The Psykinetic is in my opinion a good class, even though it was scaled back a bit from how strong it was in the last closed beta. I do have some serious gripes with how this classes passive mechanics work however, because if you want to build a character around force weapons the talents really don’t support your play style, and instead push you toward a Brain Burst build.
The big culprit here is the warp charge mechanic. Since charges are primarily generated by brain burst every single talent that synergizes off warp charge also synergizes off brain burst. There is no combination of talents you can pick that works if you want to play in a way where the majority of your peril is generated from other sources.
Basically the Psyker tree doesn’t split up into distinct styles of play the way the Veteran tree does, instead it curves in on itself and creates a circular synergy around brain burst that doesn’t allow anything else that generates peril to work. If you’re using regular weapons you don’t have to sit on brain burst all day, but you can switch to brain burst whenever you need to.
Because charges are a class resource that you gain from spending peril through brain burst you get starved of that resource when you spend peril in other ways.
Let’s say you want to make a staff build that uses staff powers a lot. You would want to maximize peril management. How do you do that? Inner Tranquility, Psychic Communion, Mind in Motion, Warp Battery, Quicken? Your peril reduction requires charges, you’re only gaining them passively at a slow rate, and your class ability now consumes charges. The entire build comes apart because you’re not using brain burst as your main weapon.
Let’s say you want to make a force sword build that dives in and uses peril for blocking and pushing. What do you pick for that? Probably Psychic Communion again, because you have no other way of gaining charges. Kinetic Deflection is a no brainer here. Then what? Kinetic Overload would be great, because if you’re looking to get up close and personal setting enemies near you on fire would be amazing, but it runs on generating excess warp charges and you don’t generate a lot of them without brain bursting non stop. Kinetic Flayer? Well, that will generate an OK number of charges, but it will eat into your peril meter, and you can’t set things on fire with the charges anymore. Ascendant Blaze? In theory it would be really bad ass to wade into melee and burn everything around you, but you’re already generating charges at a low rate, so the last thing you need is for your ability to eat them all.
No matter what you want to build, it always comes back to the same issue: Unless you’re using brain burst as often as possible you don’t generate charges at a high enough rate to support other builds. All the ways to generate some charges passively without brain bursting are too slow to support talents that consume them or proc on gaining them.
Probably the simplest fix to this would be to change it so you gain warp charges on any kill with an attack that generated peril. Cap it to one charge every 2 seconds so that big staff explosions don’t fill the whole meter in one go. But then you could generate charges with your force sword special or push-stab, or by killing people with a force staff. Suddenly all of these builds that are getting crapped on by the overdependency on brain burst actually work.
Brain burst is still in a good spot, it’s a powerful anti elite tool and it has additional synergies. It doesn’t have to be in this weird place where it’s absolutely essential to spam it non-stop for any build to really work.
