So there’s a lot of discussion currently about the psyker and the state that it is currently in. A lot of people agree that it has been nerfed into the ground and that it just doesn’t feel good to play at the moment due to everything that makes the psyker a psyker generating too much peril to rotate your kit between brain burst and using force weapons such as the sword or staves, which in turn pigeonholes you into using regular guns and swords so you can use brain burst since many of the feats are built for brain burst specifically. I’ve seen that these nerfs were made to discourage players from spamming brain burst, and that feats later on will boost the brain burst’s power.
I think this is the wrong approach to take, if the class is not fun to play in its early levels, not many people are going to play it until they get to the later levels where it allegedly becomes fun.
If the real issue and the reason for these nerfs are that players were using brain burst too much, I think a simple solution and a suggestion I’ve seen that I quite agree with is to make the brain burst the psyker’s class ability and make it instant cast much like waystalker kerillian, bounty hunter saltzpyre, or pyromancer sienna’s class ability in Vermintide 2, where it’s an instant delete button that can quickly kill a special or elite but then have it on a cool down. The current class ability that pushes should be turned into the grenade/blitz ability for the class instead.
I think this would solve the brain burst spamming and make for more varied gameplay although would obviously require some reworking of the feats to not be so overly reliant on brain bursts. This would allow people to carry and use force swords and force staves and enact the class fantasy of being a space wizard casting more spells while also giving them a more powerful brain burst that can be used less often and having their grenade ability function as a wave clear/stagger.
not sure i agree with your skill swap suggestion
however, adjusting the traits is definitely the way to go… everything in the traits massively incentivizes bursting right now, and i’d rather use a healthy rotation of staves and bursting… but i cant, because peril costs are too damn high
i WANT to use a variety of spells… thats what “wizard” classes are about for me… have a selection of tools each tailored for a job and rotate as needed or as desired
using pretty much only brainburst is not fun… using a variety of spells definitely is fun however
all of it needs a reduction of peril use, and/or separate pools, or maybe they can put brain burst on “charges” so you cant spam it too fast beyond few casts
either way, current approach of “make it expensive” is just not going to achieve what they want, it needs tweaks
I absolutely agree with this take, if people use brain burst too much, then just limits its use without crippling the other options.
What they could do is make it so you can only burst like 3/4 times at once, with each charge having a set cooldown (instead of having to pick up charges from a box). This would make brain burst into a more specialised elite killer tool, instead of the main thing.
They could even add options to restore charges like say a % chance to regain a brain burst charge on a warp based kill, or something along those lines encouraging using the psykers varied toolkit to its full potential, instead of bursting constantly.
I’d like to add a suggestion to this: Make force sword special attack reduce peril so it can be used more fluidly in combat.
Build peril then switch to sword and “funnel” the excess warp into the sword for the special attack