Flexible Inferno Psyker
 Psyker Build - Warhammer 40k: Darktide 

+ + Flexible Soulblaze/Inferno Staff Psyker + +

This build centers around using the Rifthaven Mk II Inferno Force Staff and the Psyker's Soulblaze mechanics and talents to turn ourselves into an effective crowd control and horde-clearing monster.

Thanks to the recent class reworks, you can now play this build with either Telekine Shield, a.k.a. the bubble, or Venting Shriek, as well as being able to pick any of the auras. Thanks to Warp Siphon, you will have almost perma uptime on either your bubble or your vent, letting you play more aggressively and support your team better.

Melee Weapon:

• Our two* choices here will be either the Maccabian Mk IV Duelling Sword or the Deimos Mk IV Blaze Force Sword (or any of the other Blaze Force Sword marks). The reason for these two? The Uncanny Strike blessing. It gives our Soulblaze ticks Rending, and at max stacks, it will make our flame DoTs completely ignore enemy armor.
• Maccabian Mk IV Duelling Sword(Carapace/Unyielding, Uncanny Strike/Thrust, 60% Mobility): Not much to say for the meta-est melee weapon to ever meta. It can deal with anything, has an amazing moveset, you can do crazy speedtech with it, and it's an absolute Elite/Boss killer.
• Deimos Mk IV Blaze Force Sword(Carapace/Unyielding, Uncanny Strike/Deflector, 60% Warp Resistance): BFS brings a respectable moveset to the table as well, including the powerful L1+H2 staggering hit, but most importantly, it gives you a way to block ranged damage and generate Warp Peril with Deflector. As a minor boon, you can also Quell Peril with the BFS out. The Special Attack is mostly useless.
• Usage: try to keep your Uncanny Strike stacks up between staff uses, to maximize your damage on everything that is taking burn damage. Otherwise, just use them like any other class would.

*If you really wanted to, you could run a Catachan Mk VII "Devil's Claw" Sword, since it can also run Uncanny Strike.

Ranged Weapon:

• Rifthaven Mk II Inferno Force Staff(Unyielding/Flak, Blaze Away/Penetrating Flame, 60% Warp Resistance): This specific setup will let you soften up and clear hordes of both chaff and Elites. You will be spreading Soulblaze all around with your staff and talents. And with the help of Penetrating Flame, you will be able to soften up larger Elites or Bosses for you and your team.
• You can swap Penetrating Flame with Warp Nexus for more raw damage from your crits.
• Usage: your main move will be the secondary attack, charging up the staff and releasing streams of flame onto your enemies, building up those Soulblaze stacks. If you are fighting a single or few enemies, you can keep the stacks on those enemies by using the primary attack, tapping the attack button. Finally, you want to mix in some of those aforementioned primary attacks to build and keep up Empyric Shock. So a common attack pattern could be: flame stream > flame stream > tap x 5 > flame stream > quell peril > repeat.

Curios:

• Psyker can replenish toughness out of their ass, so increasing our max Toughness is a worthwhile investment. Both Combat Ability Regeneration and Revive Speed are incredibly strong choices for higher difficulties in the current meta.
• The last stat on our curios is more flexible. You can go for even more Toughness, some Damage Resistance to Gunners/Snipers/Bombers, or some Stamina Regen.

Blitz:

• You could theoretically take any of the Blitzes, but for this build, our choice will be Brain Rupture (with or without Kinetic Flayer). We can already decimate and CC hordes faster and better than Smite can. And we can't choose our targets with Assail, so that Gunner at the back of the horde will still be an issue.
• This build is not meant for you to be the one dealing with long-range priority targets. In the occasion where a single Gunner, Sniper, Bomber, etc, is a threat to your team, and everyone else is busy, you can use Brain Rupture to deal with them. Otherwise, you can ignore the fact that you have a Blitz at all.

Aura:

• The aura of choice is Seer's Presence, as giving everyone on the team a whopping, additional 10% ability cooldown reduction is incredibly powerful. The only reason you should pick any of the other two auras is if another Psyker in the party is already running Seer's Presence.

Combat Ability:

• You can choose between having Telekine Shield + Telekine Dome + Sanctuary OR Venting Shriek + Becalming Eruption + Creeping Flames. Since we are running Warp Siphon, you will have little to no cooldown for either ability.
• Telekine Shield is a very powerful team support tool. Having an almost constant dome barrier that blocks ranged damage, regens toughness, buffs your team's damage, and debuffs the enemies inside of it is, obviously, very good.
• Venting Shriek is the more aggressive choice. It lets you flamethrower away endlessly, or even go into a Brain Rupture frenzy, since you can pop the ability at max Peril, knock back all the enemies in front of you and give them 6 stacks of Soulblaze, and with the help of Warp Siphon + aura + curios, you will have the ability back up before you can build that Peril again.

Talent Options:

*There are 3 talent points that can be moved around, based on preference. I will mention the 6 talents among which you can choose to spend those 3 points.

• Warp Ghost: It could be controversial to say this node is optional, since the benefits are outstanding, BUT, it is true that it somewhat forces you to play in a different way (you'll have to manually Quell Peril more often), and for that reason alone, I will suggest that you COULD take this off and use it somewhere else. That said, I would recommend you use it and get used to the playstyle.
• Kinetic Flayer: It's a completely automatic effect that will randomly kill or at least significantly damage an important target near (flame staff range) you every 12 seconds. The randomness of it limits its usefulness, so you could opt not to take it.
• Vulnerable Minds: 20% extra damage against all Ogryn enemies, all the non-Captain bosses, and even Daemonhosts is nothing to sneeze at. That said, this build is already quite full of offensive talents and options, so you could swap this one out for something else.
• Quietude: A decent additional source of toughness. We consider it optional since Psyker already has so much toughness regen in their kit.
• Just a Dream: This is one of the most powerful Damage mitigation effects in the game. If you are playing high difficulty content, where taking lots of health damage is a given, consider grabbing this talent.
• Penetration of the Soul: This talent sounds like a no-brainer until you realize that you can already stack 100% Rend with Uncanny Strike by hitting 5 weak spot hits, and Rend is capped at 100%, so the extra goes to waste. That said, this talent guarantees that you have at least 20% Rend at all times, and makes you require 1 less weak spot hit to Max out on Rend. That alone makes it a decent choice to consider as well.

Other Talent Notes:

• If you wonder why we are not using Wildfire, you have to understand that the talent is more limited than it might seem at first. It can only spread 4 stacks of Soulblaze per enemy, capped at 4. And the spread only happens if the target has at least 2 stacks when it dies. And while this can allow you to spread 1-4 stacks of burn throughout an entire horde, your staff and Perilous Combustion are already spreading way more stacks around than that, and with much higher caps (14 for the staff, and up to 31 for Perilous Combustion).
• That said... if you really hate using Empyric Shock and having to mix in those primary attacks, you could swap Empyric Shock for Wildfire. You will loose that extra, all-round damage potential in exchange for a few more Soulblaze stacks spreading around.

Mod suggestion (sorry console players :c):

• While I could easily recommend at least a dozen QoL mods for Darktide, one that is particularly tied to this build is the mod I Wanna See (https://www.nexusmods.com/warhammer40kdarktide/mods/371). This mod lets you disable or mitigate the VFXs for both the staff's flames and the barrier/bubble shield. The former is incredibly useful, as anyone who has spent a single match with the Inferno staff will know the pain of being able to see jack beyond the blue cone of fire.

*Disclaimer: this build guide is, by no means, original. It is an amalgamate of several other builds. Somewhat influenced by this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV28p_6nzd8