Psyker tooltip and gameplay issues as well as suggestions for the class

[AC3NATOR]

Hello there Fatshark! I hope a game designer there sees this, or one of the kind community managers could forward this to their attention!

Here is a compilation of thoughts and suggestions, ranging first from poor tooltips or nonfunctional abilities to my own thoughts and ponderances about ludologistic approaches.

Here is a list of Psyker ability issues:

Psykinetics Aura does not give the psyker cooldown back during scrier’s gaze.
Seer’s Presence does not give psyker cooldown when using scrier’s gaze
Warp Siphon does not give psyker cooldown when using scrier’s gaze

Precognition does not say that it only grants the weakspot-kill-counted-as-1-second only after scriers gaze ends
OR
Precognition does not give psyker the benefit of the weakspot-kill-counted-as-1-second during scriers gaze.

Disrupt Destiny does not state that it only targets Non-Ogryn Elites, Shooters and Bruisers.
OR
Disrupt Destiny does not mark any enemy, it does not mark specialists, monstrosities, ogryn elites or horde.

Disrupt Destiny does not state that its duration is refreshed on hitting a marked creature

“Ludologisms” and other Psyker Suggestions/Grievances:

Balance:

Assail and other blitzes.
-Ethereal Shards makes assails ability to kill everything overpowering. Damage should be lowered by each enemy passed to make it reasonable.
-Assail shards are supremely good for all situations barring fighting crushers, but fighting crushers can easily be alleviated by using uncanny strike on a force sword or a dueling sword or by using an armor piercing staff or the revolver.
-Charged assails have similar performance against gunner and shotgunner groups as well as specialists as brain rupture, whilst retaining all the other benefits of choosing assail. Assail vastly outperforms brain rupture in a few ways:

One assail shard is enough to stagger a rager out of animation, weapon switching and throwing a dart takes a fraction of the time what a brainrupture requires to achieve a cancelling of a rager flurry, since brain rupture does not stagger until the end of casting. Assail shards also can easily be used to stagger shooters and gunners and reapers. Assail can also be used to stagger open bulwarks, which I find to be a cool skill-based move where you use the control of the camera to guide the shards, but that is another point to assails overpowering nature.

Suggestion: Reintroduce the ability for Brain Rupture to stagger when the psyker uses Lock Psychic Power To Target, that existed in the Open Beta, allowing psykers to choose a new way to play, which is using brain rupture as a stagger tool. This could be a perk tied to brain rupture, and as such balanced, it could also have a set amount of uses and a cooldown, if that is desired.

Also, smite suffers from similar problems, as a committed crowd control ability, I find it frustrating that smite requries accumulated stagger to actually start staggering real threats. Smite should stagger enemies instantly, to make it on par to assail in smite’s intended forte.

I hope that you at fatshark can understand that some people want to quick-swap to brainrupture/smite to use them as clever tools of hybrid combat.

Venting Shriek:
The Venting Shrieks Warp Rupture ability is terrible at higher levels, since it does not do enough damage to be considered worthwhile when the other option sitting next to it, which it is mutually exclusive with is just more damage for no extra thinking, which also just combos with wildfire.

Suggestion:
I suggest Warp Rupture should be buffed, and I have a few ideas for that, It could use a psychic ability that exists in at least the Dark Heresy Warhammer Roleplaying game, where a psyker ruins the inner machining of their enemies guns, breaking them. This could be a cool ultimate, which forces all ranged enemies to lose the ability to shoot with their guns. To make this balanced, you can of course make the ultimate have a longer cooldown, you can also have it be a random chance ability, that scales with peril for uniformity. You can also have it be temporary, which does not make much realistic sense to me, but it is an option. All Ranged Enemies have melee attacks, so it should not be a problem in that sense.

