Psyker Warp Charge mechanic feels pointless

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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Pretty much what it says on the tin. The way Warp Charge is presented as a fairly central mechanic for the class, it’s listed as an “iconic” ability for a reason. The expectation and intent seems to be very much for the psyker to try and juggle their warp charges and keep them up whenever possible, doubly so considering they’re central to several unlockable talents.

And yet, it doesn’t really seem to come together in actual play like it does for other classes. Even on higher difficulties, I find myself just plain not bothering with the mechanic at all, while it’s both simple and rewarding to play around the iconic abilities of the other classes. I’d say the reason for that is twofold: Too much effort required, and too little effect to make it worth it.

The first reason is probably the bigger one. To keep your warp charges going, you need to land a brain burst every 25 seconds. Simple in theory, but in practice that’s a significant headache. Brain burst takes a significant amount of time to charge up, to the point where it’s only really worth it to do against elites. But if no elites are around, you’re basically interrupting what you’re doing to waste several seconds just to pop a random soldier’s head. That’s time that you could be spending much more effectively using your regular weapons. And that’s not even considering practical difficulties, like your allies killing your intended target before the brain burst goes through, your peril being filled from using force weapons, or just plain running into mission sections with few/no enemies.

In practice, keeping your warp charges up is not something you can organically include in your usual playstyle. Instead, it’s something you need to be constantly looking out for, at a significant attention and opportunity cost. There are some talents that let you generate warp charges from regular attacks, but the trouble with those is that they’re random in nature and as such unreliable, meaning you’re still playing with a constant eye on your warp charge timer. That’s in stark contrast to the other classes’ iconic abilities, which usually just work passively as long as you simply play the class as normal.

Secondly, the pay-off is just… not great. With full stacks, you get a whopping 12% extra damage. That’s just not a lot in a game where most enemies can be killed in a matter of 2-3 hits, since 12% damage will often not change the actual hits to kill required. It’s only really relevant against elites, and against those you’ll be using brain burst anyway, which is still a one- or two-hit-kill irrespective of the damage bonus. There are some additional synergies deeper in the skill tree, but those tend to work off of having max charges, which again is a significant barrier.

So, what could/should be done about this? For one, make it less of an attention tax to keep your warp charges up. The simplest way to do this would be drastically extending the decay time of the charge, like outright doubling it to 50 seconds. Alternatively (or additionally), it could be done by offering additional reliable ways of generating warp charges that are more organic to regular gameplay, like through certain force weapon attacks such as the force sword’s charge strike.

Apart from that, changing the warp charge bonus to something more interesting could be worth considering. Rather than a plain and often inconsequential damage boost, something more integral the the classes other mechanics like a boost to peril reduction or brain burst charge speed would be more interesting.

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Personally I think they should only increase damage for psyker powers but that increase should be huge. Like 30% and 150% for damage over time effects at max stacks. (looking at vermintide 2 traits)

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I don’t have much motivation to play Psyker because if a squadmates kills an enemy while you’re headbusting them, you build peril without getting any benefit. This makes building and maintaining stacks an exercise in frustration, and it also means you either need to use your career skill or immediately quell in order to continue using psyker powers.

Having stacks drop off one at a time would go some way to mitigating the problem, or if your squadmates kills your target the effect jumps to the nearest enemy AND KEEPS THE PROGRESS rather than resetting.

Personally though I find the perils buildup system entirely lacklustre. It’s just one more thing to manage, and easily managed at that, rather than the risky and unpredictable thing that psychic powers are both in lore and other games.

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I feel somewhat the same but you gave me an idea. I usually never precharge brainburst. But with that in mind i will play around with precharging to counter the unnecessary peril build up

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in the closed beta test, everything for psyker came together perfectly, it wasnt too powerful, wasnt too squishy, but was really fun to play, now its not, theyve homestly ruined him, especiallt changing his class ability from clearing all peril to not even clearing enough for another brainburst

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I just ignore it and the class seems fine anyway. But then, if it’s not doing anything, then why is it there? 12% extra damage is really pathetic. You can get 10% damage vs. stuff on weapon properties. It needs to do something more impactful. I’m not against it doing more damage but the effect should be easily noticeable. +30% Power vs. armored enemies (10 per stack), movement speed, whatever.

I agree with your suggestions too. Either make the stacks go down one at a time, or give us a longer decay time, or make them easily acquirable via Force Sword or Force Staff.

Here’s a neat idea:

  • give Warp Stacks on crossing the Peril thresholds (20%, 80% IIRC) when Peril builds up.
  • Give the reapplication an internal cooldown to avoid spam.
  • Give 1 stack on crossing into yellow and 2 stacks on crossing into red.

