I’ll mess around again but I don’t honestly notice much to any wait time between push attacks when my stamina is depleted as Psyker. It feels like it just keeps spamming nearly full speed. I do usually run one stamina curio for what it’s worth. Are you basing this off actually trying knife Psyker or just math?
The math. The delay is literally only 0.25s between the 2, but Zealot has 150% stamina regen built in. I’m also unsure if the knife has a faster stamina regen of its own considering I’ll run tac axe and this quite a bit but the bar seems to juice faster on combat knife. I also run only one stamina curio. Its push cost is high enough to where the amount of stamina you’ll get back outweighs the delay Zealot has, I keep pointing this out. Especially when your stamina is low.
I understand the math behind what you’re saying I’m simply saying it does not line up with my actual experience with the weapon so there may be other factors not being accounted for. Again I’ll mess around in meat grinder at some point to check how it plays out in reality.
It gets even worse if you throw even 1 stamina regen curio into the mix, which is where Zealot starts lapping Psyker.
Hmm.
I mean, if you’ve got a knife the sure, push attack if that’s your thing.
But if you’ve any other weapon (within reason!) then you just left click. 
Push attacks take twice as long at least.
On a zealot with crit bleed you don’t need to push attack with a knife. It’s just about the only build I can think of where its a reasonable option vs other contenders. IMHO anyway.
Illisi w/ Slaughter or the MK 2/5 Combat Axe with Brutal Momentum + Headtaker / Decimator are excellent horde clear options. Even Tac Axe with Brutal Momentum can feast with warp stacks. They’re not going to be as good as Flame but they’re still going to clean up.
I remember hearing advice about Dead by Daylight that can apply here. Survival is a team effort, performance is your own. Folks I see struggling are usually either positioning poorly, have poor target priority, or are struggling with survivability (aka can’t dodge). Just try to have an answer for every enemy type in your build so you can be self-sufficient and play your best 
And here I insert obligatory but needed statement that gun Psyker is fine. Warp stacks give guns a dimension other classes don’t have.
But without warp unleashed its really inferior to a staff, and without a force sword or a staff you have no way of keeping peril up. Like seriously just running it with a different feat I get like 50-100k less damage a run.
Staves are usually going to have higher damage bc aoe but that doesn’t necessarily make them better; They just fulfill a separate role (horde clear / disable). The upside of staves is they’re not consuming a limited resource (ammo). The downside is they’re restricted by peril and (usually) range.
Guns just shoot. Don’t need to balance peril, don’t need to wait to charge or cool, just bang. And you always have access to brain burst to fill out the weakness of any gun / melee combo you bring.
I like Gun Psyker. They’re like a Swiss army knife that can help fill any team need. I run a passive charges / 6 charges / Quicken or Barrage build when I play it and you can do everything.
Is it really that bad?
Even on crit build zealot with lacerate + uncanny strike/mercy killer?
The only way I use Crusher is by knowing I’ll don’t kill, I’ll CC everything while a friend will use a weapon that isn’t great at horde control will then kill the stragglers
So i tested a 359 knife with a good distriubution with flesh tearer and mercy killer 3. Not built for crits. Now crit builds can make a big difference since spammed ults can add a lot of damage and crit bleed stacks obviously are going to help. But i have tested other bloodletter style builds on hordes and for some weapons the crit build impact isn’t that great. Either way i can only speak to what data i do have.
It was slower than the crusher swinging normal attacks. Crusher at 42.16s vs knife at 45.46s which is close to the margin of error. Its still on my list to go back and test against crit built lacerate and mercy killer for horde clear. If you have a precise recommendation of builds for a knife (like perks) i’ll happily specifically test that if i can roll it.
In preperation for my 1 minute crusher tutorial I rolled up a really good one as pictured.
I’ve been fiddling with it more and I am starting to like the thing for more than its fun swing pattern and chunky SFX. I know i have a rather warped view of what counts as “good” since I use bad weapons quite frequently but I’ve handled some otherwise pretty stupid problems by just standing around special attacking. Like a recent auric maelstrom mission I staggerbonked my way through 6 muties, a swarm of hounds and subsequently through 7 reapers and 4 gunners in open terrain. It also, seemingly (i have not rigerously tested this yet) is able to 1shot muties. Specifically muties who hit a piece of terrain count as staggered and seem to take a single powered overhead to dispatch. Unless I’ve been getting a lot of unseen help this makes the Crusher unexpectedly handy against all the big targets if you can tolerate playing toggle the bongle and getting self-slowed constantly.