Suggestion:
Another idea, which I would enjoy, is that warp rupture gets a new option, which changes venting shrieks aoe stagger it to a beam of energy/Lighting Bolt that pierces enemies and as such can do a small fun amount of hordeclear, this way giving psykers a fun big damage blast ultimate option. It could be called Venting Beam/Grounding Bolt, but that is just flavour. This again could require a longer cooldown, and perhaps lose the ability to save a psyker from exploding, if you wanted to have that. Comparable to the use cases of Bounty Hunter’s Pistol back in vt2. I myself would like a beam more, but eh.

Scrier’s Gaze:

The Scrier’s Gaze is an odd ultimate since based on the name one would think that it is a divination/prediction type of mindreading ability, but it seems that it uses abilities of biomancy such as Warp Speed and Endurance. I suggest you add a path for it to be able to show non-horde enemy heads through walls, which could be mutually exclusive with Warp Speed and Endurance for balance reasons. This could use the Brain-Rupture head effect, with slight size change and maybe a more purple colour and the game just drawing the effect onto the screen so that it shows over everything, akin to veteran’s executioner’s stance. Let us call this idea Scrier’s Hunt, then Scrier’s Hunt could allow another node, let us call that “Psychic Huntmaster”, which allows the vision of the heads be seen by other characters in coherency and it could share 10-30% of the benefit that your scrier’s gaze has.

Brain Rupture

I miss the days of the 25% increased damage to enemy targeted with brain rupture, at least that would make brain rupture be good compared to assail by allowing the psyker to have the party do more monster damage. Something similar could be reintroduced, maybe not 25% but it could be something like 15% - 20%

Suggestions:
Add a node to Brain Rupture that brings back the 25% increased damage against creatures hit with Brain Rupture.
Another fun idea for a node for Brain Rupture could be “Skull Fragments” which causes a fun small aoe explosion of damage to the nearby enemies when an enemy is killed with brain rupture. This could be balanced with the casting time being made longer or something such as that. This could also get some mutual exclusivities with other options.

Kinetic Flayer:

I think Kinetic Flayer’s current iteration is unfun, as it is so uncontrollable and lacking in thought.
Suggestion:
Change Kinetic Flayer to instead add a function for the psyker to use Weapon Special whilst holding Brain Rupture, where the psyker then has their next attack also do a Brain Rupture, this way the psyker has control over the event, and it is not hard to implement. It could still have the same cooldown. If this is too powerful because it allows psykers to control kinetic flayer, it could have a longer cooldown and a casting time to prepare the ability with Weapon Special Button.

Also, about Kinetic Flayer’s current iteration:
The ability has a chance to cause poxbursters to explode on you when using a force swords holding m1 bash->bashattack combo, since the force push that the psyker does causes 0 damage, but it still has a 10 percent chance to use the ability, it makes Kinetic Flayer even more unfun.

Smite:
This is not as important in my eyes, but if one is to add more nodes to brain rupture in the name of more fun builds, Smite could get a node that is mutually exclusive with other, aoe focused, options, allowing you to use the m1 or the m2 fire mode as a chargeable lighting bolt for a long range single target damage option, which does not however outperform brain rupture just an idea.

Build Variety:

Node connection issues:
I know @Somberyu made a post similar to a few of these points but no matter.
Psyker is indeed not as tinkerable as “the most tinkerable class would have one believe”
Psykers cannot use Mind in Motion or Malefic Momentum with Brain Rupture
Psykers cannot use Wildfire or Psykinetic’s Aura with Assail

Psykers cannot use Anticipation and Unlucky for some with Seer’s Presence
Psykers cannot use Empathic Evasion and Anticipation with Kinetic Presence.
Psykers cannot use One with the Warp and Unlucky for some with Prescience.

Psykers cannot use Prescience and Venting Shriek
Psykers cannot use Kinetic Presence with Scrier’s Gaze

Suggestion:
These can all be fixed with a few horizontal lines between nodes, if the new options become too powerful, add nodes as tax.