This will accomplish three things:

  1. encourage use of Peril-based attacks,
  2. give you a way to manage your stacks without having to drop whatever you’re doing just to maintain a buff,
  3. encourage high-risk, high-reward gameplay by giving more bonus for staying in high Peril and still encourage using BB, since that generates a lot of Peril, while nonetheless giving some bonus to those who prefer to play it safe.

This seems like an efficient way to integrate Warp Stack and Peril management.

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It’s an almost pointless mechanic except against bosses maybe, and in that situation you cannot get any warp charges unless you’re headpopping fodder. But doing that just wastes everyone’s time, for very little payoff.

3% per stack in inconsequential, and I’m surprised they don’t seem to realize that. In comparison in Vermintide 2, Slayer Bardin just gets 30% more damage for hitting 3 melee attacks. :unamused:

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Exactly. Maybe they’re afraid high bonuses will break the game and players will abuse it. But they don’t seem to differentiate between actual exploits, cheeses and OP feats/passives and just a class working as it should and being effective.

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I agree that warp charge is a bad mechanic. Spamming brain burst is the least fun way to play a Psyker right now, and it’s the only way you can generate enough charges to make any of the talents that require stacks of them or even consume them work for you.

I think that the original design for the class was that brain burst uses the charges rather than making them, which would have made a lot more sense, but then they allowed Psykers to wield mundane weapons, and realized that they needed to give them a default power they can spam whenever because otherwise you can build a Psyker who doesn’t ever see peril. That’s pure speculation on my part, but it just seems like they somehow went from “This is your really powerful tactical ability that is similar to grenades” to “This is your default psyker power and we’re going to really push you into using it.”

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“And also, since it’s a default ability now, we’ve gone out of our way to make it hot garbage to use.”

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Yea, if brain burst was a limited use power like a grenade it could be way more powerful.

The problem is that the psyker needs a way to generate peril that isn’t tied to their weapons for the rest of their kit to work. That’s where it all comes apart.

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The only thing that seems to make the warp charge mechanic even a noticeable thing is the level 15 talent that has a 4% chance when crap gets killed near you to give you a charge. Otherwise it just feels like too much of a pain in the ass to maintain and you seem to be stuck in this constant loop of venting and pre-channeling your burst to hopefully get a kill before someone offs what you’re targetting and you lose all your stacks. I don’t even bother with it since I tend to not use burst unless I’m targetting elite guys. I hope the level 15 talent is worth.

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That talent doesn’t even come close to feeding you enough warp charges to run a full stack, let alone generate excess to spend. Statistically you need to kill about 1 enemy a second just to maintain 1 charge with Psychic Communion, and sure, there are times when you’re killing way faster than that, but there are also times where you’re just moving from room to room and you only encounter three or four guys in the span of 30 seconds. It’s hard enough to maintain a stack trying to brainburst them before someone shoots them, let alone hoping you get lucky on s 1 in 25 chance.

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Yes, exactly. The Psyker rotation is effectively this:

  1. Bust brains to acquire warp charges.

  2. Use charges to power almost literally the entire talent tree.

  3. Become strong with a ton of charges.

The issue is, you only have 3 ways to get warp charges, and all 3 of them involve enemies dying. Brain burst enemies (whereby you get charges on killing them.) A 10% chance on doing any damage to cause an automatic brainburst, once every 15s at best. A 4% (FOUR!) to have a warp charge given on any enemy death from any source within coherency.

I have gone entire hordes without a single free proc. Brain bursting is almost always a waste of time and actively harms playing the class effectively. But not getting warp charges also actively harms playing the class effectively, creating a catch-22 situation.

Hell, the people I play with are so good that I can call out that I have X unit for brain burst (E.G. sniper, pox hound, etc) and someone else, often a marksman, will look at it and destroy it before the brain burst can finish. This is doubly true for big targets like crushers or bulwarks as I actively create the opening they need to murder the enemy.

The end result is I despise playing Psyker because I may as well not have a talent tree. At all. Warp charges existing actively harms the class to such a degree that 5 of the talent tiers are completely useless because of it, because they all directly interact with warp charges that I reasonably cannot get. The sixth tier, the toughness perks, are also bad, because the second I swap from literally anything else to melee, my toughness generation completely collapses unless I’m running the quelling perk and had some peril saved up as it slowly ticks down.

There’s a reason I keep championing that Psyker is a badly designed class, and it’s exactly what people are saying here. The class has decent melee weapons, fantastic ranged weapons when you finally get a staff, its grenade is passable but not exactly world shattering. And you may as well pretend the talent tree doesn’t exist. Because it effectively doesn’t.

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