Made a post about this earlier, trying to get some traction on my fav staff being gimped into obscurity.
Please add weak spot chance back to smite and surge staff (%chance). Lightening arcs everywhere. Shouldn’t be a hard concept to work also has utility with other perks.
Please add it’s localized AOE back again lighting bounces around and surges areas not just a spot.
I miss its synergy with smite.
I agree. I’d like to see it given some small AOE jump to (obviously not on the level of smite). I want to see it’s unique nature of toasting flak and carapace returned to it as well.
Toasting visually or like dealing a lot of damage to them?
Prefacing with the fact that Surge is my favourite staff, there is an issue of balance: mainly that it deals damage, deals CC, and it attaches to the target.
I think the staff could be made better by giving it more blessings that change its behaviour, like
I think the biggest problem with randomized hits is that enemies don’t have a consistent armor profile throughout their whole body, so +damage to specific armor types become less valuable and could make it harder to hit breakpoints.
For example: +flak damage would make them better against maulers, but if it headshot and hit carapace it would probably be a damage decrease (idk how to math). Another example is dreg shotgunner which has flak torso, unarmored head, and 1 arm and leg that is unarmored while the other two are flak.
Not having reliable consistency with where you deal damage would make this a little frustrating, I think.
Surge staff is already strong and widely used, it doesn’t need help. It’s just boring imo.
I would say keep it’s single target power, which needs to be a tad higher, and anything directly next to it with no jumps to outer targets. Should have its chance to weak spot and Crit in that localized area bolstering part of the synergies in the Psyker tree. Especially as electricity likes to travel. Previously when aiming with the staff pointed at the head this would count.
Half the range of the Trauma staff, and Voidstrike. Both of those staffs have superior AOE and Stagger ability with the same damage. The Surge staff has the damage but not the AOE coverage to compete with the other 3 staves.
It doesn’t do a lot of damage or have a damage stack like hammer, bolter, against monstrosities. Something as single target focused the TTK should be similar to single target weapons. Where it takes 1 mag or 2 out of the bolter or 3-5 charged hits out of a hammer. It takes about 30 seconds with the other weapons to do this. The TTK on the surge staff and its focus is terrible and long.
I feel the class needs something that hits like other classes weapons can. I feel the Surge staff is the best candidate to do this.
I can get behind this train of thought but anything that it is now. It used to be so much better.
It is not strong by comparison to the other 3 staves. 2 of them offer the same damage and much more utility. The purgatus staff offering CC and AOE damage has its role well thought out. When you look at the differences of the other two. The surge staff has no place amongst them. VoidStrike staff being the most widely used for its ability to shut down specials and elites with CC for a much more meaningful effect, use and range. The Surge staff does the same amount of damage without any area or meaningful CC on the 2 targets it hits?
Which would you choose 650 damage to hit 5 targets or 650 to hit 2?
It charges faster and doesn’t require you to lead shots or aim precisely, it has more crit chance for it’s lack of ability to headshot and it has like ~20 m range. I would not say it’s just a worse version of trauma or voidstrike.
I can tell by clear time it is a weaker staff. I can do so much more work except with monstrosities by using a Trauma staff or VoidStrike staff. Using the 2 blessings that at 18% crit chance by peril, and 7.5% reduced charge time. The Surge staff feels like a joke by comparison.
Another easy idea is making it a channeled staff like Purgatus. Just for single target and whatever near it in a circle.
Surge only has 4 blessings. 3 if you acknowledge that run and gun has zero purpose.
Signed
I kind of agree that it’s a bit boring but not especially overpowered.
I think a change that would solve both is giving it a more interesting and more powerful charge up. Since the charge up attack is so fast now, there’s basically no difference between an uncharged zap and a fully charged zap, so there’s no tactical decision to make between them.
Like with the plasma gun or helbore, the thing that makes charge up weapons interesting to use is that fully charged serves a different purpose to uncharged. In both of those cases, fully charged is much stronger but also much slower, so one would typically use uncharged shots against weak enemies and charged shots against big targets. You don’t bother using charged up shots on weak enemies because it’s a waste of time.
I think the surge staff might be more interesting if it was an inversion of this: What if charging the surge staff didn’t increase its damage, if it always did very high damage to a single target, but charging it up made it chain to more targets, with all secondary targets taking only, let’s say, about half the damage, and it had a really long potential charge time. Something like, able to charge for up to five whole seconds, below 0.75 seconds of charging makes the bolt strike only a single target, and then one chain is added every .25 seconds above that. A fully charged strike would do lots of damage to the main target, and then substantial damage to like twenty other targets, enough to kill them if they’re weak enemies like horde guys or shooters.
I believe this would make the surge staff effective against single targets by spamming low charge strikes, and useful against groups with high charged strikes, which would be interesting to use because the psyker would always be weighing how long they’re willing to keep charging before releasing a strike as enemies approach them, not to determine how much damage to do to a single target, but to determine how many other targets they can get away with hitting.
It wouldn’t be that good at disrupting groups since striking lots of targets requires charging for a long time, but that’s okay, because that’s what Smite is for. Smite disrupts, Surge kills. It also wouldn’t make the surge staff outpace the other three staves in terms of horde killing, since they would still charge up faster and so be more reliable against hordes, thus keeping the surge staff still in its role of being the best at killing big priority targets like ogryn or specials.
oh also the surge staff should have a cooler sound effect, now that it’s a high damage weapon they should put some serious thunderclap in there or something
I can agree with this. Well written.
How about we are actually allowed to aim for a weakspot ourselves. You know, eye-hand cordination, some practice.
That would be nice, but I feel like there could just be a lot more options in blessings to grant different play styles.
Look at guns, lots of them have 9 blessings to choose from. Surge has 4.
Imagine a blessing that extended CC on shocked targets by .5 seconds. Or one that added a dot worth 50% of the damage over 3 seconds. Right now staves struggle pretty hard with boss damage, imagine if surge targets recieved 25% extra damage for 5 seconds on any targets they hit.
There are tons of ways for them to improve staves in general. I made a post about the special action button for staves doing something meaningful, I’d still love to see something like that.
Most (all) the staves have incredibly uninspiring blessings, many of which cannot even function on the staff main attack. Psyker and the staves are very obviously a last minute addition, hastily thrown together with little thought or purpose… and here we are, a year later, and they have fixed nothing. Surge staff was good for half a second, but then they brought it back in line and made it pointless. I can only imagine it’s sole purpose for existing is to give a no-aim option for controller players.
Psyker still doesn’t not have a good single target staff, because Surge ain’t it. Psyker is also missing a beam staff. And any other number of staves they could have come up with.
I’m guessing they changed it to make room for Smite, but I really miss the old Surge staff. I wish they’d bring it back as a different weapon Mark or something.