Peril Generation issue:
If a psyker takes Brain Rupture and Venting Shriek, they are forced to take -15% peril generation nodes, which hurts a lot since psykers want to be able to generate peril. Psykers want to create Peril for the purposes of abilities like One With The Warp, Warp Rider, Quietude and Warp Expenditure. This doubly hurts since they are not things like -15% toughness damage taken (Opportunity Cost).
Suggestion:
The psyker left side could have an additional node path, that allows a player to not take peril generation, instead taking toughness damage reduction. This does not even need to be 5%. The nodes could give psyker no actual benefit, and I and a few players I know would pick them still, since the benefit is that they can play brain rupture and venting shriek without suffering the penalty of -15% peril generation. So, it can be balanced by making them something like: +2.5% maximum health/toughness damage reduction.

Warp Siphon:
-Warp Siphon is behind far too many tax-nodes for it to compete against the two other options. The other two get their full benefit for far less cost.

Suggestion: Move the nodes around to allow you to go to warp siphon faster, maybe making them a side-option.

Cool psyker concepts:
Militarum Psyker:
A line of nodes for psyker that has a heavy tax of points to allow you to equip some heavier weapons from the other classes, such as the braced autoguns and shotguns. (Of course you need to build the weapons for the psyker character, but similar to vermintide with career exclusive weapons you cannot equip them without taking the node) This offshoot nodeline could also have some things that allow the psyker to use Peril whilst using alternate fire with firearms, similar to guardsman Deadshot but with peril, maybe giving the psyker a little rending for their ranged weapons. And perhaps a node that gives psykers some more ammo reserve, or ways to get ammo or save ammo during the game. No need to be comparable to Veteran’s or Ogryns +25% increase. This way gun psyker is supported more.

Psychic Dash:
It could be fun for a psyker to get the ability to perform a short range teleport/quick dash, similar to sienna’s firewalk. This could be implemented in, for example, the Venting Shriek, as a mutually exclusive option, or I thought that it could be a fun node, that has an internal cooldown and could function for example by the player holding their jumping button down, allowing them to enter a short levitative period whilst their teleport reticle shows up and allowing them to then click attack to accept it or stop the button press to release. This could all cost peril as well. This could also be somewhere beyond a node tax.

[umikaloo]

I actually really like assail the way it is.

What if Brain burst were tweaked to have a much quicker cast time, but a much longer cooldown, such that the timing is the same for chained BBs, but you can cast your first brain burst much more quickly, making them more useful as a reactive ability.

[Ayarraz]

Emperor, help me, assail whining again…

Just no, no to everything in this post. No. Bad ideas. All of them.

[AC3NATOR]

@umikaloo

I actually really like assail the way it is.

What if Brain burst were tweaked to have a much quicker cast time, but a much longer cooldown, such that the timing is the same for chained BBs, but you can cast your first brain burst much more quickly, making them more useful as a reactive ability.

I have to agree on the fact that Assail as it is, is okay. Although I still think that assail is performing more compared to the other options. Of course, if they add the things discussed to Brain Rupture and Smite, I would not even have that against Assail.

Also, your idea is nice as well, and I thought from that that Brain Rupture could get an “ammo loop” mechanic similar to what you proposed by you. The code for it already exists in assail. Assail code already supports a blitz having a cooldown and an amount of uses. Would make Brain Rupture less spammy and more engaging and thought-provoking.

[Flawless]

Having two augment options for the same ability, with both of them dealing damage in some way, is kinda bad.

I would like it if warp rupture was a different kind of augment to the ability.

For example, instead of dealing direct damage, it could turn the default forward cone of the ult into a circular aoe around the player.
Smaller aoe and no damage, but with increased stagger power that enables a much stronger defensive use (similar to the activation effect of VOC).

[AC3NATOR]

@Flawless

Having two augment options for the same ability, with both of them dealing damage in some way, is kinda bad.

I assume you refer to the current iteration of 100-200 damage to hit targets and the 1-6 stacks of soulblaze? (Correct me if I am wrong, and please specify to which you refer, so I can better respond .)

