Psyker Psykinectic needs some buffs

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Have you tried calculating the DPS? No? It’s laughable damage for time invested - not least because you slow to a crawl while doing it.

Kinetic Barrage makes it slightly less crap for 3 casts. Real good ultimate there, certainly on the level of other class 30 feats, hm?

Yeah, that’s… Certainly a Psyker using BB is the choice when clearing an area with 20-30 ranged. It’ll just take half a year.
Yeah you can grab some stuff with it. It’s not 100% worthless. But it is bad.

The thread is discussing all the bad things about Psyker. You claim Psyker is good, people list things about Psyker that is bad.

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nah can’t do most of that

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A narcissist who thinks everything revolves around him.

And this is a problem, they are weaker than all other classes, why is that bad to bring up? People want them to be stronger, be more viable, how is that a bad thing? If he thinks they are fine, there’s no reason even read these threads. I remember in V2 when people complained about how weak Kerillians waystalker spec and swiftbow was, meanwhile, I ran around murdering everything as waystalker, killing stormvermines with 3 arrows with swiftbow, and I didn’t bother with the threads because why should I? If people complaining makes the class even stronger I will just be even happier, murdering even more and faster.

Psyker is currently the weakest class, there’s no point in bringing them, if your team was class locked I would have been fine with them “just” being CC, but right now, why would we ever bring them when all other classes are stronger?

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They can, just like all other classes, the only problem is that all other classes do it better.

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Sharpshooters can do it completely safely while not even looking at the gunner? TIL. Also you don’t always have a sharpshooter.

Which nullifies everything you say because of Malleus Monstronum.

I’m sure the game is balanced around toxic awful penances. Yep.

Have you tried calculating the DPS? No? It’s laughable damage for time invested - not least because you slow to a crawl while doing it.

Good thing I said nothing about DPS. There’s more to the game than pure damage. Is the rumbler bad to you as well?

Kinetic Barrage makes it slightly less crap for 3 casts. Real good ultimate there, certainly on the level of other class 30 feats, hm?

Kinetic barrage + psykinetic’s aura can be absolutely silly in terms of deleting some elites (particularly gunners) safely while also getting your ability back. It’s definitely more than 3 casts as well. Oh, speaking of, I meant to comment on one of your statements from before:

Trauma being single target instead of AoE just makes that one even worse.

What are you even smoking here? Trauma isn’t single target.

Yeah, that’s… Certainly a Psyker using BB is the choice when clearing an area with 20-30 ranged. It’ll just take half a year.

deep breathing

Because it’s not your only option for clearing things out. If you’re getting shot at by a gunner/reaper/need to thin things out to help clear it out more safely, brain burst is there for that. You’re not going to be clearing 20+ enemies with only brain burst. That would be incredibly f’ing stupid.

The thread is discussing all the bad things about Psyker. You claim Psyker is good, people list things about Psyker that is bad.

So I can just throw in totally irrelevant things to the discussion as long as they tangentially relate to psyker? I mean, go for it, I guess, just don’t frame it as part of a reply to me.

A narcissist who thinks everything revolves around him.

Oh screw off dude, I’m trying to have a genuine discussion about the class. Zero call for that. Done replying to you for now I guess if that’s how you’re going to be. The point was that it was irrelevant when framed as part of a direct reply/mixed into a direct response to what I had said. I certainly don’t think the everything revolves around me, it just hurts an actual discussion when random points are thrown in not relevant to what’s being directly discussed.

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Psyker is being directly discussed. If I’m arguing that Psyker is bad, I’m so very sorry if you feel it is off-topic if I don’t only respond to the exact things you think are good. If you think other things about Psyker is completely irrelevant to the discussion in the thread, then… yeah. Sorry man, don’t know what to say.

Trauma pretends to be AoE. Certainly if you don’t charge it, it’s pretty much single target. Even if you do charge it, it’s still mostly pretending to be AoE. The damage happens at the very core of the circle.

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There’s a reason why they added that penance, they didn’t just do it randomly or for the lolz. It’s just Fatshark standard, nerf a class because they are too powerful and don’t change the achievement that made sense before the nerf.

