In my books unlimited cleave weapons able to delete a whole horde by pressing one button and unlimited cooldown reduction talents aren’t “fine”. Not as bad the Smite blitz which literally disables the enemy AI, but close enough
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Again, it takes like 10 seconds to kill those enemies and most of the potential damage is entirely based on your teammates not acting.
If it was an (almost) instant kill, like an ogryn bomb on a 30s cooldown, i would completely agree with you.
I wonder: do you also have such a strong dislike for the ogryn taunt?
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Sure, here is a sample of range for you, go and clearly the equivalent of those enemies in melee. I will give you 14 seconds, not 10. Also THAT would require some effort, like actually swinging your weapon and thinking about defence.
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No, because the Ogryn’s taunt redirects the aggro on the Ogryn, Smite affected enemies just stand there to be slaughtered.
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That was not my point.
My point is, that
- the enemies still pose a potential danger for that time
- because teammates will almost always attack the enemies that are burning, your actual kills from that massive aoe are gonna be a small fraction of what it potentialyl could be
If you shoot the horde with a gun, you get kills immediately.
Even if you only got half that horde within 14 seconds with your melee or gun, you actually get those kills.
Even if your teammates also attack at the same time.
The damage dealt with this ability is MASSIVELY dependent on your teammates not doing anything, while any direct damage option does not.
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Yet that exactly was my point. You will unlikely be able to kill as much trash mobs through other means, through walls, without taking any risk, putting any effort, and pressing 1 button every so often.
My similar opinion applies to Smite: no effort, no player skill involved, no risk and disables enemy AI.
I have nothing to add, this feels like beating a dead horse as this has been discussed so many times before.
I simply want to have fun in my computer games. I don’t expect Chivalry level of combat depth, but I expect some depth to the combat, not just pressing X to instantly win an engagement or whacking at enemies which cannot fight back.
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You will never choose an option that staggers over an option that completely wipes horde. Pure damage is an uninteresting node, and will never compete to the damage that soulblaze enables, but an aoe stagger just isn’t going to be better competition to a screenwipe.
You’re going to have redundancy no matter how you do blitz. You don’t always need 3 completely unique options for each class. Box and Rocks are essentially the same thing, except box can dish out more damage on unyielding and has explosions that stagger enemies. This would be like brainburst in a single target fashion, but on kill can detonate the enemy. Pretty unique imo.
Psyker doesn’t need a spammable blitz to be effective. With true aim you get very good damage if you choose to weave it in-between weakspot hits. With EP, you get way more effective charges anyways, it will practically still be infinite. This limits the dps potential of DD assails to encourage psyker to play around more of their kit rather than limiting themselves to one thing at a time.
I have over 800 levels as psyker and it was one of my favorite classes for a very long time. It is very boring now, and I do agree that other classes have serious issues in rewarding things they already do. I’m happy that crit cdr on zealot was nerfed, for instance (my highest level class and the build I played the most have been effected), and I hope that vet gets their cdr nerfed as well (my second highest level class)
I’m all for nerfing the other classes especially vet’s cdr and shout and zealot’s until death, and common weapon choices such as combat knife, power sword, or plasma gun, but I don’t really want to make a post that is everything I find wrong with every single class and weapon that inherently hinders the game experience, as it will be rather large. Instead, I rather focus more on a class that I find consistently ruins my experience with the game and one that I no longer find joy in playing because I notice these things.
Peril as a mechanic is intended to railroad psykers into tactically quelling as staves and blitz do not have a reload function or an ammunition mechanic to hinder them otherwise. Peril as it is now is incredibly easy to play around, having near 100% uptime with psyker staves and maintaining very efficient dps at the same time. There is not enough enemies you can spawn in the game to stop smite, it will continue to spread and then they will shriek and spread it for even longer and apply serious damage to all of the enemies at the same time. There is no amount of enemies you can spawn to deal with voidstrike, trauma, or purgatus, as they all deal incredibly high damage to hordes, can be built in ways to ignore carapace armor mechanically, and with the spread of soulblaze they will always snowball and come ahead. You can’t balance around this class having this amount of damage potential through insanely high cleave caps and spread of dot damage, as every other class will fall far behind by the time that this class can functionally not handle a common scenario.
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So is your main point just
“I don’t like it when another horde-clear-focused build is in my lobby, FS please delete it”?
The time required for soulblaze on its own to kill basic chaff has been discussed. You mention about killing a similar number of enemies in a similar time frame without venting shriek, which is not only possible, but commonplace on multiple other setups.
