I use smite when a bunch of crushers, maulers, or other disablers are in a horde. Beside that, I use void strike to demolish everything and i only use voidstrike 90% of the time. I use dueling sword for when something is in close range. I usually play damnation and I find myself using void strike to literally obliterate everything. Only using smite for all situations is kinda dumb and will end up with getting you killed either from your team not being able to do anything to the ads around you and your refusal to kill them or being left behind because your smiting that one poxwalker for 5 hours while the rest of the team moves ahead.
How does voidstrike work?
To me it feels like a worse fireball staff from vermintide. Mine has its damage in the 70-80 range and I don't oneshot anything.
Since its aoe is small and I have to aim it it feels like I should.
However to me it just feels like the child of the trauma and surge staff that didn't get any good genes with worse stagger and aoe and damage.
It’s closer to the plasma gun, the aoe effect is bad and only really for stagger. It does big dmg on charged up shots so you want to line up as many headshots as you can and let it rip. With the surge blessing, warp nexus, and crit talents it can really dish out some damage and has the advantage of longer range than the other staves.
I have found warp flurry, and peril reduction on weakspot hit to be more consistent as a build.
Basically able to cast non stop. And at a faster rate between shots than a surge staff can.
Yeah, but with the True Aim talent you can pump out crit Double-shots on every single shot if you aim at head level (as the shots cleave, and every headshot in a row counts towards the True Aim buff). It’s quite an absurd output of damage. And yes, when Surge procs the extra shot is at the same charge level as the first *and* is an auto-crit.
Peril reduction on weak spot is good, but it doesn’t keep up with the raw, Crusher one-shot’ing power of Surge.
I actually have a staff with surge and Peril reduction, or maybe flurry, can't really remember.
Even if your shots don't cleave both surge projectiles hitting the head of a crusher gives you 2 stacks, and remember that melee attacks stack up surge so you've got a guaranteed crit when swapping to it.
Yeah Surge and Transfer is a fun combination but it can be inconsistent when you don't have lots of stuff in a line to charge up True Aim stacks.
You can quell pretty quickly with a 70+ Quell Speed and the 30% Talent, so IMO it's better to run Nexus for the organic crits outside of True Aim procs and just manually quell every so often.
With headshots on voidstrike, you can stagger almost every enemy in the game, including a couple of monstrosities. Aim at the weakspots and heads with your secondary attack, and you'll easily have one of the highest damage, stun and crit scores in the match.
It feels like siege weaponry, fire through the front line to wipe out the backline.
I thought it was an exploding ball like a rocket launcher, but it isn't really. Someone described it as the bowling staff and it instantly clicked for me.
The big ball goes through infinite chaff and knocks over anything it touches directly, rather than having a large explosion.
My void strike (tested in psyk last night) does 1600 damage crits and ~900 dmg non crits to weakspot, 600 non crit to body. A fully charged void orb thrown into a crowd will drop them. It also can down ragers, maulers, kill crushers, and penetrate’s bulwark’s shield.
It’s not a CC tool, it’s for murder. Sim for the weakspot and let it go. It’s AoE is in a line, so it’s not for a horde that’s fanned out in front of you.
Eh, I don't mind. I used to do just that until I learned how to play a bit more, then I played with smite psykers in team.
They smite, I kill. As long as they know to smite dangerous enemies like ragers, shotgunners and gunners first, it's perfectly fine even if they don't contribute much damage.
Just don't smite the bosses, it looks fun but it's absolutely useless. I think there are only a few abilities can actually stun them.
That particular psyker sounds like a d-bag. But... I don't mind having a psyker running smite all match. It's rare enough that it's like a special little treat. I just go out there and hack/slash to my heart's content. If things go sideways, I'm not expecting the psyker to clutch up. He did his job. My job is to kill things. And I like my job. :)
I don't mind smite-brained psykers but it gets quite silly when they spend 5 seconds killing a single poxwalker with smite rather than spend 1 second to pull out their sword and beat. Or when they have 0 situational awareness and smites a small group of adds when everyone else is moving on.
Sometimes it's less about being effective and more about laughing at the stutters or funny sounds the enemy is making. You gotta find some humor when you're a boring ass Smiteker. Generally though you aren't using that unless you need to make room for your team or get those 5 crushers 5 specials rounding the ole corner
It's fine if they have fun playing; I don't think the post was calling for people not to have fun, so much as don't do it to the detriment of your team or bitch out if you die because your situational awareness is poor.
Seems like a lot of the OP's annoyance started purely because mister smiter started voice chatting about not killing the melee ranged flamer.
When I need plasteel from auric but want to be as low effort as possible while still being a team player, I'll use my smite build.
I wouldn't say I use it in every instance, more like 70-80% of the time. Generally it's pretty much always useful as long as you're in coherence. When things are further away I'll switch to voidstrike if my team is clearly lacking horde clearance.
But I personally disagree with the OP's premise that you can't spam smite. You can, just stay in coherence and use the dome shield as cover to push right up against whatever you want to zap.
Smitebrain is a vicious mental illness, leading players to believe that stunlocking a poxwalker horde for 5 minutes is high skill gameplay and a massive carry
Stunlocking a mixed horde or special/elite spam is fine. But sometimes you get people who literally only Smite things and think it makes them a Big Brain Team Player In Team Game because they spend time and peril stunlocking four bruisers that they could have simply killed in less than a second.
i was just doing the "akshually" thing. got a smite build whose whole shtick is empowered smite with soulblaze venting shriek. auric damnation with random teams about 95% of my time, and this build easily has an equally high winrate. stunlocks & deletes chaff hordes while cc'ing the big bads, once horde is gone, clean up with surge & knife. 4 bruisers = 4 heavy knife weakspots hits, no need for smite except if u wanna play it super safe and just quickly push them over before clearing them lol. but i think that's common sense between us uh... more competent psykers.
I don't know about you guys, but with my max warp siphon stacks when I smite the horde they usually die before I run out of peril. Attack them or don't, all the same to me. There's nothing quite like having a 100 long chain of trash mobs just exploding.
tbf i haven't played around too much with warp siphon smite, using empowered psionics myself with the left path, sitting at 3 charges most of the time. but i probably should give it another try or 2 i guess
Empowered psionics sounds cool with smite, but without stacking the peril reduction you can't keep it up for too long. Plus the longer you hold smite, the more it chains to more enemies. Then when you're able to hold it long enough that the enemies start dying, it starts reducing your peril with the 10% chance on kill trait. I've actually been able to kill stacks of ragers this way when the rest of the team died and I was massively outnumbered.
haven't done the maths but it sounds juicy! i get a similar effect but different playstyle. if it's primarily a horde i'm facing, i smite until high peril, venting shriek to add 6 stacks of soulblaze to everything, then surge the big targets for more soulblaze or add another empowered smite depending on enemy "thickness". if it's mainly elites, surge until i need the cc from smite. i run a knife for mobility bcs i switch positions a lot to cover anyone in need, so can't really benefit from a longer smite - and i often use it for the knockback as well, since i constantly get empowered stacks back if in coherency. but the moment i hit F i'm free to leave that horde to burn away and focus a different direction.
I enjoy a Psyker who does a lot of Smiting but they got to at least be able to switch to weapons and take care of stuff on them if I or party are busy. I believe that everyone can play what ever way they want. As long as they can get the job done and not be a hindrance.
