Warhammer 40,000: Darktide: [Psyker] Gun Builds

Because I am showing two builds, I will split the guide up for both sections and try to present the information in a hopefully digestible way.
Our two builds are:

• Columnus V + Gaze Build
• Assail + Specialist Killer Build

Both builds will also be using Disrupt Destiny. I will go into more detail with interactions with Disrupt Destiny in the relevant sections, but in brief, (Headshot) kill the blue marked target, and maintain the chain. ‘wounding’ a marked target refreshes all stacks, so dont be afraid of grazing someone just to be sure you don’t drop your stacks. Killing a marked target gives you Toughness, and short speed burst. Maintaining stacks gives you 15% extra damage dealt, 30% Critical Damage, and 37.5% Weakspot Damage. Crit Damage, and Weakspot Damage is alternatively known as ‘Finesse’ Damage, and Finesse Damage is one of the most powerful stats when stacked up. This is the secret behind psykers 1-hit killing Crushers on Heavy attack rapiers under certain conditions.

For Curios with both builds, we will use the same, with one very minor recommendation that changes.
We will use 1 HP Curio, and 2 Toughness. Psyker unfortunately lacks in both Health, and Toughness departments, and these Curios will not fix it. You have to be extremely vigilant with your low pools of both. 3x Toughness Regeneration, to try and keep you topped up whenever possible. We also go for a sprinkling of Stamina Regen, Block Efficiency, Sprint Efficiency, Gunner Resist, and Sniper resist.

This leaves one Curio feat remaining. For the Gaze build, it would benefit you more to do Cooldown Reduction, so you can get back into Gaze faster. For the Assail build, Cooldown reduction benefits you slightly less, because Peril is a stat that can vary, and you can sometimes end up with your cooldown ready, but no Assail’s to throw, so no Peril to generate. It might benefit you to instead, go with an additional Gunner, or Sniper Resist.

In this first build we will utilise Gaze to amplify our killing power. I will talk about a few talent nodes.

Things to consider:
• Quietude + Warp Expenditure. As we play, we will constantly be either gaining peril, or losing peril. Both talents will be used for great effect.
• Brain Rupture will almost never be used. At any given moment, shooting your gun is a much better answer to a threat rather than using Brain Burst. We only take this talent so we can move further down the tree. You can also use Smite if you really want to, but I choose Brain Rupture just on the off-chance emergency situation, where you have no ammo and someone needs to die.
• Psykinetic’s Aura is an extra aura, and one of the most powerful talents that psyker has.
• Seer’s Presence is also extremely powerful, and better than the other options. You might think you get more value out of 5% crit, but it isn’t the case, and it will limit our choices underneath the nodes.
• One with the Warp. We have so little toughness, that we need to do everything we can to protect it. This will increase the value of our toughness between 10% and 33% based on our peril, which means during the height of Gaze, we will be the most tanky, so we can afford to make the more dangerous plays while we are at our most powerful, and most likely to succeed.
• Warp Rider 0-20% Extra damage based on Peril, same as above.

Scrier’s Gaze Is your Ability. As you are playing, it is usually recommended to hit Gaze from cooldown to cooldown, save for the absolute most sparse rooms. Activating the ability will start accumulating Peril, and grant 10% damage, and 20% crit chance. You are incentivized to kill as many people as possible as this continues, as you innately reduce the rate in which Peril accumulates, and have a chance of activating Battle Meditation. You also should take every opportunity to kill your Disrupt Destiny target, as when you do, you have a chance of quelling more peril. The longer you stay in Gaze, you accumulate up to an additional 30% damage, and 30% Finesse damage, which will stack with our Disrupt Destiny Finesse. These values when stacked get absolutely crazy. When Gaze ends, you maintain the effects for 10 seconds.

How do you play?
Hit Scrier’s Gaze and start killing, ball out. When Scrier’s Gaze is over, ball out for 10 seconds. Once you are cooling down, play a bit more defensively as you wait for Gaze to come back. Dont forget about stacking Disrupt Destiny.

