You just gotta find a way to play the class in way that fits you, sure you can look up builds that are super meta and good on the paper but if you don’t know or understand how the weapons/build work or when to use your abilities or manage your peril you are gonna struggle.
For example Zealot is a really strong class but i don’t really get a long with it because i personally don’t like how they work.
Try messing around in The Meat Grinder that’s what i do to figure things out and then try it out in a live game.
Psyker’s one of the few ‘balanced’ classes left in the game, and yes I say that even knowing Inferno + Perilous Combustion is a thing.
It wipes entire rooms by breathing, but as a trade off, if ever you DON’T wipe the room you fall over from THEM breathing. They are the only class in the game without heaps and heaps of broken survivability (even a Veteran is immortal so long as they are above 75% toughness, only ever insta dying in high havoc from overhead strikes, which everyone outside a Zealot/True Grit Arbit/Ogryn dies to), so they have a natural way higher skill floor because of that. They also naturally have incredibly low stamina, making revives insanely difficult (without careful buildcrafting) and thus making ‘clutch plays’ very hard. And obviously they have the lowest health and toughness in the game, exacerbated even further by havoc, making them a ‘one hit wonder’ that either single handedly wins the entire game for your team, or is dead/on the ground yelling about inferiority.
To that end, as a fellow ‘decent Psyker’ that has clutched up more than a few games in my time due to the way I learned how to play them over the years, I will offer some advice. For while in the end, ‘just getting good/better at dodging’ is the main bread and butter of the class (they started with the Duelling Sword for a reason), there are ways to mitigate their pain points, to a degree that lets you feel a little less like you’re getting destroyed more than other classes. Granted, you will never reach the ease of use of Ogryn/Arbite, as they are brokenly designed to be ‘high damage uber tanks’. But that’s by design, and it’s because you can limitlessly do the damage they do if not heaps more from range, you just gotta last long enough to do it. As such:
Many builds you’ll find online ignore toughness, don’t do that. They do it because they live under the ‘ride or die’ montra, and will ‘simply not get hit’ with all their bonus effects. But every build I have has 200-202 toughness, why? Because Psykers are regen ‘tanks’, they where the progenitor of ‘everything I do gives me toughness’, so the more you have, the less of a percentage of said toughness is taken away when something hits you. This means, with all your regen, there’s less of it that needs to BE regened before toughness is protecting you from the next hit again, often allowing you to take multiple hits and so long as things are dying to your abilities, you’ll ‘be alright’. This won’t make you immortal/let you tank a overhead or anything still, but it lets you deal with ‘minor scratches’ a LOT better, especially with them continuing to amp up said Psyker toughness regen (Disrupt Destiny giving you regen over time is still just bonkers to me).
With the above point, one might ask ‘why not max out on toughness then?’, well that’s because one very often wants to take a Stamina Curio. One doesn’t ALWAYS need to take one (if you use a melee weapon with high stamina already like the Greatsword, then you don’t need it/I don’t take one), but if you’re using a DS or a Force Sword, you basically always want one. This is where the ‘202’ toughness comes in, as if you take a Stamina Curio + 2 17% toughness curios, and then take every node of toughness increase besides one (usually the far off tree node that leads to a keystone you’re not currently using), you’ll end at 202 toughness. Where as if you don’t need a stamina curio (like with said Force Greatsword), you can use 3 17% toughness curios, and you’ll have 200 toughness flat while saving 1 toughness talent point that you can put somewhere else, keeping the same ‘ratio’ across both curio iterations, allowing you to still feel ‘capable if not resilient’.
One with the Warp + the 5% toughness DR above it is basically an auto include in every build, I think one of my 38 builds (Across two Psykers) doesn’t use it, and it’s a gun build I wanted to use the Ranged Damage pip on so I take Endurance in Scriers instead. But beyond that, you’re ALWAYS taking these nodes, as it’s basically all of your survivability in two pips, and the difference between having it and not is astronomical.
Take more regen than you might feel like you need, I pretty much always have Quietude unless I take bubble for passive toughness, + Soulstealer for ‘active’ toughness. Mettle along with them if I’m a crit build, Warp Expenditure otherwise, and then whatever respective keystone regen like Essence Harvest or Psychic Leeching (sometimes, can get away with it with Assail cause crit) or Disrupt Destiny at base. One should ALWAYS be regening, if toughness not going up something is going wrong, and this is what makes bubble so broken on them as it gives you constant regen on top of your other options basically at all times. If the effects on the bottom of your screen aren’t overflowing off of it, you’re not regening enough!
And beyond that just the staple stuff like taking Pykinetic’s Aura when possible, Warp Splitting for Assail builds so it melts everything and keeps you healthy, Empathic Evasion on Crit builds so ranged can never chip you, etc etc. Ohh, and that reminds me.