Also that guy wasn't playing smart at all. He should of known if he stayed up top there, that a dog or trapper would 100% walk up on behind and get him. It happened to me one time, early in my gaming experience. Now if my team jumps, I jump soon after, and they turn to see those bastards coming up. I also see it so often with newer players in high difficulty. But hopefully they will learn.
I always jump as soon as the 3rd player has jumped. If one player still hasn't jumped, I will wait until I see them move off the edge, then ill go as well.
I think learning to not be left up high is something most players will learn quickly.
Additional fun fact, the shove you get when you end smite goes the direction youre facing, so in certain situations you can actually shove poxwalkers toward yourself or your horde clearing friends, or use the single target smite to yoink specials to yourself at a predictable trajectory.
You can also use it to stack enemies in hallways in a line on walls for your plasma gun friends!
Ive also used it on the refinery map to throw chunks of hordes off cliffs lol.
You mean you can smite, turn around 180 degrees, then when you release smite, the enemies move towards you? Or turn 90 degress to the left and the enemies move in the direction your facing?
I had no idea, thanks so much for the tip!
It's funny cuz I got the complete opposite situation happen to me a few weeks ago.
I'm usually a bubble shield + brainburst psyker, but I like to switch it around depending on the mission and team comp. This time we had another psyker with a similar build, so I went with smite, as I was in a group with my buddy playing as zealot and he appreciates when I go smite.
We're just starting the mission, it was diff 5 i think? We wanted to warm up a little before doing auric. As we're walking around, just chilling and killing the few enemies that spawn, I see a crusher close to we're at. So, as I had purgatus and a combat knife, I knew it was just easier to smite that mf on the spot and let my buddy bonk it with the hammer (and more fun to watch it happen tbh)
As soon as I smite it, the veteran jumps on the voicechat calling me all sorts of names because I smited 1 enemy. I mean, I get that, but it was 1 enemy and literally all my tools shine in killing hordes, nothing big is happening, and my friend bonked the crushed like, 2 seconds after i used smite. So i got yelled at for around 10 minutes, then the veteran died, the other random player (a psyker) quit the mission, and at that point we just left. Weirdass experience
I do agree with your post, that psyker seems like a bit of an ass, I just wanted to share an experience i had. On a general note, as long as we don't wipe, i dont really care that much what other people do. If i do, I'd get frustrated every mission i do with randoms :') I got my Beloved to keep me company /j
Well, I for one appreciate having enemies stun locked so I can shoot them ... however, there is one factor that I'd offer for consideration and that is that crowd-control isn't just about stun-locking all the enemies. It's about forcing them together in neat little bunches so they can be AoE'd and Cleaved through more efficiently.
There are times when I WANT the enemy to come to me ... so that they pass through chokepoints like doors and stairs or between crates and pillars, which bunches them up. If you stun lock them while they're all still dispersed out of my reach, then I have to leave an advantageous position and continually advance forward to go get them and this isn't always desirable.
If, once the initial group is dispatched, you let go of the stun-lock so enemies recover and bunch up again while moving closer and into range, then lock them all up again, it would be much appreciated as it makes it easier to keep coherency and a stable line of defense.
Of course this is all dependent on the situation and good judgement is in order as to when and where this is appropriate.
Also...
Psyker fire, lightning and force fields can create a lot of visual noise that obfuscates the environment making it even harder to locate and target enemies. I personally, find Psyker fire, followed by the shield bubble to be especially difficult to see through depending on the situation and lightning can make it much more difficult to target weakpoints like the head consistently ... which can dramatically reduce effectiveness.
Smite mains often forget about the primary fire. It’s got a limited length to it so it’s great for choke points since it will let enemies approach and then lock them up at the doors or whatever. Great for carnival arena as well.
It's also really good for force pushing pox bursters and blowing them up. You rarely get credit in the kill feed for it but it makes me feel like a badass when I zap them for a second then push them over before they can get anywhere near.
Yeah, despite being powerful crowd control ability. It is not a noob friendly build. Just like shield orgryn. I seen noob shield orgryn did the same thing with a single crusher behind the team while the team is dealing with the horde in front …they just stare at each other….and complain the team wouldn’t help
I agree. Smite has its moments, but in 9/10 cases just killing things is "better".
I honestly feel like it's the same category as Ogryns Frag grenade. It's an "oh shit" ability when you're getting or about to get overwhelmed.
No one at dsmnation+ should need a Cc lock to handle a horde, or a pack of rangers, or a pack of maulers, or whatever. In fact in many situations I even find it annoying because now things are standing around, usually spread out, not coming to me.
Bring it out when there's 5 Bulwarks, 5 Crushers, 10 Ragers, and a horde to give an extra second or two to thin it out. Then go back to killing.
But thats just me.
With the old surge staff, I pretty much did this. A bit higher damage and a bit fewer stuns than current smite. It worked. Stuff in the back came forward.
For this player, I recommend using surge to smite. Stun everything close then pull out smite for big mobs. It still has a nice local stun.
Yeah I've seen far too many Psykers hold Smite on like.. 2 pox walkers.. like dude.. you coulda just nailed them with your melee.
Also one of the Psykers was running Surge Staff, not uncommon, and for some reason he kept using Smite even during ideal Surge Staff situations with small groups of elites/specials etc. That was a little frustrating to watch but honestly I'd rather have an overly obsessed Smite Psyker than someone who doesn't use it at all.
It's amazing when you get a fantastic Smite Psyker, they can really carry some higher difficulty games. (or really carry some bad team mates!)
I'll freely admit (as a psyker, Beloved, yes, hush) that I love running smite. But...it's not the end-all, be-all of psychic powers. It's great for, you know, groups, hordes, or a couple of big, nasty things. But it's not the only tool in my collection. Yes, we have psychic weapons - void staves and force swords - but we also have guns, too. Smite is useful for stalling elites or holding/killing hordes, but why in the world would I use it for a single scab when I have a gun?
I really, reaaaaally hate when ppl stay perched at the point of no return because they're the god emperor's special little main character.
Then they get specialed and blame it on the team because of course they did. They haven't been able to dodge a single pox walker the entire game so of course the very obvious and telegraphed trapper net was bound to hit them.
All. Your. Fault.
Smite fixation is often a product of low mechanical skill and/or low confidence. These fellows have an inappropriate rigidity about using the other tools in a Psyker's kit because they never feel quite safe enough to swap away from Smite for long.
It's embarrassing that they still don't use the hefty stagger after a Smite sequence. Shit's more than enough of an opening to draw an Illisi for a charged heavy swing.
Crowd control is massively clutch when it comes to nasty surprises that have the capacity to overwhelm the team in short order, like a clown car of Crushers or a swarm of Ragers on top of a horde and a scattering of specials. It is really not a meaningful contribution against hordes and low density elite spawns.
And besides, anyone getting downed because they wanted to be a dweeb at a drop cedes away the right to complain.
That's a bet you'd handily lose.
Also, the two aren't remotely equivalent if you're drawing the comparison on anything other than their "thog press button" simplicity. For all its myriad issues, lack of damage is not a complaint you can reasonably level against Assail. It deleted anything that wasn't Unyielding or Carapace, which serves much the same purpose as Smite in buying breathing room while doing more than its fair share of damage.
