The fact that this staff can stun CC a whole platoon of enemies hidding behind cover without having to directly target, therefore preventing them from firing upon your squad, makes this staff a beautiful mitigator of damage.
I can never decide between this staff and the voidstrike staff, love both of them so much. I love it because everyone always thinks damage, but with the new elite patrol changes and there's 5 bulwarks with other elites headed to you, it's really nice to have so much CC regardless of armor/position of the enemy, yes you sacrifice some horde clear, but a single player, a zealot or ogryn should be able to hold the entire horde back if they are semi decent, so I think the tradeoff is quite fair.
Man, I appreciate your use of the scientific method, and such a thorough review of these weapons. I wish I was as ambitious as you in testing these things!
I will never use the surge. Do not mistake what I say. I will never use it. I do love the staff but itdoes not always target behind cover. And IT sort of stuns enemies. IT is great to stun but it does not do much to really give you breathing room. I use the purgatus. I can knock back. I can also do DOT. I can spew fire and look around, targeting nearly a full circle around me. I do not need to worry about having to charge my staff. IF, and I do emphasize IF I have time to charge my staff. I can fully charge my purgatus and both stun, and apply DOT. the difference between Purgatus and Surge is just your skill choice. Chain lighting will work kind of Hit or Miss on targets. Sometimes it targets and chains to the closest enemy. sometimes it ignores them and just randomly zoops around. My Purgatus stass will ALWAYS hit what I aim at. Because what I am aiming at, will almost always be the things I actually want to hit. It also does knock back. Meaning I get the same effect of a stamina push, without using stamina. I will also go so far as to say I get more bursts per charge out of my Purgatus than my surge. ALSO, Getting critucal peril and use spesh will work on purgatus. So it actually comes down to how your spec out your psyker. Which I will beg to differ also works on purgatus. The Surge staff is wrongly thought of as Crowd control. It is actually useful for elites and specials. Leave the CC for the Purgatus psyker.
Insane amount of testing + great explaining + referencing Dota = god tier content Really good videos and fun to watch while not playing darktide myself!
Canceling the channel with a weapon swap has a couple upsides. If you aren't going to get use from warp flurry or chose to not have it and want to kill a target rather than stun it you can swap to melee or BB to get the large burst of damage without waiting the entire channel time. If you would kill something with the surge attack and swap cancel to a melee with slaughterer on it you WILL get slaughterer stacks for each kill. A very specific use case: wrack and ruin's 4 stacks can kill flak shooters if you have enough slaughterer or +flak and a small amount of slaughterer and 4 warp charges, this means you can apply wrack and ruin and then use your surge staff to proc slaughterer to have the soulblaze kill shooters if you don't have enemies in melee range.
@@aliceleblanc7713 Maybe they patched it back in but I haven't tested since? I swear there was a patch where I wasn't able to switch to melee during the attack animation.
Fantastic video, thank you for the in depth testing. I haven't don't nearly the level of testing you have here, but my suspicions were similar to your conclusions as to how things are calculated. Your build suggestions are exactly what I had come up with too. I have one staff for melting flak and another that's more generalist... depends what the rest of the team is bringing. Though I've got to say now that I tried out the shredder machine pistol, I've turned to the heretical GunPsyker dark side and haven't looked back. It's just so much more fun and I've found that I can hard carry on my team way more with the shredder setup. That isn't to say surge is bad... it's totally team dependent. A good team with a good player on surge can basically lock down anything dangerous, and quickly take it down.
Great video and informative as always. One minor suggestion on these would be to indicate the dump stat(s) for the weapon type being review. It’s not always obvious (to me anyway) what is an appropriate “base” for a weapon before I start the RNG slots
Mmm - I shall think about this when I do reviews! Usually this is indirectly mentioned in the damage profiles if something can naturally reach a breakpoint or assisted with perks! But of course, there are some stats where a minimum can make the difference (like having a certain % of mobility giving either 4 or 5 dodges) I shall keep this in mind! Thank you for the suggestion!
