Psyker unrewarding to play

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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I’ve leveled all characters to 30 and have decent weapons all around, but finding little joy in playing the psyker. They were my favorite class on launch, but I’ve realized it was only because other people had yet to learn the game well and BB was very useful. And the psyker was easy to use because they just cloned Sienna. Now that most players are proficient there is nothing the psyker can offer a team that at least two other people are better at with the right load outs. She’s last in melee, CC is decent but inferior to the flamer, thunder hammer, high ROF vet weapons and anything Ogryn, and shooting is worse than any of the guns. At this point her signature ability just highlights elite enemies for the vet or preacher to kill.

With other characters I usually find times in the mission where I’m clutch and make a difference, not so much with the psyker, unfortunately.

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CC is the strongest in the game… No other class can lock down 7 mobs permanently, least of all - all mobs. Incidentally the Surge Staff can kill 7 Scabs in one shot, not even the Ogryn can do that.
Purgatus is better than Flamer - doesn’t need a trait to stagger, it has lower damage but a much higher uptime.

All of this without ever spending a single piece of ammo.

So, sorry, but it’s the other way around really… There’s nothing the other classes can’t provide that Psyker can’t do more efficiently

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An Ogryn with a shield can out CC a Psyker any day. An ogryns knife also clears hordes better (and also doesn’t use ammo)

A sharpshooter can pick off specials faster than brain burst.

A zealot can clear hordes just as well with their flamethrower, while also having twice the health.

And ammo is so plentiful that it’s a non-issue in this game.
(Provided you don’t have some filthy little goblin on your team sucking it all up)

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laughs maniacally whilst blowing up heretics with voidstaff sorry I cannot hear you over all that Ascendant Blaze.

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An Ogryn with a shield is already a noob trap and has you take damage on higher difficulties trying to use, it is stagger not a CC. Stagger which a Voidstrike can do, in a much larger area, from much further away whilst also, easily clearing a horde - from safety. At best the Ogryn tickles with the Knife and the Shield.

In case you want to actually CC, the only one that has a reliably CC which stops all mobs in game is Psyker. Zealot gets a 3-use nade. No one else has Stuns.

Zealot isn’t regenerating 30% toughness while clearing the horde - the Psyker is, who cares about HP when you never even dip below 90% toughness? Lol at that statement. We don’t have problems with Reload and the horde being in our face, heck we don’t even have problems with Peril on a Purgatus Staff build.
A zealot has to spend so much time reloading that by the time it is done, the horde is in his face. The Psyker does not have to worry about this and can single handedly keep a horde at bay and you’re actually useless outside of hordes with a Flamer - Psykers are not (hello Brain Burst, we can still kill stuff from a distance).

No one gives a damn about Brain Burst, I don’t even know why you think you have to pick that up… On another note, good luck finding a Veteran that can kill 8 Gunners/Shotgunners, 6 Maulers/Ragers, 5 Ogryns and 7 specials in… Time before they overrun the team. See, Brain Burst comes in handy, because; Psykers can help out and they don’t have to expose themselves while killing, can we kill everything in one shot? No. Do we need to - also no.

It’s not unusual for a Psyker with either Purgatory staff or Surge staff to be constantly sitting in the Kill Feed, less so for Voidstrike as it doesn’t impact armor as much… Trauma is just there for big stagger as it too staggers everything.

Please, at least make an attempt at learning the class before spouting nonsense.

What Psykers recognize being lacking is that we would, very much, like feats that compliments our staffs as well as let us build Warp Charges - not dependent on a damn ability and/or our allies/lvl 30 feat - but through our weapons. We know that we shine as well as any other in the roles our staffs fulfills, we just wish our feats supported that to a greater extend so we had more variety in our feat builds than the… currently 2 builds there is that and we would like actual working blessings which currently most don’t work and those that are actually worth getting half of our staffs can’t get - that is incidentally a mistake and being fixed at some point.

