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

Aqshy Psyker

The Unlocked and Loaded patch gave us some new tools to play with, which has significantly changed the way this build plays. Warp Flurry has been replaced with the new Penetrating Flame, allowing us to better deal with armour, as well as increase damage on all targets (Rending increases damage when armour pen goes above 100%). Your melee weapon should still be used to take out Crushers, but mixed hordes melt far quicker than before. This increase in damage has found me spamming both charged and light attacks from our flame staff more frequently, and seems to have really decreased the time to kill. I now prefer to opt for Warp Siphon over Empowered Psionics to really spread flame everywhere. Whilst this means we have lost our on-demand sniping tool, we can still rely on Kinetic Resonance to spam Brain Rupture immediately following an ability usage to take out range opponents and to put the hurt on monstrosities. This ability lasts 10 seconds, and with all the cooldown reduction we are packing, you'll usually be able to use Venting Shriek every 15 seconds or less. The new changes have really buffed this build, and made it so fun to use. Its crowd control is not quite up there with a smite build, but its ability to deal with Monstrosities is greater and it is so fun to use. 

Playstyle

You should use your Deimos Mk IV Blaze Force Sword for most of the match to quickly dispatch odd enemies and elites. Save your Rifthaven Mk II Purgatus Force Staff specifically for hordes to deal with crowd control. The primary attack button will only generate 4% peril and has great stagger, allowing you to herd ragers and the like away from your team. When a monstrosity appears, hit it with fire until you reach 85% peril, then use Venting Shriek to add more stacks (and likely kill most of the chaff around it). Switch to Brain Rupture and start firing, benefiting from reduced peril generation and quicker firing time of Kinetic Resonance. With this combo, you can take out more than half a monstrosity's health on Damnation solo.

In ranged fights, I like to stand in front of enemies blocking, using Deflector on our sword. Once your peril is up to 85%, use Venting Shriek. Six stacks of Soulblaze are sufficient to kill Dreg Stalkers, Scab Shooters, and Scab Snipers from full health. This ability can go through walls and cover, allowing you to clear out an entrenched group of enemies from a safe distance. Anything left standing can quickly be dispatched thanks to Kinetic Resonance. 

Build Path

Most of our toughness will come back from Soulstealer as we cook hordes of Nurgle Worshippers. However, I like to take Quietude to benefit from a large chunk of toughness whenever we use our ability. Perilous Combustion gains more value the higher the difficulty. It's a great node on most Psyker builds, but here especially it allows more Soulblaze stacks to quickly ramp up, massively increasing your damage. Mettle procs frequently due to the flames we are spreading, giving us both movement speed and toughness back.

Brain Rupture is our Blitz of choice, allowing us to grab Wildfire down the line. I find Smite has too much overlap with the crowd control we already offer. Wildfire is a natural choice for this build, combined with Perilous Combustion to quickly spread more Soulblaze dots among mixed hordes. Our build relies heavily on cooldown reduction, so we pick up Psykinetic's Aura and Seer's Presence. These are two of the strongest nodes in the game and provide a massive boon to our team. One with the Warp increases our survivability, as our peril will naturally hover on the higher side for most of a run.

Venting Shriek is the lynchpin of this build. We pick up both Becalming Eruption and Creeping Flames. If you have doubts about its effectiveness, 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 synergizes well with Perilous Combustion and 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 soulblaze, it is enough to kill them outright. In addition, we knock enemies back and and give us some breathing room. It makes this a great crowd-control build, keeping enemies off of us and our team as we roast them alive.

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

Kinetic Deflection is a node I honestly struggle to go without anymore. Its ability to tank absurd levels of damage while blocking or trying to rescue an ally makes you almost as tanky as an Ogryn in these scenarios. It can also be used for a 'back against the wall' strategy. If you find yourself surrounded or being shot to pieces by ranged enemies, you can block until your peril goes above 85%, and then shout to clear enemies and create space (potentially killing many of them in the process). 

Solidity helps us to quell our staff in the rare occasions you can't just quell it with Venting Shriek. It doesn't come up often, but when it does, you will be glad to have it. Penetration of the Soul is not a super useful skill, as it does not seem to apply to soulblaze stacks generated from Venting Shriek (at least from my initial testing). However, this is one of the very few builds we don't want to be grabbing Empryic Resolve. We actively want to be generating peril for our Venting Shriek Soulblaze stacks. The fire staff does not generate peril quickly and losing out on toughness replenishment in a close-range Psyker build is really bad. Warp Siphon Is what allows us to rely almost exclusively on our ability to get rid of peril (and spread even more fire). We pick up Essence Harvest over Inner Tranquility, both to improve our tankiness, and to prevent peril generation from slowing down. In Fire Reborn will help us regenerate our stacks in seconds and Warp Battery will increase those stacks up to 6, allowing us to benefit from a hefty 45% cooldown reduction. This combined with both Seer's Presence and Psykinetics's Aura allows us to reduce Venting Shriek's cooldown from 30 seconds, to closer to 10 seconds in an ideal situation. Absolutely spread that fire. 

Weapons

Charging up our staff does not increase its damage but simply makes the stream of fire last longer. As such, it's not super necessary to charge it up, making Warp Flurry unnecessary. The most important things to bring are a way to reduce armour (as Soulblaze struggles with Carapace and to a lesser extent flak), and critical chance as critical hits apply two-dot stacks. For these reasons, the optimal blessings to pick up are Penetrating Flame and Warp Nexus.  The most important stat for our Rifthaven Mk II Purgatus Force is burn, due to the nature of how dots work. The maximum number 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 results in significantly 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 quickly. We take extra critical chance to apply more stacks quicker. The other blessing is up to you. I often switch between Unyielding and Flak depending on what I want to focus on. 

