Aqshy Psyker | Brain Rupture | Venting Shriek | Warp Siphon | Auric Ready
Build for Darktide

Aqshy Psyker

This build is all about spreading AOE damage and burning everything in site. We will shout frequently, spreading soulblaze all across the battlefield. Those enemies already burning will quickly have their soul-blaze stacks ramp up even further with our Rifthaven Mk II Purgatus Force. We can get our cooldown down to about 15 seconds, whilst our staff generates very little peril naturally. By screaming off of cooldown, we can engulf entire swathes of enemies in our wake. When a Monstrosity shows up, we can shout to benefit Kinetic Resonance to quickly fry even their brains. The aqshy psyker seeks to incinerate everything they encounter, turning the battlefield into a charred wasteland.

Playstyle

Most of the game will be spent running around, using the primary fire of our staff. The flame burst provides a huge amount of stagger, and is what you use to herd enemies into position as you slowly roast them to death. When you get some breathing room, you can take the opportunity to charge up and unleash a torrent of flames and quickly stack up soul-blaze stacks. All dots in Darktide scale exponentially. We sadly cannot pick up critical chance in the build tree without compromising the efficacy of this build, so we need to make up for it The only thing this struggles with is Carapace Armour, so we pick a melee weapon that can effectively deal with these threats once they get to close. 

Build Path

I like to take all three of the toughness replenishment nodes at the top of the tree. Realistically, most of our toughness will be coming back from Soulstealer as we cook hordes of Nurgle Worshippers. However, I like to take Quietude & Warp Expenditure in all my Psyker builds so I know that whenever I am generating or perilling peri. It can help in situations where there is not a horde to cook, or when you have to clutch, knowing that you can replenish Toughness on demand. Perilous Combustion gains more value the higher the difficulty you are on. It's a great node on most Pysker builds, but here especially it allows more Soulblaze stacks to quickly ramp up, massively increasing your damage. 

Brain Rupture is our Blitz of choice, as it allows us to grab Wildfire down the line and I find Smite has too much overlap with the crowd Control we will already be offering with our playstyle. Be careful when taking Kinetic Flayer. The Rifthaven Mk II Purgatus Force Staff can knock back Poxburster and other enemies with their primary fire. The last thing you want is to try and push back a Poxbusrter, only for Kinetic Flayer to proc in your face and blow yourself up, so always change to melee to push these threats back. If you would rather not take this node, then it can be swapped for the extra 5% critical chance node at the bottom of the tree instead. Kinetic Resonance 

is what allows us to chunk down Monstrosities. Simply use your ability and start machine-gunning the big boys.

Wildfire is a natural choice for a build like this. Combined with Perilous Combustion It can quickly spread more Soulblaze dots amongst mixed hordes. Our build relies heavily on cooldown reduction to get the most out of our ability, so we pick up Psykinetic's Aura & Seer's Presence. Even without it being required for this build, these are two of the strongest nodes in the game and provide a massive boon to our team. One with the Warp can help increase our survivability, as our Peril will naturally be hovering on the higher side of things for the majority of a run.

Venting Shriek is the lynchpin that makes this build. We pick up both Becalming Eruption and Creeping Flames. If you are having doubts about how effective this is, please check out the Psyker venting Shriek Radius test below. The range on this thing is absurd, and can set an entire room full of enemies on fire. This synergises well with both Perilious Combustion & Wildfire to spread as much dot damage as possible. It's possible to hit a sniper from a ridiculous distance away, and with 6 stacks of soul-blaze, it is enough to kill them outright.

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

Warp Rider is almost mandatory due to its universal application of damage. Puppet Master is a so-so node, but required to go down the left-hand tree. Solidity is just a buff to peril quelling speed, so helps to maintain the uptime of our warp Attacks. Warp Siphon is what allows us to spam so much fire. The Rifthaven Mk II Purgatus Force Staff does not naturally produce much peril, and by running so much cooldown reduction we can use our ability almost every time our peril rises above 85%. We don't pick up Inner Tranquility as we actually struggle to get our peril up above 85% when using our staff, so we don't want that to take longer. Psychich Vampie is usually very good, but outclassed by In Fire Reborn in this build. Even when using our ability every 15 seconds or so, we should not struggle to get our Warp Siphon stacks back up to 6 provided there is a large enough horde nearby to burn. 

