Suggestion: Psykinetics Rebuild (FQA)

Might be a bit too strong, as Corruption is supposed to be a hard debuff

What if instead it was:

Vortex (Vortex of Doom is an ability from the Telekine discipline, which is the Psykinetic):

Psyker and Allies in coherency get additional DoT on their elite hits, applying Soulblaze in a small area near the Elite
Or
Taking toughness damage cause a DoT area, cooldown of X sec.

I think this should be avoided, maybe have threshold in Peril, where you increase your chance of getting Warp charges at low Peril but increase it at high peril. That way it doesn’t penalize people from playing with Non Warp weapon (Apart from being low Peril)

I’d like to tag on here, because you hit several of my complaints on the head, rather than create another thread echoing much of what you’ve said.

  • My background

Long time 40k-er, and 40k TTRPG-er. Been keeping an eye on Darktide since announcement. I came to the Psyker class because the Psyker is one of the coolest things in the 40k universe. I’m by no means a metagamer, but I’ve been around all forms of gaming long enough to understand how to build a character that synergizes the build with the role it fills and optimize from there. I played the Psyker to lvl 24 before coming here to the forums to see if I was missing something or if the class really was dysfunctional. I didn’t play in closed beta, so I don’t know anything about the state of the game other than hearing an off-hand comment from a friend that the Psyker was OP in closed beta. Dunno if that’s true or not. I work a lot, so I don’t get a lot of time to play regularly. This beta was somewhat the exception to the rule because it landed over a holiday and my group of gaming friends was turned onto it at the same time. I probably won’t play the game unless one or a few of my friends are online.

  • The Crux: I wanted to play the Psyker because they’re cool. Playing it isn’t very cool at all.

It has far more drawbacks to manage than any other class and is deadweight to the party when compared against the single target damage output of the Sharpshooter. The zealot is arguably as good at crowd control and objectively better at single target damage and durability. The Ogryn is probably similar in damage output to chod and specials, but far more survivable and can go toe to toe with elites and monstrosities. See Fuzzy’s summations in “What is a Psyker in Darktide?”, “Psykers vs. Others”, and “Other Psyker Roles”. It’s not cool to watch all the classes do what I’m supposed to be doing better than I can, while I just run around quelling peril the whole time. Even if they were balanced on par with dps of other classes, it should at least FEEL like I’m contributing, not wasting peril.

  • No synergy to speak of, all feats are geared toward an ability that is largely useless malice and beyond.

The description of it is a single target damage dealer, but I feel like reality is it’s anything but that. To sum up my echoes of other threads of specifics: 1) Brain burst is useless if I can never get a cast off before it gets melted. One of my friends said, “I feel bad for targeting something while you’re trying to brain burst it, but if I wait it’s just going to damage/kill me before you kill it, so I just gun it down anyway.” 2) all the feats and abilities are geared toward BB, see 1. 3) I switched to staves because it seemed to be the only thing I could find to be useful, but none of my feats and abilities are geared toward crowd control.

  • Even if the numbers somehow balance out, if it feels broken/wasteful to the player not having fun, then it’s broken

I find balancing peril with damage a good mechanic, but what’s the point of having these drawbacks the other classes don’t have while I contribute objectively less to the game than they do. If I have to worry about quelling and managing perils, shouldn’t the class be doing face melting damage to offset it versus other classes which only have to manage ammo (see mag dump burn stacks on sharpshooter)? Or BB damage being worth using the ability at least? At this point it’s more useful to use a general weapon on big baddies than to use BB. If you’re going to make me live with the drawbacks at least give me worthwhile damage to justify it.

  • Maybe just bugs, but god I hope staves are not functioning as intended

I’m getting by crowd controlling with the limited damage bonuses I get from coherency warp charges and the one feat I have for force weapons, but the random, uncontrollable perils and at best being able to get 6ish full charge secondaries off before doing the chicken dance for 10-15 seconds is laughable. The, “grenade inside [the psykers] head” is a running joke. Void staff is better, but it seems to be especially awful on the Trauma staff, which coincidentally are the only two which seem even remotely useful. Jobbut’s notes here perfectly explained all the things I was experiencing and super frustrated about staves.

  • Potential fix to consider for brain burst

If once I charge up the peril and someone else gets the kill before BB goes off, at least make the energy I already channeled into it turn into some sort of blast damage into surrounding enemies, (arguably more worthless) soulblaze, or something. At least that way there would be a reason to not just bail on a target and quell as soon as someone else shoots at it.

  • Conclusion

I really want to enjoy it, but I’m basically tagging along to have fun with my friends, at their expense, since I don’t contribute a whole lot at this point. I’m at 29 now and just hoping we’re going to see some sort of fix or rebalance to all this so I can justify still playing the game going forward. I can’t see forcing myself much longer to play without feeling like a contribution to the team and I don’t really have the time to invest in leveling something else.

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Edit: Double post