Variability of builds (psyker edition)

[Cheturnadcatii]

A level 1400 Psyker is in touch with you, and I have something to say. Today I want to talk about the variability of the psyker as a class, the need for changes in the talent tree (small, but opening the door to normal variability).

Since I mostly play havoc 35+ (lately there have been almost 40s), I will conduct the conversation from the point of view of a player playing at high difficulty levels, I warn you right away that I am not in favor of balancing the game around havoc, it just so happens that some of the psyker’s problems there are not just strong, they are obvious and very annoying when u play havoc.

Go.

1. Low variability of psyker builds and what to do with it.

Here we see the current talent tree, and the talents that you HAVE to take are marked in red because they are too valuable to sacrifice.

These talents are so good that there is absolutely no alternative to them, and it is precisely because of their location that the psyker has almost no freedom of choice. The location of these two talents limits Blitz’s entire choice of brain-blowing abilities.

The way to improve:

Move these three talents as shown in the picture, this will open the psykers a choice of all blitz abilities in any combination of talents.

I will not touch on “strong” and “weak” talents in this topic, because everyone knows about them anyway, and the purpose of this topic is to give a topic for thinking about how you can ACTUALLY increase the variability of builds (not too much, but it’s just feasible).

2. Weapons

Oh, the real miracles begin here. Let’s start with the fact that there is meta now, everyone knows her, welcome to the stage:

This pair, together with bubble, opens the doors to the ONLY meta build in the Havok 35+ psyker game. Yes, you can take an injury and a knife… but you’ll just be less useful. And it’s not that the fire staff or the imba dueling sword, it’s HOW they work.

The Maccabian sword is convenient, it has both a stagger and fast strikes, you can get rid of the crusher in just 4 seconds, which is very fast, there are simply no alternatives to this weapon in terms of ensuring the MANEUVERABILITY of the psyker.

I can’t offer anything on melee weapons for a psyker, because this (in my opinion) requires a COMPLETE rebalance of all melee weapons in the game. However, I have thoughts about the staffs.

Why is it fiery? It’s simple – he has a stagger and crowd damage.
A Psyker is literally needed to create a battlefield for allies, and a fire staff is perfect for that. Is he an Imbalanced? Only when there are many heretics and they stand in a tight ball. Why not an trauma? Long charging time, dependence on aiming, low damage, dependence on modifiers (final toll and stun immunity sends their regards).

Suggestions for staffs:

Give it to this guy:

A power (charged) attack (right mouse button) shaped not like a ball, but like this guy’s:

You can even not change the damage, this will make this weapon strong enough to consider it as an alternative.
The electric staff is more difficult. I honestly think it needs to be returned to the way it was before the nerf. He deserved it.

For now its all. Welcome to the conversation.

[Tarquelne]

Does Perilous Combustion need to be as powerful as it is?
I like the talent’s concept, but when increased difficulty primarily means increasing the number of Elites and Specials, then increased difficulty means increasing the power of Perilous Combustion.

Imagine Kinetic Flayer without a cooldown. Imagine Perilous Combustion with one: It might go from “too valuable” to merely “valuable.”

[Cheturnadcatii]

@Tarquelne

Perilous Combustion

Does nerf of perilous combustion adds variety to builds?

[Ralendil]

It makes them less mandatory

And what’s you said is:

@Cheturnadcatii

Here we see the current talent tree, and the talents that you HAVE to take are marked in red because they are too valuable to sacrifice.
[…]
These talents are so good that there is absolutely no alternative to them, and it is precisely because of their location that the psyker has almost no freedom of choice. The location of these two talents limits Blitz’s entire choice of brain-blowing abilities.

So, according to you, yes it would.

Actually, I think that soulblaze is the culprit that permits psyker to register far more damages than other classes.
So I won’t spit on the idea of nerfing it.

[Tarquelne]

EDIT: Redundant with R’s response, so changing to:

Actually, I think that soulblaze is the culprit that permits psyker to register far more damages than other classes.

I’d love more data about souldblaze and how it influences “time to kill.” It’s pretty easy to rack up a huge figure for total damage done, but I’m not certain how helpful that damage actually is.

[IGN_Vera]

@Cheturnadcatii

These talents are so good that there is absolutely no alternative to them, and it is precisely because of their location that the psyker has almost no freedom of choice.