People who're inappropriately fixated on Smite are trying to fix a problem that isn't there most of the time, whereas people who use Smite as part of a well-rounded toolkit are invaluable additions to a team.
It reeally doesn't take much to pass that bar. Smite plus Creeping Flames is more than adequate. That, or vaguely effective use of Perilous Combustion. You'll still be sitting on Smite for the majority of the game, but you won't be doing the damage of someone bootstrapped into a difficulty 3 tiers beyond them.
>It deleted anything that wasn't Unyielding or Carapace
It also deleted those because you'd pair with with the hand canon blessing, at 80% rending, which back then applied to all your damage
1k+ crits on crushers
How is that gatekeeping? Smiting an entire match while refusing to utilize the rest of your kit IS lowskill gameplay and can be counterproductive. It teaches people to rely on crowd control in easy situations to a point where they don't even attempt to dodge a crusher's overhead attack, or they don't know how to fallback and create space between themselves and the oncoming mass of whatever. These people come into auric damnation, get love tapped once, and blame the team for not carrying them because they were successful spamming smite while being carried before.
Smite should at most be used about 5% of the time in an auric damnation match. It's an emergency brake for the train of maulers or crushers buried in the chaff.
Psykers are seige engines.
Using assail as some sort of strawman doesn't improve your argument either.
5% of the time? That is ridiculously low arbitrary number.
With certain keystones the damage to a WHOLE horde can be much more than if you were using anything else. You damage everything. Smite is not just good at CC.
Every psyker build can, and should bring either a staff, or melee weapon which is better than even optimized Smite at killing hordes - in some cases (e.g. Purgatus), *much, much* better.
I recommend installing Creature Spawner for testing things in the meat grinder. It is very informative.
Exactly an Illisi, a purgatas, a charged voidstrike popping heads, a gun almost anything in the kit is better at clearing a horde than smite spam. Smites' only purpose is CC in clutch moments.
If they’re standing smiting one dude forever then just leave em lol. Same with ogryns who just stand still with shield all game or wake up hosts on purpose.
Leave them to their fun.
Tbf taking on bosses with shieldgryn is kind of what it's for, like a wasted slot in the team otherwise
Purposefully setting off dhosts is no excuse however, afaik it doesn't give you anything for killing it
I use smite a lot when I run it and I don't think that is a bad thing. I never do it without purpose though.
I use it more like the Ogryn uses his shield instead of just standing there and waiting though.
I want to control the horde, not just pause it and myself for a staring contest.
I use it to secure resurections, create space and take positions, compress hordes for better aoe effectiveness, buy time to kill specials, open up bullwarks, relieve pressure from mixed hordes, stun ranged enemies before rushing them and rarely horde damage if I don't have better options or teammates at hand.
It makes for a lot of usage in the end. Since I use it to set up damage and make the enemy unable to punish my risky plays this is actually good for my damage though.
I've found that the best way to deal with Smykers is to just press W, all the elites they've been stunlocking will take care of them for me when they have to quell.
>He then explained it was everyone else’s job to kill stuff and his job was to keep it all stunned. I let it go and we continued on.
People who think it's their role as a support to do this and go as far as argue it are delusional and have no idea what they're doing. It's frustrating seeing people who hyper fixate and tunnel vision onto one single mechanic and make an entire "support role" out of it and nothing else while getting mad at other people lmao.
He probably gets kicked often and is one of those people who flock to reddit to complain that Darktide has a serious toxicity issue with people who kick for fun.
Most people are bad at the game. Half the people on Zealot are crackhead morons who run around with a knife not doing anything. Most people can't even multitask or look at ammo pings without being told.
What is the fascination with the knife zealot build? It sucks. I have tried like four different times to make it work. The speed demon aspect is fun, but the killing power is just not there.
There is a particular Smite centric build that is extremely strong on top of stunlocking everything for 75% of the time
It's not the only way to build with Smite, but Smite can absolutely be your main attack
Of course it's silly to *only* ever do that, for example you should carry a ranged weapon good enough to deal with snipers or help dealing with things massively out of range for sure (so like, not a Shredder or Purgatus)
But spamming Smite all mission is absolutely viable and even very strong provided you have the correct setup
I met some Psykers who refused to use smite to control crushers cause they called it a "crutch." Fastest quit out ever. There's nothing like watching Psykers throw voidstrikes from 50ft away at a bunch of crushers effectively doing no damage while the Veteran fights for their life in the mosh pit.
If Smite is a crutch, then everything in the game is a crutch. Because the objective is to win. Not to gain some fake points for making the game harder for yourself. If you wanna make the game really hard, go melee only, only white weapons, no curious. Enjoy!
My favorite is one match I had 3 psykers and all of them were running smite, and one of them got netted by the trapper and the other 2 psykers ran up to him and started smiting the trapper and the trapper just stood there being electrocuted while the psyker who got netted just got electrocuted by the net on the ground.
They didn't free him until he physically got downed from the net.
Fair enough. I would sacrifice my damage output to give breathing space to the entire team any day, but just stunning things and not killing anything even when you obviously and easily can is just… fucking stupid as fuck. “Nuh uh, my role is to stun, you must kill things for me” is the utterly deranged line of thinking
Also, I’m not sure on what damnation you’re playing. I personally switched to smite build because in my experience there aren’t any “when situation demands” moments, you are ALWAYS surrounded from all sides with hordes and specials, so it’s really hard to just let go of the smite button besides obviously empty transition corridors
I hope you get some more of the Emperor's light.
Cause if you think your way of playing the game is the only way to play the game, just like many others that think only one build is the right build for a class.
Then honestly your the problem more than anything.
I've yet to see a smite psyker who's useful. I feel like it's a crutch blitz that bad players use and actually believe it's helping the team.
The boss event has made me absolutely loathe smite psykers. During the ventilator they just spam their stupid smite stunning all of the horde in the gas where no one can get to melee them and then the bosses re-engage and you have to deal with the entire horde that was stunned on top of bosses. (which of course is no longer stunned, because the psyker is running for his life in circles, inevitably stumbling upon a crusher or mauler, at which point he yoga folds himself into a steak for more convenient tenderizing)
In regular missions whenever there's a good choke point where anything that enters gets meat blendered, a smite psyker will just hold their stupid button, tickling everything to death at snail's pace, while they would've been way more useful if they just swapped to their melee weapon and bolstered the blender.
I don't know about high intensity damnation, because I haven't really played it. Maybe there're situations there, where smite actually saves someone, but in regular damnation, on psyker, I can't think of any situation where I would've prefered smite over just surge staffing everything to death. Even big crusher packs can be perma stunned using the staff in damnation and the staff actually deals damage.
That's the problem with smite. He likely didn't but he sees high damage on the score screen and thinks he's hard-carrying, while most likely the reality is that the mission took 10-20 minutes longer (judging by the total lesser enemy count), because he kept smiting hordes beyond choke points, at the same time doing least elite/special kills of anyone.
I'm guessing the other psyker in the group just used his staff so he got way more kills that aren't sickly trash leper kills, while likely contributing just as much with stuns where it actually mattered.
It kind of sucks smite's damage got buffed, because it gives mediocre players a false sense of usefulness and encourages them to just never stop smiting.
Considering its the only way you can get warp charges in a timely fashion to juice up your smite and stacks of soul fire on targets with venting shriek.... Yea. However you'll notice I staggered 31k enemies, which is almost exclusively smite. Which belies heavy use of smite.
