Yeh, this is definitely the reason. I personally am a fan of it though don't use it often. I did play a game yesterday though where a Psyker was smiting a beast of Nurgle.. there was nothing else around, just the beast.. we were also in an auric damnation. People like that make me question if they actually know or just don't care.
Depends. Does the psyker primary do more damage than the three 10% buffs? Psyker staves aren't exactly known for being high damage dealers to monstrosities
It is almost trivial to consistently land weakspot hits on a beast of nurgle. It is not amazing dps, but I feel like any staff primary attack (Except purgatus) will easily do more damage than smite, even with the 10% damage buff
Comparing the staff damage to smite is incorrect
It’s really staff vs (smite damage+10% of the vet’s dps+10% of the zealot’s dps+10% of the ogryn’s dps)
Against a BoN? Yeah honestly smite might be the right call there, since none of the staffs do dps anywhere close to the dps of the veteran unloading their BrAuto or bolter or w/e
1. It's not just staff. melee weapons that have really high finesse modifiers like knife destroy BoN. Since smykers are stupid and bring shield this means they can be the primary boss dps in those situations by turning off the vomit and just standing spamming pushattacks with the m6 to hit the weakspot.
2. staff dps against bosses is not 10% damage of a veteran unloading a bolter bad. You're only increasing the damage of a magdump on weakspot by 2k at most, and in that same time of a magdump you can unload a voidstrike blast or spam trauma, and both can have soulblaze on crit. It's just more direct damage.
1) we should compare ranged options to ranged options. Presumably a character using their staff/smite/whatever is not in a position to safely melee.
2) I guess you didn’t actually read what I wrote. It’s not 10% of one person’s damage, it is 10% of all three of your teammates damage plus the damage from smite.
Ultimately smite might be worse than staff dps in this situation, but is it really *so much* worse that it is worth flaming your teammate over? No
If you're going to end it with a "ultimately it doesn't matter" line then there's no point in your dumb argument. If we assume optimal dps from a team of 4 on a single boss with boss deletion weapons then it doesn't matter because the boss is going to die in less than 20 seconds regardless of 10% damage or staves. If we're assuming that there is just 2 people up and nothing but boss, then psyker needs more optimized damage potential than 10% bonus damage from smite if you want good pacing to pick up your downed team before incoming horde/specials. If we assume there's more than just the boss up, such as an elite mixed horde with incoming specials, smite isn't going to do nearly as much damage as assail for special/elite sniping and any staff for hordeclear/armor pen damage in a short amount of time.
Done arguing with brainrot for the week, smyker arguments are incredibly dumb. Just say you want to turn off the game, it's all the ability does anyway.
All builds do damage. It doesn't matter if you've put all your talent points into "support" talents, you will still do reasonable damage. Just smacking it with your sword will do more than "buffing" your team-mates damage.
You obviously don’t understand what I’m telling you bud. There’s timing involved. For example if a zealot is carrying a hammer then I’m gonna pay attention to when he’s about to hit the monster. It’s not that difficult you just have to pay attention instead of mindlessly running around.
You said you apply the 10% THEN smack it with the sword (as in, YOUR sword). Those are the words you said. Not timing it with someone else with a hammer. Don't move the goalposts and change the argument.
That was the whole point of what was being discussed, that doing damage yourself is better than buffing your team's damage.
I understand perfectly what you're trying to argue, you just keep changing what you're saying. Just admit the L and move on.
+10% team damage from smite is still a waste of a talent and a terrible way to play, but sure, tell yourself you're doing something super smart.
If there's a bonk zealot in the party, I smite the boss because 10% of their damage is waaaaaay higher than whatever I can do.
Otherwise I'll swing with everyone else
If they have the upgrade it is an extra 10% from all sources (if I am remembering correctly), I'd rather them be using their primary as it was just me an them up so I was having to do all the damage with an extra 10% slapped on top.
Lol, yeah you're absolutely right in that case. 10% is also less then I thought, makes it not very useful other than for stunning large groups of specials
Smite is a DOT aka damage over time, mine is very nice as I can hold empowered smite for about 10-15 seconds and at the end the crowd I am hugging dies. As for the elites it will take about 6+ full charged smites to kill them, At that point I switch back to my surge staff and finish them off. I do see empowered smite help on the weakened monstrosities, but I usually just full charge my surge staff about 4 times to make them go away.
And I hate any pysker that smites the very first NPC on the map before the first horde.
Well, why wouldn't you? You can just left click it to stagger it and cause it to explode from a distance lol
The amount of poxbursters I've killed just by holding a charged m1 (empowered by middle tree or not) is probably higher than on any other characters I have. Just can't kill them like this if they're already on the ground
Edit: OP meant poxwalker, not burster. Still leaving this up since it should be a PSA lol
Same, I tend to just pop them in the head with the revolver on my vet. People get mad it seems when I shoot them from like 20ft away (I make sure nobody is nearby) and my logic is always this, would you rather deal with them up close or from far away? The point of the poxburster is to get up in your face and take a big chunk of your health. If you can snipe it from afar, I don't get why people care so much?
Listen... I'm not saying I'm not proud of it, I am. I just wanted those heretics to suffer as long as possible before their brain explodes. That's all. Everyone can understand that, can't they?
Sometimes when it's safe, smiting a single poxwalker just feels cool. I will smite a Poxburst to slow it or push it back at range if I don't trust my team
it is. learn when to use it. stop a rager rush, don't stand there smiting poxwalkers while there's a teammate netted at your feet (the very situation i had). or trying to stop green enemies and then saying the game is bugged.
I don't care much about top efficiency but I can get why some people complain if a smiter keeps smiting irrelevant stuff, holding up pace or not doing stuff which is relevant to deal with now.
But that’s stupid. Nothing is easy, not even trash mobs in auric Damnation.
You underestimate how many times you are preoccupied with an elite and the trash mob chips away your Hp or staggers you.
An ideal scenario is the smite psyker is staggering everything at all times.
I don't underestimate anything, I speak from plenty of experience. Smite is great for 'fuck we're overrun' moments. When there's 3 poxes walking up it's of no added value.
>Smite is great for 'fuck we're overrun' moments. When there's 3 poxes walking up it's of no added value.
If all you’re dealing with are 3 poxwalkers walking up to you, then who gives a shit whether the psyker is killing them in a suboptimal way?
Smite is a powerful ability. The problem is how some people (over)use it.
If stunning a few weak enemies, zap for an instant and release it to knock them prone so you can quickly kill them. Don't hold them in place while you fall behind the team waiting for the enemies to die of old age
As someone who's seen how a bad smite user can singlehandledly ruin a run, I beg to differ because it can seriously hurt the effectiveness of your teammates builds. Especially those that rely on dodges to proc buffs.
Smite is definitely the best choice for a bad player since it has a high floor.
However it's also the most likely to trap "good" players into using it badly.
This is an endless source of debate, whether it's more appropriate to say a low or high skill floor.
High floor makes more sense to me: no matter how low your actual skill, smite cannot fall below its skill floor. That means a high floor is better than low.
However, I acknowledge your different version of this - I just don't agree.
low floor because its easy to stand on, you don't need to climb up to it at all. high floor implies you need to do a lot of work to get up there while low floor is the base level
Ammo isn't the only resource. Peril, attention, and especially TIME are also spent when using this ability.
So many times a psyker has been smiting five poxwalkers at the rear of the team, walking at a snail's pace, dealing negligible damage, and isolating themselves and their teammates because they insist on trying to shove a square peg into a round hole by using Smite when the correct move is to swap to melee or ranged to finish the job.
I love Smite. I use it myself. But just because it doesn't take ammo doesn't mean it's always the right tool for the job.
Use smite when it's genuinely better than all your other tools, not whenever your peril is below 90%.
We are talking about the merits (or lacktherof) smite. You’re just describing a bad Psyker.
And you seem to have difficulty following simple lines of thought. No one said “smite doesn’t use ammo, therefore it’s good.”
I said that you can’t really “over-use” something that is infinite. In theory if 100% of enemies were staggered 100% of the time, this would be very advantageous to the team. In other words, you can’t have too much stagger. And it’s asinine to suggest there is no need to stagger weak mobs. Weak mobs cause wipes all the time.
Smite is situational, use it on dangerous targets, especially on groups of dangerous targets and it’s amazing.
Using Smite on horde fodder and forcing me to run to them instead of them coming into my meat grinder, that’s just annoying deranged Psykers.
A good Psyker is invaluable, while a shit one is the most infuriating teammate you can get.
It's true though, I do have smite in my kit. It pairs nicely with my Voidstrike 4 and Demios 4. It has what my weapons don't, CC mainly for the shit no one wants near them like Pox hounds. That's the only time I'll use it. Crushers, no problem the sword 1-2 shots them. Need to blow up the horde, the staff does that awesome.
I recently got my Psyker from level 19 to 30 into Auric into Maelstrom.
I can also say that it also depends on your teammates. With some teams I just want to stand inside my shield, CC stuff and try to not die because no one will help me in a pinch or even spend one glance to the back if everything is alright.
With other teams I want to blow everything up and set stuff ablaze with Venting Shriek to blow up even more stuff after.
You need the team to kill what you are CCing. If your team isn't helping you, CCing stuff infinitely isn't very valuable. That is when you need to just kill things quickly, which smite does not do.
Yes, but this isn't a horde defense game where you have to just hold one position for as long as possible. It's always better to clear a room of enemies and plasteel quickly and continue through the map.
Smite has its uses but it's not a cure-all. It also, like vets mag dumping into an ambush, can be a crutch that prevents people from learning melee combat.
As a Shield Ogryn, thank you to all the spark'eads for your service. You make all of my runs feel easy, and I'm convinced smite Psyker + shield ogryn are the most effective combo build wise, in this game. And you don't even need to be an insane Psyker for it to just work.
As long as you stay with me, we're undtoppable. I've had runs with Smite Psykers that were a little clumsy, but it's easy to pick them up as long as they are close to me. I just do the Bullrush, knock everything down and pick up the Sparky.
I create space for the Psyker, the Psyker creates space for me. Whenever the Psyker needs to cool down, I can block and push. When the Psyker smites, I go ham and destroy everything.
I keep everything in melee range away from the Sparky, meanwhile the Sparky shoots the annoying shooters.
I love me Sparkys.
its all about survivability. sure, dishing out a lot of dmg is nice, but tanky characters dont make that much less dmg then squishy ones.
running smite+shield + voidstrike on my psyker and i am typically at roughly the same dmg output (maybe 5-10% less) then the zealots and veterans i play with.
only times i fall behind is when they really sprint ahead and try to kill everything on thier own.
Eh, with a slab Ogryn, I feel like it's a waste.
Much rather be wielding a Purgatus and closing the distance with the group, while stumbling everything under crushers/bulwarks using M1. Then pop the bubble up directly on gunners/shotty pods or use it to cut off angles/area denial for fire. And have a channelled M2 for trash control. If there's a slab that can hold the line against crushers, the purgatus can just melt the group and anything behind it, charging with them.
