It’s a weapon that dominates everything. It’s like zealots flamer but more damage, infinite ammunition, and an unholy amount of stagger. (The same can be said about smite, basically an infinite stun grenade.)
Note, you don’t need to charge up an attack, just press m1, spam m1 on a horde and you will see what I mean.
Having a hard time? charge up your attack and spew it in your problems direction. It’s no surprise that so many psyker players struggle in basic melee combat when they’re allowed a tool that almost renders melee combat an option. It’s not appropriate for the game, and it’s not good for new players.
It’s also terrible at the expense of zealots Inexorable Judgement, how are they supposed to dodge whats staggered? Can you really blame zealots for running ahead when all the fun enemies are dead by the time they get close?
If a nerf ever does happen to Inferno staff, it should come with buffs to the psykers other staves because theyre really under powered, and nerfing a good bit of the class too so it actually has risk. And no, Peril is hardly a risk, just pay attention to it. Use Sciers Gaze or Venting shriek if you don’t wanna do that.
Increase damage taken the higher Peril is. Would need to rework some Talents, but makes sense lore wise. The more powerful Psyker becomes, the more unstable Psyker becomes. Unstable people don’t do defense well.
Could really lean into that approach and go wild with it.
Not really. The other staves just pale when you compared them to Inferno staff. Voidblast perma-CC’s everything but bosses while doing decent damage. EK Staff is an infinte ammo single target DPS machine that has instant suppression when needed. And Voidstrike is just a poor man’s Plasma but with infinte ammo.
The obvious solution is casting while on high perill should apply corruption.
However gas and other sources of corruption will decrease the ability to cast and it shouldn’t be. So psyker will need some mechanic to get rid of corruption or/and source for corruption ressistance applied by enemies.
Or/and there casting on high perill should apply debuffs that stays for some time after - move, attack speed reduction, toughness reffil penalty, etc.
Then you can make all his staves to be devastating as they should.
And nerf infinite cleave on purgatus.
Surge - remove autoaim, make primary fire to be a cone area rapid shotgun that either have a chance to electrify or does so on crit. And for secondary either leave what it is or give him anti solo Zeus’s ligntning spear throw. Surge has the same braindead design as purgatus. there is no skill involved.
Trauma - give special attack like Gendalf’s did in TFOTR - hit the ground with pommel and cast trauma blast under your feet, basicaly a 360 area push. Noone cares yo use special pommel hit on staves.
Smite - should apply stacks on enemies, upon max stacks applies stagger and removes stacks, then you need to reapply stacks again. Basically a CD between staggers. The bigger the enemy the more stacks it needs. Or like filling enemy status bar like in Souls. Primary vs secondary also need to be a 2 drasticaly different things, but i have no ideas.
Staff that is designed to cleave by a Class that have cleave at its core, cleaves. More things w more health to cleave = more damage.
Stop begging for nerfs to everything fr
If you aren’t having fun with it, so one else should?
And inb4: “It kills things even before I can kill them", it’s you problem.
Any class has the ability to do some cleave damage or damage in general really. What do you do? Just stand there and looking at the psyker to kill horde patiently?
My Paultato build literally shits on everything even before Psyker has a chance to even build a stack. 3 buttons gameplay btw
Play some havoc moebians or rampage and it will take forever without the flamer.
It’s a fun staff to use and makes you feel like a powerful space wizard. COOL!
Smite just needs a smaller cone-shaped area of effect in front of it to make it more interesting and less annoying to use.
There are too many psykers because of the inferno staff in particular. But it will be difficult to balance without hurting other builds that don’t use the staff. It will either require a large rebalance of the class, or significant adjustments to the staff only.
Possibly reducing primary spam stagger, and both primary and secondary cleave (fully blocked by bulwarks, monstrosities, and carapace) would go a long way. As always the issue is not swinging the pendulum too far so it becomes useless.
One of the big component on why those weapons are strong (Flamer, Inferno, Rumbler) is that they’re AoE thst deal equal damage to all targets, meaning that with each difficulty that boost the number of enemies they become more effective than weapons that aren’t able to do so.
For the Inferno (and Flamer, but on a lesser degree), I think the weapon should have either a ramping up time (so enemy need to be in the flame gust for longer to really get damage), or have primary and secondary damage area, with essentially having a “beam” that concentrate the current damage and having a falling off damage around it, so that enemies that aren’t closest to the center of the screen get less damage and stagger
I agree. Reading through the forums, it feels like a lot of players are crying for nerfs. But honestly, I don’t think nerfing everything is the solution to the current balance issues.
In my opinion, the fundamental problem lies with Carapace armored enemies, though that’s just my take since I don’t have access to Fatshark’s internal data.
It feels like some people treat this PvE game like it’s a competitive PvP match.
Different classes have different roles, and in Havoc, it’s only natural for AoE-specialized builds to pump out massive damage there are more enemies with higher HP, after all.
The irony is that those high scoreboard numbers are only possible because of team support, yet people only look at the scoreboard and scream ‘nerf.’
I understand being frustrated with the balance, but I’ll never understand why ‘nerfing’ is always seen as the only fix.
Nerf or buff aside, it would be far more fun if it had an actually interesting mechanic or way to use it instead of just “yeah this fire actually penetrates every living thing for 15 meters no matter what and if you hold it down on them enough they’ll fall over and die, even the ones in the back who were behind everything else”. Why are bullets beholden to the basic laws of physics but fire isn’t? Wouldn’t it be way cooler if a big ass crusher could actually block and divert the fire to the side?
Like wouldn’t an actual hitmass system for it be more fun? That way if you wanted to burn the most enemies possible, you would actually need to seek a way to maximize the surface area you can light up. Could play with blessings like sticky napalm, melta fire, etc. It would simultaneously make it easier to balance because now it doesn’t scale 1:1 with enemies on screen anymore.
I feel the same way about stuff like explosions. Wouldn’t it be more fun if you had to actually think about where to place an explosion so a fat ass crusher can’t just block it with his thunderthighs?
My point is it would be more fun, more immersive, more complex, and more balanced if these things were actually more than just “Kill cone” and “kill sphere”, and i think the balance part is the least scuffed boring part of the flame staff
I think there is an easy fix for purga: restrict max soulblaze stacks on all skills to 18. You would still be able to seethe enemies in a wrath of fire but it would take longer to kill tough targets.
Agreed. I have a lvl 790 bowling ball psyker and can wipe hordes quicker than DoT can take out from flamey bois, but also love it when ye get that psyker different stave synergy- burns, frazzles and boom booms just nomming through sh!t! xD .
It’s all about how you play. Wish people would stop calling for nerfs- especially on what they don’t play, and start holding them to account for all these goddamn crashes and game ending bugs already.
I dream of an exhaustion mechanic… something that would force a psyker that over use his powers to be unable to use them for 20-30 seconds.
Just to force them to return to melee and stop this non sense of a blue wave that kill everything.
DS is annoying as hell. But Purgatus is the weapon that killed the most enemies in 2025. More than DS, and there is a reason behind that.
I personally think that they should try to balance psyker before adjusting purgatus staff. Or I believe that they will weaken the purgatus while not fixing the problem. Then they would have to fix psyker and then the purgatus would be bad.
Nobody wants an other useless weapon. At least, I don’t want one more useless weapon.
The goal should never to make a weapon totally useless. Several nerfs demands push for that, and we should really be cautious about that.