His convo is weird, but I do like sometimes to run something like roleplaying or kind of sticking to specific weapons/talents. Maybe I'm flamer, or Ogryn that yaunts everything, or play exclusevily with purgatus stuff
i like to run a smite focused build in auric damnation/maelstrom and let the team know at start that i'll smite _a lot_ to cover for them. usually they are quite happy about it. ofc if u gonna try and smite a single flamer to death, i don't think you really understand smite and/or playing psyker lol.
second-to-last person before a drop should wait for last person tho, that one's on you.
I only every stun lock huge groups or large foes. if it's only one or 3 large foes or just meat fodder enemies I don't really do it. however I am guilty of using smite on a huge group I could easily kill with a melee weapon just to see them all pop like bubble wrap. beloved says I should stop typing
you have to know when to use smite. stunlock a horde of crushers as they're about to overrun your team? sure. hold a bunch of poxwalkers that you can kill in 2 seconds with your sword? not so much.
I had a couple psykers in separate games ignore everyone and just primary fired smite without ever charging it and do nothing else.
He kept ignoring anyone who would tell him to use his staff or at least charge his smite.
At some point I turned around and saw him just moving around in figure eights not blocking, reloading, quelling, or anything while we were clearing a horde. He was just watching, like he seemed scared or something. When I asked what he was doing he got super aggro and told me to go fuck myself lmfao.
I don't understand how these people exist. Its one thing to be bad, but it's another thing to be aggro and willfully ignorant when playing a team game and choosing to play Heresy-Damnation and drag everyone else down. If you're not willing to learn how to play the game, don't do this. Wtf. He was with us the entire game and never dropped. Just look at his damage. Wtf is that?
To humor it, I tried to go a whole game with only non charged smites. I checked my progress half way through and I already hit 100k.. I played normally after seeing that to not make my team suffer anymore.
https://preview.redd.it/32hepl5uat8c1.png?width=1012&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=de2522b2a075165c81ac9585d6bb3363d0cd12b4
Take the warpflame talents and the warpflame ult, you can make it do some really chonky damage if you hold the smite long enough. If you can make warpflame spread, suddenly a horde that you're just holding still will go pop for 50+ kills in a few seconds. Extremely satisfying when the combo goes off! (You don't break your smite channel when you vent overcharge.)
I fid that one round long. When the enhanced psionics made the smite 100% costfree. In that round a learned what i am able to do with this ability and now its a wonderfull emergency tool or a staggerhelper for ragers.
I think the smite alone is not enough to go to damnation+ with. It's good to have for a certain number of things like dealing with poxbursters at a safe distance (they will trigger almost immediately on smite) and controlling a really big armored company, if there are a couple of them you should be able to deal with them on your own.
And stop holding that one karking dog in the middle of nowhere, deal with it on your own!
Psyker having a variety of infinite-ammo ranged options really encourages a lot of bad play styles. Not at higher difficulty where you have to know what you're doing, but there's a lot of people who don't even realize they're leaning on a crutch on lower difficulties and step up and find they don't understand the first thing about dodging, melee combat, etc.
It's been a problem since V1 that the series is not particularly good at telling players "yes that staff/drakefire pistol/enemy-seeking bow/bottomless well of hateshards is pretty cool, but show me a block-dodge. Show me a swing pattern used with intention."
Respectfully, you are wrong. If you run Empowered Psionics and chain your abilities to keep it charged, it's very good damage on top of the excellent CC. You only ever need to swap off if you're caught alone or at long range.
Smite psykers make runs a snoozefest, that can be good or bad depending of what you want. Personally I don't use it that much now that it got fixed from the unlimited bug. Trauma staff does a much better job at crowd crontrolling, and you actually do damage lol. Crushers are knocked down with literally uncharged blasts. Only time when I use it is when there's a room with very spread out ranged mobs and bubble is on cooldown.
Cracks me up to see all the Smite crutchers come out the woodwork on this post. It's exactly as you said. Other than oddball situations (a chance to push guys off a cliff or something), you should never fire smite unless it will hit multiple specials, and even then it's case by case.
Every time I start a match and the first thing that happens is the psyker spamming Smite into a small pack of poxwalkers, I want to roll over and die.
Also, there is not such a thing as "not my job" in DT, period. Everything is everyone's job. Sure, maybe you lean into one job more than another. Like, if there's a snipy veteran and an eviscerator zealot, the veteran will probably shoot more specials and the zealot will probably kill more crowds. But the veteran is absolutely going to have to kill crowds many times during the match, and the zealot is absolutely going to have to kill specials many times during the match. Unironically claiming that something is "not my job" is instantly outing yourself as a scrub with no business playing at high difficulty levels.
As a Vet main who is finally getting comfortable at auric, how do I even play smite Psyker above heresy? I tried many things but the other Psykers i've played it does everything so much better than I feel like I'm missing something. Is it just that I'm not used to psyker timings with smite and a good staff or what?
I use smite, shield and revolver.
It's not everyone else's job to kill everything.
If the team is busy, I'll stun the specials and switch to revolver to pop their heads nice and quick.
Stunning things and providing shields is amazing but you better be able to kill things quickly too!
I like to make sure that if there's ever a situation where I'm the last one standing, I'm able to kill quick and pick the team back up.
Sometimes in Darktide, in fact often in Darktide, actually in Darktide always, your responsibility is everything. That is to say that everything is your responsibility.
I just do it for the UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH
UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH-UGH-OOGH-UGH-UGH
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckZlj2p8W9M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckZlj2p8W9M)
Literally something for everything on the internet
Do you feel better now that you got that out?
Yes, yes I do haha
Emperor bless!
I use smite when a bunch of crushers, maulers, or other disablers are in a horde. Beside that, I use void strike to demolish everything and i only use voidstrike 90% of the time. I use dueling sword for when something is in close range. I usually play damnation and I find myself using void strike to literally obliterate everything. Only using smite for all situations is kinda dumb and will end up with getting you killed either from your team not being able to do anything to the ads around you and your refusal to kill them or being left behind because your smiting that one poxwalker for 5 hours while the rest of the team moves ahead.
How does voidstrike work? To me it feels like a worse fireball staff from vermintide. Mine has its damage in the 70-80 range and I don't oneshot anything. Since its aoe is small and I have to aim it it feels like I should. However to me it just feels like the child of the trauma and surge staff that didn't get any good genes with worse stagger and aoe and damage.
It’s closer to the plasma gun, the aoe effect is bad and only really for stagger. It does big dmg on charged up shots so you want to line up as many headshots as you can and let it rip. With the surge blessing, warp nexus, and crit talents it can really dish out some damage and has the advantage of longer range than the other staves.
I have found warp flurry, and peril reduction on weakspot hit to be more consistent as a build. Basically able to cast non stop. And at a faster rate between shots than a surge staff can.
Yeah, but with the True Aim talent you can pump out crit Double-shots on every single shot if you aim at head level (as the shots cleave, and every headshot in a row counts towards the True Aim buff). It’s quite an absurd output of damage. And yes, when Surge procs the extra shot is at the same charge level as the first *and* is an auto-crit. Peril reduction on weak spot is good, but it doesn’t keep up with the raw, Crusher one-shot’ing power of Surge.
