Well, you have to consider the lore accuracy of the ogryn player’s IQ.
Most of them seem to be very lore accurate indeed.
So maybe you are right. Darktide players might actually be a bit worse than V2 players.
Let’s hope it gets better over time.
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The Knife is there for the movement speed which is invaluable when getting cornered as a squishy Psyker.
While running, spamming heavy attack, will get you out of 99% of all situations. You can outrun everything besides Mutants and Dogs.
This means that if you get in a very bad positions, like this game right now here I spawned in an ongoing game where I was immediately surrounded by 3 Crushers, 2 ragers and 3 maulers; I could get out of that situation because of the knife.
Any Force Sword wouldn’t have helped me there while the knife let me kite them while BB’ing until they were dead and I could clutch the team.
HE USES THE THINGS!
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It also means you get completely fisted by hordes if you can’t get all them on one side of you, which happens a lot.
The fun thing about knife users is that their mobility means they’re often the last person standing, but their total lack of ability to kill more than one thing at a time means there’s a 1/3 chance that they’ll either get downed by basic trash enemies, kite for ages until they can whittle things down enough to get to the respawn point, or kite themselves into a corner and die.
It’s the one melee weapon I never want to see a teammate use. Which sucks, because it is pretty fun.
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So far this hasn’t been a problem because I can push myself through the horde, and I don’t know how others do their melee fighting, but I’m constantly dodging around hordes; to be more specific; I lightly strike, dodge to the side, strike, dodge to the side, in a circular pattern of movement.
Basically, I’m circling the horde, which forces them to constantly follow me and body blocking itself.
If I can’t circle the horde because I’m stuck at an awkward bottleneck, you either have to find a small space where the enemies can’t get to you, at the beginning of Ascension Riser, before you jump into one of the holes, there’s a spot where you jump down a platform to the railroad tracks, and there’s a small space there that has saved my run many times, where the enemies can’t get you and the bombers have trouble hitting you with grenades.
Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m just lucky, but having recently switched from Meme Swords to Combat Blade, I’ve been able to get out of insanely bad situations so far.
To answer you: If you are fisted by the horde, it is usually because you are taking far too long to decide that you are going to start moving.
Many of the situations where I see players get killed (and sometimes myself) are because they do not react quickly enough to a bad situation. They kind of just stop and frantically try to kill everything instead of running away and getting into a better position.
If your team is down or everyone is still alive, but you see Crushers, Bulwarks, and Ragers rushing at you along with the horde, and you feel your team slowly losing control of the situation, there’s no point in standing around waiting for the inevitable.
Move your feet as soon as you see them coming!
In my experience, this is the only way to survive, especially as a psyker who can not trade damage with his enemies like the other classes.
With my Ogryn I can do many things in this situation, from unloading my Ripper or blasting with my Rumbler. I can rush into the horde and specials before things go south.
As a Psyker; I need to keep myself alive firstmost.
The heavy supporting/lifting is something I can do with my Ogryn, but not with my sparky boi.
I really, really hope that the new shield ability can be used to clutch rescue teammates along with countering firesquads of shooters because that would be insanely epic.
I think there should be way more missions required than 10 STG to unlock Auric.
For how long did we, who were with the game from the early beginnings play Damnation - Damnation Hi-Int before the Auric update?
100s of hours.
We had all time in the world to figure out what setups works and how to tactically play the game.
I’m absolutely not the best Darktide player there is, but compared to a lot of players I’ve levelled my newly-made Psyker with it’s night-and-day from non-Auric regular Damnation to HI-STG non-Auric Damnation games.
Us old dogs all play in Auric difficulty and the game is dead while levelling up; there is barely a playerbase levelling and those who do are mostly clueless.
Knives are good for survivability because they let you run away. There’s plenty of situations where you can’t run away, hence “kiting themselves into a corner” or “getting downed by basic trash enemies”. You don’t always have infinite kiting space.
On the topic of running away when things look like they’re going south - the threshold is way lower for knife users, since mobility is really the only thing they’ve got going for them and if they can’t use that, they’re mostly useless. One of the reasons I hate seeing a knife on my team is because it means there’s a pretty good chance that I’ve got a teammate who will bail on me or someone else during perfectly winnable fights and then pat themselves on the back for being the last one alive.
Knives are good for keeping the situation under control, but if things get even a little bit crazy, the knife user almost always falls apart first.
As others have said, that’s mostly because you’re using a weapon combo I’d generously call “subpar”. Properly kitted psykers are very strong and very hard to kill.
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Of course I will bail on you!
I have no reason to trust any of my associates!
What guarantee do I have that you won’t shoot me in the back the moment I start unleashing my “freakish” powers (your words not mine) to save my colleagues ? 
" As others have said, that’s mostly because you’re using a weapon combo I’d generously call “subpar”. Properly kitted psykers are very strong and very hard to kill."
This is absolutely only my subjective opinion, but I disagree about properly kitted Psykers being hard to kill. And I include meme loadout in that statement, btw!
Playing Auric-Hi-STG or Maelstrom with my Ogryn is like being on vacation because the big guy has so many tools at his disposal. All his weapons are good. Bull Rush ultimate turns almost all bad situations around. I can rescue downed people while getting shot at.
Zealot? Let me stand in the horde and take a nice zip from my cup of coffe while swingin away at the poor heretics that dares stand in the emperors way!
Veteran? Counterfire, chill while plinking away.