For example, whether it be something more specialised like an Ogryn Gunlugger using a Kickback to mulch hordes, a Zealot with a Flamer (another form of massively stacking AoE DoT damage), or any class with a hard hitting melee weapon with decent cleave, especially when considering those two aforementioned classes have access to several weapons and talents that can inflict large amounts of bleed in an AoE; there is very little effort required for a standard “Block/push reset + stagger>L1>H2” -type attack chain for horde clearing with melee weapons, especially when combined with basic side-dodging and/or camera turning to maximise melee attack arcs.
To reiterate, the soulblaze from shriek is never left to its own devices long enough to do what you’re saying; when used purely for clearing chaff, it’s always combined with another form of horde clear, whether it be ranged or melee, from either the psyker who applied it or a teammate. You’re asking for its removal based on scenarios that just do not happen.
I fail to see the point you’re making.
There is nothing more to add because you refuse to see the evidence.
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You don’t have to build solely around shriek for soulblaze to be effective. You can play DD duelling sword, a weapon that can oneshot ragers, where each elite kill adds 3 additional stacks of soulblaze. You get the value of shriek every 2 elite kills in a clump, and hordes typically spawn with only a few elites mixed in. Combine this with shriek, and you’re able to tear entire patrols apart. Combine with rending, and that will apply even with Crusher patrols.
If you’re pretty wild, you can stack 5 stacks of true aim, gaining stacks of uncanny strike at the same time for duelling sword, cast a charged trauma blast on a crusher patrol, cast shriek, and then you have 9 stacks of soulblaze, and each kill adds another 3 more, resets the timer, and will drain an even higher amount of hp from crushers per tick. You’ll get even as high as well over 200 damage per tick, and that seriously moves crusher breakpoints for most weapons.
It doesn’t matter whether or not the team can occasionally steal kills from this. If you’re playing psyker and you’re playing around these tools that do serious crowd control like trauma or voidstrike or purgatus, and you bring a duelling sword to occasionally one tap a half-dead rager or mauler, what’s killing you at that point?
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That’s an oddly specific setup to just… not kill a patrol as easily as well, killing them outright with better options, like the duelling sword you mention in that setup.
It’s incredibly disingenuous to bring up shifting breakpoints for weapons when combined with your incredibly-niche setup of massively-stacked brittleness-empowered soulblaze. In what practical way does that “seriously move crusher breakpoints”? There’s far more readily available, actually practical builds and methods across all the classes to deal with patrols in a much easier manner.
You seem to despise everything about the class. Why play it long enough to “have over 800 levels”?
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I don’t refuse any evidence, if you were obsessive enough you would find similar comments of mine about flamer or plasma for that matter. Infinite cleave weapons are bad for the game. Excessive DoT stacking combined with infinite cleave takes it one step further. Regarding your amusing comment that there is “very little effort” involved in melee. Which part takes less effort? Melee or pressing F or holding mouse 1 on flamer / Purgatus. Yes, I’m “slightly” simplifying, but this is just too funny.
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if you were obsessive enough you would find similar comments of mine about flamer or plasma for that matter.
I simply do not care to be “obsessive enough” to trawl through some faceless internet character’s post history.
Which part takes less effort?
Are you expecting me to argue pressing/ holding one button is more effort than pressing 2+ in a rhythm? Of course I won’t, and that’s not at all the point I made. You know that.
To reiterate, no matter the setup, dealing with hordes is simple. Repetitive rhythms of clicking buttons. Once again, that single button press of venting shriek is added on top of that repetitive horde-clear combo rhythm, which at its core, requires very little effort.
It is too effortless to kill whole hordes worth of enemies by pressing F
“Press X to Win”
Regardless, you seem to have approached this thread from an angle of shriek being so overpowered to replace all other horde-clear in the team.
Show a scenario in an actual mission where people press the magic ability button then proceed to do literally nothing else and the horde melts away without fighting back.
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There is more to melee than repetitive rhythms. Anyway, I don’t intend to waste more time discussing 2+2=5 arguments.
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You ain’t gonna convince me that playing Ogryn with 3x the effective health and like 6 times the effective toughness is in any way harder than playing Warpfire psyker. Most psyker builds actually feel on-edge unlike most of the regular melee builds.
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I absolutely hate the Psyker tree, outside of the bottom right half. It’s incredibly boring and lacks almost any variety. Blitzes need to be re evaluated across the board. Soulfire should’ve replaced empowered as a keystone.
