trap talent
you never want to have less peril
basically 2 downsides in one
Some of these takes are just… phew.
To dumb it down just to make a point:
- The most efficient psyker gameplay is about keeping your peril as high as you can while blasting
- When you’re at that 80%+ peril for the max Nexus / Rider / Vent & Creeping flames … everything really → Empyric Resolve & Quietude means ~70% less quelling needed
- It’s a flat, raw buff to DPS
Yes there are exceptions, like purge or some talent setups like Quietude + By Crack of Bone / Tranquility Through Slaughter etc. But overwhelmingly, Empyric Resolve is an insanely powerful pick.
But between this and that one person claiming to be lvl 1200 saying Voidstrike sucks just omg. I think I’ve said my piece here. 
1 Like
I have never seen someone defend this talent
can you not do the same thing by quelling for literally 1 second, whats the point on wasting a point for this, since you cant die from overcapping peril so you can just stay at 99 and still shoot
youre also reducing the time to get to max value soulblaze from shriek
and getting less value from the first 5? tougness regen talents
I won’t argue that Trauma is the overall best staff. It is. I used to main it for the first year and still regularly go back to it. Only reason I tend to do Void now is bc over a year of using Trauma 95% of the time what with over half its blessings either sucking or not working at all - giving next to no build variety - was far too much to handle. 
It’s just ultra boring now.
But I don’t know what to tell you. If you have 1200 levels in and think Voidstrike is weak… well. There’s definitely nothing to be gained by discussing it further. The only reason Trauma is the best staff is because it can’t be overwhelmed by elites and brings that brittleness for the team. Outside of that Void is way stronger.
For same reason now im play gunpsyker. Because its gameplay more fluid. Flexible. Faster. Complicated. (u need all u tools to survive, and u need to switch from one to another).
Im just try it all. Many hours. Maybe its just not for my style of gameplay.
1 Like
It depends on the build and playstyle I guess. If you’re hellbent on spamming staff attacks I can see the case for Empiric Resolve + Solidity.
But at the same time for a more flexible playstyle these two seem to be working at cross-purposes.
I tend to play more melee focused as a psyker, so that may be biasing my perspective here - but I don’t want to reduce my peril gain usually because I want to get it to max level as FAST as possible to leverage all the benefits of high peril.
Likewise, I don’t want to make my active quell speed faster (i.e. Solidity) because I only need to tap the quell button for a fraction of a second to get back in the safe zone to cast again.
Battle Mediation sometimes screws you when you land a pile of kills and it proc’s a bunch of times and lowers your peril faster than you want. When that happens - it’s good to NOT have peril gen reduction so can build up quickly again.
And for all the importance of maintaining 100% toughness on Psyker, I’d never pick an ability that reduces toughness gained by 30%. That alone nullifies half the other good talent’s. Survivability is more important IMHO. I’d agree that it feels like two negatives to me - at least as far as more flexible melee-oriented playstyles are concerned.
1 Like
Empyric Resolve is useful for uptime in a pure smite spam build. Useful, effective, controversial.
1 Like
I hear you… and yet… 
Disrupt Destiny is fun and powerful, but you also have to be careful with it. If you get sucked into chasing DD targets you can get tunnel visioned as you fight to maintain it’s uptime. For a generalist build (especially aimed at giving something flexible yet strong), I feel like DD adds a complexity and pushes you to behave sometimes in sub-optimal ways.
While in many situations BB and voidstrike can accomplish similar things (I admit there’s some redundancy), BB nevertheless brings a unique degree of utility. The ability to kill elusive specialists (dogs, trappers, bombers, snipers), dodge out of sight and kill ranged elites/specialists (flamers, gunners), stagger ogryns (especially bulwarks), and deal excellent boss damage. You can use a voidstrike for hordes, mobs of melee/elites, LMB for scattered ranged enemies, etc. - but BB is excellent and particularly with EP.
Yes. Smite is simultaneously too strong AND irritating in the hands of a good player, and it’s irritating and a liability in the hands of weak player. The only reason I’d consider taking it in this build is to get access to both branches (for Malefic Momentum mostly). Just not worth it.
But I do acknowledge it should probably be listed as good/excellent - but conditional on not being totally irritating with it.
More broadly, I think this build can be tweaked to work pretty well with any staff - although if using Electrokinetic or Purgatus you’d want to drop True Aim and the node above to take something else. Swapping to Trauma is easy, and you can get the CC of Smite AND better damage output in less time.
That would explain the rationale :). Who needs toughness regen when every enemy within 15m is stun locked - right?