Prepare for Psykers that will double shoot lighting our their hands with 25% additional crit chance, add Soulblaze dots on their Purgatus staff etc.

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You’ve got to be doing something wrong if you think Psyker is weak or even problematic. It’s actually the class that feels the most “put together” other than the Sharpshooter.

With the exception of the ground-targeted explosion, the staves are all very powerful. Even Zealots and Ogryns cannot crowd control swarms as well as a Psyker using a Purgatus or Surge staff, and the Burst staff is a long-range terror that can drop multiple shooters at once with good headshot placement while costing no ammo and building Peril at a very slow rate.

A Force Sword with the Deflector Blessing plus the Feat that lets you block with Peril instead of Stamina makes the Psyker safe in many situations. They are great at killing close-range specials and elites with the charged attack, as well.

I do agree that Brain Burst falls off at higher difficulties, and that problem should be looked at. I feel like an easy solution is to have a “passive” on Staves that increase Brain Burst damage and on Force Swords that reduce the cast time.

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But it’s just not that important to be sitting and brain bursting… You can kill elites faster than a Vet and multiple of them. Just load up a full charge Surge staff and watch Maulers and Flak Armoured Ragers melt… Heck, you can do many more just by using Purgatus staff… Nothing gets pass that one…

Grant Psyker feels unrewarding on Malice… Heresy it gets really fun and Damnation is where it shines. You can carry an entire team on Damnation with just Surge and Purgatus.

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Psyker wrecks Heresy. Brain burst kills both types of scab gunners, trapper and pox burster. You are really going to miss these 3 picks on Damnation, the Gunner is one that really feels bad not having. I only use Voidstrike myself and I’m waiting to pull this Deflector blessing and apply it to my actually good Force Sword but it does work still, just no tanking ranged for me yet. Unlimited dodges is pretty hard to go away from in this game and its less commital than the chain weapons.

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Let me just say that… You’re gonna love the deflector force sword. It is absolutely king to just walk into a room of Dreg and Scab shooters on Damnation and take… No peril damage (but then I have 3x Curios with 15% block efficiency) a force sword with 20% block efficiency and the 6% from the blessing on top of 80% warp resistance!

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Yeah it was pretty enjoyable on my 297 power one. Unfortunately I was taking 3 empowered attacks to kill a scab mauler on Heresy…so I look forward to hopefully yanking it and using it as a resource. I’ve upgraded a good 15 so far before unceremoniously finding it on a trashy one in the shop. Typical.

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All these dudes on here gaslighting op.

No psyker is not better than the other classes. Is it bad.? No. Is it as good as every othe class? Also no.

Psyker needs adjustments to bring its feats in line. All of the hand wringing about the staffs is ignoring the obvious deficiency with BB.

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Psyker is still my favorite to play by a country mile.

Worship me or die!!!

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Feels like I’ve walked into some kind of upside down reality in this thread.

Permanently? Oh really.

It has way worse functional uptime. It takes a lot longer to kill, and reaches max peril much sooner than the Flamer. You may or may not have godrolled items, but in that case a godrolled Flamer would outperform your godrolled purge staff.

Zealot is in fact functionally immortal while in melee. And a good Zealot isn’t clearing the horde with a flamer.

Peril exists. The purge staff is not immune to it.

This is what Veterans do routinely. It’s what Zealots do with the correct loudout.
The only way a Psyker could pull that off would be if you had position the purge staff precisely at a doorway or chokepoint and that huge number of elites waltzed into your flame. Which means your entire team plays around the purge staff, which means you’re doing all kinds of things to pull things to your purge staff, to make you feel like it’s good.

That’s because dots tick all the time, so you have a higher % chance of getting the ‘killshot’ even if you did really poor damage.

A surge can only control a horde if there’s a very small door and you hit exactly the first mobs in front. Even then it will fail to control or stop a high density horde.