I do agree, there could be a node for venting shriek to turn it into a 360 degree self centered aoe, but that does not need to replace Warp Rupture, in current iteration or the one already proposed, since we can add more nodes.

[BongoSkaggs]

Nice post. I’ve had a lot of thoughts about the state of psyker along similar veins.

@AC3NATOR

Balance:

Assail and other blitzes.
-Ethereal Shards makes assails ability to kill everything overpowering. Damage should be lowered by each enemy passed to make it reasonable.

Assail should be made into a new actual, equipable secondary weapon and have the blitz replaced by something else. There is nothing Fatshark can do to balance assail as a blitz without just nerfing it into the ground. By the very nature of assail the shards are spammy as hell, which is where half of the fun if using them comes from. But that spammy nature entirely goes against the entire design philosophy of blitzes Fatshark has established through the game’s lifespan that blitzes should not be spammed to hell and back.

Similarly, smite should either:
A) Be removed as a blitz and have the old surge staff reimplemented as a new variant.
B) Be massively adjusted so it’s not possible to be spammed for long periods of time.

Smite spam psykers are incredibly frustrating teammates. At best they are annoyingly removing gameplay from their teammates. And at worst they are near total dead weight that thinks they are being helpful.

@AC3NATOR

Build Variety:

Node connection issues:
[…]

Suggestion:
These can all be fixed with a few horizontal lines between nodes, if the new options become too powerful, add nodes as tax.

I don’t believe this line of thought will solve psyker’s lack of build variety. Instead, psyker needs more talents period. As a class psyker has the fewest number of non-ult, non-keystone, non-blitz talents by far. Clocking in at a mere 20 talents. The next lowest is ogryn at 30 talents, which is still 50% more than psyker.

The other part of increasing psyker build variety is just giving them more bloody weapons. Why we haven’t got any new staffs, or even any bloody variants, in over a year is beyond me. Would also be nice if psyker got more unique weapon specials. Currently only the laspistols have this feature but adding more could really spice up the gunplay on the class, which it could use frankly.

@AC3NATOR

Warp Siphon:
-Warp Siphon is behind far too many tax-nodes for it to compete against the two other options. The other two get their full benefit for far less cost.

Suggestion: Move the nodes around to allow you to go to warp siphon faster, maybe making them a side-option.

Warp siphon should just be reduced to 4 talents instead of bloody 7. Main keystone should be 4% damage stack on elite/special kill. One modifier should be expending stacks on cooldown reduction. Warp battery can be left as is. Psychic vampire & in fire reborn should be combined in some way. And essence harvest should be junked.

@AC3NATOR

Psychic Dash:
It could be fun for a psyker to get the ability to perform a short range teleport/quick dash, similar to sienna’s firewalk. This could be implemented in, for example, the Venting Shriek, as a mutually exclusive option

I’ve also wanted a teleport option. Imo it should be a blitz and could easily replace assail too, killing two birds with one stone. Or they could be really radical and redo scrier’s gaze as a stimm-like blitz and make the teleport into a new ability. Both would be fine by me.

[Molonious]

@BongoSkaggs

Assail should be made into a new actual, equipable secondary weapon and have the blitz replaced by something else. There is nothing Fatshark can do to balance assail as a blitz without just nerfing it into the ground. By the very nature of assail the shards are spammy as hell, which is where half of the fun if using them comes from. But that spammy nature entirely goes against the entire design philosophy of blitzes Fatshark has established through the game’s lifespan that blitzes should not be spammed to hell and back.

On this count, honestly I wish they’d built the Gunspyker tree around the Assail functionality. Just spiking raw damage and making the Gunspyker a crit monster feels lazy, boring, and narratively inappropriate, I’d way rather see some wicked gun-fu stuff and unique utility. A gunpsyker using their powers to enhance their weapon, guiding projectiles or shooting things around corners and whatnot, would have been really cool, if you could make an Autogun’s bullets guide themselves and penetrate targets like Assail that would have been a genuinely neat enhancement.