While this is true most of the time, sometimes you find yourself in situations where you need to keep something still in a disadvantageous position! These are times where focused channeling can really help out - especially if you or your team is caught out by the unexpected!
Yo! Your commitment and attention to detail in doing all the massively time consuming research on this game is truly exceptional! I mostly main a Psyker using Surge staff and this video explained ALOT for me. Your hard work is seriously appreciated man! 🙏
great video! Another cool trick you can do with your lightning psyker is to press and hold the "R" button while sliding. This way you can quell your warp% without losing movement speed.
aaaaaah! so nice to see fair testing and statistics at work. I love numbers! very well done, I'm glad I subbed to your channel. Even though I've played 500+ hours and do tons of testing on my own I still learn something new in almost every video you make. Even if I don't you still bring interesting ideas. I'd love to play with you some time, much love! I also have a question regarding your testing setup, more specifically was there anything in your setup (blessings/feats) that altered your dmg output (apart from the warp charges you already accounted for)? Oh it would also be nice to know if it shares its primary attack dmg profile with the void strike staff :)
Other than the Psyker's passive of +10% Elite damage, no other feats (other than Tranquility) were used and my weapon was a white Surge Staff! As for the Void Strike - I suspect it might be similar to Surge and I wouldn't be surprised if it did. Easiest way to test to use max attacks on the same target and see if the damage is different. If it is then we know it deals damage based on a damage bound!
Super interesting. I am one that loves to know hard numbers and how mechanical systems work in games, so this was super informative. Could you do a purgatus staff next please?
I highly advices against the use of Quicken and Inner Tranq, it is a well thought out bait that grabs a lot of people. By simply staying at 6 warp charges, you gain an extra shot over having 4 warp charges (go from 8 to 9 low charged chained secondary on Surge with flurry IV) After you use your ult you lose all stacks, and peril resistance. 0-100 with 6 warp charges + ult is 9+5 = 14~ chained minimum charge secondary shots 0-100 with 4 warp + quicken is 8+3 = 11~ chained minimum charge secondary shots. (only 2 additional over 6 Warp charges, when you DON'T use ult - notice how many shots you lose when all your warp charges are gone) Once you drain your 4 warp charges you go from 8 shots max down to 6 shots. If you get unlucky with kinetic flayer you get you 2 warp charges back in time to drain them again using quicken and do very little else. Particularly with the buffs to quelling 50% peril is just not anything to get excited about, but loosing 4 warp charges will always suck. The idea that "I can chain warp flurry/Nexus using ult" while tempting is mostly just wrong. As soon as you use it, any following chained shots you lost anything you gained. Going from 0-100 will net you 6 shots (at 0 Warp charge) unless you are FANTASTICALLY lucky with Kinetic Flayer, vs the 9 shots if you had 6 warp charges, so the 3 extra shots you gained previously from your ult have now vanished as soon as you quell the first time. Quicken + Tranq will make you do about 20-30% less staff secondary's on average over extended periods due to the consistent loss in Peril resistance, and the lack of 2 additional charges. btw this gets way worse if you think "Oh I can build the charges back faster/more consistently using brain burst" as that uses ALL of the peril you saved using the ult in the first place Forcing you to manual quell anyway, at which point... there was no point. Currently Quicken only exists for itself... to exist for itself - we use it so we can use it more. It needs to have an ability worth having, or get rid of the penalty (and increased warp charges), and make it a flat 10~ second reduction.
All fair points! But the purpose of the Quicken build is to use it as a saving tool that works through the horde and walls. The pairing with Tranquility is so that if you don't need it to for the 30m knockdown or stagger, you still get the benefit of reduced peril cost for casting. Since this build is focused on CC, the damage boost from Warp Unleashed is not as valuable and Wrack & Ruin is out of the questions as well. So by elimination we arrive at Tranquility anyhow! This build also has Psykinetic's Aura paired with Quicken - which if you start at 4 Warp Charges, will return your Psykinetic's Wrath into only 2 Elite kills with Brain Burst - which puts you back at 4 Warp Charges again which means you can infinitely repeat this loop as long as there are Elites you can one shot (of course this won't happen all the time).
