Underwhelming Psyker Feats

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide Gameplay Feedback
1

Hey, figured I’d write up a post with the talents that I find to be underwhelming. I will update this post if I receive feedback that I agree with.

Disclaimer: I think Psyker is overall in a great place, I just think some feats are underperforming and would like them to be buffed to the level of other feats in their row.

Tier 1
All of the choices here are decent and lead to a slightly different playstyle, which is good.

Tier 2
Inner Tranquility
Good, but not as good as Warp Unleashed, and thus it is less often taken. I would consider buffing this to 7% or even 8% per warp charge.

Wrack And Ruin
While not useless, it is nowhere near as globally useful or impactful as Warp Unleashed and Inner Tranquility, such that is practically never taken by almost anyone as far as I can tell. Thus, I believe it deserves a considerably larger effect. I would either considerably increase the radius of this effect in order to make it more of a horde softener (my preferred solution) or buff this to apply many more Soulblaze stacks than it does.

Tier 3
Good choices all around.

Tier 4
None of the talents here are particularly good, to be honest, but Kinetic Deflection takes the cake for being decent.

Kinetic Deflection
This feat overall is quite decent but relies heavily on the existence of the Deflector feat, without which it is simply a nice bonus to reviving teammates. Even with Deflector I personally don’t find it to be terribly useful once you get the hang of dodge sliding, suppression, and positioning against ranged foes, though it’s fine for some feats to appeal only to less experienced players. I’m not sure exactly how to improve this feat, but one possible route would be giving this feat the effect of Deflector and simply removing the Deflector feat altogether.

Kinetic Shield
This is an odd one since it is bugged. It currently reduces all toughness damage, rather than just ranged. If this were confirmed as not being a bug, this feat would be fine, otherwise, the bonus here is simply too low to matter, and I would suggest buffing both the base and the cap.

Mind in Motion
Honestly, I would just replace this feat entirely. It is practically useless since you can just dodge slide infinitely with Force Swords while quelling. Another possibility is simply to add more capabilities to this feat, like allowing you to sprint while quelling, cast Brain Burst while sprinting, etc., which would make for quite a fun talent, though I’m unsure how much more effective it would actually make you.

Tier 5
Wildfire
Apparently, this feat is bugged. It seems to be unable to push a unit above 4 or so stacks, even if many units with more than 4 stacks die next to it, which the description seems to suggest should push it past 4 stacks. As is, it is quite bad (spreading a 16 max DoT upon enemy death doesn’t actually do much, even if it looks like lots of enemies are burning), and needs a serious buff to be worth taking over the other excellent feats in this row. Hopefully after the bug fixes it could be more fairly evaluated.

Tier 6
Since posting this I’ve seen many people do not agree with my take on this tier (both here and in the Discord), so it seemed fair to simply put it in parentheses and state that due to the amount disagreements, it’s likely this tier is actually quite balanced.

My Take

Only Kinetic Barrage is really worth taking here aside from when using Pinning Fire on the Autopistol which is where Ascendant Blaze shines.

Quicken
I’m not too sure what the point of this feat is, to be honest. However, I would still at least suggest increasing the effect dramatically such that it is possible to activate the ult twice in a row. 20% reduced cooldown per stack would work.

Ascendant Blaze
This feat was recently nerfed quite dramatically, but even before the nerf this feat was not as good as Kinetic Barrage, and the main reason for that is how it limits the ult’s usage. This is because due the Warp Charge using mechanic using it in sub-optimal situations means you are potentially throwing away ALL of your Warp Charges. As a result, I think its effect needs to be considerably more dramatic in order to make up for this quite crippling limitation.

2

Not every psyker uses Force Swords. All their other melee weapon choices, including Duelling Swords (their other class unique CCW), do not allow quelling while using them.

Kinetic Deflection is already strongly leaned towards a synergy with (deflector) Force Swords, and having two talents at the same level which strongly assume you’re taking one is not a good approach.

Also, it’s a more minor point now Peril passively vents much faster… but every single player seems to insist on sprinting from encounter to encounter (a fantastic way to ensure everyone gets to the next encounter with no Stamina to block or push with…) - and with psykers already having the lowest base Stamina and sprint speed, I have had occasions where I’ve fallen nastily behind because venting Peril slowed me to a complete crawl.

Buffing it? Maybe.
Replacing it? I don’t think that’s a good choice.

Eh, Wrath is actually quite useful (aside from staggering an entire horde, putting several specials/elites on the floor buys quite a few seconds, and it can also yeet a hound off someone from quite some distance), and if you want to make a build around it, this means you can use it a lot more often.