[AC3NATOR]

@BongoSkaggs

Assail should be made into a new actual, equipable secondary weapon and have the blitz replaced by something else. There is nothing Fatshark can do to balance assail as a blitz without just nerfing it into the ground. By the very nature of assail the shards are spammy as hell, which is where half of the fun if using them comes from. But that spammy nature entirely goes against the entire design philosophy of blitzes Fatshark has established through the game’s lifespan that blitzes should not be spammed to hell and back.

Similarly, smite should either:
A) Be removed as a blitz and have the old surge staff reimplemented as a new variant.
B) Be massively adjusted so it’s not possible to be spammed for long periods of time.

Smite spam psykers are incredibly frustrating teammates. At best they are annoyingly removing gameplay from their teammates. And at worst they are near total dead weight that thinks they are being helpful.

This brought to my mind that they could change assail to be less spammy by introducing a “first recovery” delay. It could take 30 seconds for the assail shards to start recovering at a pace of 1 per 3 seconds.

This same idea can be implemented for every blitz of psyker, that way blitzes become this resource that you consider, and spamming is not an option, and can be made more satisfying or powerful to use.

[AC3NATOR]

@Molonious

On this count, honestly I wish they’d built the Gunspyker tree around the Assail functionality. Just spiking raw damage and making the Gunspyker a crit monster feels lazy, boring, and narratively inappropriate, I’d way rather see some wicked gun-fu stuff and unique utility. A gunpsyker using their powers to enhance their weapon, guiding projectiles or shooting things around corners and whatnot, would have been really cool, if you could make an Autogun’s bullets guide themselves and penetrate targets like Assail that would have been a genuinely neat enhancement.

I am loving this, all of this, yep this. I wanted this stuff as well, but I didn’t include them since I wanted to be friendly to the designers and programmers there, something with a low threshold of changing.

[Aetrion]

Warp Charges are currently a bad system because they passive benefits of keeping the charges are so nice that you don’t want to spend them, which means picking Warp Siphon makes you use you abilities less, not more most of the time.

They should change the passives to being buffs you gain when you spend the charges, and have those buffs last long enough that you can maintain 100% uptime if you constantly spend instead of hording them.

[Flawless]

@AC3NATOR

It could take 30 seconds for the assail shards to start recovering at a pace of 1 per 3 seconds.

Ah yes… people coming in with their suggestions to try and ruin the psyker class again…

[Flawless]

@BongoSkaggs

that spammy nature entirely goes against the entire design philosophy of blitzes Fatshark has established through the game’s lifespan that blitzes should not be spammed to hell and back.

@AC3NATOR

This same idea can be implemented for every blitz of psyker, that way blitzes become this resource that you consider, and spamming is not an option, and can be made more satisfying or powerful to use.

Psyker blitz was always spamable.
It is the design philosophy of the psyker.

You guys want to remove the psyker‘s identity, while lying about your intentions.

What comes next?
Cooldowns for force staffs and melee weapons, to make them “more satisfying to use”?

Get out of here with these “improvements”.

[BongoSkaggs]

Oh yes, silly me I totally forgot Fatshark was 110% overjoyed with people just constantly brain bursting everything. That’s precisely why brain burst was so heavily nerfed last year around launch.

[Flawless]

@BongoSkaggs

Oh yes, silly me I totally forgot Fatshark was 110% overjoyed with people just constantly brain bursting everything. That’s precisely why brain burst was so heavily nerfed last year around launch.

Ok, so you claim that BB was nerfed at launch, so that players would no longer spam it. Because FS do not want anyone to spam BB…

But did FS give it a cooldown at any point, to make BB like the blitzes of the other classes, to actually stop players from spamming it?
No. They did not.

What they actually did is, they buffed BB multiple times after launch.
They designed a few penances entirely around spamming BB.
And for the first year (during which BB was the only blitz option for psykers), the entire warp charge mechanic was mostly designed around spamming BB.

So it seems that your “reasoning“ was entirely pulled from a place where the sun doesn‘t shine.

