Psykinetics Wrath damage not as stated

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
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I did some testing in the meatgrinder to see which attacks the level 10 feat Psykinetics Wrath effects, and came out with more information than I expected.
It does effect every attack from warp weapons, such as a force sword, and not just the special attack, but also heavies and lights.
It does not, however, ever come close to a +15% damage buff, even at 100% peril.
I tested all force sword attacks, all surge staff attacks, and brain burst, against every enemy type, with 0% and 100% peril.
The damage was at absolute best a 8% boost between 0%-100%, usually around 5% for most attacks.
We’re talking headstrikes against a poxwalker doing 124 damage instead of 114, that’s an 8% boost and was the biggest difference I saw.
Brainburst against a mauler did 848 damage at 0% peril and around 885 at 100%, a whopping 4% damage boost while standing at the brink of insanity.
It also scales linearly, having nothing to do with the different colors of the peril percentage: the higher the peril, the more damage it deals, with no clear jumps or “stages”.

Chalk it up to another one of the things that desperately needs work with the class, it feels so useless playing psyker right now, all you do is run around behind your team while they kill everything before you have a chance to even be helpful.

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Great digging! I’ll try to do some of the same and see what I get too.

I wonder if instead of “damage” the code is applying it to “power” instead. Power has, I’m sure, some arcane formula behind how it relates to damage output.

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Alright, so I’ve done a bunch of number crunching on this because I was really curious about it.

I took my force sword and experimented with using the Psy Wrath talent (or not) and checking it against the impact of having different warp charges.

Cutting to the chase, I believe it’s mostly working as intended (i.e. NOT broken).

The reason why you’re seeing a lower % increase from Psy Wrath is because Psy Wrath scales from 5 - 15% damage from ZERO to 100 peril. Meaning if you take the take feat and have zero peril, you get an immediate 5% damage buff. So if you’re calculating the % increases, you need to make sure to turn OFF the feat to get a baseline damage number and then check damages as your peril goes up.

So for instance, I tested my numbers on a Scab Mauler (Flak Armor, body hit). With no talents and warp charges I did 52 “base” damage. Turning on Psy Wrath feat, this immediately raised damage up to 55. This is as 5.77% increase, but if you back calculate a clean 5% increase the expected damage would be 54.6, which the UI is just rounding up to 55.

So in the chart below I ran numbers for 0 - 4 warp charges both with and without the Psy Wrath feat, and also looked at the effect of high peril and Psy Wrath with 0 and 4 warp charges.

Psy Wrath at 97% + peril and 0 warp charges resulted in 15.38% damage increase over the base (52 → 60 damage). With 4 warp charges, it was a 25% increase (52 → 65 damage).

The one thing that seems off is that my expected numbers track well for everything except 4 warp charges, where the actual number was a little below the expected. With 4x Warp Charges and 97%+ peril, you’d expect 67 damage, and I only 65. The other calculations, rounding up or down as appropriate, tracked correctly. This could be something to do with how multiple warp charges stack and the means of calculation - but it doesn’t seem too wildly off.

PsykerDamage_Breakdown_2
PsykerDamage_Breakdown_2765Ă—613 106 KB

EDIT: Updated to include warp charge levels 5 and 6

The other thing I couldn’t figure out his how I ended up with 52 damage on the mauler in the first place. The weapon tab says I should be doing 47 damage to flak armor on a light hit. I don’t know where the 52 is coming from.

By the way, the weapon’s reported damage, at least for the force sword, is the reported damage stat % (in this case it’s 48.45 with my weapon at 79% damage rating) multiplied by the first target stat (which provides a 1.3 multiplier based on my weapons rating). So the “damage” number you see at the top of the item card is “63” - which is the same as what you see reported as the damage in the detailed hit breakdown for unarmored. Flak is listed at 47, so again, no idea why it’s going up to 52.

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Awesome work.

Be worth also calculating with 6 charges and the talent that lets you hold that many.

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Done :slight_smile:

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Wow, nice job!

Ok, that makes more sense when you realize it already starts at 5%, the tooltips in this game are seriously one of the biggest mysteries of it all.

Did you do any testing on Brainburst? Because it also seemed to be affected when I tried it, but only to a much smaller degree.

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Quick check on BB:

I used BB vs. a Crusher (carpace armored ogryn):

  • 825 damage with no talent and 0 warp charges.
  • 916 damage with 4x warp charges (no talent)
  • 960 damage with 6x warp charges (no talent).

The damage numbers with Psy Wrath talent and 97%+ peril resulted in the same damage numbers. I don’t think Psy Wrath is supposed to affect BB, since it isn’t a Force “weapon” (e.g. your primary or secondary weapon).

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Ok, so I guess my numbers were being influenced by the warp charges I gained on the first uses :sweat_smile:

That explains the weak 4% boost!