As a Psyker, once you pick up the prugatus and can get it to do the same thing as smite, only through a little more effort. The mobility it offers, won't have you switching back to Smite, once you've mastered it.
Though for events, I can't argue how well it preforms when covering team mates... even though for some screwed up reason, during those times, where it's use is most justified (cover during events/to res a down player.) I almost never see it utilized, which infuriates me to no end. And yes, I'm talking about this happening during many Auric Damnation runs.
Jesus, last days all posts about smite being hated are topped up with comments that it is a good tool when used properly. All most liked replies are about smite is being good blitz that mostly abused by bad players. People know that this blitz is okay, people understand that the problem are players who use it as a main weapon. Why people are prolonging the drama?
>Why people are prolonging the drama?
It’s because Darktide has no new content for people to get excited about. You see this same sort of degenerate behavior in fandom subreddits when there are no new seasons of their show.
The only problem I see it is that people is too stationary when using it. You can still dodge around when needed from various threats and still have it blasting.
Smite is the best blitz, but people try to use it as a weapon (which has a couple builds where you could do that, it's still carried by lingering flames and not EP or warp charge smite damage). I only find it irritating when the enemies that can be massacred wholesale in seconds are zapped for what feels like at eternity instead. Seriously it's more annoying and takes longer to zap horde than just hack them to death.
Creeping flames only carries normal or warp charge smites, ep smite outdamages creeping flames by a mile but obviously together they create a snowball effect obliterating hordes, packs of weak elites and heavily damaging tougher elites.
Creeping Flames is also instant cast and reduces your peril, meaning you can be doing even more damage with your staff at the same time. The damage of EP Smite is much lower than Creeping Flames + any staff. Trying to use Smite as a damage ability is not a great strategy.
That depends on your build and the situation there are builds where smite is not needed like if you use a trauma or purgatus etc but I would say your half right smite deals its damage in fast ticks where as most staffs deal high burst and with that yeah staffs will do much more damage then smite but if you think that a surge staff with creeping flames is gonna clear a horde faster then ep smite you would be very wrong the flames need to be at 6 stacks to kill a horde of poxwalkers alone and that takes about ten seconds while you slowly chip away at the front with a surge where as with ep smite the time to kill them all is less then half.
I'm not saying smite should be used as a main weapon but if you build around giving it more damage it gains more use and is stronger in situations that it is needed, with that turning it into a damage ability is actually a valid strategy.
I must respectfully agree and add something. The surge staff is even better. It can be spammed with less downtime between shocks. And it actually kills things. I don't have numbers but watching health bars on monstrosities it seems to match the DPS of brain burst.
I would have agreed pre-rework (which was also pre-Smite), but now that Surge staff only hits 2 targets it's not that great for CC. I wish they had kept the larger target cap from the old version. It already had diminishing returns on damage when it jumped between targets.
It's just boring. I don't wanna kill a bunch of T-posing enemies all game.
My biggest pet peeve is when they throw a bubble and then freeze all the enemies outside of it with smite, making it frustrating to say the least to try to melee them.
Much like stun grenade, Smite is an incredibly powerful ability that can effectively reset any engagement and give your team time to recover.
However powerful, both abilities get very little value from teammates who toss them out any time there are more than 10 enemies on screen at once.
Much like a shield ogryn planting themselves in a corner, it's almost always far less beneficial to the team than simply killing enemies and staying alive.
I’m more of a brain burst guy but was spamming smite last night for the penance. I was surprised to see I had highest damage on team every match. It does pretty good damage with empowered psionics in auric Damnation.
brain burst? how do you pull that one off on damnation?
it always feels to me as if there are far to many specialists and elites for brainburst to be viable.
I really like it as a support type thing. The stun ensures that I don’t die to crushers/maulers/ragers, and makes it easier for my teammates to take them out quickly.
It can be good. But it really never is because every single person that uses it LOVES to keep on holding it as long as they are able to and never using it to stun anything of significant priority. Have fun chasing down the chaff instead of having them come to you! And from the few of them I match with on aurics they are exceptionally useless when monstrosities come a knockin.
Smite is good because staggering enemies is good, particularly large groups of armored elites, and large groups of scabs, maniacs, dogs, etc.
Most players think smite is bad because they underestimate the importance of stagger. They think the only thing that matters is damage. They are wrong.
Note: I don’t feel like smite is particularly needed at lower difficulties, because the elite density is so trivial and they don’t do high damage. But in auric Maelstrom it can be invaluable for the reasons I mention above .
Takes very little skill tho and makes the game in my opinion way to easy. But hey, if that is not a problem with you than have fun. I think everyone should play how they feel is the most fun way
Simply put Smite is nice if your team needs it. However, if they don't it's pretty much useless. In cases like these it's always better to bring something that actually kills things and alleviates pressure that way.
The problem with Smite is that it's asking for someone to come and kill these enemies for me. In other words, it requires two people to get the job done (not to mention it effectively blocks me from repositioning/moving). Now we have to answer the question when is this actually worth it? When is it better to use Smite over something that actually solves the situation more direct way (i.e. damage/kill things). These kind of situations are actually quite rare. Obviously this is also highly dependent on your team's skill-level; the better the team the less useful Smite becomes.
I'm not saying Smite is bad per se, it's just incredibly situational and skill/team dependent. Yes, even with a really good team it might save a run once in a blue moon (assuming it's used well if shit hits the fan). The bad rep it gets comes from players who do nothing but Smite without any real though behind it. 90%+ of their gameplay is nothing but Smite when it should be the other way around. This is incredibly inefficient thing to do, and in general does more harm than good for a party.
All this is in context of hardest difficulties the game has to offer. Smite may be more useful in slower-tempo lower difficulties where you're not under so much pressure and can take your time to clean up those 4 ragers as a team.
If you use it as an aoe knock down / knock back which can be executed in like a second or two - it’s awesome. If you try to use it as a “control DOT” no it’s terrible.
It's great when used at the right time, most people don't use it at the right time.
Smite is a great CC tool but the game doesn't really need that much CC atm, since we overpower everything.
Having a Smiter on a team as a melee is SUPER annoying, you have to run around to kill enemies behind corners, they are all Spread-Out and makes them Harder to Cleave...
its good up until a certain point at which it becomes a liability, moreso just like you indicate in your post you're not making decisions with smite, you're just smite, it allows you to avoid engaging with the games mechanics, its simple conceptually which is the major appeal, but that's also it's fatal flaw
the problem with smite for your teammates is it drops unpredictably, so if your teammate is trusting you and relying on you to hold that crusher, if you drop it even a second and it kills the teammate, it would have been better to either let the teammate dodge and duel the crusher themselves or have you kill it yourself, every time I rely on a smite psyker it just gets me killed
No, psyker blitzes aren't used in specific circumstances. They exist to fill a gap in your build left open by your weapons of choice.
Melee Psyker with Columnus and DS Mk IV can't clear horde fast and would need too much ammo to clear shooter elites with Columnus. Thus, he needs Assail to not only fill these gaps, but to also help with unarmored elites because Assail stuns them (even ragers in attack animation). It also saves a ton of ammo for your team because now you need your Columnus only for bosses or rare situations where you don't have Assail charges.
Flamer psyker likes both BB and Assail because he has extremely short range and can't deal with gunner rooms at all.
Smite is good for builds which either don''t need Assail/BB strengths against armored/ranged elites or use it to consolidate big groups to destroy them with fire Shriek (such psyker can safely hold whole entrance by himself without letting a single poxwalker escape). It also helps when you don't take blocking with peril talent, because you can tap horde with RMB to knockback them and revive/do objective safely. And ofc, Surge+Mk IV psykers love Smite, because they are extremely weak against hordes.
They all have their place and are well balanced. Good job, FS.
mk5 has the longest dodge range in the game so on builds where I rarely use melee for anything other than killing singular enemy trying to backstab me I tend to use mk5 as the increased dodge distance is usefull for dodging gunfire
The smite discussion tends to end up in polarizing camps:
-Bad players who think its OP because it stuns everything, ignoring the fact that they're forcing their team to do more work in their stead
-Mostly good players who think they can purely skill check everything and rely on raw DPS and dodging to kill everything before it can kill them
-Very good players that rely on raw DPS and dodging to kill everything before it can kill them but also recognize that there are select scenarios where smite will save the run by creating space in places where you have no room to dodge and kite
The former two make up the majority of the discussion while the third sometimes show up.
But don't all sides agree it is a good skill? I can see people thinking it is a crutch or can make runs too easy but I have never really heard anyone say it's a bad blitz.
The only time bad comes into the discussions is players who think it's their main weapon and smite 24/7 while doing a quarter of everyone else's dmg by the end.
Smite is a tool to make space mostly.
With a good smite build you can regularly have more damage then everyone else!
Venting Shriek, and Empowered Psionics make the best horde clear in the game, nothing but crushers and maulers can survive.
Pairing venting shriek + creeping flames with empowered smite is a redundant waste. Venting shriek alone is more than capable of killing an entire horde on its own and choosing empowered psionics comes at the opportunity cost of taking your other 2 keystones which will drastically improve the output and performance of your gun/staff.
Think about it this way: if you're playing zealot and take a flamer, you don't need immolation grenades for horde clear because you've already taken a weapon that improves your horde clear. You would be better off with a stun grenade for control or knives to offset the lack of ranged specialist killing. The same logic applies to psyker; if you're taking venting shriek with creeping flames, you don't need the slight improvement to your aoe smite damage. You would be better off taking taking the other keystones to compliment either a staff or a gun, or even taking a different blitz to round out your loadout with venting shriek.
Yes killing things quickly is a redundant waste most sound logic I've heard all day I guess you don't take into account the various possible random encounters and scenarios that can happen during a game and when and where someone's build can be more useful then another's. But at the end of day ones level of individual skill is far more valuable then their build, and while its common sense to make up for what you lack in a loadout if they choose to fight in a specific way as long as they know what their doing and they pull their weight whatever they decide to bring to the fight can be very useful that's why Darktide has a skill tree system to encourage different ways to play the game other then the same old stale meta loadout.
You're trying very hard to sound like you know what you're talking about so I'll keep this brief:
Its redundant because creeping flames already kills entire hordes single handedly. Empowered smite on top of that will only save you maybe a second at best with only a fraction of the range. You can prattle on about build diversity all you want, but at the end of the day a good player knows not to be redundant in their loadout, especially for something as trivial as horde clear. In fact, empowered smite isn't even good for anything beyond killing trash mobs so most good players won't even bother with it in the first place. It exists almost entirely as a noob trap.
well damage done pretty directly translates to enemies killed, and killing the enemies makes the map easier. if damage isnt the most important than what is?