1 Like
The nice thing about the push attacks with Psyker is that you’re able to spam them, which means you’re spamming the push as well. You can keep a good number of the horde staggered by doing this, and if you consistently land headshots with the push attack you’ll kill a fair number of poxwalkers and groaners as well.
Sure, it probably won’t be as effective as a well-rolled Illisi or a fire staff, but it’s a fun and viable alternative for psykers.
The push attack is also pretty quick as well–not counting the actual pushes, a psyker with a knife spamming push attacks will attack faster than a zealot spamming light attacks on a combat axe, while still hitting 2-3 targets. If you can consistently land headshots, you’ll be 1 or 2 shotting poxwalkers and groaners as well. It works better than you might think.
What was the test again?
I forgot how many of the garbage you spawn for the horde test.
I have a decent knife and would like to know how well it does in comparison.
My only real issue with the current horde clear meta is that there’s a bunch of ranged weapons that are described as optimal against hordes, and even have stats relating to it (WTF is a collateral!?) but are actually ass at it in actual use. Like most of these can’t even cleave through groaners, have high capacity which is irrelevant due to the previous detail and/or low dmg, and don’t even have a gimmick to make up for the previous two issues.
Spitballing stuff here, the ideal solution IMO would be if a proper LMG weapon archetype/Mk series was introduced. Also, weapons that said they’re anti-horde actually did what’s on the tin. Here’s how the 3 new LMGs could look:
All three have decent DMG against Infested, and unarmored.
-
High cleave, mediocre dmg, low capacity, low stagger to kill hordes. Has high anti flak, decent anti carapace, low everything else. It also has a rending or anti-armor blessing. LMG with AP rounds.
-
Low cleave, good dmg, high capacity, high stagger to CC hordes. LMG with high impact rounds. Has high anti maniac, low everything else. It also has a unique blessing that allows you to interrupt mutant charges. Explosive rounds gimmick, ie every certain amount of shots one round has super stagger or something maybe?
-
No cleave, low dmg, insane capacity, mediocre stagger. It has the suppression blessing innate to it. Has a V gimmick or unique blessing pool that allows it to suppress stuff that is normally impossible to suppress. It has high anti unyielding and carapace, low everything else.
Besides the above, something needs to be done to make suppression builds viable as well. Too much stuff that matters is for all intents and purposes impossible to suppress or CC for anything other than maybe psykers and ogryns.
2 Likes
50 poxwalkers. I use the bridge before the dropoff on magistrati oubliette’s entry run in. I make a point to fight on the bridge not at the mouth to the door.
My tests against poxwalkers set a baseline by not using chastise but i did test a crit built chainsword with devestating strike and spamming chastise so if you use chastise just keep that in mind. May be worth doing 2 tests, one with chastise spam and one without to see how big of a difference it makes. Also i measure from first hit to last hit, impact. I look for the first frame that shows a tick mark on hit or kill to determine that.
1 Like
Did the test with near perfect knife and crit feat (badly timed).
It is pretty bad. Ittook around 40s.
Some weapons can do it in ~10s and it only takes them that long because the enemies are not more densely packed.
1 Like
Did you try it with chastise or without? never mind i learned how to read. Thanks for reporting back.
Bully butcher MK3, power sword and illisi are all in the like 8-12s range. Most chain weapon builds land in the 30s. The rest are 20s or so. Pretty interesting distribution.
To be fair, i did not explicitly say that i did not use it.
So to be entirely clear, i did not use chastise and did not use bonuses from being at low hp.
I used “Bloodletting” (crit+bleed feat) and “Rising Conviction” (20% bonus damage feat).
Enemies were attacked on the bridge as you do in your tests, and i exclusively spammed light attacks at them and roughly aimed for the heads.
My character has minimum body size.
This is the knife i used.
Rending also applies to dot effects.
With 100% rending, 4 bleed stacks deal 7 dmg per tick vs infested.
Without rending, 4 bleed stacks deal 2 dmg per tick.
1 Like
Definitively, daggers need a boost. This is a weak weapon, even on a zealot. Off course, compared to others weapon. But this one is not just average, it is really weak.
Return to the horde “problem”. I believe that the game has balance problem on cleave. Cleaving/Aoe (shotguns, ripper) weapons are the one that are the most effective, ranged or melee.
In fact the game made sort of two sort of weapons, weapons aimed at individuals, weapons for mass numbers.
Using a knife is hard to deal with hordes. Not impossible, I do it with my zealot (but, even with a bolter, I am in the grey zone of the scoreboard). Not sure, however, that I would take that on a psyker…