Been playing a bit of Psyker lately and I’m frustrated at how much I have to rely on my team in order to get work done. It feels like I get shot or hit by a random melee trash mob so often, and I’d like some kind of build that lets me take care of myself while still contributing to the team.
This is what I run based on my experience of having to rev my entire team if they die, leaving me to last man stand. Also because I find shooters fairly annoying as a psyker.
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Get high mobility knife so that you can outrun mixed hordes & get to the next respawn point if everyone dies…helps to kite things you don’t have the resources & time to deal with.
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Get yourself a manageable trauma staff and if anything gets near you, just aim at your feet and gib whatever is dumb enough to get close to you. Also lets you knock anything except monstrosities on their butts:
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Dome & Smite… lame but it makes the job easier if you wanna be self sufficient. This is mainly for the large amount of stray shooters and gunners that you’ll run into.
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Go into warp charges for keystone and try to branch out to everything that reduces peril. Life becomes much easier at 6 charges and they’re very easy to maintain and get, letting you smite for alot longer & trauma force much better.
Psyker is a class all about positioning and situational awareness. The more you play the more you’ll come to understand that.
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Well, I’m already good at those two things on other classes, I suppose I just have to play more Psyker until I get how it works on that class, then.
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Don’t play psyker much apart from bounties, but i do run it on damnation/pug when i do, so YMMV but possible helpful advice.
I eventually landed on what i would call a training wheels build using void, as i felt similarly to the OP about running smite/bubble or even BB/bubble as it felt like most of the pugs i was in struggled more with ammo management/burst damage during rushes, and me CCing or bubbling really only worked as a band-aid most of the time.
Great in a solid group where everyone knows what they’re doing, just delaying the wipe in groups where things are more shaky.
(and i refuse to stand there like a smite battery in a pug, just no)
Rough build layout from memory;
You can swap out smite for BB and go center instead of left at the end of the tree (or take bubble instead of shriek) but i like having smite for actual emergencies, outside of that the best crowd control is killing things before they need controlling and/or knocking things on their asses while setting them on fire, and shriek is also handy for getting dogs off people through walls or floors.
BB for smite/center instead of left would arguably make you a lot more consistent on monsters without needing to melee, but yea, personal preference.
Play it like a situationally squishier plasma vet with no care for ammo management and you generate significant passive toughness (shriek also becoming a quasi-heal if needed since you’ll want to be hovering at higher peril), contribute decent CC and damage at all ranges (a decent headshot ratio helps with void obviously), can chain-stagger 2 out of 3 monsters with a little practice, and can absolutely melt hordes and packs at all ranges with a little positioning (ie; funneling when you can and getting surge procs).
You’ll kill everything including carapace almost as fast as a plasma headshot chain, with the same stagger potential, and you stagger bulwarks/crushers easily while doing solid damage, the rest you’ll one or two-tap depending on procs/peril.
Just don’t panic and swap to melee until you really need to, which ideally is only when you need to block shuffle out of a massive firing line with kinetic deflection/avoid getting boxed in, or you can’t be bothered to wait for a charger to turn around so you can shoot it in the face after dodging.
Granted, a good trauma staff does this better at medium to close range (or at least, safer, especially point blank) but void feels much better at high medium to long range and can melt hordes or packs of just about anything before they get in range of a trauma.
Not knocking trauma here as it’s great, better even, but with a much higher skill ceiling and some range limitations (imo, as aiming isn’t that hard even on the move, but controlling that damn trauma template when reaching out or around obstacles can be at times. Again, not a psyker main :p).
Only real learning curve to really get going is getting a feel for charge amount needed per mob to get stagger/killshots on weakpoint hit, leading shots/rapid short charge fire spam on trash/hordes, and remembering to combine soulfire stacks when possible for more damage.
The only major weakness aside from being less useful than trauma if things go completely sideways is that the void staff probably requires surge.
If you have a +5% Rcrit (and preference on the second really) staff with surge and nexus you’ll be laughing though.
As long as you keep plinking away you’ll maintain your toughness and reduce your cooldown, letting you spam more shrieks and get more CC/damage out while slapping things around with void projectiles.
Skipping things like curios and damage mitigation there as i figure that’s understood from other classes already.
Melee is up to you, I’d suggest something like a mk4 sword for defense + boss burst with my setup, but anything from dueling to dagger will work, have it cover what you feel is a weakness or your melee preference.
So yea, a psyker main can probably give you much more useful specific advice about the other options on psyker (or void for that matter), but this works (well) as a getting a feel for the class build without needing others to cover you, with solid output at the same time, especially if you’re coming from vet where you already juggle toughness by ranged kills/headshots.