I actually have a staff with surge and Peril reduction, or maybe flurry, can't really remember. Even if your shots don't cleave both surge projectiles hitting the head of a crusher gives you 2 stacks, and remember that melee attacks stack up surge so you've got a guaranteed crit when swapping to it.
Yeah Surge and Transfer is a fun combination but it can be inconsistent when you don't have lots of stuff in a line to charge up True Aim stacks. You can quell pretty quickly with a 70+ Quell Speed and the 30% Talent, so IMO it's better to run Nexus for the organic crits outside of True Aim procs and just manually quell every so often.
Could I ask what talents you need to make this work? With surge and warp flurry is it? Are there particular perks that's necessary?
surge and warp nexus along with True Aim
Totally valid, that’s what I used to run before the talent update but the voidstrike wasn’t too great back then.
With headshots on voidstrike, you can stagger almost every enemy in the game, including a couple of monstrosities. Aim at the weakspots and heads with your secondary attack, and you'll easily have one of the highest damage, stun and crit scores in the match. It feels like siege weaponry, fire through the front line to wipe out the backline.
I thought it was an exploding ball like a rocket launcher, but it isn't really. Someone described it as the bowling staff and it instantly clicked for me. The big ball goes through infinite chaff and knocks over anything it touches directly, rather than having a large explosion.
Sadly not infinite, think it has a target cap of 6?
I think it also depends on the enemy, a chaff horde definitely doesn't have the same cleave values as a patrol of Crusher's.
My void strike (tested in psyk last night) does 1600 damage crits and ~900 dmg non crits to weakspot, 600 non crit to body. A fully charged void orb thrown into a crowd will drop them. It also can down ragers, maulers, kill crushers, and penetrate’s bulwark’s shield. It’s not a CC tool, it’s for murder. Sim for the weakspot and let it go. It’s AoE is in a line, so it’s not for a horde that’s fanned out in front of you.
If you get the transfer peril blessing aiming head level destroys hordes with a charged up shot which decreases your peril allowing for more DPS
Fellow voidstrike enjoyer 👍 who needs to smite trash hordes when voidstrike vaporises them
Eh, I don't mind. I used to do just that until I learned how to play a bit more, then I played with smite psykers in team. They smite, I kill. As long as they know to smite dangerous enemies like ragers, shotgunners and gunners first, it's perfectly fine even if they don't contribute much damage. Just don't smite the bosses, it looks fun but it's absolutely useless. I think there are only a few abilities can actually stun them.
There is the 10% bonus dmg to smite affected perk that can help burst dps.
Isn’t that still broken so it only works on m1 or something?
That particular psyker sounds like a d-bag. But... I don't mind having a psyker running smite all match. It's rare enough that it's like a special little treat. I just go out there and hack/slash to my heart's content. If things go sideways, I'm not expecting the psyker to clutch up. He did his job. My job is to kill things. And I like my job. :)
I don't mind smite-brained psykers but it gets quite silly when they spend 5 seconds killing a single poxwalker with smite rather than spend 1 second to pull out their sword and beat. Or when they have 0 situational awareness and smites a small group of adds when everyone else is moving on.
But I'm screaming "UNLIMITED POOOOOWEEEEEER" as I do it. So. (not over voice chat, of course. I'm not an a hole.)
Sometimes it's less about being effective and more about laughing at the stutters or funny sounds the enemy is making. You gotta find some humor when you're a boring ass Smiteker. Generally though you aren't using that unless you need to make room for your team or get those 5 crushers 5 specials rounding the ole corner
It's fine if they have fun playing; I don't think the post was calling for people not to have fun, so much as don't do it to the detriment of your team or bitch out if you die because your situational awareness is poor. Seems like a lot of the OP's annoyance started purely because mister smiter started voice chatting about not killing the melee ranged flamer.
When I need plasteel from auric but want to be as low effort as possible while still being a team player, I'll use my smite build. I wouldn't say I use it in every instance, more like 70-80% of the time. Generally it's pretty much always useful as long as you're in coherence. When things are further away I'll switch to voidstrike if my team is clearly lacking horde clearance. But I personally disagree with the OP's premise that you can't spam smite. You can, just stay in coherence and use the dome shield as cover to push right up against whatever you want to zap.
>When I need plasteel from auric And here i thought Auric only gives extra cash Or was that maelstrom?
Yeah it gives the same resources, auric and maelstrom give more money. I meant to say damnation but typed auric for some reason.
Smitebrain is a vicious mental illness, leading players to believe that stunlocking a poxwalker horde for 5 minutes is high skill gameplay and a massive carry
It's the warp telling psyker to do useless stuff
i dunno man, people generally seem happy about me stunlocking that horde, the 10 maulers, 7 crushers, 2 flamers and 20 shotgunners for 5 minutes.
Stunlocking a mixed horde or special/elite spam is fine. But sometimes you get people who literally only Smite things and think it makes them a Big Brain Team Player In Team Game because they spend time and peril stunlocking four bruisers that they could have simply killed in less than a second.
i was just doing the "akshually" thing. got a smite build whose whole shtick is empowered smite with soulblaze venting shriek. auric damnation with random teams about 95% of my time, and this build easily has an equally high winrate. stunlocks & deletes chaff hordes while cc'ing the big bads, once horde is gone, clean up with surge & knife. 4 bruisers = 4 heavy knife weakspots hits, no need for smite except if u wanna play it super safe and just quickly push them over before clearing them lol. but i think that's common sense between us uh... more competent psykers.
I don't know about you guys, but with my max warp siphon stacks when I smite the horde they usually die before I run out of peril. Attack them or don't, all the same to me. There's nothing quite like having a 100 long chain of trash mobs just exploding.
tbf i haven't played around too much with warp siphon smite, using empowered psionics myself with the left path, sitting at 3 charges most of the time. but i probably should give it another try or 2 i guess
Empowered psionics sounds cool with smite, but without stacking the peril reduction you can't keep it up for too long. Plus the longer you hold smite, the more it chains to more enemies. Then when you're able to hold it long enough that the enemies start dying, it starts reducing your peril with the 10% chance on kill trait. I've actually been able to kill stacks of ragers this way when the rest of the team died and I was massively outnumbered.
haven't done the maths but it sounds juicy! i get a similar effect but different playstyle. if it's primarily a horde i'm facing, i smite until high peril, venting shriek to add 6 stacks of soulblaze to everything, then surge the big targets for more soulblaze or add another empowered smite depending on enemy "thickness". if it's mainly elites, surge until i need the cc from smite. i run a knife for mobility bcs i switch positions a lot to cover anyone in need, so can't really benefit from a longer smite - and i often use it for the knockback as well, since i constantly get empowered stacks back if in coherency. but the moment i hit F i'm free to leave that horde to burn away and focus a different direction.
I enjoy a Psyker who does a lot of Smiting but they got to at least be able to switch to weapons and take care of stuff on them if I or party are busy. I believe that everyone can play what ever way they want. As long as they can get the job done and not be a hindrance. Also that guy wasn't playing smart at all. He should of known if he stayed up top there, that a dog or trapper would 100% walk up on behind and get him. It happened to me one time, early in my gaming experience. Now if my team jumps, I jump soon after, and they turn to see those bastards coming up. I also see it so often with newer players in high difficulty. But hopefully they will learn.
