Kind of shares my sentiment on him.
Psyker is currently very unforgiving glass cannon, you can get toughness back nicely, but have little boosts / utlilites allowing you to take or avoid a random burst of damage: burster behind a door, running into gunner/rager patrol and so on.
I like to play him from time to time, but the class feels quite unforgiving to play, regardless of the build. For me, psyker gets monotonous pretty quickly: never drop your guard, use a blitz, use a staff, rinse & repeat…
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Imo the psyker should be a glass cannon as a defining feature.
Just like the ogryn is tanky by default.
Alternatively, they could slightly buff psyker base defensive stats and add an optional talent that increases all dmg dealt by 30% at the cost of also taking 30% more dmg.
Thing is, probably everyone would take that optional talent and then people will complain about a lack of survivability. Most people will likely blindly jump at the opportunity to deal more damage, even if it means that they will crumble like a crouton.
Players will then complain about having to sacrifice their survivability for the “obvious“ and “necessary“ pick of that bonus damage.
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I just ran a few aurics and Psyker felt fine, no deaths but did get knocked down a couple of times while in tight spaces. Where there was space to kite it was fairly safe, but if you get cornered, like just after a drop down, you are very vulnerable. I dont mind the glass cannon design but a touch more mobility would be nice to help with kiting. I also like the idea of a tanky space wizard career like unchained.
PS Are people running 3 x 20% hp trinkets all with 15% curse resistance for the silent bursters now? Or is toughness better to counter them?
If you’re using deflector and kinetic deflection talent, and frankly even if you’re not, I run one +3 stamina curio. Stamina helps psykers survivability a lot. With a force sword you can force push your way through packs of enemies and tank a ton of hits if you need to.
I run one health and one toughness curio from there.
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Brain Burst has been pretty lackluster ever since the game launched, because it was so OP in the betas.
The Psyker has been sorely lacking a real single target big nuke for attacking bosses and sniping big enemies that has a meaningful restriction on how frequently you can use it.
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Psyker is fine, the shield is a killer defensive option.
The alternatives to shield at the moment are not good enough compared to it which kinda restricts ‘good’ useful psyker builds.
If anything, psyker is great compared to the release, post beta psyker for a while now.
Brain burst with the accelerated free ones you get in the middle branch is awesome as it is, and can one shot most elites / specials with some empowerement.
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Of course we’re fine, we’re very strong even
We’re just not busted, as things should be
People look at actual busted and think “that should be me too”, but no thank you
A rework of Disrupt Destiny would be nice though
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Psyker is fine. I pub T5 Auric Maelstroms with Surge + Vent Burn + Empowered BB with Knife / Dueling Sword and it might be my favorite build in the game right now. The flow feels really good, I kill everything, and it’s a priority-target hunting safari ^.^
If you’re dying at range, position near corners / cover or run bubble. Know how you regain toughness via nodes. If you’re dying in melee, peril block + dodge + shove + make sure you understand the opening timings. You’ve got less TDR than other characters but you’ve got really easy toughness regen available. It’s a game of keeping damage sources from overwhelming your resources. A lack of survivability is almost always a skissue.
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I cannot fathom that we’ve arrived to this word, but here we are.
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Skissue = an estimated rating of another players capabilities 
Shield is almost useless except for 4-5 seconds of moving between cover, more than 1 gunner will drop the shield in 6 seconds or less on t5+. It is a great pick for that reason but just as viable as shriek if you arent needing it to move between cover all the time, its more of team utility since you can just deflector slide between cover for yourself. Honestly, shriek is fine where it is, the damage component(100-200 damage is nothing) needs a buff probably or some way to scale into t5+, but otherwise it works as intended with a huge peril drop and knockback. Scriers is for gunpsykers so its got its own thing going on.
Psykers are not very strong though they require far more input for basically the same output every other class gets far easier but don’t get any rewards for the difficulty. For being the squishy mage class they don’t get more damage and they dont get more utility. It has nothing to do with being busted unless you are saying every other class is busted, which actually means psyker is busted in a bad way.