3 Likes
You can maintain your peril levels easily by tapping primaries etc. while sliding around, so you really only need to build it up once. You also have the option of Force Swords like the pic above to push it up instantly no matter what. But since Nexus caps at 80% and charge levels are a thing, it’s almost never just a matter of tapping quell once to get 100% → 98%. You want to dip below 80% and then get as many uses as you can until quelling again.
So overwhelmingly, building peril isn’t an issue, maintaining it and making the best use of staying in that ideal range is. So the numbers come down to this:
- Without Solidity, quelling from ~100% → <80% takes almost 30% longer
- Without Empyric Resolve you need to quell further past 80%, to ~70%+ or so, so that your next charged blast is just there at ~80%, adding even more of a delay. With Empyric Resolve the peril buildup difference means even ~75%+ is enough.
- Without Empyric Resolve you’ll have the ~1/3+ less shots from <80% → 100% before you need to quell again
The difference is extremely noticeable on every single staff build, and the DPS differences - as much as I hate referring to scoreboard - are very obvious. But it’s not just staves, even on Scrier’s gunpsyker / melee builds that -40% peril generation is huge and gives you a much higher uptime on Scrier’s, which ofc. means longer & higher buffs & stacks.
The only downside other than the talent costs (which are none if you’re going to Warp Siphon anyway) is that toughness regen. And yes obviously it matters, but the better you are at dodging and the more dmg you deal, the less impact it has. And this dmg difference plays directly into the talent itself. Between Solidity & ER you’ll be dishing out a ton more damage with shorter breaks than usual which means proccing Soulstealer etc far more often too, so it’s not -30% toughness regen in practice but often evens out or even comes to net positive depending on your performance.
1 Like
U have talent that quell on crit. Its more than enough to gain 30 stacks.
For fast guns that procs those crits frequently, yes. It’s once per attack only so slower weapons like shotguns, bolt pistols, revolvers etc. get very little out of it.
They are hardly directly comparable, same as By Crack of Bone.
That requires a non-warp ranged weapon. Here’s an example of using it with a scrier’s staff build to get more scrier’s stacks https://youtu.be/LkgOmEdOx8c?si=QUE-YmOSCe71BR9l
Yeah…as this was called out before the release of those changes, these builds are, not so surprisingly, disgusting. I’m unlikely to ever try these before the nerfs, the light attack spam with a staff doesn’t appeal to me, I think I would fall asleep.
I got tired of staves before Patch13 which brought the talent tree changes. I really cannot remember the last time I played with a staff. I wish light attacks were unique as they are in VT2, and the secondary attack play rewarded finesse / aim more.
I think it’s ok if you don’t use a quell cancel macro. Boring or not is more subjective.
This is a complete player issue, and hardly ever a real concern with how short ttk is. Especially with lingering influence stack decay is almost unnoticeable and you barely need to focus on DD targets.
I don’t understand how it would force anyone who knows what they are doing to play “sub optimally.”
3 Likes
Your argument against it is… poor self control and tunnel vision? That sounds like a you problem, honestly.
Especially if you want to argue that your build is a ‘generalist’ one… by focusing on BB keystones? Heavy disagree. For the usecase you describe base BB is more than sufficient. A generalist would do much better with DD in the paths you’ve built.
That’s why I dislike ‘guides’ like these. Someone thinks up something based on his personal preference and sells it as a baseline to new players, which in turn fall into all the traps of a build designed to one persons specific tastes.
The talent evaluations I can mostly agree with… the build recommendations sadly not. Lots of noob trap material. Especially for lower level psyker players coming from malice or heresy, which already fosters an unhealthy overdependance on their Blitz, due to how powerful it is on those difficulty levels.
2 Likes
The Voidstrike’s utility, to my mind, is not in its ability to deal with Crushers. In fact, I don’t really like it for dealing with Crushers.
What it’s great at is basically being a nigh-infinitely-firing support weapon, particularly with Warp Flurry. You can blap hordes even at close ranges. You can engage snipers at great distances. You can deal with clumps and conga-lines of Elites with charged shots. You can react to and quickly kill or disrupt Specialists.
I can shoot and keep shooting for longer than almost any other class. The sustained continual killing power is where it’s at.
Other staves are better at specific niches, but the Voidstrike can be better than average at many different things while being incredibly sustainable.
That said, it needs Warp Flurry, at least in my hands. Totally falls apart if you don’t have that enhanced charge rate.
has any one tried or tested Charged Strike (the smite add on)?
Does it make your heavy melee attacks be like the shock maul lights or something?