What are you baiting for here, exactly? What ‘proof’ could anyone give? Are you trying to bait scoreboard posts where it has scored low, so the legion of ‘git gud scrub’ can laugh at it?
Scoreboards are 500% meaningless. No, really. Totally and completely meaningless. I tend to top the scoreboard 80+% of the time no matter what I run. That doesn’t mean I think all the builds I run are equally good. Is Surge viable? Yeah. Is there any reason to run it over something else? No. Is it better to run something else? Yes.
High damage alone = meaningless, may as well spam into hordes. No real effect on real dangers.
High damage + highest elite/special/disabler kills count by a large margin = you deal enough damage fast enough to take out the key targets that make the game difficult.
Thus you can infer that either your weapon, build or playstyle is effective.
If you use the same build with different weapons you can then gauge the performance of each weapon.
That is the only way to determine how effective a weapon is right now.
All you people keep on yapping about ‘topping scoreboards’ and them being ‘useless’ never actually read the numbers in relation to each other.
I dunno why anyone is arguing about scoreboard screenshots. I’m sure there’s useful information in there somewhere but wouldn’t you need an awful lot of them to draw any accurate conclusions? So much random stuff happens in every mission. You’re only one quarter of a randomized team with randomized builds, random amounts and types of enemies, even random missions. To average out the variables in a set like that to see how the Surge Staff specifically handles you’d need hundreds of scoreboards to look at and compare, not to mention an even larger set of control data with runs using other weapons.
I don’t bother trying to tease out whether it “needs a buff” or “is performing fine” because I don’t have access to Fatshark’s presumably massive internal metrics. But metrics aren’t the only important thing. Regardless of whether the Surge Staff is strong or weak or viable, I don’t personally find it very fun to use, and that’s also an important factor with game design.
Like I said earlier, I think the bigger problem is that the short charge up time means there’s only one thing to do with the Surge Staff. I point it at people and I zap them, over and over and over again. Occasionally I shoot a force bolt at somebody far away, if I really want to spice things up. No aiming for headshots (not that I do that anyway much since I suck at it) and no tactics to use beyond when to switch to Smite or my sword. The other staves have a notable difference between a rapid low charge and a slow full charge, but low charge and high charge surge is almost identical. Except, full charge does do more damage, which means the zap feels less effective sometimes even though my brain doesn’t detect a significant difference between mid and full charge on my part.
Since I’m only doing one thing, it starts to feel monotonous even if it basically kills stuff adequately, which primes me to notice that lower damage, and it makes the whole weapon feel less reliable and less useful than it actually is. Which is an impediment to my Fun.
I say surge staff needs a much longer max charge time for a much higher max damage, or much higher max targets, or something. Balance against the other staves and against all the guns can come second; first it should be cool. To say nothing of the charge speed up blessing being basically worthless.
and come to think of it, all the staves could use a much longer max charge and larger max damage/area/whatever, why not.
Apart from the scoreboard e-peen, that I stopped using exactly because somehow I was almost always the best performer, I use Surge only because I prefer enemies being stunned instead of thrown on the ground.
I run a mainly support setup meant to save the run in case the party finds itself in a pinch, I don’t really care for damage or to be the one who gets the kill, I care to finish the run.
As it stands Surge is what I use when Smite is not needed or the sword can’t reach the enemy.
I happened accross psykers that run my same setup and runs are much smoother when 2 of us are present, so much so that I happened across people crying we were too OP just because we protected each other and were not at risk of being overwhelmed… in spite of us being the one saving their asses when they jumped into a horde.
Surge would just need to deal all the damage to the first enemy before jumping to the second, just that would make it much better simply because it would reach breakpoints much easier.
Remove part of its CC to increase the primary target damage. The total damage would remain the same, it would just be distributed differently.
I play it from time to time. Nerfs hit it hard, but Voidstrike is still railgun without any need for ammo. I don’t play enough Psyker nowadays to make a close balance assessment, but you can go ham with it pretty hard.
About the Surge IDK, I don’t play it, but whenever I see a psyker using it, it seems to perform incredibly well, although being a close-range weapon it can be a bit annoying to play with if the user matches your target selection. Probably should try it out myself.
Sounds good honestly. I should give it a go again. I’m still enjoying melee/gun psyker too much right now though.
Which is why I said all of the above. It isn’t even as close range as many people think, it has decent enough reach. It works best when played very aggressively, which is why I always position myself at the front and also see other psykers playing it very forward focus as well, that kinda balances out the range.
For anything you can’t rush down you have Brain Burst, which is also your dedicated boss damage.
Old surge didn’t necessarily do a lot of damage, but you could reliably stun lock elites/specials until your team got to you. It was a great cc champion of packs of elites; not so much any more.
This is anecdotal evidence on my impression: but it now seems to:
generate peril a lot faster
chain-hits fewer targets
doesn’t trigger stun on elites/specials with any more probability than it used to
does no more obvious damage than it used to
often “earths” itself - i.e. lighting visibly hits the ground
I’m not after a mega damage buff personally. But I do think some things could be improved - in the wake of “smite” which seems to be a one-skill-point grenade version of the staff.