It’s also improved a lot, now it doubles all your Warp Charge gains. Sure, you might need to recharge them more often, but that can be borderline automatic if you also take Psychic Communion.

1 Like
3

I use mind in motion because I can’t use kinetic deflection due to warp unleashed. mim also seems to impact dodges while venting as well and I like the additional positioning power it gives. quicken is just fine, and wildfire is really good at killing horde/softening elites. Ascendant Blaze is also fine and am also not sure why your counter argument to this point is calling people naive and claiming they have never experienced hardship.
Entire post reads in a fashion I don’t find pleasant.

4

Have you tested this? The fact that you can’t get those elites above 16 damage a tick means this isn’t quite true, unfortunately.

…What are you talking about? Where have I “called people naive” and claimed that “they have never experienced hardship”?

5

so you’re using words you don’t even know the meaning to?

6

Fair points regarding Mind In Motion, thank you. I have added a suggestion to buff it instead.

Hmm, I thought perhaps the intent is to use the ult more sparingly as a CC tool, but I just find that this feat is still a bit underwhelming in comparison to the effectiveness of Kinetic Barrage. I still think it could be buffed.

7

“Oh, sweet summer child.”

8

Oh, I see. I seem to have misused this idiom quite badly. English is not my first language. I was attempting to express my dismay over it being nerfed recently. I will edit this out.

It’s called making a mistake. I hope you can find it in yourself to forgive me.

9

Psyker is at a good spot. It doesn’t need more buffs.

If anything the Ogryn feats needs more attention because most of their kit is based on either downed/dead teammates or getting hit in melee to get benefits.

EDIT
To be honest, I miss the Unlimited Cleave talent they took away to replace “Knock Em Down, Beat em up”. Wish we can get that back in one of the feats.

10

I generally agree. I don’t want Psyker to get sweeping buffs, I want the feats he has to be as close as possible to each other in power level so that there is more effective build variety.

I’ll add this clarification to the post.

11

It´s busted especially as a level 10 feat and needs a nerf or get replaced. There is no chance other feats can compete with it without making them broken to overshine it.

This feat WAS good. Since peril-management is no issue anymore and pressing R for a second nearly always possible, it´s something not needed anymore.
If peril-management stays as strong and easy to play around as it is, this feat needs to be replaced.

This feat is actually somewhat balanced and does a lot for poeple who like to BB especially on higher difficulties where elite-enemies spawn way more often and in larger groups.
It´s just that at pretty much any time using your stave is the better choice thanks to the overbuffed warp unleashed + peril management to deal with them, especially since you can stagger all of them easily.

They´re all good in their own way, it´s just that the movement penalty on stave is just like 10% compared to the 90% of BB.
So far mind in motion is only the choice if you BB all day long or don´t want to deal with movement penalties in general. This feat should´ve bring more luxus to the peril-management instead of buffing it so hard in general. So players had to decide between peril-comfort or the other options.

First i dunno how poeple don´t understand that “up to 4” + “the total amount… cannot exceed the stacks of the dying enemy” obviously means that 4 stacks is the maximum.
So if an enemy has 3 stacks, but you kill one with 4 and it spreads, it´ll just replaced.

And no, this feat is not useless. It´s just a chain-reaction you can use if you engage into a group of enemies with wrack and ruin, or while running force-weapons with the soulblaze-blessings.
It does a really good job tweaking the gameplay and assisting soulblaze-builds, it´s just that gaining and maintaining those 6 stacks of warpcharges has become so easy and that running 8% more damage in general is the obvious meta-choice.

It got hard buffed and is still a really good choice for cc especially on high int maps. But of course if poeple always safe their ultimate for 100%+ peril or so, it´s nothing you would ever choose.

Sounds like you never really used it.
It killed / kills a normal horde completely with 4 stacks. 6 stacks were needed for the breakpoint on poxwalkers. And no matter how, you mostly got all your stacks back when you unleashed it into a horde and did a bit melee action on top.
Yet you can also pick wildfire on top and you don´t even need 4-6 stacks to count it “as useful”. Unleash it, kill stuff with your melee or range-weapon and that 1 stacks will spread and stack up to 4.

It´s obviously made to deal with hordes if you don´t run something like a purge-staff, while Kinetic Barrage is made to deal with elites.
I personally would never choose KB over Quicken or AB, unless the rest of the build doesn´t fit it. But since the builds are either “pick staves that do a better job than BB” or “pick guns against elites and AB for waveclear”, the choice is obvious to me.