Weapons

The most important stat for our Rifthaven Mk II Purgatus Force is burn, due to the nature of how dots work. The maximum amount of soul-blaze stacks you can achieve with this staff is 15, with a burn value of 76. Anything less than 76 burn is not worth running. It might not seem like a lot, but because of the exponential nature of dots, that one less dot stack is a lot less damage. Hitting a critical hit applies two stacks of soul-blaze, which is why critical chance is so important for our damage potential. Low levels of soul-blaze do very little damage, so we need to stack it up fast. We take up extra critical chances and additional damage to flak to more quickly deal with hordes.

The main weakness of the Rifthaven Mk II Purgatus Force is its ability to deal with Carapace. Everything else gets incinerated, but Carapace only takes about 5% damage from Soul Blaze, so we need something to deal with this. The Duelling swords are the best for this, but grabbing those puts us at risk of ranged attacks, seeing as we are not picking up Telekine Shield. Therefore I like to grab the next best thing, the Deimos Mk IV Blaze Force Sword. It has access to Deflector, so can help out when if we get caught out in the open. Heavy attacks are straight lunges, and the second one has insane stagger value attached to it, allowing you to knock Maulers and Crushers on their backside almost at will.

Curios

After 500+ hours in Darktide, I have a simple rule of thumb when it comes to Curios. For melee classes (Ogryn and Zealot) Take 2x Toughness and 1x Health Curios. For ranged classes (Veteran and Psyker), take 3x Toughness curios. Veteran benefits massively from Toughness and Ogryn massively from health, with the other two classes falling somewhere in between. There are a few niche builds that might require Stamina Curios, but this is a pretty safe rule to stick to, and means that you have curios that are effective for the vast majority of your builds. Wound curios should only ever be used by Zealot Martyrdom builds. Even then, I consider Martyrdom builds a bit gimmicky and less effective than other Zealot builds, which is why I only ever run them for banter and memes.

For perks, I opt for raw stats. +20% Gunner Resistance is the most useful resistance node as it applies to Scab Gunners, Scab Shotgunners, Dreg Gunners, Dreg Shotgunners and Reapers. This is the largest collection of enemies out of any of the resistance perks. These enemies can absolutely shred you in seconds, and make up a significant portion of the enemies encountered in Auric Maelstroms. The difference between running 3 of these perks compared to running none is night and day, and arguably the single most useful perk you can apply to your curios. +5% Toughness and +5% Health provide us with raw stats that you can never go wrong with. If you have to pick between one of the two, go for Toughness. This is because the Health Curio provides 21% Health, and the Toughness Curio provides 17% Toughness, meaning that the Toughness Perk is a better value proposition. 

For the Aqshy Psyker, I like to opt for a 4% cooldown reduction over the health perks. Psykers are squishy and the extra Health is not going to benefit us too much. Being able to vent peril, regain toughness and more quickly apply soul-blaze with our shriek is far more impactful for increasing our survivability more than health. The best defence is a good offence. 

Strengths

You are the king of trash clear. It is very easy to stack up warp charges with In Fire Reborn, so even with a relatively short cooldown on your Venting Shriek, it is not uncommon to get all your warp charges back by the time you're ready to use it again.  Our Staff does great damage to monstrosities on its own, but you can use your ability to start rapid-firing Brain Rupture to chunk it down fast and even further. With the inherent stagger on the primary fire of our staff, it's pretty easy to keep enemies at bay as we cook them. Heavy attacks from Deimos Mk IV Blaze Force Sword are used to deal with threats that take too long to burn, mostly Crushers.

Weaknesses

Carapace, Carapace, Carapace. Between our Deimos Mk IV Blaze Force Sword and Brain Rupture we have means of dealing with these threats, but they require us to change up our playstyle to deal with them effectively. Also ranged combat can be an issue, forcing you to take out individual gunners one by one with our Brain Rupture to participate in long-range combat.