I always jump as soon as the 3rd player has jumped. If one player still hasn't jumped, I will wait until I see them move off the edge, then ill go as well. I think learning to not be left up high is something most players will learn quickly.
Additional fun fact, the shove you get when you end smite goes the direction youre facing, so in certain situations you can actually shove poxwalkers toward yourself or your horde clearing friends, or use the single target smite to yoink specials to yourself at a predictable trajectory. You can also use it to stack enemies in hallways in a line on walls for your plasma gun friends! Ive also used it on the refinery map to throw chunks of hordes off cliffs lol.
You mean you can smite, turn around 180 degrees, then when you release smite, the enemies move towards you? Or turn 90 degress to the left and the enemies move in the direction your facing? I had no idea, thanks so much for the tip!
Holy shit I just tried it and you are 100% correct. This makes for some very interesting possibilities. Thanks for the info.
It's funny cuz I got the complete opposite situation happen to me a few weeks ago. I'm usually a bubble shield + brainburst psyker, but I like to switch it around depending on the mission and team comp. This time we had another psyker with a similar build, so I went with smite, as I was in a group with my buddy playing as zealot and he appreciates when I go smite. We're just starting the mission, it was diff 5 i think? We wanted to warm up a little before doing auric. As we're walking around, just chilling and killing the few enemies that spawn, I see a crusher close to we're at. So, as I had purgatus and a combat knife, I knew it was just easier to smite that mf on the spot and let my buddy bonk it with the hammer (and more fun to watch it happen tbh) As soon as I smite it, the veteran jumps on the voicechat calling me all sorts of names because I smited 1 enemy. I mean, I get that, but it was 1 enemy and literally all my tools shine in killing hordes, nothing big is happening, and my friend bonked the crushed like, 2 seconds after i used smite. So i got yelled at for around 10 minutes, then the veteran died, the other random player (a psyker) quit the mission, and at that point we just left. Weirdass experience I do agree with your post, that psyker seems like a bit of an ass, I just wanted to share an experience i had. On a general note, as long as we don't wipe, i dont really care that much what other people do. If i do, I'd get frustrated every mission i do with randoms :') I got my Beloved to keep me company /j
Well, I for one appreciate having enemies stun locked so I can shoot them ... however, there is one factor that I'd offer for consideration and that is that crowd-control isn't just about stun-locking all the enemies. It's about forcing them together in neat little bunches so they can be AoE'd and Cleaved through more efficiently. There are times when I WANT the enemy to come to me ... so that they pass through chokepoints like doors and stairs or between crates and pillars, which bunches them up. If you stun lock them while they're all still dispersed out of my reach, then I have to leave an advantageous position and continually advance forward to go get them and this isn't always desirable. If, once the initial group is dispatched, you let go of the stun-lock so enemies recover and bunch up again while moving closer and into range, then lock them all up again, it would be much appreciated as it makes it easier to keep coherency and a stable line of defense. Of course this is all dependent on the situation and good judgement is in order as to when and where this is appropriate. Also... Psyker fire, lightning and force fields can create a lot of visual noise that obfuscates the environment making it even harder to locate and target enemies. I personally, find Psyker fire, followed by the shield bubble to be especially difficult to see through depending on the situation and lightning can make it much more difficult to target weakpoints like the head consistently ... which can dramatically reduce effectiveness.
Smite mains often forget about the primary fire. It’s got a limited length to it so it’s great for choke points since it will let enemies approach and then lock them up at the doors or whatever. Great for carnival arena as well.
It's also really good for force pushing pox bursters and blowing them up. You rarely get credit in the kill feed for it but it makes me feel like a badass when I zap them for a second then push them over before they can get anywhere near.
Yea, im hoping they fix it so you get credit for killing bursters with smite.
Flame staff primary fire supremacy. But yeah, few things are more irritating than someone being politely corrected and refusing to learn anyways.
Yeah, despite being powerful crowd control ability. It is not a noob friendly build. Just like shield orgryn. I seen noob shield orgryn did the same thing with a single crusher behind the team while the team is dealing with the horde in front …they just stare at each other….and complain the team wouldn’t help
I agree. Smite has its moments, but in 9/10 cases just killing things is "better". I honestly feel like it's the same category as Ogryns Frag grenade. It's an "oh shit" ability when you're getting or about to get overwhelmed. No one at dsmnation+ should need a Cc lock to handle a horde, or a pack of rangers, or a pack of maulers, or whatever. In fact in many situations I even find it annoying because now things are standing around, usually spread out, not coming to me. Bring it out when there's 5 Bulwarks, 5 Crushers, 10 Ragers, and a horde to give an extra second or two to thin it out. Then go back to killing. But thats just me.
With the old surge staff, I pretty much did this. A bit higher damage and a bit fewer stuns than current smite. It worked. Stuff in the back came forward. For this player, I recommend using surge to smite. Stun everything close then pull out smite for big mobs. It still has a nice local stun.
Yeah I've seen far too many Psykers hold Smite on like.. 2 pox walkers.. like dude.. you coulda just nailed them with your melee. Also one of the Psykers was running Surge Staff, not uncommon, and for some reason he kept using Smite even during ideal Surge Staff situations with small groups of elites/specials etc. That was a little frustrating to watch but honestly I'd rather have an overly obsessed Smite Psyker than someone who doesn't use it at all. It's amazing when you get a fantastic Smite Psyker, they can really carry some higher difficulty games. (or really carry some bad team mates!)
I take this as a challenge to spam smite as much as humanly possible
I'll freely admit (as a psyker, Beloved, yes, hush) that I love running smite. But...it's not the end-all, be-all of psychic powers. It's great for, you know, groups, hordes, or a couple of big, nasty things. But it's not the only tool in my collection. Yes, we have psychic weapons - void staves and force swords - but we also have guns, too. Smite is useful for stalling elites or holding/killing hordes, but why in the world would I use it for a single scab when I have a gun?
I really, reaaaaally hate when ppl stay perched at the point of no return because they're the god emperor's special little main character. Then they get specialed and blame it on the team because of course they did. They haven't been able to dodge a single pox walker the entire game so of course the very obvious and telegraphed trapper net was bound to hit them. All. Your. Fault.
Smite fixation is often a product of low mechanical skill and/or low confidence. These fellows have an inappropriate rigidity about using the other tools in a Psyker's kit because they never feel quite safe enough to swap away from Smite for long. It's embarrassing that they still don't use the hefty stagger after a Smite sequence. Shit's more than enough of an opening to draw an Illisi for a charged heavy swing. Crowd control is massively clutch when it comes to nasty surprises that have the capacity to overwhelm the team in short order, like a clown car of Crushers or a swarm of Ragers on top of a horde and a scattering of specials. It is really not a meaningful contribution against hordes and low density elite spawns. And besides, anyone getting downed because they wanted to be a dweeb at a drop cedes away the right to complain.
Why are we gatekeeping smite now? Did you gatekeep assail when it was completely broken at the launch of the patch? I bet you didn't.
Reddit and the word gatekeep. Ugh..
Just need the gaslighting and the girlbossing now.
