Azyr Psyker
 Psyker Build - Warhammer 40k: Darktide 

 ── AT A GLANCE ──

 

Horde Clear: [5/5]
Crowd Control: [5/5]
Elite Killing: [3/5]
Special Killing: [4/5] 
Monster Damage: [2/5] 
Survivability: [4/5] 
Team Utility: [4/5] 
Peril Management:  [Easy]
Skill Floor: [Moderate]

Foreword

So it's been over a year since I played Darktide. Coming back, I watched and read a lot to see how the game and meta had shifted. I had several messages through Discord, telling me that this build no longer worked, and that the Nomanus Mk VI Electrokinetic Force Staff  was now the worst staff in the game. So I loaded into Havoc, fully expecting this to underperform. I then climbed to Havoc 40 pretty quickly, dealing the most damage in the majority of games. So let's talk about the Azyr Psyker, its strengths and weaknesses, what team compositions it works into and how to get the most out of it.

Azyr Psyker

First and foremost, the Azyr Psyker is a SUPPORT build. It is not designed to make solo or clutch plays. It is designed to suppress the enemy, giving your team enough breathing room, to make sure that this situation does not occur in the first place. It is also a highly specialised build, focusing almost exclusively on crowd control and horde clear. It is not a jack of all trades and will require at least one ranged DPS teammate to shine. Movement is essential, and this build lives and dies on your ability to dodge slide whilst smiting. Positioning well is the difference between living and dying, and this can look a little different with smite.

Smite will shoot electricity to up to 3 beams out from the psyker. However once an enemy is being electrocuted, it can then jump again, up to 2 additional targets provided they are within a ±45° angle cone opposite to where they are initially hit by smite. This can happen an infinite number of times, meaning that if you hit the first person in a horde, you can effectively electrocute the entire horde, and this will only count as one of your three beams. Once Smite has locked onto a unit you no longer need to aim at them. Once you are sure that all enemies are being shocked, and none of them have managed to sneak past that ±45° angle, you can start looking around. Whilst smiting, if you are below 3 beams, it will automatically latch on to new targets, allowing you to suppress groups of enemies both in front and behind you. NEVER smite using left click. Only ever Smite after charging up with RMB. 

Once you have locked on to an enemy, move around using dodge slides to position yourself in the safest position possible. Once it has acquired a target, smite will pass through walls and objects, allowing you to get into cover whilst zapping a horde round the corner. Ordinarily, Smite is more of a crowd control spell. But by running Empowered Psionics , we triple the damage, turning it into a crowd control ability that can also delete hordes. This combined with Venting Shriek  allows us to create a Wombo-Combo.  Everything in an extremely large area in front of you will start burning, as demonstrated in the video below. Screaming 'UNLIMITED POWER!' as you do this is optional.

Psyker Venting Shriek Radius Test - Warhammer Darktide 40K: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHg6tov0vDc

Once our peril rises above 85%, we use venting shriek to apply max stacks of soul-blaze (6). This can be done whilst continuing to channel our blitz, so the combo will only use one stack of Empowered Psionics.  By using Smite when our peril is at 0%, using Venting Shriek at 85% to reduce back down to 35%-15%, depending on how many targets we hit, we can continue our attack for longer until it rises close to 100%. Combine this with Battle Meditation , and smite can last a long time. Soulblaze + Electricity deals enough damage to kill Scab Mauler  and Scab Rager  in Auric Damnation difficulty, and can do the same even at Havoc 40 if enough Procs of Battle Meditation  are triggered. In order to get a long enough duration to do this, Empyric Resolve  is required, and Penetration of the Soul  is needed to deal with armour. This does mean that Toughness is harder to replenish. This is precisely why correct positioning is so damn important. 

Try to get into the habit of releasing Smite at around 95% peril. If you release smite before 100% you will send out a shockwave that knocks all human-sized shocked enemies over. The added knockdown is similar to the Psyker's push but affects every shocked enemy regardless of distance. The enemy will be knocked flat on their back. This will give you enough time to quell your peril and start a new round of smite before the horde closes in too much. It also allows you to do a block push combo immediately afterwards without blowing yourself up (speaking from experience).

The Azyr Psyker is capable of dealing Boss Damage. But mostly, you do not deal boss damage. A Plague Ogryn , Scab Captain  or hell, even Rodin Karnak  and Rinda Karnak  are not great threats by themselves to a competent team.  What is a threat is them combined with Scab Trapper  Pox Hound  and all manner of Nurgle worshippers trying to sodomise you whilst you're dealing with these bosses. Your job is prevent enemies from interfering whilst your teammates give them a London Welcoming.  The main reason the Karnak Twins spell disaster for so many Havoc mode runs, is because object permanence goes out the window as everyone hyper-focuses on them. It's not the Pox mines that are the problem by themselves, but the horde that forces you onto them. The only time you should be engaging bosses is if everything else is dead or if the boss is literally in your face and you can't focus the horde. 

