Brain burst is an incredibly clunky thing to manage them with. My suggestions:
Warp stacks only decay one at a time or warp stacks have a SIGNIFICANTLY longer duration.
Brain Burst gives stacks on CAST rather than on KILL.
I’d also consider buffing warp stacks a bit as well. A larger damage boost as well as, perhaps, charge time reduction per stack.
The on kill talent’s proc chance is too low to be consistent, and RNG feels bad.
I’m still fairly new and learning the Psyker myself, but I agree that stacks can be frustrating to maintain especially in uncoordinated groups that don’t respect the head glow of an impending pop. Perhaps instead of making it solely reliant on head popping, any warp power can award a stack, or a talent that does something similar? Or, perhaps headbursting an elite / special awards more than one stack?
Feels bad As a zealot main, going to start avoiding that blue head but honestly 2/3 of the time its on some random minion and not that arse bomber
I don’t take it personally when someone accidentally wrecks a minion head pop, especially if it’s in a crowd, but it can be frustrating when I’m trying to target one way off in the distance in order to keep my stacks up and a marksman picks it off. 
The only way around this right now is using Secondary to prep a headpop instead of a lock on headpop with primary.
Honestly warp stacks are very hard to manage and stay at 4 stacks consistently for how much they actually gives you. I definitely agree they need to be easier to both generate and keep.
Take a look at your stacks, I feel like I’ve been getting stacks if I charge head pop and a teammate kills my target but I could be wrong.
If you have a warp stack centric build, then take the talent that gives any kill in coherency a chance to generate one. It will top you up to full warp stacks in relatively short order for any period of intense combat, and for lower intensity fights you don’t need full warp stacks.
It really doesn’t. It’ll give you a stack here and there, but even fighting a big horde doesn’t cap it out quickly.
It does but it’s very inconsistent. Most likely a bug.
I think alot of people have no idea how the big shiny blue stuff works, heck, I didnt before reading this post, that combined with the fact that something that lights up draws people’s attention doesn’t help either.
That said, it should definitely be on cast or possibly work with the coherency range (blue glow goes up, dude within your choerency range pops it, you get a stack anyways)
Yeah, either way the warp stacks feel like a tedious job rather than a rewarding buff. By the time it’s stacked you get to hit a few times then you have to stack again.
Yes this is correct. If your start a brain burst and your teammates kill the target partway through (feels like you need to be about 50% of the way through the charge up) then you’ll still get the stack as if you had killed it.
No you won’t.
You will, though you need to be around 90% through the charge to get it. Basically, right before you pop the brain.
Either way, having to kill with the brain pop makes it kind of go against the point of the ability: to target high hp elites. You will pop them 2-3 times depending on the game difficulty and more often than not you will pop an elite and someone will finish it off before you can pop them again. So if you play your role as an elite kill (which you should be doing) you won’t be getting your warp stacks.
You reliably get warp stacks by popping the small guys that die in 1 hit or weak elites like shot gunners, snipers, gunners, flamers, and hounds. Everything else takes 2-3 if you’re on Heresy or above.
If you want to keep your warp stacks, you gotta pop a weak guy every now and then before popping the big guys. But that seems kind of like the opposite of what you’d want to be doing as you’d be saving the big guys for a few moments to refresh your stacks, giving them more time to be a problem for the team rather than just dealing with them outright.
All of that is just too messy to deal with, causes problems and is just insanely unfun to play. So heres what I do: Ignore warp charges all-together. Just use a staff, slap on the feat that gives you a 4% chance on kills in coherency and let them come and go passively. If you’re stressing about having to keep them up, you will make a lot more mistakes. The 6% peril resistance per charge is nice but not exactly game breaking as it tends to give you 1 extra cast. However, with a 1 second quell time you will quell enough to get a new cast anyway. The 3% extra damage per charge at max charges is also not enough to meet any break points. Enemies that take 2 head pops will still die in 2 head pops, enemies that take 3 pops will take 3 regardless. (Though reapers on Heresy can be made to take 2 pops if you have the feat that makes it so you deal 15% extra damage on enemies you head pop while also being at max stacks. But its just not worth the trouble). You gain very little for maintaining max stacks for the effort it takes to build them up so just ignore them.
I’ve played psyker to level 18, I want to use brain burst and have it be useful, but there’s no other way to get warp stacks. And really your main weapons are the staffs or the force sword (your uniques that are supposed to be very good). They don’t give you charge, and most of your talents don’t even synergize with anything that isn’t using brain burst. Which is AWFUL.
I just finished leveling my Psyker to 30 today. I don’t even think about warp stacks anymore. If they’re there that’s great but if not c’est la vie. I just do my thing. The idea of them is fine but the current implementation does make them feel too hard to maintain and not worth the effort.
Pretty much exactly what I said above. The benefits they give just do not out weigh the effort/resources it takes to maintain them. I’d rather just damage the big bois on sight with brain bursts than spam brain bursts on weak enemies to stack up charges to get an ever so slightly more damaging brain burst.
Its more fun just using the staff as your main weapon and dishing out damage with them, only swapping to brain burst when a big guy or multiple big guys show up that have a brain in need of popping. It feels much more natural and much more useful to the team this way than struggling to play a mini game with the useless warp charges.
Agreed. The bonus damage is pretty low considering how much focus goes into maintaining the stacks.
I made a thread about this earlier, some thoughts about how to make warp charges a lot more fun.
Armchair, that is not a good stopgap. In fact it’s not even effective. What’s worse is it’s worthless to you in a battle with a Monstrosity, especially when nothing is around. You gain no benefit from HALF your kit.
There needs to be a way to generate them through damage, not kills. They need to rethink this.