Everything Surge staff does can be done by other staves. its only saving grace for stunning mobs, while helpful, can be done by other staves except for maybe Purgatus.
But in my experience in Damnation, its not the elites on their own that wipe teams, its hordes. And this is why I think Surge is the worst staff in the game. The one special attribute for stunning specials and elites gets completely screwed over in large hordes. Since you dont have total control of where the bolt goes, it will go in a cone of vision from nearest to furthest with limited bounces. Meaning, in hordes, stunning specials and elites becomes incredibly unreliable and you just end up tickling poxwalkers and other unarmored enemies. While it is nice to melt flak enemies, the unreliable nature of its alt fire is incredibly frustrating with some enemies just straight up ignoring the stun despite the game saying the hit connected.
A simple fix for this would be allowing us to manually aim where the initial bolt will go and bounce from there. This will allow us to have more control over our own weapon instead of just spamming it in a crowd and hoping for the best.
If the team has no good horde-clearers, then hordes can be dangerous on 5+. On regular 5 people ought to be able to simply melee hordes down. But yes, if the team is lacking in horde clear ability or skill, then obviously the Surge is not exactly helping the situation.
Know what you can bring along with a Surge, though? An Illsi. Suddenly your horde and mixed horde clear is pretty dang good.
I will say that if you want to ātop scoreboardsā with Surge and actually do damage, it takes a little bit of clever feat building and being selective about when you use it and when you melee, rather than just spamming uncharged Surge constantly.
I love and hate the surge staff. With the right perks/blessings it deletes (not just stuns) pretty much all shooters other than reapers. Then the horde comes and it is pretty much not usable. That trade-off always seemed kinda balanced to me tbh.
Yeah I sometimes bring blazing Trauma, sometimes the Surge. Mostly Trauma. Iāve never found Purge to be of much interest to me, and I struggle to make Voidstrike more than a gimmick at 5+.
What about paired with an illisi?
I run a melee focused psyker with an infernus laspistol as backup for armored targets and pesky shootersā¦ And being able to force-push poxbursters back.
I imagine a decent surge staff could do the same job as the pistol, ascendant blaze & slaughterer illisi take care of hordes anyways.
I occassionally run a melee centric psyker (as much as its an oxymoron atm) with a force sword and surge staff. Its decent, fun build, but far from other options in terms of damage. Surge has a really narrow niche of doing great damage vs armourā¦and offers CC, useful vs specials. But then damage is king in Tide games, and other staves all have decent CC. It could be me, but surge always falls behind in terms of damage on the scoreboard. Those numbers donāt lie.
Have they even fixed the bug where surge would not crit/do damage if combined with Warp Flurry?
You can basically play psyker as a zealot, but you have very little room for error. With the best stamina regen delay, dodge delay, infinite dodge, infinite slides, very high DR and very high damage boost itās pretty good. I sometimes do that to get the adrenaline going.
Having 1 Surge psyker in the team is actually the closest Iāve seen the game getting ātrivializedā. This works even if the Surge player is one of those ācarry meā players who donāt know they have a melee weapon for hordes or brainburst when the situation demands it. Itās bad of course if there are more CC-focused players so the team lacks overall damage, but itās a rare sight.
Surge might be a niche weapon, but its niche is extremely strong.
Strongly agree with this. Though personally I donāt like when psykers run it since it does some combination of stunning things I was planning to hit before they get to me and making all the bigboi fights kind of dull while not being useful the rest of the time. Kindaā¦zaps the fun out of it sometimes.
I donāt think its a bad staff and I donāt want it changed just 'cause it annoys me a bit. I like OPās suggestion though. Itād be good QoL and add a skill advantage to the weapon.
Welp I tried it, just logged in and the armoury had one at the top of the list with nice stats, 370 base, quell speed was the only low stat, I amped it up to orange and went on a heresy mission.
Just not feelinā it, my laspistol has more range, single target damage output, better sustain.
The surge staff kills groups of maulers and ragers just as fast, but the difference is it has to be charged up, and once your peril is full, you gotta take a break and retreat. With the laspistol you just reload in the blink of an eye and keep firing.
The staff did help keep my peril up for a better damage boost though.
The pistol also has a HUGE movement speed advantage, I feel like the flash every time I switch to it.
The only thing the staff really felt better at is bulwarks & crushers, and I always use BB on them anyways.
Warp Nexus obviously, Warp Flury and crit chance perk if you can. Quitetude, warp unleashed. The next part varies a bit, been testing stuff and not sure which is actually most effective. I ran super damage hungry for a while, which Psychic Communion, Warp Battery and Kinetic Barrage. Many will run AB for the ult, butā¦ I dunno. Even in solo quickplay, most teams can manage a horde just fine without a single AB thrown in there, and it consumes your charges. Faster BBing/faster CC ult that doesnāt consume charges works better for me. Plus, the Illsi exists now. All you need on it is slaughterer, anything else is just gravy.
Lately Iāve changed it up a bit and gone for Psychineticās Aura or Celebral Lac in third row, Kinetic Flayer and once again Kinetic Barrage. Canāt say for sure which build is āultimatelyā the best. Celebral Lac for instance is very helpful against monsters, and really helps hitting 2-shot BB breakpoints despite only running four warp charges. Oh and Kinetic Deflection or Kinetic shield, depending on if youāre a deflector-boi or not.
Also I tend to try to always fully charge against any shooters (when there isnāt a Vet or someone deleting the same targets), and I fully charge against most meatier things too. I only really spam if things are really going to hell and the CC becomes far more important than the damage.
You also have to be super willing to wade into melee, especially against hordes. Learn to heavy-heavy and dodge while striking with the Illsi, and youāll be fine most of the time, and do lots of damage. If things are superdense/they keep coming at you, heavy-light will be slightly faster and still do good damage. Iāll only Surge into a horde if itās mixed, or if itās coming at us in a way where holding the horde back for a few seconds is actually important. Beyond that, melee the horde, donāt surge it.
Sure would be nice to be able to create the weapons you want to try out builds, as opposed to all these locked perks and blessings and wishing a good roll on everything elseā¦
I was called a troll and asked to kill myself for using this staff on shock troop so idk about that, at least people perception of it is quiteā¦ hostile xd
Itās funny to me how surge was considered the top pick around release, then got less popular due to purgatus having a renaissance and now you get posts like this.