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 address this. The duelling swords are the best for this, but using them puts us at risk of ranged attacks, especially since we are not picking up Telekine Shield. Therefore, I prefer to grab the next best thing, the Deimos Mk IV Blaze Force Sword. It has access to Deflector, which can help if we get caught out in the open. Heavy attacks are straight lunges, and the second one has an insane stagger value attached to it, allowing you to knock Maulers and Crushers on their backs almost at will.

The Deimos Mk IV Blaze Force Sword is arguably the Psyker's most versatile weapon. It has pretty good horde clear, and the Heavy-2 attack has absurd stagger, able to bring Crushers and Maulers to the ground if you land a weak spot hit. By running Deflector along with Kinetic Deflection, we can stay safe from ranged combat even without Telekine Shield. As Carapace is the biggest weakness of this build, we take extra damage to these threats to deal with them more effectively. The other choice is honestly dealer's preference. I pick up Maniac specifically to deal with Mutants who run into our backlines more quickly. Slaughterer is just a great damage increase, making it a good second blessing choice, although, in all honesty, it’s not super necessary.

Curios

After 1,000+ hours in Darktide, I have a few simple rules when it comes to Curios. Melee classes (Ogryns and Zealots) should take 2x Toughness and 1x Health Curios to provide a good mix of defensive stats. Veterans should take 3 Toughness Curios, as they benefit more from Toughness than other classes due to their larger toughness pools and skills such as Iron Will. Psykers should run 2x Toughness and 1x Stamina Curio to make up for low base stamina and to benefit from their faster stamina regeneration. Obviously, there are some caveats to that. A melee-centric Veteran might want to run 1x Health Curio, and certain knife and stealth builds might want to run a Stamina Curio. But for the most part, I find this a good rule to stick to in order to ensure you have Curios that are effective for the vast majority of your builds, especially when starting out when it is difficult to find any Curios, much less good ones. Oh, and Wound Curios should only ever be used on Zealot Martyrdom builds. Having Wound Curios actually means that health stims will heal you less. I know some people like to take a Wound Curio 'just in case they go down,' but in higher difficulties, there is no guarantee your team can pick you up. It's far better to invest in defensive abilities that prevent downs as much as possible.

For perks, always take Extra Toughness and Gunner Resistance. 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 ability is multiplicative, so it does have some diminishing returns. 0.80 × 0.80 × 0.80 = 0.512, meaning that we end up with a total gunner resistance of 0.488, just below 50%. I can certainly see the argument for only running two Gunner Resistance Curios (with an overall damage resistance of 36%) and opting for something else (potentially Sniper or Flamer), but I still value that extra 12.8%. The one exception is Ogryns. For these, I like to take extra Sniper resistance instead of health on the Health Curios.

For the final perk, it depends on your build. If you are using a build that relies heavily on your ability, then run Cooldown Reduction to more frequently make use of said ability. I find this to be especially powerful on builds that make use of Voice of Command, for instance. If your build is not too heavily reliant on your ability, then go for Extra Health. Again, you can tweak this to suit individual playstyles (and the mercy of the RNG gods as Hadron bricks yet another piece of equipment), but this is a pretty good rule to aim for. As this build benefits from Cooldown Reduction (and Psykers naturally have low health), we naturally go for Cooldown Reduction.

Strengths

The Aqshy Psyker is surprisingly well-rounded, having tools to deal with most situations. Horde control is our biggest strength. Primary attacks from our staff have great stagger, and can be used to stun ragers out of their combos. When you have some breathing space, we can charge our attacks up to quickly stack soul-blaze to a large number of targets. Ranged enemies can blocked with Deflector and subsequently dealt with by using Venting Shriek, applying enough Soulblaze to kill snipers. Monstrosities can take serious damage thanks to a combination of Soulblaze stacks and Kinetic Flayer to deal heavy damage in a short amount of time. 

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. The biggest issue is when you have a group in your face, as Crushers are not staggered by spurting flames at them, making them a major threat to you if they can close the distance. Also whilst we can protect ourselves from ranged engagements, without Telekine Shield, we cannot protect our allies.

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 in a Damnation level Auric run 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.

Question: Why Don't you pick up Souldrinker?

Answer: Pathing mostly. If it was on the left-hand side of the tree, I would probably try to grab it. However it requires a 3-node investment to grab, and we just do not have the points to spare. Kinetic Deflection is too valuable to lose out on since we are not using stamina curious (we pick up too few toughness nodes to justify not taking 3 toughness curios), and following this path picks up a guaranteed critical chance node anyway. Also the two nodes on the way to Souldrinker are very mediocre here. We have plenty of other ways to replenish toughness, making this just too much of an investment to justify picking up. 

Question: Can I change Node xy or z?

Answer: You can do whatever you like! Please use my builds as a guide, not a hard and fast rule. Some of these I build to be meta, some because I really like a weapon and want it to work as optimally as possible. For the Aqshy Spyker, there are two changes you can make. Kinetic Flayer can be swapped out for Warp RIder if you are not a fan of the random brain bursts (or justifiably like Warp Rider as it is a great node). Additionally whilst great, the 4 nodes after Warp Battery could be swapped out to 4 other nodes if you wanted something different. I would recommend picking up In Fire Reborn at least, but that would still give you 2 more nodes to play with.