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As Someone who’s done this way to long, I got a few options for you! But I’ll say first:
- get yourself toughness curios. 16% will do you but 17% will be the best. Psykers have very little forgiveness but generate toughness like no other, so the more of it you have, the more your many many MANY percent regens will help you and make you happy. You’ll see as well all my builds tend to grab every toughness node for this reason as well.
But yeah, in order from ‘most self sufficient/able to carry’ to ‘will take a bit of doing but still work’:
the main bread and butter build, important to note you can Scream while smiting, so that lets you both nuke the wave (shout at around 80% for max effectiveness) and keep the smite going for much longer due to the peril generation decrease. Voidstrike until the wave gets close then smite it all away, rinse repeat. (Voidstrike can weakspot hit too, I just realized I clicked the wrong blessing but you want Transfer Peril not Focus Channeling). Ohh, and Dueling Swords are just longer knives in terms of mobility btw, so 100% use them if you can get one.
my personal favorite despite it being technically weaker ever so slightly, ‘ability spam trauma staff’. Everything gets you toughness, everything is set on fire and stays on fire so long as you kill, and you kill well. the Blaze Sword IV also for whatever reason gives you faster dodges, so while you won’t leap as far as the Dueling Sword/Knife you can do them faster, making up for it in most cases in my opinion. I like Deflector to, your own personal shield.
the ‘I am greedy and out for myself’ build, more than the others. You just stack warp charges and clear, the most ‘brawler’ of the builds I’ve made due to the Blaze V not having as much dodge potential. Anticipation makes up for it a decent bit though, and one empowered sweep through a wave fully refreshes your toughness thanks to Slaughterer and Soulstealer, so at lot more high risk, but so much reward when you’re ‘really feeling it’. (if you want to use the shield though I put a note in the description about it).
and the final build I’ll put here (I got a gun Psyker build but that’s more for fun) the ‘support flame Psyker’. Since Purgatus just doesn’t generate Peril at all, you can use Shield without really feeling it, and you kinda need it to to allow yourself to close the distance. Spam light attacks on the wave to suppress them (even maniacs get suppressed in one puff most of the time), and then charge for more damage and flame stacks. I run crit because more fire more better, I couldn’t fit in the crit pip though as much as I tried. If you wanted to run the ‘two points in warp siphon’ instead you could run it, but I REALLY like being able to snap cast brainburst on Crushers and Bulwarks with this build, along with nuking lines of gunners with a few well aimed pops. But yeah, it’s the ‘least effective’ due to having to wait for things to die, so you find yourself falling over a decent bit more. But good swaps to the sword to dodge super fast away from things can keep you alive quite well while you ‘wait’, and then you just rocket back to full as things die from fire around you.
Ok! Made a lot bigger post than I thought but hope at least one of these strikes your fancy! They are what I’ve centered on and enjoy the most when running around with Psyker personally, I’ve even carried with the top two multiple times (i.e. everyone died and I needed to get to a res point and not die while doing so. The smite build I even solo’d an assassination boss long enough with kitting around the edge of the arena until I could res my teammates one time too) . So again, hope they help!
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Thanks a bunch! I’ll definitely try these out!
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I’mma give you one of those boring answers.
It’s all going to come down to playstyle and experience. Builds help, as do your choice in loadout. But at the end of the day, learning to melee, dodge nets/mutants/dogs, pushing poxbursters at the right moment, even inside a horde, or using a corner when the horde is filled with elite armor, how to deal with each monster etc. Is going to be the way forward to your success.
You can learn it many different ways. Personally, I prefer just playing the game and over time you learn to overcome the challenges you face.
The Psyker builds are pretty cookiecutter, so you can pretty much use any. Loadout is going to come down to personal preferences. On my Psyker, I exclusively play staves. I think Trauma, Surge and Purgatus are all S-tier. Voidstrike I think is A-tier on a good day.
Melee weapons I use are, Mk 5 force sword (Illis something something), or Mk 4 Duelling Sword. There are loads of other good choices there too. I use the force sword for my Surge staff (because it has low horde clear), and my duelling sword with Trauma and Purgatus (with Purga because it has no anti-carapace, and with Purga/Trauma for 1or2-shotting mutants).
You can always check out gameplay by other players on YouTube as well, or upload your own for critique. It should also be said that, some ultra elite players, the things they do are usually reserved for players of their skill. So if you look at some hotshot, don’t expect to mimic their playstyle and loadout and coming out successful. 
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