Tbf the best change they should make to brain burst is making swapping brain burst and the knockback. The knockback should take the place of the grenade and brain burst being the class ability.

This is just stupid, if people bring more into the reply than what you wrote you can either respond or ignore it, just brushing it off with “I DiDn’T sAy ThAt” just undermines any point you tried to make because people ARE saying these things. 90% of psykers I run into ARE using guns because their staffs are just not good. I don’t care if YOU don’t say “bring a gun”, it’s a fact that people use guns.

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Then please at least put it as a separate point? That’s all I was getting at. You mixed it into a paragraph replying directly to me, of course I’m going to take that as being aimed at me. By all means, add other points as you want. Also I think psyker needs more cosmetics. But when you’re replying directly to somebody it’s bizarre to just chuck random points in. See the cosmetic line. Just threw it in there to make the point. (I have no feelings at all about psyker cosmetics) It doesn’t fit at all in this reply if I was being serious about it.

Trauma pretends to be AoE. Certainly if you don’t charge it, it’s pretty much single target. Even if you do charge it, it’s still mostly pretending to be AoE. The damage happens at the very core of the circle.

I think you’re seriously undervaluing its ability to AoE, particularly as a combination CC/damaging option. Also it functions like the grenadier gauntlet/rumbler, as long as you clip a poxburster with it there seems to be a crazy high damage modifier that will pretty much insta kill it every time. Genuine question: Have you tried it at all in damnation?

There’s a reason why they added that penance, they didn’t just do it randomly or for the lolz.

And yet there’s a penance designed around literally killing yourself. Penances are just badly designed and have no place in a balance discussion.

90% of psykers I run into ARE using guns because their staffs are just not good. I don’t care if YOU don’t say “bring a gun”, it’s a fact that people use guns.

I think I’ve seen maybe two gun psykers total in damnation and I’ve been running it for weeks (months? Since beta), and both of them were terrible and useless. I’m not saying nobody uses guns, but it sure as hell is stupid to me to do so.

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@I don’t care if YOU don’t say “bring a gun”, it’s a fact that people use guns.@

This is a pure madness.

Maybe, just MAYBE the RNG SHOP dont give good staffs? I have 250+ missions on psyker and i have 2 (!) good staffs - 1 void and 1 flame. Everytime i go to the shop i see TONS of guns and other stuff, but not force weapons. Also i have 1(!) good (not ideal) melee weapon. I spent big amounth of time play psyker and everyday check shop for the weapon i need and i just cant get it. THIS is the MAIN PROBLEM - u cant get what u deserve to get. U may not know how properly play psyker, but RNG gods can give u 500+ ideal staff (but still - u will complain about it BAD stats).

Melks shop also bad - have an 420 legendary staff is s*it (because of BAD base stats).

So. What we have here - people complaining not about CORE PROBLEM - but about consequences.

About BB long charge - yea, but no (because u can cast it from safe place)

About DPS - Maybe, just maybe - DPS is not what psyker born to do? Maybe there is 3 more people can do it?

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And why should we bring a psyker then? We need damage, we don’t need utility. Utility that they need a specific weapon to even have, and just as you said yourself, might not have gotten because of the bullsh*t RNG shop. If the class itself brought utility, no matter what weapon they had, it would have been fine, but that’s not the reality. If people complain about psykers using guns and that they SHOULD use staff for the utility you have a much larger design issue. Sienna never had this issue because her skills was actually useful and she could compete with all other classes in the game, psyker is lagging behind all other classes.
Yes you CAN play psyker, yes they CAN manage to be useful, but all other classes outshine them in every situation.
You can use BB from cover, and while you are sitting there hiding, the sharpshooter has already killed your target and 3 more.
People are complaining about the core problem, the core problem isn’t the shop when it comes to the design issues of psykers. People in this thread are assuming that you managed to get a decent weapon, and still, with psykers having a decent item, they lag behind the rest of classes.

No one here is telling people not to play them, they just want them improved, I don’t get this fervent defense of psykers when they are just objectively worse than all other classes.

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32

I feel like i gotta apologize, i din’t know people actually ran gun psyker builds, and went off on my grudge with not finding good staffs, i guess that says something about the state of the class.
i still think theres too many guns in the shop though.
Edit: i play SA servers so idk what builds what people make in the other regions.