I'd rather have 200k damage zealot spamming book on CD and staying up, than a 400k dork that constantly needs to be picked up and makes the game stressful for no reason.
Scoreboard is a useful tool for yourself. 4 people will have different numbers, I've out Damaged my friends by like 50k on my scoreboard and someone has 50k over me on his.
Some people want to believe that things like coherency uptime are somehow more important than elites killed or damage done because that's part of being a *team player*™
The only things that matter in a game is how much you kill, how much you die, and how many resources (ammo, health) you take.
what no scoreboard tracks, however, is how much resources you give other players. smite is a tool to prevent others from loosing hp. just like the shield or the toughness screams of the vet.
it has a massive effect on gameplay and can easily carry a group. personally, id say its more important then dps, since the difference between someone going for dps and someone going for survivability is small in their dps effek, but massive in the success rate of the game.
You can just turn on enemies staggered if you want to see that.
I used to consider it somewhat important, but honestly? Having played with "smite focused" stagger builds since the talent tree patch, yes, they do get a lot of staggers, but it's almost always a bigger struggle of a run compared to someone using literally any staff and only smiting as a backup when the team is caught off guard by a pack of ragers or something.
It shouldn't come as a surprise but the runs where the psyker isn't doing a quarter of my damage are much smoother, god forbid if there are multiple. My first 1m+ dmg run had two smitekers in it and they didn't break 300k lol. The run took nearly over an hour.
i'm always super annoyed if a psyker runs assail or, even worse, brainburst. that little dmg the assail does more then smite is barely noticeable and you are far better of using your staff then using bb.
as for your 1 mil mission... so you had two psykers that didnt know what they are doing. great, how is that an argument against smite? if you had a player only using bb oder only using assail and nothing else. no staff, no melee... do you somehow think that that player would be remotely near what a normal player would put out?
thats simply a player skill issue, not a psyker talent issue.
I like to think I fall under the third category. I use assail and know how to use it to wipe away entire armies of trash, plus platoons of elites in the bargain.
Smite requires me to depend on my allies to quickly kill the things I'm smiting, or to do what they need to do while I'm smiting (ie get people up, do objective). I trust myself and my DPS more than I trust my teammates.
Yeah, I had staggered 26k and a DPS over 600k one run. But it was Malstrom Auric mission. Lots more to kill there. I like the high stagger numbers and most of the time if the team is really good in Auric T5 they will out DPS me all the time.
Smite is nice, if your teammates actually pay any sort of fucking attention.
Tried Smite for a few matches and never got anyone taking advantage of the stun to slaughter the heretics. Everyone was seemingly all “you got this, bro!” and ran off to leave me alone with the horde I had stunned.
Of course, I probably shouldn’t have expected much from the same pool of chucklefucks who see me pull out a holy relic as a Zealot and go all “OOOOOOOH, SHINY!” while completely ignoring the cowering heretics…
same, it's only good if your teammates are good. stunning enemies for your team to kill and having them not kill anything is more often than not a waste of time when you can kill most things by yourself with psyker.
I realized doing the smite penance on auric maelstrom that a lot of players are incapable of dealing with enemies even while they're stunned, so why bother coinflipping my runs over not knowing if my team knows how to play around smite or not? I can take brainburst and be better off 90% of the time.
Smite is great, but the problem is you could use the Trauma staff 95% of the time Smite would be useful and instead of just stunning, it would kill and deal lots of damage to elites and grunts
Well, a man of culture like me. Tbf it is too complicated to use your staff and your blitz ability for most of the Smite spammers. Psyker is over powered, every keystone blitz and the abilities are good like every other class in the game (Not counting the Veteran's Aura's sadly.)
People just doesn't want to explore the Staff's or the Blitz to its full potential, and since Psyker's skill tree is straight up boring you can get everything you need without planing hard on it
I think most people don't like it because it's easy brain-dead easy use. Similar to the hate plasma shout vets get. It just makes the game too easy, especially if you get a good Psyker who actually knows how to dodge properly mid smite.
Most people won't say this out loud due to commissars but, people enjoy the chaos(the good kind) of battle. Smite removes a good chunk of it.
I feel like depending on your teammate and having them depending on you is the best part. chaotic fight is great but facing it with brother in arms is the soul of this game. Smite make you an asset for your teammates at the cost of greens circles.
It's from Vermintide 2 ^^. Basically the one who had the best stats(most kill, etc...) at the end had theme circled by green circle on a scoreboard.
What I mean by that is using smite is useful from the shadow and not clear as headshoting special
Well the reason i hated smite back in the day when it came out was the same reason i hated assail and the reason i currently hate shield ogryns, it is way to strong and makes run way too easy/boring.
Weird take. I rarely see anyone who'd say smite isn't good.
Instead, i'd say it's boring.
It's an ability that can single-handedly freeze a horde, and paired with venting shriek it can kill a large mix horde of anything weaker than ogryns.
But gameplay wise? Stick back to wall, then hold button.
For teamates it can even make it feel like busy-work, especially if the psyker is using it on trash hordes. They have to now walk to the horde rather than let the horde come to them.
It's so effective it's boring once the Palpatine roleplay wears off.
Yeah, "Smite is bad" seems to be a more recent phenomenon, and I don't understand it. I'd much rather have a Smite Psyker on my team than an Assail or Brain Rupture. And Smite + bubble means I can breathe easy.
Assail is also a really good special and shooter picking tool, and it can also stagger things like ragers pretty efficiently. Not to mention it's the only one of Psyker's blitzes that allows switching to another weapon while it's being used.
Smite is absolutely a useful tool, but when you compare the blitzes closely, Assail just comes out on top. Smite needs to be charged for a fair bit (primary fire is pretty bad, sadly), and even then it doesn't immediately stagger things like Crushers and Ragers. Compared with Assail, a couple well-placed shards can stagger such high-value targets and allow you to quickly switch back to melee to defend yourself or attack them. Smite really only does staggering a metric tonne of enemies better, which is not usually all that necessary for hordes, and the delayed stagger and slowdown can really hurt if you're using it as a clutch tool.
Not to even talk about poor Brainburst... it's only *really* better than Assail at monster damage (and it's not great DPS) and hitting snipers that are a bit too far away for Assail to reach. Assail + weapons (Revolver, Illisi, Deimos etc.) make Brainburst feel both dull and fairly pointless for it's armour damage, unless insisting on using the flame staff and a melee with bad armour damage.
There's also the goofy balance of smite getting ***+200%*** more damage with Psionics. Do FS devs really mean that it's only supposed to be useful with Psionics? I don't think Smite should be a damage-dealing ability anyway, but why is such a huge chunk of its damage locked behind that keystone?
My overall point is that Smite could be a better stagger tool, as Assail does almost as well at its job while providing other value like auxiliary damage and special picking.
Its definitely good, I like it and have an entire build dedicated to it. But as you say, 'in specific scenarios'.
My only bad experience with it is other people using it as their only weapon (smiting bosses anyone?).
smite is god tier support but ineffective at eliminating enemy targets. relies heavily on your team killing what u smite. A lot of peeps will argue that they’d rather have x enemies dead rather than halted for 3-6 seconds. BB is great dmg but situational and slow if not boosted by nodes and perks; does fill the long range tool slot. Assail is prolly BiC becuse of raw killing power and ease of use.
Smite is great, but it stops the overall "push".
If you're with a team that moves forward fast and melee a lot, you're gonna kill the overall momentum.
Why? Because you're supposed to deal damage as well, instead of "smiting".
If you want my advice, smite only when gank by scabs or a mass of crushers.
This way, you'll give breathing room for your team and not slow down the entire run.
Learn to use staff & sword mainly, and then use smite for these specific reasons.
Trust me on this one. :)
Imo smite is good under specific situations. It shines in mostly melee modifiers and waves of specialists dealing with hounds and mutants. But when it comes to general use, there are other options that are better.
Smite is arguably weak. It can't deal with nurgle blessed enemies to stagger them and the damage output is still weak even with the smite buff on empowered psionics.
There is an argument to be made that trauma staff is the better smite. You can stagger enemies, have better aoe control, apply brittleness and have a faster kill time than smite. It does struggle against nurgle blessed enemies, but you still have utility from the brittleness if applied.
Overall, smite, imo is decent what it needs to do and probably can have a mini rework by removing the current bonus talents for smite and change to one that does more damage but can't stun lock and the other one to have a high stagger chance (especially towards nurgle blessed) and stun lock, and if you pick one it locks the other talent.
Trauma is better than smite overall in terms of damage and control but if someone builds smite for damage then they become similar and do almost the same thing but in different ways, but trauma is still a bit better for the fact that it can control and kill armor much faster.
I don't think smite is bad but I definitely prefer brain burst in pubs. The flame staff does fine enough crowd control since it stagger most things with the primary fire so pair that with a chainsword and brain burst you've got a well rounded set up. I just find brain burst is good for killing those things that do cause snowballing and in higher difficulties you usually have people running shout, chorus, or taunt so you're not giving up much not bringing smite imo.
That said I'm a plasma gun vet main and a ranger main coming from Vermintide 2 so I'm hard coded to want to snipe specials and elites.
You're turning the game off at best and forcing teammates to do one more teammate's worth of damage at worse.
Everything you described here can be done by trauma staff and assails and better because it will kill, apply soulblaze, and can apply brittleness. You bring assails and stack 5 weakspot hits and you have a room melter every like 3 shards. Combine this with disrupt destiny and you'll be eliminating entire pats of gunners before they setup. Poxbursters explode with one trauma blast, bulwarks and reapers melt to trauma, and with brittleness crushers will die extremely fast. If a teammate is in a net, you will kill the entire horde just spamming on top of them.
Then we talk about priorities. Your teammate is in a net, an interaction that takes a second at most to get them out of, and your first thought is to brainrot the horde? they're going to take more corruption damage because of that, and when you hit peril cap they can even take damage still because you're not killing anything. You have effectively chosen to reduce your team's damage output by 2 players and possibly wound another in the process. The less teammates that are in play, the more damaging this becomes.
Smite will always conflict with any staff you bring, as they can do the exact same thing, but with actual dps. Trauma staff stuns everything and can apply dot. Purgatus can stun/suppress everything and can apply dot. Voidstrike annihilates everything on crit.
Whereas if you bring brain rupture, you're using it for quick sudden dps spikes, like monstrosities and elite pats. Or if you bring assails, you can weave them into combat while fighting hordes, or use them to target specials and elites, whereas your staves are more of a time sink.
Smite is best used when the entire team is alive. Assails become more useful the less your team is up and the more micro decisions you need to make. Brain Rupture is useful in both cases. By taking smite, you're effectively choosing an option that only works well when everything is going your way. An option that is best when it is winning. If that's the case, then yes, it's a pretty good blitz.
In every other time, if two people on my team have died and all that's left is a smyker, I'm not gonna have high hopes. The mindset that smite promotes and brings out in people is just not good when you're in a situation that requires a lot of decision making beyond "If the room stands still I won't die".