However while I didn’t read through this post fully it seems like a lot of the suggested changes aren’t great.
A Purg psyker? Absolutely. Purg psyker is by and far the most braindead build of all time.
Ogryn did take more effort when the shooter buff was still active… 
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No matter, you already had your mind made up before you came to this thread and didn’t want to argue in good faith.
You’ve been asked to provide evidence in proper context and delivered nothing.
You’ve argued nothing.
Enjoy the rest of your day 
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It’s an example setup to show that you could have an infinite scaling dps option as psyker for everything at a range, where there is no risk of death from crushers. Sure, it’s not that good when you use it to just kill a couple crushers and gets out dps’d by duelling sword.
But it infinitely scales. crushers that take 100 damage a tick is very significant to their health pool of 3600, especially after the requisite couple of trauma blasts that lower their health. A whole patrol of crushers can’t do anything if they’re all permanently staggered on the ground. If you for some reason get a double patrol, they’re still useless and not doing anything while on the ground, while taking massive damage from a high scaling source of damage like soulblaze.
Then you factor in that you apply brittleness to that entire area, and your team is now getting 40% more value in their penetration. That’s very significant for ranged weapons, and even more significant for melee weapons like devil’s claw. Crushers won’t be able to do anything, they are taking a lot more damage from all sources including soulblaze ticks, and the entire team is now capable of putting a group of them down in a couple seconds.
It’s not really about practicality at this point. What amount of enemies in the game can beat a trauma psyker? You have infinite cleave, you can build up a free crit off of enemies on the ground, allowing you to cast a free soulblaze over a very large area, and after every 2 or 3 elite kills, an entire horde is deleted from the game. Then you factor in that killing elites gives cooldown reduction.
This leads to very funny scenarios in testing in psykanium where if you decided to spawn over 100 ragers, they will die in less than 30 seconds. Pretty good time in terms of scaling.
Oh, but the game only sends like 12 or so in a patrol? I guess killing 12 in 30 seconds is pretty bad considering you can oneshot each one with the right duelling sword build or with brain rupture, but you can oneshot ragers in that amount fairly easily especially if you knock them all onto the ground.
As for killing a horde with shriek, it’s really easy especially since psyker already has to build peril in the first place. The breakpoint for deleting a horde of bruisers is less than 9 stacks of soulblaze. This scales infinitely over an area. It doesn’t matter if it’s 100 bruisers, or 10, they are dead at 9 stacks. You can just hold block, the class literally has a talent that gives them near infinite block through peril, which builds peril, and can be expended via another shriek or just holding a button after a dodge. To get to 9 stacks, that’s less than 1 purgatus burst, 1 crit trauma and shriek, 1 crit voidstrike and shriek, 3 elite kills, or less depending on which stage of shriek stacks for soublaze you’re at, and any combination of crit trauma.
For ranged shooters that show up en masse, if you kill two elites or specials near them they’re dead at 6 stacks. Or if you just shriek. Whether there is 1000 dreg shooters or scab shooters, they are all dead by the time 6 stacks deplete. it takes 9 stacks to kill both gunner and shot gunner variants.
No matter how you look at this, it’s extremely powerful to have access to an ability that can remove the majority of problems from the game in less than 10 seconds, and heavily damage anything that remains in that time. 6 stacks is more than enough of a move in breakpoints for brain rupture to kill a rager in one hit without empowered psionics and damage bonus from warp rider. 9 stacks for a mauler with empowered psionics. It also moves duelling sword from a 6 hit breakpoint without uncanny strike to a 3 hit breakpoint on maulers, and at 12 stacks it moves it to a 1 hit breakpoint. This scales infinitely, so all you have to do is trauma for 3 stacks, shriek for 6, and kill 1 mauler, and the rest are all dead in one hit, and 2 maulers will kill them all at 15 stacks.
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Here is a severely bit crunched video of soulblaze smite in action. What amount of enemies in the game challenges this? This isn’t even smite at its peak performance, you can spend a point where each kill has a chance to expend 10% peril, which makes this even easier to maintain in normal horde situations.
What I’ve been focused on mostly has been trauma staff as that’s the build I usually run, but this one is even more braindead. You can even see that it sometimes doesn’t grab an enemy and I have to dodge a little, but in return for maintaining that, I am killing 75 maulers or 100 ragers or infinite amounts of enemies because there is no amount of enemies you can possibly scale to make this build impossible to play especially in a team based setting without completely crunching all other options. Imagine if there was one other person to keep that rager or mauler off of me for this entire duration. I don’t even need to dodge in that circumstance. It’s practically free.
