The original class was designed to showcase the melee gameplay and provide a familiar home for our Vermintide veterans. There are options to deploy multiple shields, to have specials stagger when trying to pass through, and options to exchange the wall for a dome. The modifier layer allows heavy customization too. It can be played purely defensively, as part of a push, or more tactically to ensure objective completion. It’s a simple concept: place a flat shield that blocks enemy shots but lets yours and your allies' shots pass. Perhaps the biggest news with the biggest impact on the whole game loop is found in the Shield ability available in the Psyker talent tree. There are modifiers that allow you to lessen the limitations that come with the ammo loop, but at its core, they work best as a burst of extra damage. Warp-infused homing missiles that will track and pick targets based on what you're looking at, have a self-regenerating ammo cap built in. For the last Blitz, we did implement an ammo loop in the end. A chain lightning that allows the Psyker to stunlock large populations of enemies, holding them in place and pushing them around at will. The new Smite blitz is our crowd control one. We have added two new ones, one for crowd control and one for those easily mesmerized by the twirly spectacle that is our true flight projectiles. On the Blitz side, we have the old Brain Burst, mainly intact with some balance adjustments and fine-tune improvements. Enforcing a layout that encourages this and invites exploration and customization rather than straightforward progression was the initial goal. The shared resource between weapons and blitzes tie everything together, and since there’s plenty of talents that scale and interact with Perils, it makes build choices for the Psyker a bit more involved and interesting. The new Psyker talent tree was envisioned as the most tinker-friendly. A true mastery of the warp, walking a fine balance between suffering its perils and unleashing its powers. The design was all about enabling the use of force powers and the interplay with managing your Peril meter. The ultimate single-target remover of problems, disregarding armor, line of sight, or anything else standing in the way of a kill. The Brain Burst blitz encapsulated the design principle of pushing Psyker utility towards the extremes of our design space. Mechanically, the release version of our Psyker leaned on controlling the overcharge mechanic of Perils by providing dynamic buffs and abilities granting better management. Creating a well-rounded or very specific build for your Veteran is up to you, with clear and straightforward build options available and lots of tinkering hidden in the talent clusters and bridges between lanes. The staple features of ammo management and extra grenades are still present and are integrated into parts of the tree. There are clear tinkering spaces where talent options and stat nodes enable builds ranging from pure ranged damage output, suppression immunity, and resilience, melee loadouts with stamina configurations, and plenty of others in between. We have tuned the tree to allow for flexibility, where zig-zagging across the different lanes is not just an option but encouraged. We've ended up with a Veteran talent tree that provides a suitably rigid layout with three clear lanes. In the end, any weapon-specific node ends up either offsetting the entire balance of the particular weapon or becoming a mandatory talent tax. After multiple iterations and some closed testing feedback, we ended up removing the weapon-specific keystones. The idea was to create specific bonuses for different playstyles while introducing mutual exclusivity between them. Initial designs for the Veteran talent tree included weapon-specific Keystones, with the plasma rifle, bolter, and power sword as the first set. On what started to be known as the ‘commando’ side of things, ambushing and smoke grenades were added to allow the players to get stuck in and disrupt the ranged enemy domination. We also wanted to allow Veterans to lean into the more aggressive, close to melee range, assault infantry power fantasies. There were early prototypes of a squad leader subclass based on the original release format lying around, so scavenging some abilities and the odd Krak grenade implementation was a solid start. We wanted to expand the build space into more support roles, using the leadership and officers of the Astra Militarum as inspiration. Equipped with a frag grenade, it allowed for a ranged focus playstyle that could circumvent challenges by simply headshotting efficiently. When we first released Darktide, we wanted to provide a solid template background striving to capture the core of the guardsman experience, encompassed by the Veteran Sharpshooter.
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