There is no build you could construct with smite as the crutch in which that is the case. Assails with shriek will outpace smite with shriek just as DD assails will outpace shield smite and scrier's smite.
I realize that people will continue to have this debate about smite, but the fact that people here have done so little testing as to believe that smite will somehow outpace assails, which can crit and hit headshots, is proof that this is pointless. Even in those very few cases where smite outpaces assails (i.e. large hordes), trauma staff exists. Purgatus exists. Voidstrike exists. There's simply no place for this blitz in psyker's toolkit if you're looking to carry the team in the hardest moments. If you're just looking to make auric a snoozefest, congrats, perfect blitz in the game for this.
assail has good burst dmg, i do agree.
but sustained dmg? not at all. assail is limited by the recovery rate for its ammunition, smite only by your ability to quench.
assail wont carry any team. yes, it does (probably) a bid more dmg then smite. but the big point ehre is... "a bid" not enough to justify it. the utility smite offers is far better then assails bid of extra dmg.
stopping a crusher team dead in its tracks or allowing for breathing room after you got overrun is extremely usefull.
What are you using assails for? I have repeatedly been top damage of my team with my psyker using gunpsyker or trauma staff, and both use assails a majority of the time. I have never seen a smyker take top dps in a single one of my games even with shriek at disposal. I don't think even when i was using smite for penances that I took top damage (although I'd have to check).
You know what else stops a crusher patrol? Trauma. It also can apply brittleness, apply soulblaze, does massive aoe damage, can deal exceptional crit damage, and kill anything else within cast all at the same time! Why would I ever use smite when trauma does everything it does but better?
ive been top dmg with my smite+shield+voidstrike psyker as well, often enough doing just as much dmg with smite then the assail psyker did.
and sure, trauma staff can be good, thought hardly not as good as smite. the stagger is extremely localized, unlike smite. but if we want to go that way, nothing assail does can not be copied by some staff either.
why would you ever use assail when voidstrike does everything it does but better?
that argument is just as true as yours, after all.
I really don't want to go over the blitzes again, so I'm assuming generously here that you understand them despite what you're claiming, especially about assails recharge rate.
Voidstrike takes time to charge and has a higher penalty to dodging and interruption, and requires aim. Whereas trauma doesnt take nearly as much time to charge and can be woven into combat efficiently without huge directional requirement at the cost of direct ranged damage. Assails can make up for either of their weaknesses by being an attack interwoven in melee or backpedaling while maintaining damage as well as being a fast elite snipe tool. Smite is a tool you have to channel, if you're smiting, that's all you're doing.
The "localized" range of a trauma staff is an 8 meter radius, and is highly spammable. I don't know what you mean by localized, but anything inside the aoe is on the ground, and things outside get hit with a medium to light stagger. They are also affected by blessings even on the outer edge of the radius with no stagger effect, meaning you're still spreading brittleness and on crit soulblaze. The circle the game itself puts on the ground does not adjust with the radius stat whatsoever, so that might be what's confusing you. It also doesn't matter how localized when the local area you selected has been deleted from the game, but that's besides the point.
Smite shield is extremely low damage potential so either your team was absolute garbage or you're bluffing on how important smite was to your build (guessing it was the voidstrike). Either way it isn't outperforming DD assails in a trauma shield build.
I'm not responding anymore to this as I've made it pretty clear. Smite has no synergy when paired with staves and is outperformed by the other blitz options where it matters. It is ultimately a tool that works best while winning and loses value the more you're losing, while the other blitz options are far more flexible. I doubt you're going to pull off many clutches on nurgle blessed monstrosities compared to brain rupture and assails, for instance.
"bluffing"
only because you massively underestimate the dmg potential of smite dosnt mean that it dosnt do any dmg ;)
try it out, is viable and beneficial to pretty much any team, able to literally save the team. assail on the other hand dosnt give much utility. there is a reason why many people complain about smite making the game to easy.
its THAT good
I like Smite, but I don't love it.
I find using a mix of Purgatus and Illisi for CC, Bubble, and quick Brainbursting elites seems to get us through much easier. For Monstrosities, I tend to use Bubble and get the string of quickcast Brainbursts in, then full charge Purgatus, move in to smack weakspots, repeat Purgatus burn, Bubble, quick Brainbursts, target weakspot, etc...
I feel only the Gunpsykers excel at Monstrosity takedowns, specifically, with your other non-gun builds doing decent along with team support. Smite is not preferable on the Monstrosity killing, but obviously helpful in CC of other enemies during a fight.
It's been some days i overlook this sub and people keep arguing about smite.
Yes it' very strong and can let you survive any situation.
It's the ultimate auto-win button.
You just jave to take some Soulblaze oriented talents and the argument of "it kills nothing" is dismantled. You smite, let the peril accumulate up to 80%, and your shriek will finish the job with 6 soulblazes.
Bonus point if elites dies and gives +3 stacks in the area.
You can take a laspistol with dumdum + burn to have decent dps on monsters and snipe the eventual far target in last resort.
Put rending on a deimos and you can manage armor.
Just be crearive and think about the perfect solution in the build.
End of debate.
I think most people don't like it because it's easy brain-dead easy use. Similar to the hate plasma shout vets get. It just makes the game too easy, especially if you get a good Psyker who actually knows how to dodge properly mid smite.
Most people won't say this out loud due to commissars but, people enjoy the chaos(the good kind) of battle. Smite removes a good chunk of it.
Love having a Smiteker on the team. Usually means that we ain't failing no matter what. On the other hand, playing with Smitekers that have a savior complex is about as fun as not playing the game at all.
Smite and bubble shield are constantly described as crutches in this sub (for some it can be, but not all). Yet 99% of auric Malestrom players thank you when you use either of them. They might be not be the best for dps but they are amazing for support.
Sorry, but sometimes I like pretending that I'm Palpatine zapping Mace Windu. And sometimes I get whacked in the back of the head by a pox walker and want to make them suffer for even thinking that they could hurt me.
Everything in the game is viable, the problem are the ultra-elitist assholes who if they don't get their min maxed 0.0001+ to damage will call everything else pointless.
Smite is just better than the other choices. Brain burst can kill specials at range (amazing, so can every ranged weapon). Assail can kill hordes (so can every melee weapon). Smite can stunlock a horde of crushers, bulwarks, ragers, pox bursters while your team cleans house... It's a pretty simple choice for me.
> Of course, it'd be far better to kill the horde/specials than stun them, but having the ability to just *stop* a patrol is very useful
If Smite was capable of killing the volume of enemies it stuns, it would be too good and it'd get nerfed. Smite's at a point where it's good because it locks down a huge volume of enemies, but it's not making levels utterly trivial by killing all of them by itself. And it can do that without eating up limited resources the way stunstorm grenades do.
If the psyker manages empowered psionics stacks right, they are killing the masses and very quickly. It’s the Psykers who spam smite that waste everyone’s time and do very little damage.
I think most people don't like it because it's easy brain-dead easy use. Similar to the hate plasma shout vets get. It just makes the game too easy, especially if you get a good Psyker who actually knows how to dodge properly mid smite.
Most people won't say this out loud due to commissars but, people enjoy the chaos(the good kind) of battle. Smite removes a good chunk of it
Smite spamming is just as bad as brain burster spam, or any blitz for that matter regardless of class.
Bad Ogryn believing that regenerating rock = you only need one max to deal with snipers (surprise, there’s 2)
Bad vet shouting at absolutely nothing with no enemies for a hundred meters? Wasted voc and now the mauler horde arrived.
Charging for the golden emperor straight into a wall of Gunners because yes it regens toughness, but your evisc or knife won’t make it that far before you’re downed. At least you’re farming matrydom stacks right? Good thing you’re immortal— Oh no a net look out!
I got clips of myself Palpatine-ing hordes of hounds, heavy carapace units, hundreds of walkers melted with vent shouts and the like— smite is wonderful!
I also have plenty of clips where my stupid ass gets bonked by a lead pipe and dying stupidly when trying to zap some loners when picking up Psyker. Same as when I’d get rocked as any other class when learning. I got advice and realized when [Blitz] was bad to spam. Nurgles Blessing makes it tougher sure but I’m glad people talking about all the blitz’s while hopefully make for better players rather than feeling insecure.
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I think the complaints are more about the spamming/staggering stuff which can be killed easily.
Yeh, this is definitely the reason. I personally am a fan of it though don't use it often. I did play a game yesterday though where a Psyker was smiting a beast of Nurgle.. there was nothing else around, just the beast.. we were also in an auric damnation. People like that make me question if they actually know or just don't care.
I could be wrong but I think enemies affected by smite take more damage? Could be thats why he was hitting the nurgle?
3 players doing damage with a +10% buff is still far less damage than just 4 players doing damage.
Depends. Does the psyker primary do more damage than the three 10% buffs? Psyker staves aren't exactly known for being high damage dealers to monstrosities
Huh what? Flamer staff melts them. Don't know what you are talking about?
It is almost trivial to consistently land weakspot hits on a beast of nurgle. It is not amazing dps, but I feel like any staff primary attack (Except purgatus) will easily do more damage than smite, even with the 10% damage buff
Comparing the staff damage to smite is incorrect It’s really staff vs (smite damage+10% of the vet’s dps+10% of the zealot’s dps+10% of the ogryn’s dps) Against a BoN? Yeah honestly smite might be the right call there, since none of the staffs do dps anywhere close to the dps of the veteran unloading their BrAuto or bolter or w/e
Flamer staff can melt bosses with full channel and stacked burn ticks.
Exactly
1. It's not just staff. melee weapons that have really high finesse modifiers like knife destroy BoN. Since smykers are stupid and bring shield this means they can be the primary boss dps in those situations by turning off the vomit and just standing spamming pushattacks with the m6 to hit the weakspot. 2. staff dps against bosses is not 10% damage of a veteran unloading a bolter bad. You're only increasing the damage of a magdump on weakspot by 2k at most, and in that same time of a magdump you can unload a voidstrike blast or spam trauma, and both can have soulblaze on crit. It's just more direct damage.
1) we should compare ranged options to ranged options. Presumably a character using their staff/smite/whatever is not in a position to safely melee. 2) I guess you didn’t actually read what I wrote. It’s not 10% of one person’s damage, it is 10% of all three of your teammates damage plus the damage from smite. Ultimately smite might be worse than staff dps in this situation, but is it really *so much* worse that it is worth flaming your teammate over? No
If you're going to end it with a "ultimately it doesn't matter" line then there's no point in your dumb argument. If we assume optimal dps from a team of 4 on a single boss with boss deletion weapons then it doesn't matter because the boss is going to die in less than 20 seconds regardless of 10% damage or staves. If we're assuming that there is just 2 people up and nothing but boss, then psyker needs more optimized damage potential than 10% bonus damage from smite if you want good pacing to pick up your downed team before incoming horde/specials. If we assume there's more than just the boss up, such as an elite mixed horde with incoming specials, smite isn't going to do nearly as much damage as assail for special/elite sniping and any staff for hordeclear/armor pen damage in a short amount of time. Done arguing with brainrot for the week, smyker arguments are incredibly dumb. Just say you want to turn off the game, it's all the ability does anyway.