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33

Psykers aren’t weak, they are just disappointing because their talents don’t really allow for any meaningful customization of their play style.

Staves are pretty good, but they could use more interesting blessing options, and their primary attack should be something with high DPS but low crowd control and horde clear potential so that it actually complements the slow low DPS secondary attacks, rather than just being superfluous.

For that matter, I’d like it if there were melee staves that hit decently hard, but their block is a seriously beefy force field that can block ranged, and their block attacks are genuinely dangerous short range psychic emanations.

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That would be awesome, we’ve already had combination melee/ranged weapons in VT2 with the Javelin, wouldn’t be unheard of.

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psyker IS WEAK

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36

This so much. High peril is not only a problem because of the danger of downing yourself if going too high, it also negatively affects vision and sound.

Sound in this game is so important, but if you’re above 50% peril (which you are a lot) the sound is really muffled so you often times can’t distinguish overall battle noise from important special cues.

In my opinion the problems with psyker compound on each other in ways that make gameplay feel slow, sluggish, and frustrating.

Trouble keeping up warp charges means you often have to brainburst, which gives you peril, which you need peril resistance to slow the rate of build up. And you need warp charges for damage and peril resist (and you really do need that), but you’re constantly generating peril which gimps your vision and hearing so you constantly have to quell peril otherwise you often can’t hear trappers or hounds in battle(particularly an issue with people who have certain hearing disorders that make it more difficult to distinguish sounds when there’s background noise), so you’re slow and often fall behind and stand there useless and vulnerable for 3-10 seconds while quelling(or you get jumped by a dog in the middle of a battle and everyone’s like why did’t you just move? - and you didn’t because your peripheral vision is blurred and it sounds like everything’s underwater), and time is ticking on your warp charges so you have to suddenly try to brain burst because you can’t rely on the occasional 4% proc from random kills unless you’re all killing large amounts of horde. It all feeds into each other.

I don’t think psyker is weak damage-wise. And as a sort of glass-cannon class it makes sense it’s not particularly tough. It has utility in many situations and not needing ammo on purgatus staff, for example, is a big boon. But it has these compounding, negative feedback loop-ish mechanic that makes you unnecessarily vulnerable and you can, well actually “remain a liability” to your team because often if you go down, someone will have to try to get you back up, and this can cause a cascade of further problems. Basically psyker has a rather taxing kind of peril and warp charges type of management.

TLDR:

  1. If peril generates too high, it obscures vision and hearing too much, making you vulnerable to being jumped in battle.
  2. Quelling peril takes time during which you’re basically useless and vulnerable, and slows your movement too, making you lag behind constantly, making you vulnerable to being jumped.
  3. Generating warp charges and keeping them up (required for regenerating toughness and getting peril resistance) takes attention away from more directly battle-related stuff.

Fix:
Make warp charges last 15 - 20 secs longer. Make the sound and visual effects that come with high peril considerably less intense, especially the sound. Reduce the movement-speed penalty that comes with quelling peril. Make warp charge proc chance on the random kill feat 5% or 6%, instead of 4%. Increase the amount of peril dumped with push to something like 65% instead of 50%.

All staves should have “cannot be interrupted when charging” as a built-in thing.

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37

Alright - I finally made a video demonstrating psyker gameplay on a solid mission run (see bottom of post)

This Heresy Mission had 2 psykers, 1 vet, and 1 zealot. The other psyker and I were frequently finishing each other’s BB kills. It was a crazy run as the spawns broke (we think?) and pox walkers were nearly constantly spawning nearby.

I added COMMENTS (subtitles) to the video explaining a few things as I go.

I can’t speak to damnation difficulty, but at least on Heresy I feel very impactful and strong as a psyker, and able to perform well in a bunch of situations.