Playstyle

My beloved Nomanus Mk VI Electrokinetic Force Staff is an underrated and misunderstood weapon. It deals respectable damage on a quick charge time, and does not require us to be at all effective with aiming. This makes it especially good for lights out and ventilation purge modifiers, or to quickly snap and eliminate a special threat. It can stun larger armoured threats like Crushers in their tracks and can stop a leaping hound. The stun happens immediately, whilst the damage does not proc until the animation ends. The arc will spread to an additional target, letting us hit two targets at once. Repeated uses of this weapon can open up Bulwark  and stun a couple of Crusher  in their place, neutering them as a threat even before they are killed. For the majority of the mission, charged shots should be spammed as you progress to eliminate specials and ranged enemies before they can become a problem. 

When the number of elites exceeds 4+ or a horde of lesser enemies approaches, this is where we start smiting. Try to position yourself either behind your team, behind cover, or with your back up against a wall to make sure you can hit the entire horde. Obviously this puts us in a position where we are cornered, so be constantly vigilant of threats. Mutant  can be difficult to stagger so will likely require dodging. The biggest threats come from Dreg Tox Bomber  and Scab Bomber , as their AOE will force you to change position. The Deimos Mk IV Blaze Force Sword  is used mostly for utility. Deflector  allows you to block ranged attacks, and when paired with Kinetic Deflection , can be used to build up your peril if you're looking to Venting Shriek  to spread some soulblaze. Its heavy-2 attack when aimed at a Crusher  can Stagger them to the floor. Use this weapon when you're surrounded and blocking to dodge slide towards safety, or to deal damage to Mutant  and Scab Captain  when the opportunity presents itself.

Build Path
 

• Soulstealer, Souldrinker  & Mettle  - The only sources of toughness replenishment we have. We mostly rely on Crowd Control and positioning. The first two will keep you topped up whilst smiting hordes. The latter can help when using the Nomanus Mk VI Electrokinetic Force Staff 
• Perilous Combustion  &  Wildfire  - Helps to extend and spread the damage from Soulblaze applied with Venting Shriek  & Creeping Flames .
• Smite , Empowered Psionics  & Charged Up  - Main source of crowd control and damage. This combination is what allows you to melt hordes.
• Seer's Presence  &  Psykinetic's Aura  - Helps reduce cooldown for frequent uses of Venting Shriek 
• Venting Shriek , Becalming Eruption  & Creeping Flames  - Used as a combo extender for Smite  and to increase AOE damage via stacks of soulblaze.
• Solidity  - Reduces quelling enough that you can reliably quell in between Smite  and keep a horde suppressed
• Empyric Resolve  & Penetration of the Soul  - Massively extends Smite duration and increases damage against armoured targets respectively. Also allows the Nomanus Mk VI Electrokinetic Force Staff  to be spammed constantly.
   

A final note on Kinetic Deflection . This node provides insane defence for any budding Psyker. The formula for how it converts stamina expenditure into Peril is:
 

Peril gained per block = (Block Cost ÷ Max Stamina) × 25%
 

This is the sole justification for taking the Stamina curio. Taking a single +3 Stamina curio roughly halves your Peril generation per block, because Block Cost is fixed, it's the stamina that block would normally have cost you, set by your weapon,  while Max Stamina is the number you're inflating. Divide a fixed number by a bigger number and the result shrinks.
 

Block Efficiency stacks on top of this rather than competing with it. It reduces Block Cost itself before the Peril conversion happens, so a build running both Stamina and Block Efficiency curios is hitting the formula from both ends: a smaller numerator and a bigger denominator. Practically, this means Block Efficiency isn't a "nice to have" alternative to Stamina,  the two compound, and a Kinetic Deflection build wants both rather than picking one.

Weapons

The Deimos Mk IV Blaze Force Sword  is mostly used for utility. With Kinetic Deflection  and Deflector  we can safely turtle up regardless of how FUBAR a situation has become. Realistically, you should have this out for less than 10% of the match, and there are only 4 scenarios when it should be pulled out. 

