Heearth Psyker
 Psyker Build - Warhammer 40k: Darktide 

── AT A GLANCE ──

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

Aqshy Psyker

The current meta psyker build, especially for high level Havocs. The Aqshy Psyker provides a massive amount of utility while also melting mixed hordes. These two effects synergise together, as enemies killed via soulblaze reduce your cooldown. This is what allows at least one instance of Telekine Dome to be up permanently. It provides not only ranged protection to your team, but toughness regeneration in melee fights. You are providing so much to the team that you shouldn't be afraid to stand behind them, using them as a shield, giving yourself the space needed to make the most of your warp abilities.

Playstyle

Horde clear is our specialty. The Inferno staff does less armoured damage than the equivalent Zealot flamer, but makes up for it with infinite ammo. Use it constantly throughout the mission to deal with approaching hordes. The primary attack fires a squirt of flame rather than a constant blaze, which is not a good way to apply soulblaze quickly, since it only applies one stack normally or two on a critical. It does, however, have very high stagger, enough to push ragers back. Use this to quickly push enemies away from you while you create distance to hit them with a concentrated secondary attack stream of fire.

You are the linchpin of the team. You should decide the best place to engage the enemy and position your Telekine Dome accordingly. A good team will fight with you inside the shield, and only leave when forced to. Make use of chokepoints and terrain advantages as much as possible, positioning yourself so you can incinerate enemies in a line. A good defensive position is always preferable, and domes in the middle of nowhere should only be used when caught out suddenly or advancing on ranged enemies. This is also effective against a Beast of Nurgle. Putting a dome over its head traps it, preventing its vomit attack from spreading and allowing allies to safely land heavy attacks to its head.

During boss fights, your focus should still be on horde clear. That said, if there is no horde to clear, you can contribute to boss damage. Dropping a shield allows you to make use of Kinetic Resonance, and spamming Brain Rupture at a monstrosity can deal respectable damage from a safe distance. Your melee weapon can also deal good boss damage and is the best method for dealing with Scab Captains. Otherwise, this is a risky endeavour for such a squishy character and should only be attempted in emergencies.

Weapons

The Inferno staff is our primary weapon throughout the mission. To get the best use out of it, make use of funnel points and chokepoints. Flames deal damage based on the base armour type of the enemy, so I like to pick up extra flak damage since it's the most common armour type you'll encounter. More importantly, though, is how the flame staff works with critical hits. The majority of the damage comes from the burn stat, and soulblaze stacks increase damage exponentially, so even a modest increase of 5% leads to a massive damage increase across all damage types. The burn stat technically caps damage over time at 75% with 14 stacks. If you want to min max your weapon, you can push for this, but I kept the dump stat at 60% for simplicity's sake (and because of rounding errors, I'm not fully certain if it maxes out at 75% or 76%, and I don't want to spread misinformation).

Most staff psykers run some kind of force staff to make use of its Deflector ability. Given how frequently we're dropping Telekine Dome, though, I find this less necessary than for other psyker builds. I've recently started heavily favouring the Catachan combat blade. It provides unparalleled mobility, allowing you to reposition quickly, and boasts one of the highest single target monstrosity damage outputs available to the Psyker, rivalling the Duelling sword for that honour. In reality this comes down to preference, and several weapons are viable depending on your playstyle.

Catachan combat blade: best mobility and good single target damage
Duelling sword: decent mobility, good single target damage, and a parry that deflects Mauler and Crusher overhead attacks
Force sword: protection from ranged attacks and Crusher stagger with Heavy 2

Curios

3x Toughness curios gives a solid bonus to our shield, preventing gunners from insta beaming us to death. We naturally have very low health, so I find trying to offset that with a percentage based increase to health a poor strategy. Assume you are always within one shot range. All 3 curios should have ability cooldown reduction, to provide maximum uptime on our shield. Since we're often at the back of the team serving as the linchpin, we're the ones best positioned to notice when an ally goes down and to quickly pick them up. As such, 3x ally revival speed here can be pivotal in rescuing a teammate before things spiral out of control.

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 of any resistance perk. These enemies can 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 the toughness grace period removed. The effect is multiplicative, so it has diminishing returns: 0.80 x 0.80 x 0.80 = 0.512

3x Gunner resistance = 48.8% damage reduction
2x Gunner resistance = 36% damage reduction

Given the diminishing returns of taking all three (and the fact that it doesn't apply to basic ranged enemies, which arguably become more dangerous at high Havoc as a result), I like the final slot to go toward extra toughness.

Strengths

• Incredible AOE damage
• Great teamwide defence
• High shield uptime
• Great crowd control and stagger
• Good boss damage
• Mobile

Weaknesses

• Slow at eliminating ranged threats
• Slow to kill Carapace enemies
• Squishy
• Reliant on team for space and protection
• Takes time for DoT effect to kill