A few things to point out:

  • I rarely worry about gaining warp stacks. With Psychic Communion and Kinetic Flayer I gain them nearly constantly as it is. This helps keep my toughness up.
  • I play “high peril” to maximize the damage boost as much as I can. I often charge the staff just to keep myself around 50% peril. You can start a BB right below 97% peril and not explode. I don’t want fast quelling equipment because I’d rather keep peril up.
  • If you get in trouble with peril, use ult. It recharges in 30 seconds. It’s very quick to come back.
  • Ascending Blaze is awesome for mass stagger and DOT. When you account for chip damage on targets, it will end up killing a fair amount of stuff. I usually regain 4 warp charges while fighting within 5-20 seconds, without needing to use BB.
  • Voidstrike staff - I mainly use minimally charged (RMB) bolts. I never LMB with this staff and rarely do a larger charge. Partially charged bolts stagger and penetrate, and with transfer peril blessing you can shoot it a lot in quick sequence while managing peril at a higher (but non-critical) level.
  • Dodging to reposition is key. You can charge BB and staffs in close proximity to melee threats by being good at dodging and using that as movement speed buff.
  • BB is great for opening up targets and dealing damage from safety. Plenty of cases where it was immensely useful on this run.

Pardon the poor video quality. I can only do 720p at 30 frames (and Darktide settings are all VERY low) since my computer = potato.

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I’m not sure what the point of the post was about since the original post explicitly says that psyker is not useless and that it can be useful, but is noticeably weaker than other classes.

and I’m not sure either that it can satisfy a balance discussion without playing on damnation since damage to die and to kill is alot less forgiving, but i’ll humour you.

Pretty standard match of heresy IMO, the game can be a lot more unforgiving than that on heresy without being hi-int. I think i’d only point out that both psykers struggled to get specialist kills, the zealot and the vet seemed to get most, probably because of their higher DPS, although i could be wrong. Other than that there isn’t much to say about this really.

Although i would add, while i don’t think that BB is that bad, the video does display some of it’s problems with how slow it is, since you fail to connect either to giving up on charging it or another player killing it quicker than you could charge several times, to be exact as far as i counted you used BB 19 times, 11 of those times you failed to connect or gave up, that is quite alot.

I’m aware of that build, and use it, it’s decent, my only problem with it is that some times when you need toughness regen and you don’t have a horde of enemies close enough to your ult or don’t have it charged, you are hoping that RNG will bless you with the 1/10 chance of BB, since using the BB manually to get the toughness back is unviable, it can be awful if you are especially unlucky, it also regens too slowly considering psyker has such low toughness.

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Thanks for checking out the video, I appreciate that.

I noted it in the video at one point, but me and the other psyker were often BBing the same special. I think they were a little quicker on the draw than me, so for the 1-hit BB targets they got more of those than me.

The other thing is that even if my BB didn’t kill the target, for larger targets I still did a lot of damage and staggered/opened up the target for others to quickly finish off. I don’t need to chase the kill feed to feel I’m being impactful.

At the end of the day, if Psyker gets a buff, either globally to damage in some way or multiple finer enhancements to skills/abilities, in certainly fine with that and I’m not going to complain about being stronger.

My worry in all of the psyker threads are the people screaming “OMG psyker is totally broken” - and I’d hate for Fatshark to totally revamp the class based on that feedback into something else that doesn’t give me the same satisfaction. Fatsharks track record with balance and addressing the actual concerns is pretty lacking, so by messing with the class there is a good chance they’ll ruin some other aspect of it that’s fun. I’d hate for that to happen.

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40

So much misunderstanding here about what actually ails the Psyker, it actually boggles the mind.

Psyker is a deeply flawed mess of systems that dont mesh well with actual gameplay.

Starting with Warp Charges:

  • The icon is tiny and tucked away on the buff bar, which can already get pretty visually messy.

  • Duration is far too low for how long it takes to get to max stacks. An encounter will often be practically finished by the time you max it.

  • Impossible to generate them in a single target encounter such as a Deamonhost, Plague Ogryn or Beast of Nurgle unless you constantly BB Poxwalkers in the vicinity throughout the encounter.

  • Each individual Warp Charge is only a 3% damage bonus. 12 - 18% damage bonus at max stacks. You are quite literally punishing yourself for not keeping stacks at max.

  • Scoring a killing blow with Brain Burst is the only guaranteed way to acquire a Warp Charge

  • If not using BB to acquire Warp Charges, You are wholly dependent on a 4% chance to gain a Charge on Squad members (including self) kill something or a 10% chance per hit to fire off an auto BB on a 15 second cooldown.