And no, AB was not dramatically nerfed. It´s still in a really good spot, while armoreds last in a better spot aswell. And we need more changes like this to other damage-sources to differentiate enemies in more than a skin and healthpool.

Yet poeple of FS still seem to fail to see that it´s a broken mechanic that needs to be fixed. And why? Because you´re not the first and will not be the last one being like “If you´ve issues with XYZ, get used to dodge-slide.”
It´s terrible like the dodge-jump “mechanic” in V2.

Having feats that offer tradeoffs that make you stronger or offer more surviveability while getting hit is not a bad thing. Their made to help you out of bad situations and helps the frontline to push / tank / whatever…

But yeah, having feats that only work “when your team sucks” or which force you “to stay under 50% health” are a terrible design-choice in general.
Yes they do help in their way aswell and might be even somewhat good for not so good players. But they work clearly against the rules the game is made around and it might often be a thing, that if you would choose another trait, you would´ve dealt better with enemies, which means your teammates wouldn´t be set under pressure and died, you wouldn´t have lose health etc…

Such feats need a rework across all classes. And Zealot could use some more depth than just offering +X% feats in general.

12

If anything this row is the most problematic to me. Psyker has to rely on coherency for toughness regen IN combat by far the most out of all the classes and has too little base toughness. If anything the class needs 50 more base toughness and having Tier 1.1 and 1.2 reworked. Quietitude is fine.

Considering the class’s toughness issues - Kinetic Shield is more than a viable to circumvent range toughness damage.

13

I did. I don’t disagree with what you’ve said about this ability, I know it can clear hordes. What I’m saying is that it is problematic due to consuming all of your warp charges. If you don’t use it on a horde, you are unlikely to refund more than 1 or 2 charges, making the ult inadvisable to use in situations where you aren’t facing a horde, which is plenty of times in my experience. In other words, it adds a steep cost to use the ult on non-horde situations, which to me is too much of a counter balance to its effectiveness when used on hordes.

I agree, but I didn’t want to wade into “general Psyker buffs” territory in this post, and stick to imbalances within tiers.

1 Like
14

I mean I get it. If you do, then the allmighty Lord Angreal comes around - Arbiter of all things that are balanced XD.

15

Personally, I like it because it allows you to hold a charged BB for longer; useful if you’ve heard the sound cue for a special and want to be able to kill it as soon as it appears, but you don’t know exactly when it’s going to appear.

16

While i agree the ultimate feels wasted in such situations, the other situations will outweigh it.

Also the lack of horde might be a thing on low int or low level mission, but heresy+ is not an issue and it shines on hight int missions, especially since a lot of them has an endless horde in the end event.

Generating warpcharges and maintaining them is really a no-issue with feats like Psychic Communion or Kinetic Flyer. If you run Warp Battery instead of KF you´ll hit higher breakpoints, so it´s easier to get warpcharges back through soulblaze. I pretty much never use BB to generate warpcharges while running my soulblaze builds.

And as i´ve said above, i do think what it offers in certain situations clearly outweighs the loss of warpcharges, even if you keep save your ultimate for them. There are a lot of big rooms and using it once with 4 stacks will cause like 100+ enemies to burn just by one button. It also also the doubled range of a flamer so.
Ofc 4 stacks are nothing against Ogryns and flak-armored got nerfed. But poeple do underestimate the effect of the dot since it allows you to kill every enemy with less hits.

The tradeoff seems completely fine in my eyes and it´s on the players hand to run full damage while relying on BB or to go the comfortable way with auto-charges.

KB on the other hand is pretty much only good to reduce peril while maintaining max damage or to take out Ogryns asap. (Which is probably easier with staves so…)
Might be good for some BB builds aswell, but i won´t say it´s better / worse than AB or the recently buffed Quicken.

17

Hey, fair enough. Glad you find it to be more useful than I do.

Kinetic Barrage lets you shoot out more BBs before having to quell, and faster. I find it to be very useful whenever I need to take out a bunch of elites or specials, especially Bulwarsk and Crushers, and even when I just want to clear out some shooters fast. And as opposed to AB, I can do this every 20 seconds or so, which is great in my eyes.

18

I completely get your point here. It just might relate on the prefered playstyle in general, which is why i consider Psyker to be the best class in general since it offers a lot of different stuff with the more utility - related feats than just flat damage numbers.