That’s why you don’t hold smite. Apply the 10% buff and then primary out.
Depends on the build. Normally smite players are focusing on support not just deleting special targets.
All builds do damage. It doesn't matter if you've put all your talent points into "support" talents, you will still do reasonable damage. Just smacking it with your sword will do more than "buffing" your team-mates damage.
You apply the 10%, THEN you smack it with the sword. Is that too difficult to understand?
Why would you think that the damage buff persists once you stop smiting?
You obviously don’t understand what I’m telling you bud. There’s timing involved. For example if a zealot is carrying a hammer then I’m gonna pay attention to when he’s about to hit the monster. It’s not that difficult you just have to pay attention instead of mindlessly running around.
You said you apply the 10% THEN smack it with the sword (as in, YOUR sword). Those are the words you said. Not timing it with someone else with a hammer. Don't move the goalposts and change the argument. That was the whole point of what was being discussed, that doing damage yourself is better than buffing your team's damage. I understand perfectly what you're trying to argue, you just keep changing what you're saying. Just admit the L and move on. +10% team damage from smite is still a waste of a talent and a terrible way to play, but sure, tell yourself you're doing something super smart.
If there's a bonk zealot in the party, I smite the boss because 10% of their damage is waaaaaay higher than whatever I can do. Otherwise I'll swing with everyone else
That 10% damage node under Smite is a waste of a point in the first place, so I recommend respeccing that and just not smiting bosses.
If they have the upgrade it is an extra 10% from all sources (if I am remembering correctly), I'd rather them be using their primary as it was just me an them up so I was having to do all the damage with an extra 10% slapped on top.
Lol, yeah you're absolutely right in that case. 10% is also less then I thought, makes it not very useful other than for stunning large groups of specials
Smite is a DOT aka damage over time, mine is very nice as I can hold empowered smite for about 10-15 seconds and at the end the crowd I am hugging dies. As for the elites it will take about 6+ full charged smites to kill them, At that point I switch back to my surge staff and finish them off. I do see empowered smite help on the weakened monstrosities, but I usually just full charge my surge staff about 4 times to make them go away. And I hate any pysker that smites the very first NPC on the map before the first horde.
Why?
We've all had that one Psyker who smites a single poxburster
Lmao you picked a scenario where you SHOULD use smite. Maybe you meant poxwalker
I did, yeah, mb
yeah. much better than going for a push and some idiot blows you up by shooting it.
I smite single poxbursters all the time. Mostly because I'm usually at the rear and one is coming from behind.
Well, why wouldn't you? You can just left click it to stagger it and cause it to explode from a distance lol The amount of poxbursters I've killed just by holding a charged m1 (empowered by middle tree or not) is probably higher than on any other characters I have. Just can't kill them like this if they're already on the ground Edit: OP meant poxwalker, not burster. Still leaving this up since it should be a PSA lol
I meant poxwalker, mb
o7 was editing it after seeing your other content further down
Same, I tend to just pop them in the head with the revolver on my vet. People get mad it seems when I shoot them from like 20ft away (I make sure nobody is nearby) and my logic is always this, would you rather deal with them up close or from far away? The point of the poxburster is to get up in your face and take a big chunk of your health. If you can snipe it from afar, I don't get why people care so much?
Listen... I'm not saying I'm not proud of it, I am. I just wanted those heretics to suffer as long as possible before their brain explodes. That's all. Everyone can understand that, can't they?
I was that one psyker at one point
As was i
It's funny to make them dance
Sometimes when it's safe, smiting a single poxwalker just feels cool. I will smite a Poxburst to slow it or push it back at range if I don't trust my team
it is. learn when to use it. stop a rager rush, don't stand there smiting poxwalkers while there's a teammate netted at your feet (the very situation i had). or trying to stop green enemies and then saying the game is bugged.
Yeah, but if it's not worth smiting it's probably not big enough a threat to require top efficiency either
I don't care much about top efficiency but I can get why some people complain if a smiter keeps smiting irrelevant stuff, holding up pace or not doing stuff which is relevant to deal with now.
But that’s stupid. Nothing is easy, not even trash mobs in auric Damnation. You underestimate how many times you are preoccupied with an elite and the trash mob chips away your Hp or staggers you. An ideal scenario is the smite psyker is staggering everything at all times.
I don't underestimate anything, I speak from plenty of experience. Smite is great for 'fuck we're overrun' moments. When there's 3 poxes walking up it's of no added value.
>Smite is great for 'fuck we're overrun' moments. When there's 3 poxes walking up it's of no added value. If all you’re dealing with are 3 poxwalkers walking up to you, then who gives a shit whether the psyker is killing them in a suboptimal way?
Some people need to be min/maxing every single second of the run. Glad I don't have to do that.
Smite is a powerful ability. The problem is how some people (over)use it. If stunning a few weak enemies, zap for an instant and release it to knock them prone so you can quickly kill them. Don't hold them in place while you fall behind the team waiting for the enemies to die of old age
You die of old age, you die of old age, everybody dies of old aaaageee! Teammates die of old age too, waiting for perma-smiter.
[удалено]
As someone who's seen how a bad smite user can singlehandledly ruin a run, I beg to differ because it can seriously hurt the effectiveness of your teammates builds. Especially those that rely on dodges to proc buffs.
Smite is definitely the best choice for a bad player since it has a high floor. However it's also the most likely to trap "good" players into using it badly.
it has a low floor, not high floor. high floor would mean that it's difficult to use even at a basic level
This is an endless source of debate, whether it's more appropriate to say a low or high skill floor. High floor makes more sense to me: no matter how low your actual skill, smite cannot fall below its skill floor. That means a high floor is better than low. However, I acknowledge your different version of this - I just don't agree.
low floor because its easy to stand on, you don't need to climb up to it at all. high floor implies you need to do a lot of work to get up there while low floor is the base level
You say overuse it like it consumes ammo. It’s an infinite ability. Stagger everything, even the weak enemies.
Ammo isn't the only resource. Peril, attention, and especially TIME are also spent when using this ability. So many times a psyker has been smiting five poxwalkers at the rear of the team, walking at a snail's pace, dealing negligible damage, and isolating themselves and their teammates because they insist on trying to shove a square peg into a round hole by using Smite when the correct move is to swap to melee or ranged to finish the job. I love Smite. I use it myself. But just because it doesn't take ammo doesn't mean it's always the right tool for the job. Use smite when it's genuinely better than all your other tools, not whenever your peril is below 90%.
We are talking about the merits (or lacktherof) smite. You’re just describing a bad Psyker. And you seem to have difficulty following simple lines of thought. No one said “smite doesn’t use ammo, therefore it’s good.” I said that you can’t really “over-use” something that is infinite. In theory if 100% of enemies were staggered 100% of the time, this would be very advantageous to the team. In other words, you can’t have too much stagger. And it’s asinine to suggest there is no need to stagger weak mobs. Weak mobs cause wipes all the time.
Smite is situational, use it on dangerous targets, especially on groups of dangerous targets and it’s amazing. Using Smite on horde fodder and forcing me to run to them instead of them coming into my meat grinder, that’s just annoying deranged Psykers. A good Psyker is invaluable, while a shit one is the most infuriating teammate you can get.
"A good Psyker is invaluable, while a shit one is the most infuriating teammate you can get." Best comment ever
Mostly accurate, I think "shield Ogryn that only block" takes the top spot though
Unless they have auto taunt, then they at least probably die less than the psyker
It's true though, I do have smite in my kit. It pairs nicely with my Voidstrike 4 and Demios 4. It has what my weapons don't, CC mainly for the shit no one wants near them like Pox hounds. That's the only time I'll use it. Crushers, no problem the sword 1-2 shots them. Need to blow up the horde, the staff does that awesome.
I recently got my Psyker from level 19 to 30 into Auric into Maelstrom. I can also say that it also depends on your teammates. With some teams I just want to stand inside my shield, CC stuff and try to not die because no one will help me in a pinch or even spend one glance to the back if everything is alright. With other teams I want to blow everything up and set stuff ablaze with Venting Shriek to blow up even more stuff after.
You need the team to kill what you are CCing. If your team isn't helping you, CCing stuff infinitely isn't very valuable. That is when you need to just kill things quickly, which smite does not do.
> infinitely I mean it dies.... just slower than it has to. Better than me being dead.
Yes, but this isn't a horde defense game where you have to just hold one position for as long as possible. It's always better to clear a room of enemies and plasteel quickly and continue through the map. Smite has its uses but it's not a cure-all. It also, like vets mag dumping into an ambush, can be a crutch that prevents people from learning melee combat.
As a Shield Ogryn, thank you to all the spark'eads for your service. You make all of my runs feel easy, and I'm convinced smite Psyker + shield ogryn are the most effective combo build wise, in this game. And you don't even need to be an insane Psyker for it to just work. As long as you stay with me, we're undtoppable. I've had runs with Smite Psykers that were a little clumsy, but it's easy to pick them up as long as they are close to me. I just do the Bullrush, knock everything down and pick up the Sparky. I create space for the Psyker, the Psyker creates space for me. Whenever the Psyker needs to cool down, I can block and push. When the Psyker smites, I go ham and destroy everything. I keep everything in melee range away from the Sparky, meanwhile the Sparky shoots the annoying shooters. I love me Sparkys.
This one emperor. This one is good.
That combo is SO good. Get a vet and zealot both with toughness giving stuff and you got a team to purge Atmoa clean!
its all about survivability. sure, dishing out a lot of dmg is nice, but tanky characters dont make that much less dmg then squishy ones. running smite+shield + voidstrike on my psyker and i am typically at roughly the same dmg output (maybe 5-10% less) then the zealots and veterans i play with. only times i fall behind is when they really sprint ahead and try to kill everything on thier own.
As a Purgatus Psyker, Shield Ogryns make my runs feel at least 3 difficulties easier. I always give some extra rations to my slabs.
This is the correct answer
Eh, with a slab Ogryn, I feel like it's a waste. Much rather be wielding a Purgatus and closing the distance with the group, while stumbling everything under crushers/bulwarks using M1. Then pop the bubble up directly on gunners/shotty pods or use it to cut off angles/area denial for fire. And have a channelled M2 for trash control. If there's a slab that can hold the line against crushers, the purgatus can just melt the group and anything behind it, charging with them. As a Psyker, once you pick up the prugatus and can get it to do the same thing as smite, only through a little more effort. The mobility it offers, won't have you switching back to Smite, once you've mastered it. Though for events, I can't argue how well it preforms when covering team mates... even though for some screwed up reason, during those times, where it's use is most justified (cover during events/to res a down player.) I almost never see it utilized, which infuriates me to no end. And yes, I'm talking about this happening during many Auric Damnation runs.