The weapon that we are using as a cornerstone of the build is the Columnus V. There are many weapons that will achieve this purpose, like laspistols, the Kant 12, or a Vraks 7, but this choice offers us more benefits as it is the better all around gun, while also reaching higher highs than the others. It has higher DPS, fires multiple crits in a row, and can even do hordes, if you absolutely have to.
3 of our choices on the weapon are simple, 5% Crit Chance, Flak, and Dumdum. The last choice is trickier. There are a lot of good secondary options, and you shouldn’t care too much if you get stuck with Deathspitter, Fire Frenzy, or Raking Fire, all are good.
Important Note: If possible, use either a Crosshair mod, or the Extended Weapon Customization’s scopes, as the muzzle climb on this weapon, is basically unmanageable without it, as where your bullets go becomes not represented at all by your ironsights after firing.

To go with our Columnus, we want something with horde clear, that we won’t be afraid of using during Gaze to ensure lots of kills. While we could use weapons like the Maccabian 4, or the Combat Knife, to maximize our horde clear we will use an Illisi. It slices, it dices. Just mash click in a horde, chain Heavys in a horde, alternate Heavys and lights in a horde, everything works great. Just make sure to keep your finger off the activation when you are in Gaze, as you will make Gaze run out faster, or worse, blow yourself up. Due to your Finesse damage being jacked up, in a pinch, you can use this against a Crusher, but be careful. Neither of these weapons are very good at dealing with Crushers, so either leave it to your team, or use a Red Stim and lay into it with the Columnus V with headshots.
5% Crit, Flak, and Slaughterer should be no surprise to anyone. I recommend Shred for most cases, but if you prefer Riposte instead of Shred, that is fine as well.

This build is a lot less sweaty, and more fun. Playing a more safe distance from the fight, and also being a bit more dynamic with your personal ‘flow chart’. It will be a challenge learning what to do in the situations you find yourself in, as you will be basically spinning plates balancing meters and ammo. I talked about some of the nodes earlier, so lets discuss the different nodes.

Talents:
• Perilous Combustion is a very undervalued talent, which provides more benefits than most people know. If you weren’t aware, if someone dies, with any amount of soulblaze on them, even if they were not killed by it, it counts as your kill, and activates any blessings or talents that would proc on kill. If a Disrupt Destiny target is on fire, 1. It means Disrupt Destiny cannot fall off, as the dot damage will refresh the buff, and 2. You will get the kill, but it wont be a headshot. Fire will help soften up units and make it easier for your horde clearing work. Focus down Elites and Specialists and you will be rewarded.
• Creeping Flames. Remember the magic number, 86% Peril. Once you are over 86% Peril, your venting shriek will put on the max amount of Soulblaze charges. This many stacks is enough to kill everything in a horde for 30m in a cone, and because your weapons have Flak, many basic flak units will die too. This shriek pierces all walls, and can be useful to get Hounds off players despite meters of walls. Before you fire, take a second to aim the best 30m cone, and remember that it travels upwards and downwards a bit as well.
• We took True Aim before, why mention it now? This talent, for every 5 weakspot hits, you earn a guaranteed crit. Every Assail, might end up being 3 weakspot hits all on its own, and when you throw the Assail, all 3 targets will be crit. This provides incredible value to our build.
• We are not using Battle Meditation, or Purloin Providence. We are going to be a bit more deliberate with our Peril this time around, and excessively dumping it isn’t something we’ll ever do. We will vent peril, but not do much quelling save for aimed shards.

How do you play?
When you enter a room, a lot of options will be available to you. You could spam assail, aim assail, which will gain you more peril, while saving shards, good for if enemies are spaced far apart. You can even melee or shoot at your own pleasure, especially if there is a High Value Target to snipe. Your goal in any situation where there is a horde, ambush, mixed horde, or any troublesome clump of enemies, should be reaching 86% Peril, and then venting. After that, you can join the fray with your melee, or put your attention elsewhere. Management of your shards is important. Running empty will limit your responses you can do in any given situation, as well as make it difficult to raise Peril, with no shards. Because we have True Aim, and a respectable amount of Finesse, our Assails do very high amounts of damage, and we are free to swap between throwing shards, melee, and gun for whatever the situation needs.