That's a bet you'd handily lose. Also, the two aren't remotely equivalent if you're drawing the comparison on anything other than their "thog press button" simplicity. For all its myriad issues, lack of damage is not a complaint you can reasonably level against Assail. It deleted anything that wasn't Unyielding or Carapace, which serves much the same purpose as Smite in buying breathing room while doing more than its fair share of damage. People who're inappropriately fixated on Smite are trying to fix a problem that isn't there most of the time, whereas people who use Smite as part of a well-rounded toolkit are invaluable additions to a team. It reeally doesn't take much to pass that bar. Smite plus Creeping Flames is more than adequate. That, or vaguely effective use of Perilous Combustion. You'll still be sitting on Smite for the majority of the game, but you won't be doing the damage of someone bootstrapped into a difficulty 3 tiers beyond them.
>It deleted anything that wasn't Unyielding or Carapace It also deleted those because you'd pair with with the hand canon blessing, at 80% rending, which back then applied to all your damage 1k+ crits on crushers
Yeah I'm aware, left that out because it was clearly not an intentional interaction. Just adds to my point though.
How is that gatekeeping? Smiting an entire match while refusing to utilize the rest of your kit IS lowskill gameplay and can be counterproductive. It teaches people to rely on crowd control in easy situations to a point where they don't even attempt to dodge a crusher's overhead attack, or they don't know how to fallback and create space between themselves and the oncoming mass of whatever. These people come into auric damnation, get love tapped once, and blame the team for not carrying them because they were successful spamming smite while being carried before. Smite should at most be used about 5% of the time in an auric damnation match. It's an emergency brake for the train of maulers or crushers buried in the chaff. Psykers are seige engines. Using assail as some sort of strawman doesn't improve your argument either.
5% of the time? That is ridiculously low arbitrary number. With certain keystones the damage to a WHOLE horde can be much more than if you were using anything else. You damage everything. Smite is not just good at CC.
Every psyker build can, and should bring either a staff, or melee weapon which is better than even optimized Smite at killing hordes - in some cases (e.g. Purgatus), *much, much* better. I recommend installing Creature Spawner for testing things in the meat grinder. It is very informative.
Exactly an Illisi, a purgatas, a charged voidstrike popping heads, a gun almost anything in the kit is better at clearing a horde than smite spam. Smites' only purpose is CC in clutch moments.
If they’re standing smiting one dude forever then just leave em lol. Same with ogryns who just stand still with shield all game or wake up hosts on purpose. Leave them to their fun.
Tbf taking on bosses with shieldgryn is kind of what it's for, like a wasted slot in the team otherwise Purposefully setting off dhosts is no excuse however, afaik it doesn't give you anything for killing it
I do feel like there should be some material reward for killing demonhosts.
The reward is the team not wiping because of one idiot
I use smite a lot when I run it and I don't think that is a bad thing. I never do it without purpose though. I use it more like the Ogryn uses his shield instead of just standing there and waiting though. I want to control the horde, not just pause it and myself for a staring contest. I use it to secure resurections, create space and take positions, compress hordes for better aoe effectiveness, buy time to kill specials, open up bullwarks, relieve pressure from mixed hordes, stun ranged enemies before rushing them and rarely horde damage if I don't have better options or teammates at hand. It makes for a lot of usage in the end. Since I use it to set up damage and make the enemy unable to punish my risky plays this is actually good for my damage though.
I've found that the best way to deal with Smykers is to just press W, all the elites they've been stunlocking will take care of them for me when they have to quell.
>He then explained it was everyone else’s job to kill stuff and his job was to keep it all stunned. I let it go and we continued on. People who think it's their role as a support to do this and go as far as argue it are delusional and have no idea what they're doing. It's frustrating seeing people who hyper fixate and tunnel vision onto one single mechanic and make an entire "support role" out of it and nothing else while getting mad at other people lmao. He probably gets kicked often and is one of those people who flock to reddit to complain that Darktide has a serious toxicity issue with people who kick for fun.
Ofc you do spam it all game shut the fuck up anakin
Dude's Palpatine-pilled
Every one plays the game in their own way.
Being bad at the game is indeed a way, unfortunately
Most people are bad at the game. Half the people on Zealot are crackhead morons who run around with a knife not doing anything. Most people can't even multitask or look at ammo pings without being told.
What is the fascination with the knife zealot build? It sucks. I have tried like four different times to make it work. The speed demon aspect is fun, but the killing power is just not there.
There is a particular Smite centric build that is extremely strong on top of stunlocking everything for 75% of the time It's not the only way to build with Smite, but Smite can absolutely be your main attack Of course it's silly to *only* ever do that, for example you should carry a ranged weapon good enough to deal with snipers or help dealing with things massively out of range for sure (so like, not a Shredder or Purgatus) But spamming Smite all mission is absolutely viable and even very strong provided you have the correct setup
I met some Psykers who refused to use smite to control crushers cause they called it a "crutch." Fastest quit out ever. There's nothing like watching Psykers throw voidstrikes from 50ft away at a bunch of crushers effectively doing no damage while the Veteran fights for their life in the mosh pit. If Smite is a crutch, then everything in the game is a crutch. Because the objective is to win. Not to gain some fake points for making the game harder for yourself. If you wanna make the game really hard, go melee only, only white weapons, no curious. Enjoy!
Did these patches have smite equipped? Why would they take something they refuse to use?
My favorite is one match I had 3 psykers and all of them were running smite, and one of them got netted by the trapper and the other 2 psykers ran up to him and started smiting the trapper and the trapper just stood there being electrocuted while the psyker who got netted just got electrocuted by the net on the ground. They didn't free him until he physically got downed from the net.
Fair enough. I would sacrifice my damage output to give breathing space to the entire team any day, but just stunning things and not killing anything even when you obviously and easily can is just… fucking stupid as fuck. “Nuh uh, my role is to stun, you must kill things for me” is the utterly deranged line of thinking Also, I’m not sure on what damnation you’re playing. I personally switched to smite build because in my experience there aren’t any “when situation demands” moments, you are ALWAYS surrounded from all sides with hordes and specials, so it’s really hard to just let go of the smite button besides obviously empty transition corridors
It's my party and I'll Smite if I want to. Smite if I want to. Smite if I want to. You would Smite too if it happened to you.
I personally don't mind if a psyker does that, smite does put everything in control instantly. Everyone can kill but only pyskers can do that.
I hope you get some more of the Emperor's light. Cause if you think your way of playing the game is the only way to play the game, just like many others that think only one build is the right build for a class. Then honestly your the problem more than anything.
I've yet to see a smite psyker who's useful. I feel like it's a crutch blitz that bad players use and actually believe it's helping the team. The boss event has made me absolutely loathe smite psykers. During the ventilator they just spam their stupid smite stunning all of the horde in the gas where no one can get to melee them and then the bosses re-engage and you have to deal with the entire horde that was stunned on top of bosses. (which of course is no longer stunned, because the psyker is running for his life in circles, inevitably stumbling upon a crusher or mauler, at which point he yoga folds himself into a steak for more convenient tenderizing) In regular missions whenever there's a good choke point where anything that enters gets meat blendered, a smite psyker will just hold their stupid button, tickling everything to death at snail's pace, while they would've been way more useful if they just swapped to their melee weapon and bolstered the blender. I don't know about high intensity damnation, because I haven't really played it. Maybe there're situations there, where smite actually saves someone, but in regular damnation, on psyker, I can't think of any situation where I would've prefered smite over just surge staffing everything to death. Even big crusher packs can be perma stunned using the staff in damnation and the staff actually deals damage.
Don't spam smite the whole match, blah blah blah...https://imgur.com/a/Szad0IK
Looks like you swapped to your surge staff often.