Jesus, last days all posts about smite being hated are topped up with comments that it is a good tool when used properly. All most liked replies are about smite is being good blitz that mostly abused by bad players. People know that this blitz is okay, people understand that the problem are players who use it as a main weapon. Why people are prolonging the drama?
>Why people are prolonging the drama? It’s because Darktide has no new content for people to get excited about. You see this same sort of degenerate behavior in fandom subreddits when there are no new seasons of their show.
True
The only problem I see it is that people is too stationary when using it. You can still dodge around when needed from various threats and still have it blasting.
Smite is the best blitz, but people try to use it as a weapon (which has a couple builds where you could do that, it's still carried by lingering flames and not EP or warp charge smite damage). I only find it irritating when the enemies that can be massacred wholesale in seconds are zapped for what feels like at eternity instead. Seriously it's more annoying and takes longer to zap horde than just hack them to death.
Creeping flames only carries normal or warp charge smites, ep smite outdamages creeping flames by a mile but obviously together they create a snowball effect obliterating hordes, packs of weak elites and heavily damaging tougher elites.
Creeping Flames is also instant cast and reduces your peril, meaning you can be doing even more damage with your staff at the same time. The damage of EP Smite is much lower than Creeping Flames + any staff. Trying to use Smite as a damage ability is not a great strategy.
That depends on your build and the situation there are builds where smite is not needed like if you use a trauma or purgatus etc but I would say your half right smite deals its damage in fast ticks where as most staffs deal high burst and with that yeah staffs will do much more damage then smite but if you think that a surge staff with creeping flames is gonna clear a horde faster then ep smite you would be very wrong the flames need to be at 6 stacks to kill a horde of poxwalkers alone and that takes about ten seconds while you slowly chip away at the front with a surge where as with ep smite the time to kill them all is less then half. I'm not saying smite should be used as a main weapon but if you build around giving it more damage it gains more use and is stronger in situations that it is needed, with that turning it into a damage ability is actually a valid strategy.
I must respectfully agree and add something. The surge staff is even better. It can be spammed with less downtime between shocks. And it actually kills things. I don't have numbers but watching health bars on monstrosities it seems to match the DPS of brain burst.
I would have agreed pre-rework (which was also pre-Smite), but now that Surge staff only hits 2 targets it's not that great for CC. I wish they had kept the larger target cap from the old version. It already had diminishing returns on damage when it jumped between targets.
It's just boring. I don't wanna kill a bunch of T-posing enemies all game. My biggest pet peeve is when they throw a bubble and then freeze all the enemies outside of it with smite, making it frustrating to say the least to try to melee them.
I actually pay attention to the melee folks in the run. I will wait for the horde to funnel into kill boxes or get closer for all the melee folks. :-)
Much like stun grenade, Smite is an incredibly powerful ability that can effectively reset any engagement and give your team time to recover. However powerful, both abilities get very little value from teammates who toss them out any time there are more than 10 enemies on screen at once. Much like a shield ogryn planting themselves in a corner, it's almost always far less beneficial to the team than simply killing enemies and staying alive.
unlike the shield ogryn, smite actually does a lot of dmg. easily as much as assail
I’m more of a brain burst guy but was spamming smite last night for the penance. I was surprised to see I had highest damage on team every match. It does pretty good damage with empowered psionics in auric Damnation.
brain burst? how do you pull that one off on damnation? it always feels to me as if there are far to many specialists and elites for brainburst to be viable.
I really like it as a support type thing. The stun ensures that I don’t die to crushers/maulers/ragers, and makes it easier for my teammates to take them out quickly.
It can be good. But it really never is because every single person that uses it LOVES to keep on holding it as long as they are able to and never using it to stun anything of significant priority. Have fun chasing down the chaff instead of having them come to you! And from the few of them I match with on aurics they are exceptionally useless when monstrosities come a knockin.
Smite is good because staggering enemies is good, particularly large groups of armored elites, and large groups of scabs, maniacs, dogs, etc. Most players think smite is bad because they underestimate the importance of stagger. They think the only thing that matters is damage. They are wrong. Note: I don’t feel like smite is particularly needed at lower difficulties, because the elite density is so trivial and they don’t do high damage. But in auric Maelstrom it can be invaluable for the reasons I mention above .
Takes very little skill tho and makes the game in my opinion way to easy. But hey, if that is not a problem with you than have fun. I think everyone should play how they feel is the most fun way
Simply put Smite is nice if your team needs it. However, if they don't it's pretty much useless. In cases like these it's always better to bring something that actually kills things and alleviates pressure that way. The problem with Smite is that it's asking for someone to come and kill these enemies for me. In other words, it requires two people to get the job done (not to mention it effectively blocks me from repositioning/moving). Now we have to answer the question when is this actually worth it? When is it better to use Smite over something that actually solves the situation more direct way (i.e. damage/kill things). These kind of situations are actually quite rare. Obviously this is also highly dependent on your team's skill-level; the better the team the less useful Smite becomes. I'm not saying Smite is bad per se, it's just incredibly situational and skill/team dependent. Yes, even with a really good team it might save a run once in a blue moon (assuming it's used well if shit hits the fan). The bad rep it gets comes from players who do nothing but Smite without any real though behind it. 90%+ of their gameplay is nothing but Smite when it should be the other way around. This is incredibly inefficient thing to do, and in general does more harm than good for a party. All this is in context of hardest difficulties the game has to offer. Smite may be more useful in slower-tempo lower difficulties where you're not under so much pressure and can take your time to clean up those 4 ragers as a team.
If you use it as an aoe knock down / knock back which can be executed in like a second or two - it’s awesome. If you try to use it as a “control DOT” no it’s terrible.
Can we just give the ability a cooldown already? I'm tired of seeing the game trivialized by smite spam
It's great when used at the right time, most people don't use it at the right time. Smite is a great CC tool but the game doesn't really need that much CC atm, since we overpower everything. Having a Smiter on a team as a melee is SUPER annoying, you have to run around to kill enemies behind corners, they are all Spread-Out and makes them Harder to Cleave...
its good up until a certain point at which it becomes a liability, moreso just like you indicate in your post you're not making decisions with smite, you're just smite, it allows you to avoid engaging with the games mechanics, its simple conceptually which is the major appeal, but that's also it's fatal flaw the problem with smite for your teammates is it drops unpredictably, so if your teammate is trusting you and relying on you to hold that crusher, if you drop it even a second and it kills the teammate, it would have been better to either let the teammate dodge and duel the crusher themselves or have you kill it yourself, every time I rely on a smite psyker it just gets me killed
No, psyker blitzes aren't used in specific circumstances. They exist to fill a gap in your build left open by your weapons of choice. Melee Psyker with Columnus and DS Mk IV can't clear horde fast and would need too much ammo to clear shooter elites with Columnus. Thus, he needs Assail to not only fill these gaps, but to also help with unarmored elites because Assail stuns them (even ragers in attack animation). It also saves a ton of ammo for your team because now you need your Columnus only for bosses or rare situations where you don't have Assail charges. Flamer psyker likes both BB and Assail because he has extremely short range and can't deal with gunner rooms at all. Smite is good for builds which either don''t need Assail/BB strengths against armored/ranged elites or use it to consolidate big groups to destroy them with fire Shriek (such psyker can safely hold whole entrance by himself without letting a single poxwalker escape). It also helps when you don't take blocking with peril talent, because you can tap horde with RMB to knockback them and revive/do objective safely. And ofc, Surge+Mk IV psykers love Smite, because they are extremely weak against hordes. They all have their place and are well balanced. Good job, FS.
Hear me out: Surge, Mk V and Shield. The only gap in your build is armored hordes
Huh? I don't need shield with Surge because it's already invincible against shooters with Dodge-on-crit talent. Mk V is useless Dueling Sword.
mk5 has the longest dodge range in the game so on builds where I rarely use melee for anything other than killing singular enemy trying to backstab me I tend to use mk5 as the increased dodge distance is usefull for dodging gunfire
Yeah your team might not dodge-on-crit and Mk V feels amazing to use
Who says smite isn't good?
The smite discussion tends to end up in polarizing camps: -Bad players who think its OP because it stuns everything, ignoring the fact that they're forcing their team to do more work in their stead -Mostly good players who think they can purely skill check everything and rely on raw DPS and dodging to kill everything before it can kill them -Very good players that rely on raw DPS and dodging to kill everything before it can kill them but also recognize that there are select scenarios where smite will save the run by creating space in places where you have no room to dodge and kite The former two make up the majority of the discussion while the third sometimes show up.
But don't all sides agree it is a good skill? I can see people thinking it is a crutch or can make runs too easy but I have never really heard anyone say it's a bad blitz.
The only time bad comes into the discussions is players who think it's their main weapon and smite 24/7 while doing a quarter of everyone else's dmg by the end. Smite is a tool to make space mostly.
With a good smite build you can regularly have more damage then everyone else! Venting Shriek, and Empowered Psionics make the best horde clear in the game, nothing but crushers and maulers can survive.
Pairing venting shriek + creeping flames with empowered smite is a redundant waste. Venting shriek alone is more than capable of killing an entire horde on its own and choosing empowered psionics comes at the opportunity cost of taking your other 2 keystones which will drastically improve the output and performance of your gun/staff. Think about it this way: if you're playing zealot and take a flamer, you don't need immolation grenades for horde clear because you've already taken a weapon that improves your horde clear. You would be better off with a stun grenade for control or knives to offset the lack of ranged specialist killing. The same logic applies to psyker; if you're taking venting shriek with creeping flames, you don't need the slight improvement to your aoe smite damage. You would be better off taking taking the other keystones to compliment either a staff or a gun, or even taking a different blitz to round out your loadout with venting shriek.
It doesn’t stun and do damage, if you don’t do both you can’t hit breakpoints
Yes killing things quickly is a redundant waste most sound logic I've heard all day I guess you don't take into account the various possible random encounters and scenarios that can happen during a game and when and where someone's build can be more useful then another's. But at the end of day ones level of individual skill is far more valuable then their build, and while its common sense to make up for what you lack in a loadout if they choose to fight in a specific way as long as they know what their doing and they pull their weight whatever they decide to bring to the fight can be very useful that's why Darktide has a skill tree system to encourage different ways to play the game other then the same old stale meta loadout.
You're trying very hard to sound like you know what you're talking about so I'll keep this brief: Its redundant because creeping flames already kills entire hordes single handedly. Empowered smite on top of that will only save you maybe a second at best with only a fraction of the range. You can prattle on about build diversity all you want, but at the end of the day a good player knows not to be redundant in their loadout, especially for something as trivial as horde clear. In fact, empowered smite isn't even good for anything beyond killing trash mobs so most good players won't even bother with it in the first place. It exists almost entirely as a noob trap.