With our assail and venting shriek obliterating hordes, it wouldn’t benefit us so much from using an Illisi. Instead we should sacrifice some of our horde clear power, to improve our precision and ability to kill Elites. The best of both worlds is the Maccabian 4. While spamming left click is an adequate horde clear, as long as it is paired with good dodging and horde control, its true power is with its Heavys. Aim for the head, and enemies will crumple. Whenever you have the opportunity to use heavys rather than lights, such as when the enemies are coming you one after another, use heavys.
If you look into the weapons damage profile, there is an ocean of difference between the damage of a basic attack, and a crit. So we will be taking every opportunity we can to do more crits with Shred, Riposte, and 5% crit chance. Rather than Flak damage, I believe Elites is a better choice here. We can use this for Ragers, we can use this for Crushers, and for a Mauler we can either poke the body, or head, and achieve basically the same result due to our finesse. Do your best to dodge and activate Riposte, youll feel the difference in damage.

We’re all having fun, right? Why not have some more. The Combat Knife when built with the right blessings and Crit chance can really be devastating, even in horde clear scenarios. Dodge to activate Riposte, and circle the horde while spamming. Youd think you would only be mildly wounding enemies are you encircle them, but anyone hit by an errant crit, even a cleave crit, will likely bleed out before you get back to them. Like the rapier, this weapon gains a ton of damage on crit, so we will take advantage of it with 5% crit chance, and Riposte. Flesh Tearer will help with hordes, and very much help with Monstrosities. Flak will help us hit our breakpoint with most units, as well as help with the Elites we feel like meleeing, but the same goes for Elite damage as well for the same reason.

We have assail, we have our melee, so what do we want our gun to accomplish? The first niche, and weapon you may have thought of was the Revolver, so we can put down specialists, and help with distant Crushers, but you will quickly realize a problem. Because we have so many plates to spin, often we cant take the time to reload the Zarona revolver. So we need a gun with a bit more staying power, without a slow reload. The new Bolt Pistol is perfect for this. Hipfire into Elites, specialists, Ogryns, and threatening shooters, when you can’t Assail. Aiming down sights this weapon is tricky, and in most situations ill advised. Same perks as before, but for Blessings, I go with Point Blank, as I can quickly use the bolt pistol to respond to a threat, and there is a chance that the crit chance might affect your Assail, but I haven’t tested this. Puncture is a little underwhelming, but at least reliable damage. It will especially pay off in Monstrosity fights where the team members applying bleed might be temporarily forced away, and maintaining capped bleed stacks becomes important.

Can you have too much fun? Yes its the Cowboy Revolver, its actually of use to us! Before the Bolt Pistol came out, I used this exclusively due to its rapid reload. Always aim down sights, and get used to an uncanny randomness between super lucky shots, and ‘how did I miss?’s. Unlike the blessings on a normal revolver, we will not use Hand Cannon and Surgical, we need to maximise the likelihood of crits to get our damage as high as possible. So we will use Crit Chance, Crucian Roulette, and Point Blank. For both guns, Flak damage is less important, you can choose to up your Maniac damage to more reliably kill Specialists, or choose Elites as your weapons will more often be used against Crushers and Maulers.

These builds and playstyle should take you from being a weak psyker, the sort using Smite and likely dying at the first opportunity, to a top of the scoreboard playmaker. This sort of psyker is for the people who love high skill, high execution gameplay. Assail might not be as difficult, but it does make you feel good swapping between the different combat styles, and planning around all of your abilities, ammo count, and cooldowns.

If you blow yourself up, you are cringe. Either get up and ball out, or start apologising uncontrollably like the sniveller you are.

With the extra Assail talents, you can throw aimed assails basically as quickly as you regenerate them. But aimed assails generate extra peril. Keep this in mind, and aim your assails when you want to hold onto your shards, but want to vent flames more.

Remember you have Peril Block, you can revive players through incredible situations.

If you absolutely must maintain Gaze with no enemies around, you can switch to your Blitz and try and Quell for as long as you can, but you wont be able to do this forever. There wont be many opportunities where you need to do this.

When using the cowboy revolver, the last few bullets have the most value due to Crucian Roulette. If you fire 4 rounds, you might as well use the last.

Remember the feats on your weapon will amplify Assails in the air, as well as Soulblaze damage

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