You pretty much came to the same conclusions i did. I test a ton but not 600 times all documented, well done man. I find one of my jobs is to stun lock/kill all the shooters, which are flak or unarmored, so i run +damage versus those as my perks. Cast time blessing and extra crit blessing for the unarmored damage plus the "no interrupt" blessing is pretty worthless for me, i see maybe one interrupt every 3-4 matches, its pretty worthless. They really need more blessings, only having two that matter is not really interesting, but im getting off point. Its insane cc for the overall success of the group is insane. Its a big difference in my experience. Greatly reducing difficulty by means of stopping nearly all disablers, and big damage dealers, shutting down all the shooters, and stunning big targets making them quick easy kills. I run cost reduction feats, and psychic communion to keep 6 stacks at max for more damage and cost reduction pretty consistantly. It fades too much otherwise. I can keep CC up and not have to constantly bb or worry about fighting those crazy vets for targets. You can cast 7 full charge shocks versus only 4 without cost reduction, its a big difference. Not to mention the nutty BB spam you can do. I find the huge peril pool much better than the realistic avg of 15-20% damage. Honestly i usually even do more damage with the cost reduction as i spend far less time quelling. But as you said, depending on what you want to do, or what your group needs, you can tweak it for sure and be fine.
HEY something i noticed about the surge staff is when you get a critical secondary attack your surge staff always creates a electrical effect on itself to insinuate that the staff is also attacking not just your hand which is why threes an increase in damage. all normal attacks don't have this affect its only when there is a critical.
the surge staff only gets 3 blessings at tier 4. I really wish it could get the surge blessing, though I could see that getting OP do to the CC that could do. Thanks for the informative vid.
While I also thought the same, I think if it could roll Surge, it would be... a little too op honestly.. What I wished it could roll was Blazing Spirit! The only Staff with a Crit Stat baked in and it can't get any blessing that work with crit...
When i eat a massive dinner any my brain is at 10% function, i jump into Damnation Shock troop HI with the surge staff. And we clear games no problem. I usally push into enemies ( and cover ) aggressivly as well.
CoughWarpNexusCough - Flurry+Nexus has been working well for me, but I got a good roll. Definitely a support build though, stunlock everything so everyone else can knock heads. A favourite of quiet achievers, not for glory hounds. Smashing vid, thank you! EDIT: Colour me dunce, just learned Harnessing and Nexus are the same thing.
@@rykenxiv My bad, for some reason it's still Nexus for me, but reading I see they changed it to Harnessing. Apologies! The descriptor for Harnessing was a little unclear, I thought they were two separate things.
I have never seen another video series that not only gives it's information clearly, but concisely gives EXACTLY what I want to know, what is important and WHY it is important. Thank you!
I'm a bit on the fence with the surge staff, sometimes it feels useful and other times it feels like hot garbage. I think it's too specialized for its own good. That and it's usefulness is heavily dependant on your team mates and the enemy compositions. The other 3 staffs on the other hand almost always feel useful.
sucks having serge staff with 3 veterans because they dont need you to CC shooters which is one of the surge's strengths. In that scenario its better to have Ascendent blaze for hoard clear, but then if you get matched with a flamer zealot and another psyker you dont need ascendent blaze.
the surge staff is NOT the worst staff in the game. oddly enough it is the closest thing to a support staff, as being around a palpatine will generally guarantee quite a lot of safety when engaging enemies
Technically... neither would be worth using against a horde... that being said, if you want to give some supporting cover while remaining at range, electrocuting nearby enemies is always helpful to keep the pressure of your teammate!