Any decent psyker player should know, that the psyker is the class that swaps through weapons the most.
Having blitzes that you can use pretty much at any time, is the foundation of making this possible.

You seem to have no idea about actually playing the class, or about its identity.
Yet you are trying to completely change it, based on lies.

You were never supposed to spam BB at everything btw. You are supposed to use it to focus down specials and elites, and to dps bosses safely.

[Flawless]

@AC3NATOR

@Flawless

Having two augment options for the same ability, with both of them dealing damage in some way, is kinda bad.

I assume you refer to the current iteration of 100-200 damage to hit targets and the 1-6 stacks of soulblaze? (Correct me if I am wrong, and please specify to which you refer, so I can better respond .)

I did specify.

@Flawless

I would like it if warp rupture was a different kind of augment to the ability.

For example, instead of dealing direct damage […]

[AC3NATOR]

@Flawless

I did specify.

Yeah I got that, but I also spoke of a potential new ability for Warp Rupture, which is to add an ability similar to Weapon Jinx from Dark Heresy. It introduces uncertainty whether you referenced to this concept for Warp Rupture or the current iteration of Warp Rupture.

I also mentioned a beam option for Venting Shriek, which your wording was not clear whether it referenced or didn’t.

That is why I asked for clarity.

[AC3NATOR]

@Flawless

Ok, so you claim that BB was nerfed at launch, so that players would no longer spam it. Because FS do not want anyone to spam BB…

But did FS give it a cooldown at any point, to make BB like the blitzes of the other classes, and to actually stop players from spamming it?
No. They did not.

What they actually did is, they buffed BB multiple times after launch.
They designed a few penances entirely around spamming BB.
And for the first year (during which BB was the only blitz option for psykers), the entire warp charge mechanic was mostly designed around spamming BB.

Hey, the ideas proposed here, giving brain rupture more damage but a cooldown + uses like assail, is not mutually exclusive with your wishes for a spammable brain rupture. Since we have nodes, players can opt in or out of different mechanics more flexibly nowadays. This means that the baseline brain rupture could be as is, much to your spamming enjoyment and your want to cleave to the original design intent. And then those who wish to use it more akin to the grenades, knives or rocks of the other classes, instead of a constant use spammable ability, get their gameplay as well, because fatshark can introduce an optional node for such an option.

This in no way damages anyone’s play, since you could always opt out of the new cooldown+use option.

[AC3NATOR]

@Aetrion

Warp Charges are currently a bad system because they passive benefits of keeping the charges are so nice that you don’t want to spend them, which means picking Warp Siphon makes you use you abilities less, not more most of the time.

They should change the passives to being buffs you gain when you spend the charges, and have those buffs last long enough that you can maintain 100% uptime if you constantly spend instead of hording them.

I wholesale agree with this. I think warp charges should give you cooldown reduction, but they should not be lost on ultimate. This can be made more reasonable by lowering the benefit from a stack to something like 2-3% for stack.

This means that the psyker experiences the fantasy of leeching power from the souls of his enemies, but also does not introduce backwards-to-intent emergent properties of design.

[Flawless]

@AC3NATOR

Hey, the ideas proposed here, giving brain rupture more damage but a cooldown + uses like assail, is not mutually exclusive with your wishes for a spammable brain rupture.

This (see citation below) is what you actually said before. You did not suggest to make psyker blitzes more powerful with a 30 sec cooldown as an optional choice via skill node at all.
You suggested to simply make them this way, which would indeed remove the playstyle of every single psyker that is not unaware of their blitz ability existing.
You explicitly said that this change should be made so that spamming the blitzes is no longer an option.

@AC3NATOR

This brought to my mind that they could change assail to be less spammy by introducing a “first recovery” delay. It could take 30 seconds for the assail shards to start recovering at a pace of 1 per 3 seconds.

This same idea can be implemented for every blitz of psyker, that way blitzes become this resource that you consider, and spamming is not an option, and can be made more satisfying or powerful to use.