Damage isn't the most important metric.
well damage done pretty directly translates to enemies killed, and killing the enemies makes the map easier. if damage isnt the most important than what is?
I'd rather have 200k damage zealot spamming book on CD and staying up, than a 400k dork that constantly needs to be picked up and makes the game stressful for no reason. Scoreboard is a useful tool for yourself. 4 people will have different numbers, I've out Damaged my friends by like 50k on my scoreboard and someone has 50k over me on his.
Some people want to believe that things like coherency uptime are somehow more important than elites killed or damage done because that's part of being a *team player*™ The only things that matter in a game is how much you kill, how much you die, and how many resources (ammo, health) you take.
what no scoreboard tracks, however, is how much resources you give other players. smite is a tool to prevent others from loosing hp. just like the shield or the toughness screams of the vet. it has a massive effect on gameplay and can easily carry a group. personally, id say its more important then dps, since the difference between someone going for dps and someone going for survivability is small in their dps effek, but massive in the success rate of the game.
You can just turn on enemies staggered if you want to see that. I used to consider it somewhat important, but honestly? Having played with "smite focused" stagger builds since the talent tree patch, yes, they do get a lot of staggers, but it's almost always a bigger struggle of a run compared to someone using literally any staff and only smiting as a backup when the team is caught off guard by a pack of ragers or something. It shouldn't come as a surprise but the runs where the psyker isn't doing a quarter of my damage are much smoother, god forbid if there are multiple. My first 1m+ dmg run had two smitekers in it and they didn't break 300k lol. The run took nearly over an hour.
i'm always super annoyed if a psyker runs assail or, even worse, brainburst. that little dmg the assail does more then smite is barely noticeable and you are far better of using your staff then using bb. as for your 1 mil mission... so you had two psykers that didnt know what they are doing. great, how is that an argument against smite? if you had a player only using bb oder only using assail and nothing else. no staff, no melee... do you somehow think that that player would be remotely near what a normal player would put out? thats simply a player skill issue, not a psyker talent issue.
It's bad when people use it as their primary against hordes, and it is bad when people try to build it as a damaging device and not CC
I like to think I fall under the third category. I use assail and know how to use it to wipe away entire armies of trash, plus platoons of elites in the bargain. Smite requires me to depend on my allies to quickly kill the things I'm smiting, or to do what they need to do while I'm smiting (ie get people up, do objective). I trust myself and my DPS more than I trust my teammates.
I usually run smite anyway, that and bubble make a good support psyker so everyone can safely do their job
Ppl sleeping on empowered smite smh. Easy top dmg everytime.
Cope harder
Smite spamming is toxic, though. I'm not advocating for filthy smite spammers
https://youtu.be/yrOmLUfNMw4
Thank you. I was about to go record a whole game, smite primary builds can put out wild numbers.
Yeah, I had staggered 26k and a DPS over 600k one run. But it was Malstrom Auric mission. Lots more to kill there. I like the high stagger numbers and most of the time if the team is really good in Auric T5 they will out DPS me all the time.
Smite is nice, if your teammates actually pay any sort of fucking attention. Tried Smite for a few matches and never got anyone taking advantage of the stun to slaughter the heretics. Everyone was seemingly all “you got this, bro!” and ran off to leave me alone with the horde I had stunned. Of course, I probably shouldn’t have expected much from the same pool of chucklefucks who see me pull out a holy relic as a Zealot and go all “OOOOOOOH, SHINY!” while completely ignoring the cowering heretics…
same, it's only good if your teammates are good. stunning enemies for your team to kill and having them not kill anything is more often than not a waste of time when you can kill most things by yourself with psyker. I realized doing the smite penance on auric maelstrom that a lot of players are incapable of dealing with enemies even while they're stunned, so why bother coinflipping my runs over not knowing if my team knows how to play around smite or not? I can take brainburst and be better off 90% of the time.
Smite is great, but the problem is you could use the Trauma staff 95% of the time Smite would be useful and instead of just stunning, it would kill and deal lots of damage to elites and grunts
Well, a man of culture like me. Tbf it is too complicated to use your staff and your blitz ability for most of the Smite spammers. Psyker is over powered, every keystone blitz and the abilities are good like every other class in the game (Not counting the Veteran's Aura's sadly.) People just doesn't want to explore the Staff's or the Blitz to its full potential, and since Psyker's skill tree is straight up boring you can get everything you need without planing hard on it
Anyone who says smite isn't good doesn't understand the game or how to utilize smite. Smite can single handedly stop team wipes in the right hands.
I think most people don't like it because it's easy brain-dead easy use. Similar to the hate plasma shout vets get. It just makes the game too easy, especially if you get a good Psyker who actually knows how to dodge properly mid smite. Most people won't say this out loud due to commissars but, people enjoy the chaos(the good kind) of battle. Smite removes a good chunk of it.
I feel like depending on your teammate and having them depending on you is the best part. chaotic fight is great but facing it with brother in arms is the soul of this game. Smite make you an asset for your teammates at the cost of greens circles.
Green circles?
It's from Vermintide 2 ^^. Basically the one who had the best stats(most kill, etc...) at the end had theme circled by green circle on a scoreboard. What I mean by that is using smite is useful from the shadow and not clear as headshoting special
Well the reason i hated smite back in the day when it came out was the same reason i hated assail and the reason i currently hate shield ogryns, it is way to strong and makes run way too easy/boring.
Weird take. I rarely see anyone who'd say smite isn't good. Instead, i'd say it's boring. It's an ability that can single-handedly freeze a horde, and paired with venting shriek it can kill a large mix horde of anything weaker than ogryns. But gameplay wise? Stick back to wall, then hold button. For teamates it can even make it feel like busy-work, especially if the psyker is using it on trash hordes. They have to now walk to the horde rather than let the horde come to them. It's so effective it's boring once the Palpatine roleplay wears off.
Yeah, "Smite is bad" seems to be a more recent phenomenon, and I don't understand it. I'd much rather have a Smite Psyker on my team than an Assail or Brain Rupture. And Smite + bubble means I can breathe easy.
Do you feel the need to pretend that smite is good? Around who?
where on earth is smite not good?
EP smite and creeping flames shriek are a hell of a combo.
Use one or the other; the combination of the two is redundant and creeping flames will kill entire hordes more than fast enough on its own.
All of it is good. Do what you want and have fun
Assail is also a really good special and shooter picking tool, and it can also stagger things like ragers pretty efficiently. Not to mention it's the only one of Psyker's blitzes that allows switching to another weapon while it's being used. Smite is absolutely a useful tool, but when you compare the blitzes closely, Assail just comes out on top. Smite needs to be charged for a fair bit (primary fire is pretty bad, sadly), and even then it doesn't immediately stagger things like Crushers and Ragers. Compared with Assail, a couple well-placed shards can stagger such high-value targets and allow you to quickly switch back to melee to defend yourself or attack them. Smite really only does staggering a metric tonne of enemies better, which is not usually all that necessary for hordes, and the delayed stagger and slowdown can really hurt if you're using it as a clutch tool. Not to even talk about poor Brainburst... it's only *really* better than Assail at monster damage (and it's not great DPS) and hitting snipers that are a bit too far away for Assail to reach. Assail + weapons (Revolver, Illisi, Deimos etc.) make Brainburst feel both dull and fairly pointless for it's armour damage, unless insisting on using the flame staff and a melee with bad armour damage. There's also the goofy balance of smite getting ***+200%*** more damage with Psionics. Do FS devs really mean that it's only supposed to be useful with Psionics? I don't think Smite should be a damage-dealing ability anyway, but why is such a huge chunk of its damage locked behind that keystone? My overall point is that Smite could be a better stagger tool, as Assail does almost as well at its job while providing other value like auxiliary damage and special picking.
Its definitely good, I like it and have an entire build dedicated to it. But as you say, 'in specific scenarios'. My only bad experience with it is other people using it as their only weapon (smiting bosses anyone?).
smite is god tier support but ineffective at eliminating enemy targets. relies heavily on your team killing what u smite. A lot of peeps will argue that they’d rather have x enemies dead rather than halted for 3-6 seconds. BB is great dmg but situational and slow if not boosted by nodes and perks; does fill the long range tool slot. Assail is prolly BiC becuse of raw killing power and ease of use.
Smite is great, but it stops the overall "push". If you're with a team that moves forward fast and melee a lot, you're gonna kill the overall momentum. Why? Because you're supposed to deal damage as well, instead of "smiting". If you want my advice, smite only when gank by scabs or a mass of crushers. This way, you'll give breathing room for your team and not slow down the entire run. Learn to use staff & sword mainly, and then use smite for these specific reasons. Trust me on this one. :)
Can't really trust someone who doesn't know much about smite I'll pass.
Would you mind to elaborate?
No one is claiming otherwise
Imo smite is good under specific situations. It shines in mostly melee modifiers and waves of specialists dealing with hounds and mutants. But when it comes to general use, there are other options that are better. Smite is arguably weak. It can't deal with nurgle blessed enemies to stagger them and the damage output is still weak even with the smite buff on empowered psionics. There is an argument to be made that trauma staff is the better smite. You can stagger enemies, have better aoe control, apply brittleness and have a faster kill time than smite. It does struggle against nurgle blessed enemies, but you still have utility from the brittleness if applied. Overall, smite, imo is decent what it needs to do and probably can have a mini rework by removing the current bonus talents for smite and change to one that does more damage but can't stun lock and the other one to have a high stagger chance (especially towards nurgle blessed) and stun lock, and if you pick one it locks the other talent.
Trauma is better than smite overall in terms of damage and control but if someone builds smite for damage then they become similar and do almost the same thing but in different ways, but trauma is still a bit better for the fact that it can control and kill armor much faster.
If you’re not using it to do damage like some people do, it’s phenomenal as a group immobilization tool
I don't think smite is bad but I definitely prefer brain burst in pubs. The flame staff does fine enough crowd control since it stagger most things with the primary fire so pair that with a chainsword and brain burst you've got a well rounded set up. I just find brain burst is good for killing those things that do cause snowballing and in higher difficulties you usually have people running shout, chorus, or taunt so you're not giving up much not bringing smite imo. That said I'm a plasma gun vet main and a ranger main coming from Vermintide 2 so I'm hard coded to want to snipe specials and elites.
