As cool as the concept is, and neat to look at, it’s absolutely unhealthy for the game.
For people who want to play melee and actually play with mixed horde and do things, a smite psyker who does nothing but use smite and vent just turns everything into statues and makes the game incredibly stale. Why am I playing a game about hitting statues?
For the actual psyker, it encourages bad habits of not actually learning mechanics besides holding M2 and M1. There’s no need to learn melee combos, sliding, dodging, etc. Just hold M2 and M1 and press F to vent every so often.
With a smite psyker, you’re effectively playing a man down against statues in this game which makes the game incredibly stale.
Watching smite psykers enter a monstrous specialist game is entertaining when they attempt the same tactic of stunning everything and then having it fail on monsters, and they die because they never learned to dodge dance, block, DPS melee combos, etc.
Personally, I’m not sure how to rework smite easily to differentiate it from surge staff. It does either need to lose the hard continuous stun or to focus more on a support role of debuffing (rather than stunning) enemies.
For example, it would be a lot better and feel like an actual tool to have the AoE shock to apply one quick and short burst of stun after a charge up instead of the current iteration of a constant channel mechanic we see now. This would at least encourage the psyker to actually plan their smite usage and to dodge/slide during the animation.
There’s also the massive issue of uncharged smite being purge garbage, but that’s another discussion wholly, and it could be possible to be a part of a rework.
An easy way to at least somewhat reduce spamability would be to slightly increase charge time, give it a maximum duration (so you have to recharge), and make the stun work like the Zealot’s relic AoE does against bosses:
Charging mutants etc. would only be stunned on the first and, say, every third pulse afterwards; This means you’d have to time it correctly in case you’re the target.
variable range is also an option.
I really don’t think an ability that doesn’t require any cooldowns or forethought as to when to save it should have the ability to stun monsters. They’re already struggling to exist already with zealot shenanigans, and I’d rather not add something more to weaken their existence imho.
Smite is the old surge on steroids. It propagates near instantly (build dependent) and stunlocks everything perfectly including elites balls
It’s not very fun to play into.
You know how back when the flamer was significantly better it made the game unfun due to the interactivity it caused to hordes? Smite is that.
What’s currently the “uncharged” Smite should act as a (slightly) higher damage, single-target stun - maybe for when a really dangerous melee enemy (such as a Rager, or a Mauler, or maybe even a Crusher) gets a little bit too comfortable in your personal bubble, it’ll stun them and take a half-decent chunk of their health away, so that you can get your bearings. Think of it as a “bite-sized Surge”
What’s currently the “charged” Smite is fine in its current form as a “Crowd Control” utility, and it’s saved a fair few runs due to that distinction!
The question is whether or not your run should have been saved. Clearly, your team or capabilities hit a snag, and a pretty mindless CC option managed to fix everything it turning everything into statues to trivialize something difficult.
Vermintide 2 has plenty of elite packs show up, and surge or any equivalent wasn’t needed to deal with them, and people use pure melee with no issue.
How is it balanced for one person to stop an infinite number of crushers for as long as they want by holding M2 and M1 without any cooldowns, and only having to manage a little bit of perils?
It’s seriously not healthy for the game to have such a ridiculous option since the crusher pack was meant to be threatening.
A little bit of peril? My build has multiple buffs to slow my Peril generation and Smite completely fills it up after only 3-4 seconds of use; unless I’m experiencing an issue that no one else has, it seems fairly balanced to me! It’s not mindless to stun a crowd of enemies or a particular Elite/Specialist Enemy for a few seconds to buy either yourself or your team some time.
Edit: At least I don’t use Assail, that’s still horribly useful in all of the wrong situations. Assail Psykers just kinda wipe all of the hordes and make the other teammates feel useless and unsatisfied, but then a Monstrosity walks in and the Psyker can’t do anything but sit in the corner and watch unless they’ve SPECIFICALLY got a Voidstrike Force Staff.
As it stands right now, smite is a worse trauma since they both do CC, do damage, apply debuffs, and works in the AoE, but trauma has drawbacks of a much longer charging time, much more investment to use, much higher peril cost, and an actual risk of exploding. Trauma is straight superior since the actual damage output is far greater, and the rending debuff is much higher value.
Yes, what I listed earlier with a quick application charged AoE smite is similar, but there can easily be a trade off for speed, peril cost, ease of access, range versatility, etc. there’s still an available niche for a burst version of smite.
I run smite with my voidstrike build, and even in Auric damnation I maybe use it once or twice per mission. Its to help people not get overwhelmed, period. Or to protect when someone is using data interrogator.
Smite bots are annoying and I don’t like playing with them.
Psyker just seems overall to be the console player class with how the kit is, as a psyker you can be effective just spamming smite and shield. Most of the psyker staffs doesn’t require much aiming and is generally some form of aoe. Personally I think that’s fine that some parts are designed around console players but smite? No way. Why does a psyker need to be able to completely trivialize any elite encounters and make all the enemies into punching bags for the team to handle? It’s not a question that it isn’t effective just that it’s really boring since the risk of engaging in melee is gone.
There was a similar issue with active camo before patch 13 where people would just use it as a crutch and your team would just be down a person effectively. I think I it’s something similar to smite where sure, it’s a tool you can decide to use effectively, but people can decide to just make the game worse for others by “playing the game.”
For the most part psyker is fine, and while they’re not going to get to the hilarious DPS levels of a thunderhammer, deimos stabs are still really good for boss damage.