Pretty sure Psykinetic Aura being locked out by Assail was intentional. Assail is stupid strong against Shotgunners, Gunners, and Specialists. Psykinetic Aura is procced by all of those.

Assail with Psykinetic Aura would be Plasma Gun levels of strong, CA like Unbound Scrier’s Gaze would have near 100% uptime during HISTG.

[IGN_Vera]

@Ralendil

Actually, I think that soulblaze is the culprit that permits psyker to register far more damages than other classes.
So I won’t spit on the idea of nerfing it.

Very true. It’s the fact that it can stack to 16 stacks with Shriek and the synergy with Blessings like Uncanny, Blaze Away and Slaughterer that make it such a powerhouse.

Soulblaze should be able to wipe trash mobs off of the screen quickly. Soulblaze should not melt armored Elites.

Get rid of the Blessing effects on Soulblaze, maybe reduce the max stacks to 8. If it can horde clear trash mobs effectively, it’s fine. If it can melt armored Elites, it’s not.

[IGN_Vera]

@Cheturnadcatii

The electric staff is more difficult. I honestly think it needs to be returned to the way it was before the nerf.

Electrokinetic staff has the least amount of AOE and Cleave out of all the staves, secondary fire’s initial bolt should definitely be the highest single target damage when fully charged out of all the staves. Maybe less stagger if that’s too strong.

“But it has auto aim.” Indeed, it does, but that auto aim range is limited. Outside of that range, secondary fire is useless.

[Murderer]

@Cheturnadcatii

The way to improve:

Move these three talents as shown in the picture, this will open the psykers a choice of all blitz abilities in any combination of talents.

I’d argue the way to improve perilous combustion and psykinetics aura is making them not absolutely stupid busted anymore. They both need heavy heavy nerfs. PC is free shredder grenades without even having to swap to a grenade slot, and psykinetics aura is 4% CDR for the entire team on elite/special kill. As a reminder, Ogryn had his 4% CDR on elite kill talent changed into cooldown rate increase because it’s so OP. And that was elites only, and only for himself, and not for the whole team.
Both of these talents NEED to be nerfed hard or the game will never be balanced. You will have them in 100% of psyker builds so long as they’re not nerfed, which is the actual root cause of low variety.

Same goes for DS4 and inferno staff. You want variety? Nerf these obviously gamebreaking OP weapons

[MixedLetters]

Yeah, I made a post a bit back about this, but I got too wordy with it so it got completely ignored.

But yeah, Perilous combustion is absolutely bonkers and I think one of the main things making Psyker ‘op’ verses just super strong in higher difficulties. 3 free soulblaze on packed elite swarms is insane, usually resulting in a ‘kill cascade’ especially when paired with Wildfire + Inferno staff. After 2 shotgunner kills the entire wave starts with 4 soulblaze stacks inherently on them, thus all it takes is for two tics from your staff to make the damage actually start hurting the target (pushing over the ‘6 stack exponential curve’ threshold), and if you get a crit with the staff that’s only 1. Now you scream, and the entire wave is 10 stacks deep with only more being added as elites and specials die, and now the wave is just permanently burning for beyond max soulblaze damage as you just cook them with more and more flames.

Pull back on Perilous, and suddenly you’re starting from 0 like you’re supposed to be, you have to actually use your scream as a starter instead of a finisher, you gotta rely on crits more to get the flames up and keep them there, and you’ll always be resetting back to 4 at best with wildfire verses 7 when killing a special/elite with high stacks. And now suddenly you aren’t tripping over waves by just killing a gunner line and watching everything die afterward. Assail suddenly has more of a purpose as it will give you back that heavy wave clear, Trauma and Voidstrike get to take the stage as one does good damage with good CC while he other does even MORE damage with infinite non-armor cleave at high ranges. Suddenly the psyker is told to ‘make it work’, with fire still being a potent option if used right. Verses just ‘bubble perilous inferno with Aura, I win!’ because Perilous makes up for everything and makes infinite fire the moment a Flayer proc goes off and starts the chain. This all being the main reason why I don’t even consider the Inferno Staff that op, because it’s Perilous combustion that’s actually the ‘culprit’, the staff is just a less damaging flammer. But when it gets to start at 4-7 base flame on every target it hits, then it’s pretty friggen strong.