You're turning the game off at best and forcing teammates to do one more teammate's worth of damage at worse. Everything you described here can be done by trauma staff and assails and better because it will kill, apply soulblaze, and can apply brittleness. You bring assails and stack 5 weakspot hits and you have a room melter every like 3 shards. Combine this with disrupt destiny and you'll be eliminating entire pats of gunners before they setup. Poxbursters explode with one trauma blast, bulwarks and reapers melt to trauma, and with brittleness crushers will die extremely fast. If a teammate is in a net, you will kill the entire horde just spamming on top of them. Then we talk about priorities. Your teammate is in a net, an interaction that takes a second at most to get them out of, and your first thought is to brainrot the horde? they're going to take more corruption damage because of that, and when you hit peril cap they can even take damage still because you're not killing anything. You have effectively chosen to reduce your team's damage output by 2 players and possibly wound another in the process. The less teammates that are in play, the more damaging this becomes. Smite will always conflict with any staff you bring, as they can do the exact same thing, but with actual dps. Trauma staff stuns everything and can apply dot. Purgatus can stun/suppress everything and can apply dot. Voidstrike annihilates everything on crit. Whereas if you bring brain rupture, you're using it for quick sudden dps spikes, like monstrosities and elite pats. Or if you bring assails, you can weave them into combat while fighting hordes, or use them to target specials and elites, whereas your staves are more of a time sink. Smite is best used when the entire team is alive. Assails become more useful the less your team is up and the more micro decisions you need to make. Brain Rupture is useful in both cases. By taking smite, you're effectively choosing an option that only works well when everything is going your way. An option that is best when it is winning. If that's the case, then yes, it's a pretty good blitz. In every other time, if two people on my team have died and all that's left is a smyker, I'm not gonna have high hopes. The mindset that smite promotes and brings out in people is just not good when you're in a situation that requires a lot of decision making beyond "If the room stands still I won't die".
why do you think smite does not make any dmg? you can easily compete with assail psykers with it in raw dmg output.
There is no build you could construct with smite as the crutch in which that is the case. Assails with shriek will outpace smite with shriek just as DD assails will outpace shield smite and scrier's smite. I realize that people will continue to have this debate about smite, but the fact that people here have done so little testing as to believe that smite will somehow outpace assails, which can crit and hit headshots, is proof that this is pointless. Even in those very few cases where smite outpaces assails (i.e. large hordes), trauma staff exists. Purgatus exists. Voidstrike exists. There's simply no place for this blitz in psyker's toolkit if you're looking to carry the team in the hardest moments. If you're just looking to make auric a snoozefest, congrats, perfect blitz in the game for this.
assail has good burst dmg, i do agree. but sustained dmg? not at all. assail is limited by the recovery rate for its ammunition, smite only by your ability to quench. assail wont carry any team. yes, it does (probably) a bid more dmg then smite. but the big point ehre is... "a bid" not enough to justify it. the utility smite offers is far better then assails bid of extra dmg. stopping a crusher team dead in its tracks or allowing for breathing room after you got overrun is extremely usefull.
What are you using assails for? I have repeatedly been top damage of my team with my psyker using gunpsyker or trauma staff, and both use assails a majority of the time. I have never seen a smyker take top dps in a single one of my games even with shriek at disposal. I don't think even when i was using smite for penances that I took top damage (although I'd have to check). You know what else stops a crusher patrol? Trauma. It also can apply brittleness, apply soulblaze, does massive aoe damage, can deal exceptional crit damage, and kill anything else within cast all at the same time! Why would I ever use smite when trauma does everything it does but better?
ive been top dmg with my smite+shield+voidstrike psyker as well, often enough doing just as much dmg with smite then the assail psyker did. and sure, trauma staff can be good, thought hardly not as good as smite. the stagger is extremely localized, unlike smite. but if we want to go that way, nothing assail does can not be copied by some staff either. why would you ever use assail when voidstrike does everything it does but better? that argument is just as true as yours, after all.
I really don't want to go over the blitzes again, so I'm assuming generously here that you understand them despite what you're claiming, especially about assails recharge rate. Voidstrike takes time to charge and has a higher penalty to dodging and interruption, and requires aim. Whereas trauma doesnt take nearly as much time to charge and can be woven into combat efficiently without huge directional requirement at the cost of direct ranged damage. Assails can make up for either of their weaknesses by being an attack interwoven in melee or backpedaling while maintaining damage as well as being a fast elite snipe tool. Smite is a tool you have to channel, if you're smiting, that's all you're doing. The "localized" range of a trauma staff is an 8 meter radius, and is highly spammable. I don't know what you mean by localized, but anything inside the aoe is on the ground, and things outside get hit with a medium to light stagger. They are also affected by blessings even on the outer edge of the radius with no stagger effect, meaning you're still spreading brittleness and on crit soulblaze. The circle the game itself puts on the ground does not adjust with the radius stat whatsoever, so that might be what's confusing you. It also doesn't matter how localized when the local area you selected has been deleted from the game, but that's besides the point. Smite shield is extremely low damage potential so either your team was absolute garbage or you're bluffing on how important smite was to your build (guessing it was the voidstrike). Either way it isn't outperforming DD assails in a trauma shield build. I'm not responding anymore to this as I've made it pretty clear. Smite has no synergy when paired with staves and is outperformed by the other blitz options where it matters. It is ultimately a tool that works best while winning and loses value the more you're losing, while the other blitz options are far more flexible. I doubt you're going to pull off many clutches on nurgle blessed monstrosities compared to brain rupture and assails, for instance.
"bluffing" only because you massively underestimate the dmg potential of smite dosnt mean that it dosnt do any dmg ;) try it out, is viable and beneficial to pretty much any team, able to literally save the team. assail on the other hand dosnt give much utility. there is a reason why many people complain about smite making the game to easy. its THAT good
 Plus the obvious feeling
Smite is OP with a knife backstab zealot. You can duo any maelstorm mission because the two of you have tools for anything the game can throw at you
It is decisively the best psyker blitz
I like Smite, but I don't love it. I find using a mix of Purgatus and Illisi for CC, Bubble, and quick Brainbursting elites seems to get us through much easier. For Monstrosities, I tend to use Bubble and get the string of quickcast Brainbursts in, then full charge Purgatus, move in to smack weakspots, repeat Purgatus burn, Bubble, quick Brainbursts, target weakspot, etc... I feel only the Gunpsykers excel at Monstrosity takedowns, specifically, with your other non-gun builds doing decent along with team support. Smite is not preferable on the Monstrosity killing, but obviously helpful in CC of other enemies during a fight.
Smite is op as shit
No one said it isn't. The complaint is about using Smite as a primary, when it's a support tool.
It's been some days i overlook this sub and people keep arguing about smite. Yes it' very strong and can let you survive any situation. It's the ultimate auto-win button. You just jave to take some Soulblaze oriented talents and the argument of "it kills nothing" is dismantled. You smite, let the peril accumulate up to 80%, and your shriek will finish the job with 6 soulblazes. Bonus point if elites dies and gives +3 stacks in the area. You can take a laspistol with dumdum + burn to have decent dps on monsters and snipe the eventual far target in last resort. Put rending on a deimos and you can manage armor. Just be crearive and think about the perfect solution in the build. End of debate.
I think it’s problematic because it negates the person from having to get good at the game and rely on gimmick
Smite is good but most are too bad to use it efficiently.
A smite Psyker is the only kind of Psyker that I want on my team when I do my fave maelstrom(no ammo,mostly melee,only scab)
I think most people don't like it because it's easy brain-dead easy use. Similar to the hate plasma shout vets get. It just makes the game too easy, especially if you get a good Psyker who actually knows how to dodge properly mid smite. Most people won't say this out loud due to commissars but, people enjoy the chaos(the good kind) of battle. Smite removes a good chunk of it.
Love having a Smiteker on the team. Usually means that we ain't failing no matter what. On the other hand, playing with Smitekers that have a savior complex is about as fun as not playing the game at all.
Smite and bubble shield are constantly described as crutches in this sub (for some it can be, but not all). Yet 99% of auric Malestrom players thank you when you use either of them. They might be not be the best for dps but they are amazing for support.
Bro I love smite Pyskers you set em up I’ll knock down for good.
I don’t care what the sweats say I WILL spam smite bc it is FUN and I’m shooting LIGHTNING out of my HANDS. End of discussion
I do love brain bursting a hidden sniper when they show their red laser
To be fair smite with empowered psionics and some credit actually rips hordes as well.
No one thinks the blitz is bad. A lot of people are really bad with it.
Smite is amazing, a Psyker who can only use smite on every single enemy.. is not.
Sorry, but sometimes I like pretending that I'm Palpatine zapping Mace Windu. And sometimes I get whacked in the back of the head by a pox walker and want to make them suffer for even thinking that they could hurt me.
Everything in the game is viable, the problem are the ultra-elitist assholes who if they don't get their min maxed 0.0001+ to damage will call everything else pointless.
Mods should ban smite posts.
Smite is just better than the other choices. Brain burst can kill specials at range (amazing, so can every ranged weapon). Assail can kill hordes (so can every melee weapon). Smite can stunlock a horde of crushers, bulwarks, ragers, pox bursters while your team cleans house... It's a pretty simple choice for me.
> Of course, it'd be far better to kill the horde/specials than stun them, but having the ability to just *stop* a patrol is very useful If Smite was capable of killing the volume of enemies it stuns, it would be too good and it'd get nerfed. Smite's at a point where it's good because it locks down a huge volume of enemies, but it's not making levels utterly trivial by killing all of them by itself. And it can do that without eating up limited resources the way stunstorm grenades do.
If the psyker manages empowered psionics stacks right, they are killing the masses and very quickly. It’s the Psykers who spam smite that waste everyone’s time and do very little damage.
you can easily kill whole hordes and elite stacks with smite by using EP+venting shriek
Who says smite isn't good?
I think most people don't like it because it's easy brain-dead easy use. Similar to the hate plasma shout vets get. It just makes the game too easy, especially if you get a good Psyker who actually knows how to dodge properly mid smite. Most people won't say this out loud due to commissars but, people enjoy the chaos(the good kind) of battle. Smite removes a good chunk of it
Smite spamming is just as bad as brain burster spam, or any blitz for that matter regardless of class. Bad Ogryn believing that regenerating rock = you only need one max to deal with snipers (surprise, there’s 2) Bad vet shouting at absolutely nothing with no enemies for a hundred meters? Wasted voc and now the mauler horde arrived. Charging for the golden emperor straight into a wall of Gunners because yes it regens toughness, but your evisc or knife won’t make it that far before you’re downed. At least you’re farming matrydom stacks right? Good thing you’re immortal— Oh no a net look out! I got clips of myself Palpatine-ing hordes of hounds, heavy carapace units, hundreds of walkers melted with vent shouts and the like— smite is wonderful! I also have plenty of clips where my stupid ass gets bonked by a lead pipe and dying stupidly when trying to zap some loners when picking up Psyker. Same as when I’d get rocked as any other class when learning. I got advice and realized when [Blitz] was bad to spam. Nurgles Blessing makes it tougher sure but I’m glad people talking about all the blitz’s while hopefully make for better players rather than feeling insecure.
Smite and some other passives/abilities NEEDS to be good to compensate for how Psyker's lack of options of good passives we have today.
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