It takes any number of charges from the Surge to kill fully armoured stuff. The TTK is actually really, really long. A Vet kills them off far, far faster.

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I’m leveling a Psyker now. My other three characters are already 30 and while I love each of them for their own reasons, I’m having a little more fun playing the Psyker. It’s such a departure from the others. I can turn off my brain while playing the other classes, but the Psyker requires a lot of situational awareness and knowing when to do one thing to save someone vs doing the other and dooming the team.

I’ve still got 17 more lvls to go, but once I hit 30, I can see myself spending more time on my Psyker than any of the others. At least until more balance changes are put in.

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Literally everything wrecks heresy. Psyker brings the least to the table out of the four classes. Ogryn and psyker are under tuned. Psyker was the least fun to max because he isn’t as good, and that was before the nerfs.

I’m not saying psyker brings nothing to the table on damnation, but he brings less than the other classes. On damnation you see a lot of vets and zealots, because they are more put together. Zealot has the killing power to protect the backline, and can stagger. Vet can kill the priority targets. More importantly, you can carry as vet or Zealot in a way that you can’t as ogryn or psyker. Psyker can CC, but that is his main contribution unless you do ogryn shield and psyker flame staff cheese. Ogryn is useful as a revive b****, but is less effective at protecting the backline than zealot and certainly can’t wipe out priority targets like vet.

Each class should have a niche that it excels at, not every class needs the same killing power, but ironbreaker had enough killing power to protect the other classes and had tools to draw aggro. Ogryn needs that, and I don’t want to see psyker get the Sienna treatment. She was always the most undertuned character, so it’s fitting that the new sienna is undertuned as well

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People disagreeing isn’t gaslighting. Stop using words if you don’t know what they mean.

And many people understand that Brain Burst falls off in Heresy and Damnation. There are multiple suggestions out there on how to potentially make it better, but that doesn’t mean the class isn’t on par with the rest. Staves are powerful. Force Swords are powerful. Brain Bust is still useful at high levels, even if it needs some VERY SMALL adjustments (a way to up the damage and reduce the cast time, predominantly).

And ALL of the classes have some Feats that are obviously stronger than others in the same tier. Psyker actually has a couple of viable setups, depending on how you like to play.

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No one kills hordes faster than a psyker. The flame staff is far superior to the flame thrower.

The flame thrower also means a zealot has no range whatsoever. This becomes problematic in any game you dont have teammates that understand that while u sit around waiting for them to kill ranged.

BB is useful at all levels, the fact you dont see or understand that shows a lack of understanding of the game and its strengths

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I played psyker first and had a blast for a while. The lack of staff / force melee weapon options, brain burst, and brain burst / warp charge focused feats made me lose interest pretty quickly.

I then leveled veteran > ogryn > zealot and had a substantially higher amount of fun as those classes feel like they have some level of cohesion between weapons and feats.

I’m sad to say that psyker is probably going on the backburner until unless they make some drastic changes and add more psyker specific weapons.

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In which way? Flamer does more damage and has a longer reach. Do you mean Purge doesn’t have ammo? Is that what makes it “far superior”?

Bad teammates makes the game harder, yeah. If you sit around waiting for people to kill ranged, though, I can inform you that you appear to have no idea how to play Zealot.

In any case, I don’t run flamer on Zealot because hordes are almost never a problem. Not even without a flamer or a Psyker on the team. Hordes are incredibly easy to deal with.

I have also never even once felt like a Psyker was missing from the team, whereas I would be very hesitant to join a PUB if there’s no Vet, or no Zeal or Ogryn. Similarly, when I play my Psyker, I have never felt like having an additional Psyker on the team was of any benefit compared to another class.

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Please, don’t talk like an elitist. It’s not like I don’t have a 30 psyker as well. I’m sure 90% of the people in this thread do too. You’re not special, and neither am I.

If you’re not good enough to perform to the standards I set out in my post, maybe you need to play less psyker and practice your aim. :wink:

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