Race conditions are extremely bad for a game where the purpose is to work together as a team. It feels already bad enough for someone else to secure that elite/special kill that was guaranteed to get killed by your Brain Burst, but picking this feat exaggerates the problem. Heck, even I as a psyker can kill majority of the specials and elites faster with a gun than with Brain Burst.
As long as this feat is “on elite/special hit” and not “on hit”, it can never be balanced. The main competitor for this feat is Warp Unleashed which allows you to reach easy additional Brain Burst one shot (Damnation) tresholds for Ragers, Flamers and Bursters, not to talk about the additional break points for weapons that even the base +10% makes possible to reach without any peril. With the current design you would need to tune the Soulblaze stacks up a bit more to match it, which leads to huge AOE damage… but only when you can land it.
With the new 4 stacks, you can one shot Flamers at 6 warp charge stacks with Wrack and Ruin but it takes like 10 seconds after the Brain Burst to happen, which means the flamer can still act. Same goes for Ragers which die a bit faster. Bursters at least die in a few seconds after the Brain Burst cast at 6 warp charges, but the thing is, you cannot keep up your warp stacks this way. If you pick Ascendant Blaze you have at least some chance to get them back but it’s still very unreliable due to the 10% chance to proc.
For the love of the game, drop the stack count back to 3 and allow this to trigger on any hit. It’s still a race condition but at least a lot weaker one as you can target a mob in the middle that is not high on the kill priority list of others. This would allow the second column to function as a choice between:
- Reach additional breakpoints with Brain Burst and other weapons
- Get more casts before having to quell
- Make Brain Burst usable as a reliable AOE damage tool