Excusing flaws in the class because you learned how to overcome them doesn’t make them not flaws. Its similar to people who think fighting 6-10 gunners around every corner during old ai director wasnt a problem because you can slide cancel at them, it doesnt make it a good system, you just got good at bad mechanics. These are the posts that prevent good changes in the game, because noone wants to admit their favorite class isn’t the best. Psyker definitely needs the most help of the 4 , no way to really argue it, the glass cannon class doesnt really have a cannon atm.
I don’t understand how psyker went from patch #13 “OMG Psyker slays literally everything OMG it’s sooooo strong” to now, where assail and soulblaze got reigned in a bit and now apparently its utter garbage according to many here. Nothing much has really changed for many psyker builds. I don’t understand by what metric people are saying it’s weak.
I’ve been running a trauma, BB, soulblaze, shriek, warp charge build and freaking slaying. It’s amazing.
I seriously don’t get it. I feel like people that think psyker is weak just have a playstyle expectation that doesn’t mesh with the reality of what effective psyker builds are. So they end up chasing some concept of how they should be playing that end up leading them into an ineffective direction.
11 Likes
Hell, I’ve been running an objectively meme Psyker build with revolver and assail where 90% of it is carried by said revolver, and I don’t feel particularly weak.
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I think that the problem is that balancing things like smite and assail are particularly difficult when you consider balancing the abilities across essentially 6 different difficulties. Assail in it’s previous form felt decently balanced versus things like auric maelstrom - but that version of assail versus malice was absolutely bonkers.
So I get where people were coming from when they were complaining about it versus where people are coming from now where assail feels kinda lack luster on auric.
I think honestly fat shark needs to remove a difficulty tier and flat out tell people what difficulty they are aiming their game at being balanced around. If it is damnation then they have 2 choices. Let things like assail, smite and venting shriek seem overpowered in lower difficulties or simply add a damage reduction modifier to them that raises as the difficulty lowers…
Or maybe make assail’s damage scale with the character’s level?
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BB down the middle is fun to play and pretty effective. The other builds are so reliant on the rest of the team to deal with any difficult target. I often feel like it’s very fun with a good team, but if I am the best player on the team in damnation, I feel like I should have picked something else, anything else really.
I like to use telekine shield to further boost the BB when I am out of empowered charges. It’s still largely a support class, doesn’t really have any other builds I think are nearly as good, and is difficult to play. The point about the psyker not having any skills to immediately regain toughness is true. The other classes all have panic buttons along with better melee options that make them much more comfortable to play, even relaxing by comparison, but isn’t that sort of the point of peril?
I’m checking for a patch every once in a while because this game needs healthy DLC for variety as well as a huge bug fix and balance pass after 13. Played for the first time in a week and a half and 2 of the 3 matches bugged out with my chorus failing to activate and pretty much costing us the run the second time. I quit out in hope that my bot saved them after I went down cause without the toughness regen from chorus we were already boned.
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I’m telling you guys it has to do with playing alongside completely outlandish stuff like plasma gun vet
They see these guys poorly aiming their baby mode weapon in one general direction and blowing up the kill feed, and so they tell themselves “oh well i can’t do that with Psyker therefore Psyker is weak”
I personally have 3 very strong builds - not that they’re hard to find because skill trees are in fact pretty rigid
You really only chose whether you want to emphasize sustain or more damage
The rest is just logic : making sure you have an option for every range, making sure you’re not entirely useless against Carapace, Bullwarks and Bosses
Honestly if they just made any damage causing ability scale to the difficulty it’d fix things.
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?
Assail is great on aurics. It gives you space from trash mobs, and still murders ranged packs like no one’s business.
It’s the only blitz I use.
Better than smite? Probably not if you have competent killers on your team, but I’ll not gamble with that even on aurics.
It’s a tertiary weapon with great horde clear on a negligible CD. Players just lean on it too heavily and expect it to have good single target as well or something.
Never understood any complaints about its lack of power.
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