Kinetic Deflection is insanely goated, it isn’t on EVERYThing I use mind you (you can get away with just the stamina curio + Deflector), but having it (especially with high stamina like on the Force Greatsword) lets you basically becoming an immortal tank while blocking. The damage to peril conversion is INSANELY generous, and is what allows me to run around with the Devil Claw Sword (with an assail build, so I still merc everything) and just parry stuff whenever I’m waiting for assail to regenerate, as you’ll basically always kill faster than your peril has time to max out. I recommend it ESPECIALLY with deflector, as it gives you the ‘personal shield ability’ pretty much one to one, and lets you just pop it up whenever you need it. Best of all? since it doesn’t consume stamina, you can use it to regenerate stamina, allowing you to (with the Force Sword/Greatsword especially as their push attacks are INSANE and so heavily useful for crowd control) spam your pushes and get things away from you when they get on you from complete safety behind the shield. This being the main reason the heavily mentioned Force Greatsword is so often used, as not only is it’s reach long and it’s wave clear super useful, but you can hide behind it and shove EVERYTHING over with it’s powerful push attack. It’s just, insanely good, on top of letting you use a ‘toughness point’ from above and put it somewhere else you want it (like Kinetic Deflector), so if nothing else comes of my wall of text, use the force greatsword it’s really good.
But yeah, I THINK those are all of my 'survivability tips from a sudo Psyker main that can’t ‘just dodge it all the time forehead’, may it increase your survival rating and make you feel at least a LITTLE less squishy, even if not the ‘walking wall’ that are the other melee classes…And to help ‘demonstrate’ what I’m getting at, here’s two builds of the different Stamina types that I like/think of them most when I think ‘build I use to carry things’ (that isn’t just inferno staff cause that feels self explanatory really):
i feel like the scriers gaze melee psykers are extraordinarily powerful; one you get on a roll with that thing it’s night on unstoppable. The force sword damage bonus gets so high you end up bisecting everything short of a monstrosity.
psyker in itself is fine maybe some restructuring of the tree could be nice but besides that just buff / rework the other staves so that they arent dogshit / niche usage
also remove animation locks and slow charges from the force weapons k thx
braindead take when the biggest hold back of those weapons is not damage or anything else but the getting stuck in animation loop but sure lets just use knife or duelist sword over the supposed psyker exclusive meele choices and onetap a crusher without getting stuck in the animation cuck chair
but to be fair in auric snoozenations and below this probably doesnt matter with the occasional 1 crusher that eventually spawns
I mean, as I said I’ve actively carried with these/won Auric (what’s likely more equivalent to mid Havoc these days) games with everyone but me dying and needing to chain revive at the pylon thanks to the forgiveness of these, so as Sam says (since you’re clearly a troll going STRAIGHT onto my block list XD)
kind of off-topic, but did they nerf or adjust the electricity staff in the past little while? it doesn’t seem as reliable in terms of crowd control anymore, or maybe i’m just remembering it differently…
They unfortunately did (for no real good reason), it used to chain to 3 enemies, now it chains to 1-2. They didn’t even give it a minor bump to damage to compensate, so it’s like…You use it cause you want to not cause it’s good these days.
Well first I need to point out that Zealot’s one build has less total toughness than Psyker builds because they buffed his base toughness to match Ogryn. Secondly I have no idea how you could possibly have 38 different Psyker builds when you could just grab everything you need in one or two builds.
Grab Perilous Combustion because it is one of the single most broken things in the entire video game after the buff
Pick Brain Burst or Assail depending on whether you want to abuse Psykinetic’s Aura or not
Cooldown aura
Empathic Evasion abuse
Pick if you are abusing Bubble or Scrier’s Gaze
Kinetic Deflection so stamina is a thing of the past and True Aim is right there
Disrupt Destiny does everything the other keystones do (except cooldown) but way better and only needs two points. You have already grabbed Kinetic Deflection and True Aim so it is right there.
Warp Rider
I take offense with saying that Purg Staff and Perilous is balanced considering that it makes you immune to gunfire while you evaporate every single melee elite in front of you. Every Psyker who is already abusing Purg Perilous is gonna have DS4 with Uncanny so that’s everyone in the game taken care of.
I’m sure Electro is one of the Es (it’s nowhere near that bad but whatever I agree it’s probably the worst one), but fascinated with which other staff you think is E tier.
Seems the bullet points largely match up (mine just get a bit wordy as I tend to do),
But yeah, I will say my wording there at the beginning wasn’t the greatest. I meant that not in the sense that I think Inferno + Perilous Combustion is balanced (lord knows it isn’t), but that the Psyker class as a whole is the most balanced despite how utterly broken the flame + Perilous Combustion is.
Obviously said combo plays the game for you while CCing most everything so you basically become ‘like everyone else’ and don’t have to play the game either (given as the OP stated, Arbite, Ogryn, and even Zealot to an extent, all get to auto win for breathing and have infinite survivability and wave clear, they just don’t do it from range and turn everything blue). But that’s the only combo that got that exclusively does that, verses being their entire identity, so I tend to view the class as ‘Psyker’ and ‘Psyker with Inferno Staff’.
And to the build point, yeah, I cover ALL the bases, cause I just like having variety and excuses to test things. If one’s ‘boring’ they can very easily grab ‘the staple stuff’ in 2-3 Psyker builds and then get bored of the game in a couple games if they want, I just life fing around with stuff. There’s a reason I didn’t suddenly share my catalogue though xD as most of it is just experimentation/builds thrown into a folder for the sake of it, and on Psyker especially a vast amount of them are mostly the same with 1-2 talent point changes and a weapon swap. But, I downloaded a mod that increased my loadout cap, felt ‘might as well enjoy myself’.
Especially these days, given Auric’s basically Heresy now, gotta get my kicks somehow.
Psyker has the same issue Zealot does where you have some of the strongest nodes in the game sprinkled next to nodes that are either boring or just really bad. Build variety is basically how hard you want to shoot yourself in the foot; minus ignoring Perilous Combustion, which is morally correct.