(I saw one comment I liked where you put Perilous Combustion as an upgrade to brain burst, so now you have to get kills with that to start the fire chain, instead of just getting a free pop every elite/specialist kill. I think that would be good personally.)

[Tarquelne]

@MixedLetters

Perilous Combustion as an upgrade to brain burst, so now you have to get kills with that to start the fire chain

That’d be cool.

[Raichu]

Psyker needs those nerfed, operative modifiers removed and some new passives to fill the gaps. Then maybe you’d have true variety in the tree.

[Cheturnadcatii]

Zealot, veteran also have cdr talents, zealot have more op talents. If we want to nerf cdr talents - nerf them all.

[Cheturnadcatii]

Im not fan of nerfing things.

In my eyes better is give another option.

Nerfing is easiest way to get rid of things, but its not the better one.

If psykinetics aura needs adjusment - imo go and do it psyker only, not team. Because its power (on hvc 35+) its not about cdr to others, but for u.

Zealot can easily cdr book with crits and kills in the back.

Veteran can cdr voc by the special kills.

Its not the case.

Perilous combustion is strong because u can exeed limitation of 15 (16 with crit) stacks of soulblaze. Its THE ONLY way to do it without shriek.

Its not as imbalanced, its just dont have another option. U may entirely delete this talent, and literally nothing changes to psyker role in the high havoc.

The point is - now its just not have adequate alternative.

[Harridas]

Forgive me for being contrarian, but these aren’t mandatory choices outside of Havoc. You can play without these talents and still pull a strong performance just fine. You write that you’re not in favor of balancing the game around havoc but it seems to me that’s precisely what your proposed changes are for in addition to furthering powercreep. I agree with the others in this thread that a nerf would be a better idea but unless FS is going to change Havoc’s hidden modifiers there likely won’t be any nerfs either.

Like IGN_Vera wrote, Assail is already really strong, we don’t need to give it even more power. Havoc is problematic enough as is and I’d rather not powercreep Psyker more because of it. I think Psyker’s talent tree is pretty neat and well balanced outside of Havoc.

[Cheturnadcatii]

@Harridas

Forgive me for being contrarian, but these aren’t mandatory choices outside of Havoc.

@Cheturnadcatii

I will conduct the conversation from the point of view of a player playing at high difficulty levels, I warn you right away that I am not in favor of balancing the game around havoc, it just so happens that some of the psyker’s problems there are not just strong, they are obvious and very annoying when u play havoc.

I know this

[alsozara]

@Cheturnadcatii

I know this

→ Agrees this isn’t an issue outside of Havoc

→ Says they don’t want to balance around Havoc

→ Wants accessibility buffs to top tier talents because of said issue that we’ve agreed only exists in Havoc

[Cheturnadcatii]

The havoc is good example of testing grounds what builds are strong enough to provide usefulness to your party.

Im using this as ground point for starting discussion about that.

I dont see any problems with that.

Yes i know that game should not be havoc oriented, but lack of difficulty on other gamemodes does not provide some solid point to not discuss about lack of variability

[Raichu]

@Cheturnadcatii

Im not fan of nerfing things.

In my eyes better is give another option.

Nerfing is easiest way to get rid of things, but its not the better one.

Nerfing is the easiest way to balance things along with buffing the weaker. Otherwise you get perpetual power creep of the lessers reaching the better always buffing in see saw fashion.

CDR especially group is precisely the problem if teams rely on these OP features to progress that’s the obvious problem to our new mode.

It’s almost like they created the biggest mess of a mode to highlight what’s OP if players are still able to beat it.

[Ralendil]

@Cheturnadcatii

Zealot, veteran also have cdr talents, zealot have more op talents. If we want to nerf cdr talents - nerf them all.

I think, personal opinion, that the zealot needs CDR. The problem of the zealot is that it needs so much CDR that it restrains a lot the good builds.

The CDR node of psyker, however, give bonus for the team. I must say that I think this is clearly a problem these bonus for the team… and I think it to shield of the contempt (zealot 60% damage reduction for 4s), to psykinetic aura or VoC.

I am not sure that we should restrain them to the player and forbid team bonuses, but sure these talents are extremely strong. I would say that they should allow a good bonus for the player and a less one for the allies.
I add that I would say that having aura that give the same bonus to all the team is good. But there should not be other talents that act like that.