I've found this particular staff to always be situational at best. Great if you have another CC build, either Purgatus or a Flamer Zealot but suffers heavily if you're the sole source of CC on the team which is common on High Intensity Shock with people spamming weapons like the Plasma Gun or Bolter and then failing to bring a consistent CC melee. To mitigate this, I swapped out from the Force Sword for an Axe since consistent headshots with the right blessing removes the limitation of only single target hit and then you can start one tapping entire hordes as long as you can keep chaining headshots. When I did this, suddenly went from almost no damage to consistently top damage on leaderboard in horde clearing and still maintaining elite shutdown.
Flack ragers and gunners/shotgunners aren't elites, they're specialists, right? I think maniac/unyielding/carapace is far better for the first build. Could probably take specialist damage too
Those are considered Elites! Specialist are Snipers, Dogs, Mutants, Trappers, etc... (Reapers, Bulwarks, and Crushers are Elites too) As for your perk recommendations, the reason I don't pick them is because you aren't likely to kill these armour types in a any reasonable amount of time! So, you might as well build it into dealing with Flak (which covers most Elites except for the Dreg Rager which is maniac)
@@rykenxiv Huh, interesting. I always assumed Shotgunners and Ragers specifically where specialists also. I knew about the maulers/Ogryn and Boss enemies were elites, but I didn't know about shotgunners, gunners, and ragers.
Unfortunately not anymore! Update 13 brought with it many unexpected changes to a weapons damage profile and blessing recommendations, but for most weapons, their mechanics remained the same. The Surge staff however, was re-done completely, so this video is no longer relevant! For the other weapon reviews, apart from damage profiles and blessing recommendations, everything else should still be relevant as of now (hidden mechanics and how it works remains untouched)!
this quickly became my favourite to the most hated way to play in about 3 days lol i love the support aspect that this brings, but most of the player base is so incredibly, mind-numbingly stupid, that it’s pointless most of the time on heresy+. a lot of people really like to rush into waves of mixed enemies, one by one, only to to get overwhelmed and die. you’ll hear the sound queues for hordes, pox hounds, mutants, and for some reason, most people will go running off into random directions lol it’s not even like you gotta be sun tzu to play this fucking game, either. just don’t run into the middle of a fucking horde. they shouldn’t even call it, “common sense”, anymore, because that shit isn’t common lol
Not hitscan, so only useful if the enemy is standing absolutely still for you to target the head, lol. Any slight movement, or even just the shooter crouching suddenly, makes you miss the weakpoint. And if I'm not wrong it needs both flak and unarmored perks to get 1-hit headshots on shooters too? I rarely see psykers use primary fire in my games. I use it together with reload-cancel, but only occasionally.
@@zanaros2606 its not hard to land shots tbh, most enemies run a straight line at you. Not to mention, even missed shots provide free ammo-less suppression to enemies with ranged weapons. When there are no elites/specials nearby I'm primary cancel spamming to provide both damage and support.
Yeah it's not hard...but always some miss rate to that crazy primary fire damage. With reload-cancel, good for headshotting charging maniacs and statonary shooters and specials like bombers/net throwers/snipers, or spamming bodyshots on maulers. But at the opportunity cost of using your staff's main powers. At it's current state I think it will always be an uncommonly used niche among psykers. But on the other hand it's also true that not many psykers in t5 games know how to use it. (Without reload-cancel it has horrible rate of fire.)
This staff has plenty of drawbacks though. My friends playing sharpshooter actually HATE when I use this staff because they whine it always staggers the shooters just when they lineup a headshot. It also does horrendously during hordes as it has a limit to how much it can hold with the lightning and the ones not effected will easily run through the shocked units and overwhelm you, making your melee weapon your horde weapon. It also isn't very consistent, enemies caught at the sides of the lightning tend to look like they should be stunned by will charge you through the lightning and get a hit on you anyway.
On last thing, it can't shock enemies fast enough to keep shooters from shooting you. They're often able to get a shot off just before the 2nd shock hits unless you have the charge speed blessing. It also overheats very quickly.
this staff has no value in veteran teams but its good for zealots and ogres. In all honesty against hordes if you actualy want to contribute. Take out a sword and swing not spam lighting.