1.  You have become completely surrounded and need to defend and dodge-slide until you can create some distance and start suppressing.
2.  You need to deflect damage against ranged units as you advance on them.
3. You need to quickly dispatch a mutant.
4.  You want to deal damage to a Monstrosity or Scab Captain  and all other threats have been dealt with (or your team has left you to deal with it as it backs you into a corner).
    

Because of this, Increased damage to Unyielding and Mutant makes the most sense. The Scab Captain  shield is its own damage type and nothing increases damage against it. You could take extra damage to Flak to hurt them more when the shield breaks, but the Mutant  is a much more present threat that you will likely have to deal with multiple times throughout a run. Being able to kill it in 1-2 hits eliminates this threat quicker and allows you to get back to crowd control duties.
 

An argument can be made to instead run the Catachan Mk III Combat Blade . Doing so would increase your mobility, allowing you to reposition better. It also contains greater boss damage owing to bleed stacks and extra weakpoint damage. The latter remains somewhat underwhelming however, without access to nodes increasing damage that other classes possess. It also leaves you much more vulnerable to ranged enemies which become a huge threat in high havoc. Both are viable for different playstyles,  and I've experimented with both. The Catachan Mk III Combat Blade  has greater clutch potential. The Deimos Mk IV Blaze Force Sword  makes it less likely you get to a point where clutching is required. And realistically, it's the result of you getting beamed to death by gunners, so you're not the one doing the clutching anyway. 
 

For our ranged option, the Nomanus Mk VI Electrokinetic Force Staff  pairs extremely well with both Empyric Resolve  & Penetration of the Soul . You can effectively spam the secondary fire throughout a mission, ensuring specials are unable to approach your strike team. It arcs to +1 additional enemy, meaning that you can keep 2 Crusher  locked in place, or open up a pair of Bulwark  from range without having to go around the shield. It also has incredibly high innate crit chance, allowing frequent procs of Mettle . The primary fire can be used to take out distant targets and on average, will do much more damage than any other staff's primary fire.

Curios

2 x Toughness Curios and 1x Stamina curio. We are squishy, so the extra toughness helps with survivability. Our health pool is naturally so low that bringing additional health will not prevent us from getting 1-shot by a Scab Mauler  or Crusher  overhead, so just don't get hit by these Five-head.  The extra toughness perks add just a little extra shield, to help prevent us from getting shredded by ranged attacks. Ability cooldown allows for more frequent uses of Venting Shriek , which in turn leads to more suppression, more wombo combos and more damage overall.
 

Gunner Resistance is the most useful resistance node as it applies to Dreg Gunner, Dreg Shotgunner, Scab Gunner, Scab Plasma Gunner, Scab Shotgunner, and Reaper. This is the largest collection of enemies out of any of the resistance perks. These enemies can absolutely shred you in seconds, and it's not uncommon to see teammates seemingly insta-die when faced with a firing squad of them, especially with toughness grace period being removed.  The ability is multiplicative, so it does have some diminishing returns. 0.80×0.80×0.80=0.512 
 

3x Gunner resistance = 48.8% damage reduction
 

2x Gunner resistance = 36% damage reduction
 

The stamina curio is brought due to its synergy with Kinetic Deflection , doubling the effective amount of hits we can block. Block efficiency is taken for the same compounding effect. I tend not to favour taking increased revive speed, as 9/10 times,  you're better off suppressing the enemies that downed youre teammate so someone else can pick them up. Seldom does it come up, and we need all the survivability it can get. That said, if you feel like it's mandatory to your playstyle and team, then the toughness perks can be dropped to facilitate this. 

Strengths

• Unparalleled Crowd Control abilities
• Disintegrates lesser enemies
• Quick response time to stun and kill specials
• Capable of holding entire lines of Crusher  and Scab Mauler  enemies in place
• Not ammo reliant
• Easy peril management
• Low skill floor, high skil ceiling
• Excellent Defence

Weaknesses

• Subpar monstrosity damage
• Squishy
• Reliant on positioning
• Weak at Long ranges
• Low Clutch Potential
• Unable to stagger enemies with stagger resistance from modifiers (i.e The Encoraching Garden).

Questions & Answers

Question: Why do the stats, weapons, and abilities in the video not match what's written in this guide?

Answer: I am constantly evolving and refining my builds. As patch notes are released, certain weapons and abilities may change in effectiveness. Additionally, as my skills and knowledge grow, my preferred builds can shift. I aim to provide videos demonstrating the effectiveness of my builds as proof of concept. However, these videos may sometimes be outdated. While I strive to keep everything current, Darktide is my hobby, and I may not always have the latest updates in the videos. The information in these guides reflects my most recent thinking and should be considered more accurate than what is shown in the videos.