1 - Any enemy wearing carapace should be stun-shocked and damaged more. Metal. Electricity. You know. Flak to a lesser degree. The surge staff should attach itself to the highest amount of metal and do high damage there (where an enemy wears multiple pieces; i.e. carapace damage > flak > etc)
2 - Unarmoured, diseased, specials/without metal: Surge should do LOW damage. i.e. you can’t really hurt a large horde that much. → so as not to encroach on Flame Thrower or Purgatus Staff roles.
3 - It should chain further. I think currently I tend to hit maybe 6 targets off my main? You look at any other staff and they can hit more targets from a charged shot.
4 - Peril is out of whack. I should be able to get three full charges off I think before I need to vent. I’m running a top level staff too, so heavens knows what lower levels are like. Peril build currently is silly.
On a positive note; the left-click primary mode is ‘okay’. I don’t like that it seems to be templated; but maybe a ball of electricity that does aoe damage to those it passes might be cool. Albeit a re-work of the weapon mechanic and high dev investment.
What niche/role should Surge occupy? Purgatus has short range/heavy AOE, Trauma has short-mid range/medium AOE/general purpose, Voidstrike has mid-long range/“sniping”*
I don’t know exactly what niche this would belong to, but I’d like more lightning - whether that’s more tendrils of lightning or more chains per tendril (or both, e.g. a single cast does 1 → 2 → 4 tendrils, total 7 targets). Maybe lean in hard on damage vs the armored armor types, so >125% modifiers to Flak/Carapace and <100% modifiers to other enemies. Some new blessing choices to make it more interesting (or adjust its focus) e.g. one extra tendril per fork (so 1 → 3 → 9, total 13 targets) with 40/35/30/25% reduced damage (for example), or some way to proc Soulblaze.
*Given the Voidstrike’s hitbox, sniping is kind of overstating the precision required, I’m not sure of a better word though.
I’m usually not in agreement with your statements at all, but this is an actual W take.
Scoreboards really don’t say a lot, they are so easily manipulated and dependent on the performance of everyone else.
All it takes to top the scoreboard is to be the last man standing and to clutch a bit. Since that person does all the killing then, their numbers will skyrocket, no matter the loadout.
I actually don’t see the Surge staff used a lot anymore since the bugfix for the talent interaction.
What I mainly see is Purgatus Staff and Voidstrike Staff. Some Assail. And the occasional gun psyker.
Psykers who want to shock enemies go full smite build. Even post-nerf it’s unironically better than Surge.
The only time I see Surge performing is as an assistance tool when you’re actually playing melee psyker. Because it takes out singular targets, especially armored ones, it’s good for that. So you bring Surge for tough enemies and do all the Horde killing and special munching with your melee weapon.
But since most people don’t really want to play the Psyker for melee (despite it unironically being the 2nd tankiest class) you barely see Surge now.
I assume you meant Purgatus and Void. Otherwise this doesn’t make sense.
Anyhow I can’t confirm. I see the opposite on EU servers. If a staff is used it’s mainly Surge or Purgatus. Very rarely do I see Trauma.
As I said above, Surge is still perfectly capable. I pull roughly the same numbers as Void and Purgatus. There are certain specific Trauma builds you can use to top both of them but I just don’t enjoy Conflagration blue edition.
Melee Psyker has been a thing since release, given the insane damage numbers dueling sword 4 in particular can pull. But most people aren’t skilled enough to survive on Psyker melee. You can basically go down to a single mistake, and there’s little in terms of a panic button in the kit. Sure shriek comes to mind, but when you’re playing melee not going Scrier is a waste.
Then again it’s a freebie in the gunpsykers kit. You’re already built for crit and damage stacking. Funny enough in the current balance meta columnus mk 5 Gunpsyker trumps all of them.
In regards to tanking, yes if you slap a +3 stam curio, some stamnina regen, kinetic deflection and a dueling sword onto your psyker you can block for days but most Psyker players manage to die anyway the moment they’re swarmed.
I still think that gunpsyker is the easiest character to do Orthos hard mode with: Mobility only inferior to knife zealot, veteran level ranged dps, incredible melee damage with dueling 4 heavy… really everyting you can ask for in that arena. You can solopop both shields, tank the melee boss if necessary, pop mines due to your speed or pop the melee boss’ shields.
Anyway back to Surge: It’s better than people think when played highly aggressively.
Yeah, Surge Staff isn’t so great as a Main Weapon anymore since it only kills one, maybe two guys at a time. I use it in conjunction with Smite and a good Force Sword, and tend to use all three equally.
Only being good at single targets is fine if it’s an anti-heavy weapon; it fits into a similar niche as the revolver or plasma gun. Unfortunately it’s not as good as they are. Really the only thing it has going for it over a revolver is that has infinite ammo.
This… for me.