  • All of the alternative methods to generate a Warp Charge require killing blows and all are tied to an RNG of 4 - 10%.
    There are no “On-Hit” methods to gain Warp Charges.

I may have missed something, but thats the gist of issues facing Warp Charges.
The biggest issue though, would be the simple observation that the best way to get Warp Charges is to rely on the RNG rather than BB, essentially railroading you into specific feats.
Compare Warp Charges to literally any other class passive.
Hint: All the other Class passives are permanent bonuses. Hell, a Zealot maintaining 3 stacks of Martyrdom gets 15% damage at 145 HP, with no time constraints.

Now for Brain Burst:

  • Extremely slow cast speed.

  • Fixed damage, unaffected by any blessings or power progression.

  • Fixed Peril generation, Force Weapons do not confer their Resistance and Quelling stats to Brain Burst.

  • Many Feats that relate to Brain Burst trigger when Brain Burst itself scores a killing blow.
    Often also requiring that the target is an Elite.

  • Has 1 useful advantage: Once locked to a target and charging has begun, the damage will land regardless of LoS.
    This is countered almost wholly by the stupid fact that hostiles are not valid targets for BB if behind absolutely anything, including a simple chainlink fence or grate that can be shot through with guns, but not staves because of course not.

  • Significant lag when switching to BB from a Staff, particularly after firing a shot with the staff. Requiring you to either quickswap to melee and go to BB from there or wait for the post shot animations of the staff to complete.

Thats largely the issues Brain Burst has from a sheer mechanical standpoint.
And on top of that, we add in the fact that most of the Feat tree for Psykers wants you to be regularly using Brain Burst as often as possible.

Psyker is the only class who can go an entire mission without triggering their Feats, often through no fault of their own because teammates will often kill Brain Burst targets before the charge completes, denying you all the benefits that a killing blow offers through the feats.

Psyker badly needs its systems looked at. There is no good reason that any Class should suffer from having their feats denied usage by their teammates through no ill intent.

PS: To anyone saying they can do damnation just fine as a Psyker: Just because you can complete a mission, doesn’t mean the underlying class mechanics arent broken.

Its not about buffing Psykers into god slaying super soldiers. Its about fixing all the broken mechanics so that the class actually functions properly.

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41

This is something I can get behind. The staves’ left click is painfully bad coming from VT2 (Where it was already only just ‘serviceable’) and by far one of the biggest things I find myself frustrated with. With conflag staff I felt fine poking heads/taking out specials with it, with the trauma staff I find myself annoyed by how pitiful its !fireballs are. (Also how laggy and crap they feel to shoot but that’s another matter. Fix the servers or add P2P thanks.)

Disagreeing with what you’re criticizing is the point. Pointing out things aren’t as bad as you say/disagreeing with what the problems are isn’t a fervent defense.

Psyker’s core issues to me right now are:

Lack of a reliable burst toughness regen option. (Peril quelling toughness is pretty strong though) A blessing for staves based around peril generated so you have a more consistent up and down time might be a nice option?

Staves’ left click sucks.

Warp charges in general are just extraneous and set up bad expectations for the class. This one is the big tricky one that tends to cause a lot of the disagreements. Detaching them from brain burst would go a long way to fixing why a lot of people over focus on brain bursting and think it’s an issue. If they do keep them together they need to adjust brain burst in some manner so that it’s not as anti teamwork as it can feel, as going for a head pop only for the target to die anyway feels terrible. Either making it charge faster based on target HP and/or giving a charge regardless as long as the target dies. Give it a very small cooldown (EG: .5 seconds if that) if they were to go down this route, so you can’t just chain spam at a horde your team is killing to instantly get full charges.

It’s set up to be agile but the current spawning system of the game along with poor quality servers greatly hampers your ability to totally avoid damage at times.

Make quelling consistent (AKA use your highest quell speed) across weapons/brain burst so you don’t have to awkwardly swap to your staff instead of staring at your beautiful, beautiful fingers. It’s one of those things that in theory raises the skill cap but it’s just busy work and irritating to remember to do. At the very least make your hands use your highest quell speed, perhaps keep the weapon separate to account for things like the force sword.

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