The Purgator skull has an issue currently of feeling like griefing your teammates by wasting a grenade charge compared to the medicae skull or much stronger damage blitzes. A simple fix would be to buff the Purgator damage. An alternative, and IMO superior solution, would be for the ammo economy of purgator skull to behave like Zealot knives. That would make it worth taking as a talent point, and it would be more fun to use knowing you can still save your grenade charges for medicae, especially since it’s common for grenade charges to be reserved for stronger grenades like for Hive Scum’s RPG and toxic blitz.
The shield blitz also would feel much better to use if it was a recharge, instead of grenade pickup, like Arbitrator’s dog shock blitz. It could also have reduced quantity of charges to keep it balanced.
It’d also be a great change if the main servo-skull was baseline. When choosing a blitz other than skull, you should just lose out on Noospheric Command, Purgator, and Medicae skull. The main skull that hacks and does light consistent damage feels too important to the class identity, it feels bad to not have. A separate talent that removes the main skull in favor of grenade regen like Arbitrator would be perfect for anyone that wants to go completely skull-less.
Even discounting scum’s ridiculously strong grenades, purg skull feels like a (warm) wet noodle.
Just keep it as is and add a decent capacitance cost + small CD & give shield a capacitance cost + CD too (maybe something else as well, I mean right now I really struggle to see the point of the shield when dodging and sliding are in the game - especially when it doesn’t even block nets etc. like psyker’s shield does, so you’re anyway better off dodging just to make sure)
It would be much more engaging to juggle ability uses with blitz use (assuming they balance it well so you can’t just spam it like noospheric)
Plus it removes the anti-synergy with medicae skull which might need 1 charge less as is.
On a side note I’d also like an option to have the skull default to the aoe mode always and then need input to change to directed, generally if I want to throw it out fast I want aoe and if I’m going for directed I’m probably anyway going to take a moment to line it up perfectly.
I feel like Noosphere should be removed, powering up the skull just slightly more effective, and the servo skull blitz should add the flame skull but on cooldown, like 120s. Everyone is heading here for medicae skull and I’d like you to have many floating heads.
I thought we didn’t want helpers taking care of business.
Noosphere is really strong, but it’d suck if they took it out, because it’s a cool idea. I would start by giving it a slight cooldown after use.
Skitty’s other blitzes are pretty bad, though. I understand that if you prime enemies with Electrocuted you can deal crazy damage with the Arc Grenades, but I feel they will always be inferior to just taking Servo-Skull.
Bubble could just have a cooldown and/or cost capacitance. Or, perhaps just make it so that even having it reduces max damage you can take from one attack. It’s a sub-node, but make it active all the time. Then you can have a tanky Skitarii if you want, but you can’t get get any Servo-Skulls.
imo just bump the capacitance cost up, it’s good but I don’t think it’s too out of whack, it’s just way too easy to recoup its cost.
Arc grenades are actually pretty good even if enemies aren’t preprimed, they’re just inconsistent enough you can get barely any value out of a use - or outright delete an elite swarm - with a lot of results inbetween. I take them if my build doesn’t have an answer to crushers and/or I don’t need servo skull’s precision. Servo is probably still the stronger blitz overall, but really it’s the inconsistency that hurts arc grenades (that and the current subnodes feel more like a tax for what you should get baseline than an enhancement, at least relative to servo skull and its subnodes).
Shield just sucks because most of what it does can be done by dodging and sliding, and you anyway have to dodge with it up because of melee stragglers and trappers etc. ignoring it. It really should eat trapper projectiles too like psyker shield does so you can at least use it for clutch revives in the same situations as psyker shield, I mean this is the selfish version after all and yet it’s just largely worse.
I’ve also seen people get eaten by burgle with it up so I have to assume it doesn’t block the barf.
Like you said it needs a CD/capacitance cost, and/or imo a complete rework. Rolling the max damage node into baseline and maybe reducing it to 25 would also be a big buff.
Arc grenades are fine “as a grenade”. They’re just completely outshone by the Servo-Skull because you can, almost constantly, get value from that. Against even a massive pack of ragers you can just ping them while blocking and dodging and whittle them down. The debuff is strong on everything. It’s insanely useful to the point of feeling class-defining. The only downside is having to spam-target things. Not sure if there’s a mod out there that makes this less annoying yet?
Zealot’s nades are comparatively low-impact, but that seems by design in comparison to Vet. But as it is, Skitty has something extremely strong and then some far inferior options. They need some closer parity. Maybe, like, you can just carry more arc grenades than usual? I dunno. They’re a cool idea, I like them. They just pale in comparison to the SKULL OF DOOM.
I’m not searching for power creep here. It’s a vexing situation. Just trying to create more of a reason to consider each grenade. I’ve tried Arc Grenades with electro build, and I found they just felt kinda . . . tacked on? There’s synergy, sure, but it feels too superfluous.
All Skitarri Blitz should cost Capacitance, and a cool down in some cases. Except maybe arc grenades, which also could use capacitance and not fk with the grenade economy
A strong AoE / AoD option taken in addition to a bunch of other useful blitz tools, that can be as readily available as Zealot’s puny knives hitting a single target is definitely the right comparison. Nothing can go wrong here, this game definitely lacks more balance-breaking crutches, we can’t have enough of purgatus and smite, need more of that.