The more and more I play on higher difficulties the more I’m realizing how much of a trap Brain Burst is for Psykers at lower level.
On the first two difficulties and lower class levels it allows you to carry games due to a lack of weapon and talent choices for everyone else. The moment everyone else opens up their class options and get better at the game you realize BB is literally just a crutch used to grind XP. There is little point in using BB right now in Malice and Heresy. The CC provided by your staff and Force sword is leagues more useful in a fight then standing around for 2 seconds to pop one single head out of the 8+ heads that have spawned. The only time I’m using BB is to pop a random head off in the distance for charge upkeep or take out something trying to run away. If I try to use BB as an Elite/Special killer I rarely get it off before someone else gets the kill(many times this is because the game wont let me target the correct head regardless of it being marked) and I’ve opened myself up to taking multiple hits if someone isn’t specifically watching my back.
BB is not a good ability in its current form. Anyone who makes a Psyker and comes to rely on it in their fights is doing themselves a disservice as your play style at 30 on higher difficulties is that of mobile CC Turret.
In higher difficulties you’ll have more specials and elites spawning, so being able to help the sharpshooter dispatch of them relatively quickly means that BB will always have a use.
The CC you get from shock staff is good, yes, but it’s not the only thing you should be using.
The hound and bomber especially are meant to be prime targets for BB since they often run and hide out of line of sight to make it harder for sharpshooters.
I do think it should oneshot the hound at all difficulties, so i agree with you there… But for the rest of the enemies i think making it require more than one isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
There is no time to stand around and cast BB on anything in Heresy lol. What I provide with my staff(Void) and Sword is 10x what a single or even multiple casts of BB are doing.
Honestly the only mob that BB works really well on. Snipers. Because they are so quick to cover you can get a BB lock on one and take it out. Everything else the rest of your team can kill much quicker than your BB can. Perma staggering entire groups is way more useful.
Emphasis mine.
Problem is, BB sucks at doing that in its current state.
Long charge up, prohibitive cost, damage falls off in higher difficulty - the only upside is that is is not tied to ammo and an inconsistent stagger.
It’s best use is to highlight priority targets for the vet - and that’s why Psyker is kinda frustrating atm.
Vet doesnt even need you for that because of volley fire. He highlights them for himself and does 50% more damage. It can also regen more toughness on cast than zealot with the appropriate lvl30 feat and it can increase duration on elite kill.
My buddy can kill 3 reapers and 2 gunners in the time in takes me to kill 1 bomber with brain burst.
It should one-shot ALL human sized enemies on all difficulties, 2 shot ALL ogryn type enemies on all difficulties and do normal damage on bosses.
I dont even want to hear about balance, its literally the one trick psykers have. Veterans can already do the job better with plasma guns with none of the delay or drawbacks.
BB ranges from the most useless ability in my kit to being marginally useful based off how the rest of my team is equipped and skilled. If I’m able to get BB off on multiple high priority targets in a row we either lack a Vet or have one that is still learning. In either case the run is going to be rough because the team now has to wait for me to get my BB’s off to deal even a decent amount of damage instead of the Vet just making things dead while I cc the room.
For the 2 seconds I channeled BB and didn’t even kill something I could have launched multiple exploding balls of staggering fire all over the place allowing my team to hack and shoot their way through anything that lives.
Yes BB is used on runs but only when it really makes sense and not part of a normal “rotation” to deal damage. Earlier difficulties you can spam BB all day long, still have time to whip out your staff and CC some stuff and it makes you look like a hero.
I agree that bb in its current form isn’t worth using from a risk/reward view, in Heresy and up, arguably even in Malice.
As you say, it often doesn’t go through, and having to swap to it makes it even worse. Imo, changing it from a “weapon” that you swap to, allowing us to simply cast it by keeping the button pressed while holding sword or staff, and giving us a reliable way to decrease cast time (such as via trinkets or talents) would be a great solution.
What really sucks about BB losing usefulness the higher difficulty you are in is our entire kit is supposed to be based around using this ability at least semi-regularly to gain charges. These are supposed to make us “good” and make our talents “come alive” but you don’t really see a massive effect from almost every choice we make Talent wise. So you rely more on passive charge generation and if you even notice you hit your cap in an encounter it kind of feels good inside like you accomplished something small.
Psyker just feels off to me. Sienna wasn’t always in a great place numbers wise but at least most of her kits made sense and were useful. Even in the early days of VT2 I never felt useless or locked down into a single type of game play because another class could do everything I was supposed to do but more efficiently. Sienna can take on a number of roles and each of her careers have multiple different Talent choices that lead to different weapon choices and tactics.
It definitely has a use in difficulty 3, since it has oneshot capabilities.
I think they need to reconsider the balancing for higher difficulties. Not being able to oneshot specials like the Poxhound basically negates the niche that the psyker has. Making BB take twice as long to use properly is the wrong way to balance this class.
BB should more or less be constant across all difficulties, since we have no way of actually improving this skill with perks or trinkets or anything like that. It’s the only career skill in the game that actually seems to fall off in power in higher difficulties.
It would be kind of neat if BB scaled with player level, but it makes total sense to have it be a one shot human sized and two shot ogryn at any level, considering how it has been nerfed and how vulnerable you are made. Wish it was infinitesimally faster to use since you have so many synergies tied into it. Poor handling of psyker so far.
I 100% agree that BB should maintain its level of effectiveness across all difficulties even if that effectiveness comes at the cost of more Peril spent the more HP a target has.
Considering that specials and elites are more common on difficulty 4 and 5, i think this is already a great balancing factor for BB and the damage doesn’t even need tuning.
Even if you can still oneshot certain enemies with BB, they are much more numerous now so you have to really be a good psyker to handle them well. Increasing the TTK just adds insult to injury since now you’re even less effective than veterans for handling the specials and elites. That was supposed to be a niche for the psyker.
I’m in agreement that in lower levels, I spammed BB a lot more. Now that I’m playing on Heresy, I’ll only use it on certain enemies. Most of the time, I use it to trigger my warp charge toughness regen before I go back to blasting with my staff. More often than not, I’ll use my force sword over BB because it STUNS them during the whole animation, which is the exact opposite of what I thought I would ever do prior.