Damage efficiency only matters if there is something to stop you from doing damage. It doesn’t matter if smite only did 10 damage a tick on infinite crushers if the crushers can’t move in the first place. It will eventually kill them and it will eventually win. Will it be outdps’d? Certainly, the game doesn’t spawn this many enemies in the first place so it will never generate this amount of value in a single duration like this. But if it holds every enemy in the game in place, does dps even matter?
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0% realistic scenario.
Good luck finding hundreds of melee elites at once, which you can all slap with an aoe at the same time, and use to repeatedly get your ult cooldown back due to cdr on elite kill.
What is up with people creating perfect fake scenarios in order to show how “broken“ something is, when those scenarios are so unrealistic that there is no way that any player ever experiences it outside of self made spawns?
Might just as well spawn a million crushers inside of each other and kill them all with one krak grenade.
Why don‘t you spawn a million ragers and insta kill them all with the ogryn grenade?
Those are realistic scenarios that perfectly show how those things actually work in practice, right?
How about the immolation grenade? Are you gonna show how strong it actually is, by spawning a billion enemies and burning them with the grenade?
And don‘t tell me “but those only have limited uses“.
Wrong. There is a grenade pickup right there in the psykhanium, which you can use as often as you want.
Using infinite grenades is about as realistic of a scenario, as what you did in your video, so it should be fine by your standards.
Yes.
Because you are playing in a group.
Other people also attack.
They will kill a lot of those enemies before you can, severely reducing your real damage output.
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If you’re not interested in balance just say so. There’s no point in arguing if your only counterpoint is that you don’t like that this is possible.
This fake scenario is meant to demonstrate the point I have been making, that psyker has a lot of easy infinite scaling damage options with very little setbacks to them. Quelling from 100 to 0 in a manner of seconds is not the same as ogryn only having 1 nuke, vet only having 2 krak grenades, or zealot having 3 immolation grenades. Those options are all strong, but have a limiting factor to them. A vet, of course, can just regen nades, and I would like to see that nerfed too, but being only able to throw 2 nades every 2 minutes is probably, just slightly, a more limited option than being able to permanently stagger all enemies around you with a decent amount of damage over time with almost no downtime between casts and apply 6 stacks of soulblaze every 30 seconds assuming there are no elites in a map, and if there are, 5% faster per elite.
Let’s further continue the thought experiment here. Do you think that a zealot can kill this much in 30 seconds consistently throughout a mission? If the mission continuously spawned an elite wave of over 100 elites every 30 seconds, would any other class be able to consistently clear them without taking any damage and without a loss of resources and progress? Because that’s currently the state that psyker is in. It costs nothing to use purgatus for a couple seconds. It costs nothing to use smite. Shriek is constantly refunded back to back to back. Ogryn will run out of nukes. Zealots will eventually run out immolation nades or throwing knives and they’re not going to be able to forever kite this much pressure. Maybe bleed nade vet can do this with their nade refund talent, but they’ll definitely have to kite for a bit. But Smite can just hold them in place, doing absolutely nothing but holding down a key and spamming another one at the same time, and they will never take any damage. It will always outlast the others.
You can keep bringing up that other players or classes can kill a far lesser amount of things a lot faster than these options, but it doesn’t matter because smite and shriek are infinitely scaling. It works the same whether it is just 10 poxwalkers or 100000 dreg bruisers. Shriek doesn’t care if the dreg shooters or scab stalkers exist, it kills large quantities of them just as it would kill 1.
I’ll ask again, what amount of enemies in the game can challenge this? Because it certainly isn’t a small number. There simply isn’t a large enough number you can come up with that doesn’t severely impact the performance of every other class in the game. If you could come up with a composition of elites, horde waves, specialists that could potentially, maybe, break through this crowd control and stop the psyker for a bit of time, every other class in the game would be borderline unplayable and it would probably crash the server by the time it reached them anyway. You just can’t balance the game around these options existing as they currently do.
The only legitimate point you have been able to make and have been holding onto the entire time, is that there is not enough enemies in the game to see this value, and that teammates will also kill things. This ultimately doesn’t matter much, as long as the enemies are under the effect of smite, under the effect of shriek, they are effectively incapable of doing anything to the player and dead.
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