As i´ve said, i personally don´t need BB unless my team forces me into those stupid stucked range-fights or there are a bunch of snipers around the corner. Dealing with elites with my prefered weapon-choices is really not a big deal so. But i can understand why other prefer KB or don´t want to lose their warpcharges aswell.
I really don´t see an issue in any of the level 30 feats, so i guess we can agree to disagree in the worst case.

19

Tier 1

Warp Absorption is not that great. It only gives you toughness when you don’t need it. Warp Absorption and Essence harvest should be combined (with values tweaked as well to not make it overpowered), which would free up a slot for something new.

Tier 2

Warp Unleashed is a clear over performer. One would hope they buffed the others but it’s also completely reasonable for them to tone it down a bit.

Wrack and Ruin should just trigger on any BB hit to make a BB spam build actually worth using. It could also increase the usability of gun builds since you would have an actual reliable mini made.

Tier 3

Yeah all are solid options and get used depending on what the current build needs.

Tier 4

You underestimate the power of Kinetic Deflection. It allows you to spam push attacks and sprint safely without having to worry about not being able to block. This is especially useful on the combat knife which deals the same damage with push attack than on the heavies but push attacks can be used twice as fast.

Also, since the peril meter is scaled according to your stamina, having enough max stamina allows you to face tank Daemonhosts on Damnation.

Kinetic Shielding is nice but unreliable and you really have to be stacking toughness curios to make a difference with it.

Mind in Motion in its current form should be just baseline for the class, which opens up a slot for a new feat.

Tier 5

Wildlfire, oh you have no idea how bugged this feat is. Let me enlighten you:

  • the feat cannot increase nor refresh the duration of Soulblaze on targets with 5 or more stacks regardless of the stacks on the original target
  • the feat cannot proc from targets that have only 1 stack of soulblaze on them
  • the feat does trigger off from dead bodies that have 2 or more stacks of Soulblaze on them when the effect ends, yes, you can apply Soulblaze on bodies and it will spread to living enemies after 8 seconds or so but its not as useful as it sounds

Not a bug but it would be also nice to mention the 5 meter proc radius on the description.

Wildfire is underperforming greatly. These have been reported as bugs and acknowledged as such by Fatshark. However, I am still a bit sceptical if fixing them (next year?) will make this feat worth it over Battery or Flayer. Only time will tell.

Kinetic Flayer, they should just remove the 10% proc chance and make it on next hit similar to how the guaranteed crit hit works for Bounty Hunter in Vermintide 2. It would make the feat usable and more reliable with so many more builds and you could actually enjoy the benefit on Cerebral Lacerations on big targets more reliably as well if you take it. If that requires adding a couple seconds more to the cooldown, so be it.

Tier 6

Quicken is great as it is now. It’s good and usable for Surge staff for additional CC and quelling as well as great for maintaining a 5/6 charge battery for gun breakpoints. You only need 3 BB to top it up, which you can do back to back. Shredder is currently overturned so once that gets toned down perhaps people start to realize a Psyker can turn that faster firing MG Ia lasgun into a XII equivalent for popping ranged unit heads with single shots on high warp charges and proper perks.

Ascendant Blaze is good, but it could do a small buff for the warp charge proc rate since Blazing Spirit builds still need to rely on Psychic Communion in order to reliably keep up and build stacks in case you mess up. You should only really consider using it if:

  • you have Battery and need more horde clear
  • you are using a Shredder with the overturned power feats
  • you are using a Purgatus
  • you are using a Warp Nexus Blazing Spirit Trauma

Getting a proc with a Warp Nexus 4 Blazing Spirit Trauma is pretty easy since that’s around 30% Crit Chance at 80+ peril. That will give 3 Soulblaze stacks to anything around 8.5m radius circle around the centre point. Apply a 6 stack AB ult on top and stuff dies in seconds as they are then at 9 stacks and insert a chef’s kiss here. This includes elites and specials other than Crushers and Mutants as well. It’s great for those ‘oooo sheit’ moments when you need to clear the room now. A well aimed 6 stack AB will always yield the stacks back.

The only gripe with AB is that the stacks for warp charges used are 1/1/2/3/4/5/6, so giving it a minor buff there to make it 1/2/3/4/5/6/7 would make it more rewarding to use at low stacks with Blazing Spirit Trauma builds, since currently it does not matter if you have 1 or 0 warp charges.

EDITS: typos.

2 Likes
20

This is quite funny, as previously InnerT was considered the go to option in that row, as the other talents were pretty weak and situational (pre-recent psyker buff).