On Heresy, BB does lose some effectiveness. For example, BB does not one-shot dogs and flamers anymore and you are better off staggering them or meleeing them if you’re already busy with other stuff.
BB is still usable while in combat but it almost requires you to use your ability and pick Kinetic Barrage as a feat, so you can quickly do 2 BrainBursts to kill whatever elite or special you want even when you’re fighting other minions.
You can still BB gunners and shotgunners, but there are so many, it’s not a very time-effective strategy. They’re usually taken care of by the Sharpshooter.
On Heresy, if I did not have Kinetic Barrage, I would say it’s bad. But since I always pick that feat and often use it in conjunction with the ability, it’s still kinda good.
On Damnation, I haven’t tried it, but I’d wager it’s complete crap.
Overall, the Psykinetic Psyker : not a very well-designed class. But so is the Zealot. It’s a little like the early days of VT2, before everything got reworked twice.
Brain Burst is not a well designed ability, because it’s in that category where it’s simply impossible to balance.
In order for it to be powerful with how slow and difficult it is to deploy it has to be pretty much the most powerful single target attack in the game.
In order for it to not overshadow every other form of attack when it is that powerful and become mandatory to succeed it has to have limited uses.
However…
It also has to have infinite uses, because it’s the default way to generate peril for the Psykinetic.
So they basically painted themselves into a corner with this ability.
I wrote a topic with some ideas how to fix it and other issues with the Psyker a few days ago, if anyone wants to have a look:
Doesn’t feel like they ever had a clear image of how they wanted the Psyker to actually function in terms of mechanics. Everything about Psyker sounds and looks really good on paper but it isn’t playing out that way in actual game play. The way our abilities and Talents are described and work lend to a certain type of game play especially early on and then suddenly on Malice you start realizing the core mechanics of your class don’t really work well anymore.
Once I reached the point of excluding BB because I determined it was not worth the time to cast it. Then the whole warp stack mechanic goes out the window since that was your only way to generate them. Maybe its improved by all the feats that provide stacks(Im not there yet), but even then the class became very bland and one dimensional as you just use the staff attacks and either quell or melee in between.
I’ve been using the peril to force weapon damage feat to weave melee and staff, but it doesnt really improve the gameplay. Part of that being how dissapointing the force sword is.
I do still use BB, it definitely has its uses when multiple elites/specials are up at different ranges. I tend to watch my Vet and use BB to fill in the gaps where I know it will actually pop a head and I’m not sacrificing toughness/health or CC to do it. But staff CC attacks really are more useful in almost every scenario. Staggering multiple elites/specials on your front line over and over again just can’t be beat.
Grab a Force sword with Deflector and take Kinetic Deflection in row 4. Force sword is a great personal defense weapon as it allows you periods of semi-immunity to melee and ranged damage. The first push attack is amazing for perma staggering even mixed hordes. As a general offensive weapon the Force sword isn’t great. It has specialized moves that work well at taking out singular melee targets with large amounts of health but not much else.
I think you’re right. At this stage, the most simple fix that doesn’t involve remaking that class from the ground up is, like you suggested, to make Brain Burst weaker by default, but super beefy if it consumes a Warp Charge (which should not disappear after 25s).
I think a lot of these buffs sound really great in my opinion, maybe not all of them simultaneously but I hope Fatshark considers them and decides to integrate some of them in stages to manage power creep (rather than getting a big buff and then a reactionary big nerf).
Someone earlier suggested warp charge on hit rather than kill but what if after hitting with warp charge the enemy is afflicted with some debuff for x amount of time and if killed while the debuff is in effect then you get a warp charge. Also I think it would be great if we got some more stagger on a brain burst hit so that at higher difficulty it is less about killing big targets but staggering them out of their animations like a mutant charge or bulwark block. This isn’t to say that the changes mentioned above aren’t great but these could also be options that are less risky to “overtune” in Fatsharks eyes perhaps. What do you guys think?
I personally feel no abilities should encourage you to feel frustrated when you are not the one getting a kill (especially with the slow BB) as opposed to encouraging you to cooperate to get kills irrespective of who last hits.
Id want an instant cast dot and if the target dies within its duration it rewards a warp charge.
No more frustration when people snipe the glowing head midcast, no more awkward usage in casting for 3 seconds when you could have been blasting with staff. The peril cost would just be all up front since it would be instant