Psyker is strong against hordes and especially regular Poxwalker hordes absolutely, but in my PERSONAL opinion Psyker is not the strongest class in the game, because I have to give that to the Ogryn that besides having the most fun loadout IMO with every weapon being good, also have everything he need to both survive and help the team.
I think that Psyker’s are great when they can do their thing without getting interrupted, or you go with guns instead of staves which kinda defeats the identity of the class for me, or some stray mob hitting you in the back. Brain Burst absolutely suck as a replacement for grenades and I will die on that hill!
Nothing worse then entering a shooting gallery without a gun and either have to wait for the Veteran to plink everything dead or starting braindead boring Brain Bursting one target at a time 
If we could get a replacement skill that we could choose in our loadout instead of Brain Burst I would be the first player to equip that replacement skill because Brain Burst really is the absolute worst part of the Psyker’s kit and just make me wish that I went in with a gun instead.
Oh, what’s that? I can Brain Burst; Bulwarks, Ragers, Crushers, specials?
OOOOOR.
I could just have went in with a friggin gun, why not a meme Pinning Fire Autopistol, and blown em up in three seconds instead of standing there chaneling and quelling my Brain Bursts like the dork space wizard I am.
“Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.” - Han Solo
He was right all along!
My first char was Psyker btw
Oh, and I got a godrolled Purgatus so atm it’s Purgatus + Combat Blade!
Knife can actually be a surprisingly decent horde clearing tool for Psyker if you spam the push attack and aim for heads
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That’s how you do it, stick and move!
Yeah but you still need to fight enemies. This is why I wouldn’t recommend catachan knife off Zealot. Not only do they have the crit build, they have 50% faster stamina regen and almost Ogryn tier stamina. The catachan’s best move by far is its push attack, having damage profiles of the heavy attacks but fast animation speed and cleave like a light attack. Literally spamming push attacks is the best offering of the knife atm, and even with Psyker’s low stamina regen delay they’ll get no where near the same level of pushes and mobility.
Knife Zealot is almost not a meme, the rest absolutely are. They need your ranged choice to carry everything, so not using a staff really hurts here.
Running faster by heavy attacking is the primary reason why I like it the knife, also stabbing everything in the head and look as they bleed out is very satisfying.
Also, The animations of the swords besides the Dueling Sword are so scuffed and it annoys me!
Very noticeable in 3rd person!
Not sure if anyone pointed this out yet, but unconventionally the specialized ranged options for the Psyker are their horde clear.
Voidstrike Staff can melt an entire stack of enemies clumped up instantly with a single hit.
Trauma staff is a bit less effective when it comes to damage, but you immediately throw everyone around and knock them down.
Surge Staff can only target so many enemies at once, but is a guaranteed stun + knockback, even for muties.
Purgatus Staff is the most consistent but has no burst damage.
All of them provide Horde Clear to a degree. The melee on the psyker is really just for clean-up when most of the chaff is dead, but your peril is maxxed out.
Trauma was shadow buffed or something, it doesn’t throw trash enemies so hard around anymore but kill, like blast radius or damage was changed.
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I think that was them making it have a unique blast radius fall off instead of working similarly to the rumbler and grenade. This also makes the blast radius the most important stat on the trauma, since the 80% roll one has an AoE like 30% greater than the current circle visuals show.
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Huh? You just listed all the reasons knife is vastly superior on Psyker then somehow gave it to Zealot? Psyker has the lowest stam regen delay and peril block lets you spam push attack literally infinitely while never ever having any risk of being guard broken. You can spam push attack way way more on Psyker than you can on Zealot. You will run out of stamina and be forced to stop on Zealot and being critically low stamina on Zealot is actually dangerous while you literally never have to stop spamming it basically at all on Psyker.
Am I missing something here or have you actually never played knife Psyker with peril block? I wouldn’t pair it with like a lasgun or similar personally but I genuinely think it’s one of the better melee pairings for autopistol on Psyker.
Is math not a reason? It takes literally 4 seconds for Zealot to recover 7 stamina (catachan knife + class + 3 stam curio). It takes 6.6 for Psyker to recover the same. The game is totally playable without tanking your stamina the entire game + dodging every 1 second, contrary to the belief of some VT2 players. Thus Zealot has a massive advantage in stamina, the most useful move of this weapon, without running some goofy build like double stamina curios on Psyker.
You also wouldn’t have access to easy peril building running a gun, which is probably the only thing coming close to matching Zealot’s just-Rising Conviction/attack speed buffs damage-wise.
There’s also the whole 50% crit build on a weapon with like 3X finesse multipliers thing going for it. And the ult, and the current feat tree. Plenty of actual play time and not ‘hey psyker has 0.25s faster stamina regen but I haven’t looked at any of the math behind it’. This weapon is best literally tanking your stamina bar through push attacks and flicking lights until its back in full. Zealot will get way more of these out in a game, because 150% stamina regen. And actually be able to kill elites with it, without ult, from just the ridiculous 50% crits.
No it’s based on playing knife on both and noticing that I literally never have to stop spamming to let stamina refill with Psyker while I do with Zealot. I’ll believe you Zealot gets better damage output from crit feats but you absolutely do not get to use more push attacks with Zealot than Psyker because again, you can literally never stop spamming at all with Psyker if you want to and again you can do it in the face of multiple crushers in basically complete safety which you absolutely cannot with Zealot.
Its as bad as the indignatus crusher. One of the worst at horde clear.
Has math provided, it doesn’t matter. Alright, you can get 2 push attacks back with Zealot in the same amount of time, and Psyker can’t push attack endlessly without depleting their bar where again it would take over twice as long to recover the same amount of stamina.