate your relative weakness vs. ranged enemies by using Ghost on your autogun. Vs bosses or other big targets, cerebral lacerations gives a great damage boost for your whole team.
An alternative variant is to take Warp Battery instead of Kinetic Flayer, for a +24% damage boost, and then Psychic Communion to get bonus warp charges instead of cerebral lacerations. Or you can keep Cerebral Lac if you’re comfortable switching to BB more often to keep up your warp stacks.
Psykinetic Wrath is here as an option (my preferred) just as a soft boost to your Force Sword. You can use Deflector + kin deflection to blocked ranged when needed and get your peril up to high level so that when you do go into melee, you have +15% damage with your force sword AND +16-24% from your warp charges. Also - I “think” Cerebral lacerations works with the force swords normal attacks (non-special), since the normal attack doesn’t count as a “warp attack” IIRC.
If you personally like a build that is great and you should run what you enjoy, but statistically the current staff weapons aren’t great especially when compared to their VT2 counter parts. The void strike is just a worse version of the fireball staff, I’m not saying that its unusable, its just extremely slow to kill important targets. In VT2, you could charge a fire ball, and lob it through an enemy doing damage, and have it land directly behind them doing damage again on detonation, which allowed you to kill elites mixed into groups. Due to the flat trajectory the void strike is easier to aim at range, but harder to double hit with, and can’t be used to double hit elites here anyway because it explodes on armor, and still wouldn’t kill them anyway because it doesn’t do enough damage.
Having options like the bolt / beam staves for sniping specials and elites, or coruscation for a ranged burn build would make a significant difference to the class is all I’m really saying here, and the guns simply aren’t the answer to fill that roll efficiently
I think the Voidstrike is a really a hybrid of the bolt and fireball. The charged shot cleaves weaker enemies and damages them like the bolt staff, and when it hits a hard target it explodes like the fireball.
The difference is that the explosion effect does a lot less damage than the fireball, and a full charged voidstrike bolt does a lot less damage than a fully charged sienna bolt staff.
So I agree with you that in both cases the damage is pretty weak, and single shot sniping targets isn’t really the best of the weapon IMHO. Frankly, you can charge a BB probably faster than a fully charged sienna bolt, and it will do the high level of damage you’re looking for.
I need to play around with the Trauma staff more. What blessings are good on the Trauma staff?
Bolt Staff full charge is 2ish seconds and could be reduced by 40% with tranquility on BW, so fairly similar to BB, but it could also pierce 5 targets, crit to kill CW’s in one shot, and killed all other specials/elites in one shot to the head. So I would argue that bolt staff required more skill to be good with it, but was objectively better if you were practiced. Comparing a character’s innate skill to a specific weapon is kind of apples and oranges though. I think BB is mostly fine where it is now, we just need weapons that allow for more roles, and a tightening up of the skill tree to support those roles
Thanks for the detailed response!
It works with both normal and special force sword attacks. Only things it doesn’t boost are trauma primary and secondary, void primary and secondary, surge primary. Everything else gets the bonus from lacerations, including subsequent BBs.