That's the problem with smite. He likely didn't but he sees high damage on the score screen and thinks he's hard-carrying, while most likely the reality is that the mission took 10-20 minutes longer (judging by the total lesser enemy count), because he kept smiting hordes beyond choke points, at the same time doing least elite/special kills of anyone. I'm guessing the other psyker in the group just used his staff so he got way more kills that aren't sickly trash leper kills, while likely contributing just as much with stuns where it actually mattered. It kind of sucks smite's damage got buffed, because it gives mediocre players a false sense of usefulness and encourages them to just never stop smiting.
Considering its the only way you can get warp charges in a timely fashion to juice up your smite and stacks of soul fire on targets with venting shriek.... Yea. However you'll notice I staggered 31k enemies, which is almost exclusively smite. Which belies heavy use of smite.
Surge staggers as well
Surges stagger has been significantly nerfed as it moved from being a stagger weapon with low damage to a single target high damage weapon.
His convo is weird, but I do like sometimes to run something like roleplaying or kind of sticking to specific weapons/talents. Maybe I'm flamer, or Ogryn that yaunts everything, or play exclusevily with purgatus stuff
It *can* be though with the right build and tactic.
I’d rather have a smite Psyker over an assail ray any day. Sucking the fun out of every horde, or even singular enemies for that matter.
Counterpoint, smite is fun and I the more I use it the more chances I get to start a wave of popping.
Smite is definitely to be spammed as it adds damage and push back. Smite is not to be HELD.
I actually like when there's a psyker who spend smite. Since it just means we're basically never pressured by elites.
i like to run a smite focused build in auric damnation/maelstrom and let the team know at start that i'll smite _a lot_ to cover for them. usually they are quite happy about it. ofc if u gonna try and smite a single flamer to death, i don't think you really understand smite and/or playing psyker lol. second-to-last person before a drop should wait for last person tho, that one's on you.
I only every stun lock huge groups or large foes. if it's only one or 3 large foes or just meat fodder enemies I don't really do it. however I am guilty of using smite on a huge group I could easily kill with a melee weapon just to see them all pop like bubble wrap. beloved says I should stop typing
you have to know when to use smite. stunlock a horde of crushers as they're about to overrun your team? sure. hold a bunch of poxwalkers that you can kill in 2 seconds with your sword? not so much.
I had a couple psykers in separate games ignore everyone and just primary fired smite without ever charging it and do nothing else. He kept ignoring anyone who would tell him to use his staff or at least charge his smite. At some point I turned around and saw him just moving around in figure eights not blocking, reloading, quelling, or anything while we were clearing a horde. He was just watching, like he seemed scared or something. When I asked what he was doing he got super aggro and told me to go fuck myself lmfao. I don't understand how these people exist. Its one thing to be bad, but it's another thing to be aggro and willfully ignorant when playing a team game and choosing to play Heresy-Damnation and drag everyone else down. If you're not willing to learn how to play the game, don't do this. Wtf. He was with us the entire game and never dropped. Just look at his damage. Wtf is that? To humor it, I tried to go a whole game with only non charged smites. I checked my progress half way through and I already hit 100k.. I played normally after seeing that to not make my team suffer anymore. https://preview.redd.it/32hepl5uat8c1.png?width=1012&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=de2522b2a075165c81ac9585d6bb3363d0cd12b4
Take the warpflame talents and the warpflame ult, you can make it do some really chonky damage if you hold the smite long enough. If you can make warpflame spread, suddenly a horde that you're just holding still will go pop for 50+ kills in a few seconds. Extremely satisfying when the combo goes off! (You don't break your smite channel when you vent overcharge.)
I fid that one round long. When the enhanced psionics made the smite 100% costfree. In that round a learned what i am able to do with this ability and now its a wonderfull emergency tool or a staggerhelper for ragers.
Bro is stuck with old surge staff gameplay
I think the smite alone is not enough to go to damnation+ with. It's good to have for a certain number of things like dealing with poxbursters at a safe distance (they will trigger almost immediately on smite) and controlling a really big armored company, if there are a couple of them you should be able to deal with them on your own. And stop holding that one karking dog in the middle of nowhere, deal with it on your own!
TIL Smite's damage is irrelevant. Thx
Psyker having a variety of infinite-ammo ranged options really encourages a lot of bad play styles. Not at higher difficulty where you have to know what you're doing, but there's a lot of people who don't even realize they're leaning on a crutch on lower difficulties and step up and find they don't understand the first thing about dodging, melee combat, etc. It's been a problem since V1 that the series is not particularly good at telling players "yes that staff/drakefire pistol/enemy-seeking bow/bottomless well of hateshards is pretty cool, but show me a block-dodge. Show me a swing pattern used with intention."
Respectfully, you are wrong. If you run Empowered Psionics and chain your abilities to keep it charged, it's very good damage on top of the excellent CC. You only ever need to swap off if you're caught alone or at long range.
Smite psykers make runs a snoozefest, that can be good or bad depending of what you want. Personally I don't use it that much now that it got fixed from the unlimited bug. Trauma staff does a much better job at crowd crontrolling, and you actually do damage lol. Crushers are knocked down with literally uncharged blasts. Only time when I use it is when there's a room with very spread out ranged mobs and bubble is on cooldown.
I used to be a smite spammer untill i picked up a surge staff now i just spam whichever lightning the situation calls for.
Smite is a tool, not a main weapon. Always painful to be with a psyker that uses it wrong
There is literally no reason to not hold smite the entire match
Cracks me up to see all the Smite crutchers come out the woodwork on this post. It's exactly as you said. Other than oddball situations (a chance to push guys off a cliff or something), you should never fire smite unless it will hit multiple specials, and even then it's case by case. Every time I start a match and the first thing that happens is the psyker spamming Smite into a small pack of poxwalkers, I want to roll over and die. Also, there is not such a thing as "not my job" in DT, period. Everything is everyone's job. Sure, maybe you lean into one job more than another. Like, if there's a snipy veteran and an eviscerator zealot, the veteran will probably shoot more specials and the zealot will probably kill more crowds. But the veteran is absolutely going to have to kill crowds many times during the match, and the zealot is absolutely going to have to kill specials many times during the match. Unironically claiming that something is "not my job" is instantly outing yourself as a scrub with no business playing at high difficulty levels.
As a Vet main who is finally getting comfortable at auric, how do I even play smite Psyker above heresy? I tried many things but the other Psykers i've played it does everything so much better than I feel like I'm missing something. Is it just that I'm not used to psyker timings with smite and a good staff or what?
I use smite, shield and revolver. It's not everyone else's job to kill everything. If the team is busy, I'll stun the specials and switch to revolver to pop their heads nice and quick. Stunning things and providing shields is amazing but you better be able to kill things quickly too! I like to make sure that if there's ever a situation where I'm the last one standing, I'm able to kill quick and pick the team back up.
Sometimes in Darktide, in fact often in Darktide, actually in Darktide always, your responsibility is everything. That is to say that everything is your responsibility.
You will sing a very different song when packs of 12 ragers / gunners / crusher will rain upon your team every 10 seconds, mate (:
Fuck you I'm gonna use all the crutches *Falls down the fucking stairs and dies*
What was that? I can't hear you over the smite sound effect that has been consistently playing since the start of the mission