Surge staff has scaling issues compared to other staves

As others eluded, Surge Staff can be an amazing CC tool, but you NEED your team’s support. A friend of mine who plays a Psyker main and primarily uses Surge once wracked up over 16k enemies staggered* in one high-intensity map we ran, whereas I topped the charts in enemies killed that round.

For the entire map, I was his battle buddy and was glued to him at the hip. I used my Power Sword (I have Power Cycler IV, so it’s less assy) to keep the trash off him while he Emperor Palaptine’d the heresy out of everything in our path.

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I have another friend who’s a veteran main who also runs Power Sword/Bolter, and likes to speed run, regardless of difficulty/modifier. I typically don’t run Surge when playing my Psyker with him because I know I’ll be left behind, staggering the Richard Trickle for Days with my Thunder (5 points for Griffindor if you got that reference).

Instead, when running with Speedy run Gonzalez I just use my Master Exploder™ build (i.e. Void Staff /w Transfer Perril IV, spam headshots for DAYZ!)…

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I think both styles are fun, and it just depends on…

  1. The nature of the mission I’m running
  2. What the group needs
  3. What I feel like playing

Sometimes I go extra spicy and don’t even run a staff at all! Been screwing around with my machine pistol and Kenetic Flayer feat (10% change to proc brain burst), which is insanely fun :smiley: .

Does it need to be tweaked? I don’t think so. No other class can CC just about any mob in the game the way a Psyker with Surge can (trivializes disablers, or anything really). I don’t begrudge it for having some drawbacks, otherwise, there’d be no reason to use anything else.

Still infinitely better than a straight up coin toss IMHO.

A fix for the staff would be for it to prioritize targets with carapace and wearing metal before targetting chaff. This makes sense and is how it would likely work anyways

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I think upping the “spread” of the chained lightning would help it out a lot too

That’s very interesting! I also have the scoreboard mod (or did before the last patch - I need to rerun the enable mods batch file :slight_smile: ). Anyway, I’d be curious about the numbers. With the Surge Staff, I’ve seen 16.8k staggered enemies on a just a Heresy High Intensity:

What kind of numbers did you see with Purge?

You also eluded to another good point, even if you can’t take things out of play with comparable stagger, you can still take it out of play (permanently) with Moar DoTs™ - the best defense is a good offense ^_^…

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Phyker is my main and I have a loadout for every staff. (Purge nad surge being my favorite) All of them I’ve been able to do 300k-400k damage and surge staff was actually the weapon I was able to get the penance for taking no damage in a mission (given that was high int heresy) Personally I think it’s in a fine place after the damage buff they gave it a little while back, but that may just be me.

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