What Pyromancer skills are actually good?

[Caridor]

So I made a pyromancer and I'm level 30 and I've gone into being a pure soldier with a heavy bolter. The only pyromancer talents I've picked up is the one that boosts crit chance when you hurt something and the one that melts armour on hit.

Burning just seems so pointless when you have a 16 shot burst, 150 ballistics skill and crit for 30 damage or more. Even if I threw myself into the pyromancer, I can't see where the damage comes from. Spreading the fire seems more trouble than it's worth to deal, what 40 damage on a crit at the end of a turn?

[reevestone]

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If you're running psyker isn't it better to run vanguard instead of arch militant? Can build up a lot of resolve through that archetype. Way more than anything else. And a lot more defense. Plus better if you want to utilize Sword of Faith, but that's rather situational.

For "Burning Man" Melee Psyker, Arch-Militant *was* (not quite as much now) the way to go if you absolutely, completely, 100% wanted to maximize damage and just evaporate anything you'd ever touch. Though I always thought Vanguard was the more balanced and safer option, since even with them the Melee Pyro has one of the highest damage potentials of any build in the game, while simultaneously being essentially impossible to kill. But Arch-Militant is an option for people that prefer to sacrifice a lot of survivability and Resolve to get damage numbers as high as possible.

[Razer]

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If you're running psyker isn't it better to run vanguard instead of arch militant? Can build up a lot of resolve through that archetype. Way more than anything else. And a lot more defense. Plus better if you want to utilize Sword of Faith, but that's rather situational.

For "Burning Man" Melee Psyker, Arch-Militant *was* (not quite as much now) the way to go if you absolutely, completely, 100% wanted to maximize damage and just evaporate anything you'd ever touch. Though I always thought Vanguard was the more balanced and safer option, since even with them the Melee Pyro has one of the highest damage potentials of any build in the game, while simultaneously being essentially impossible to kill. But Arch-Militant is an option for people that prefer to sacrifice a lot of survivability and Resolve to get damage numbers as high as possible.

How high are we talking about?

[reevestone]

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How high are we talking about?

I don't remember any more, most of my experimentation with this was back near release. So this involved Arch-Militant before Wildfire and Reckless Rush were nerfed, before Seize the Initiative was nerfed, before Bring It Down! was nerfed, before Finest Hour was nerfed, before Reveal The Light was nerfed, when No Respite was bugged and would skyrocket your stats, etc., but you could end up hitting for around 10k damage total per hit between your base hit and the two fire pings afterward. Though you'd rarely spin up to that potential because you'd kill everything in the fire before that happened.

Those days are gone now, and along with the specific targeted nerfs to Arch-Militant most of the ancillary nerfs to the action-economy will have hit the Arch-Militant build more than Vanguard since they make it harder to spin up the Arch-Militant on Turn 0/1 and more likely that tanking is actually relevant since some enemies will actually get to act. And as said, shooting for those damage numbers was honestly gross overkill anyway, Melee Pyro Vanguard's damage potential was/is still so insanely high as to (at least back at release, but I don't think it will have fundamentally changed much) be able to brute force through every enemy and boss in the game Turn 1 without issue.

Though talking about this does make me want to start another run in this post-1.2 world and run Melee Pyro again. I've always had a real soft-spot for Pyro Psykers, but the blaster-caster Pyro ended up being so weak on release that my first run on release was a Melee Pyro since that was the only Pyro build that worked, initially as a Vanguard then trying Arch-Militant. I just finished revisiting Pyro, but as a Soldier blaster-caster throwing Molten Beam at everything to try out the buffs.

[Razer]

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How high are we talking about?

I don't remember any more, most of my experimentation with this was back near release. So this involved Arch-Militant before Wildfire and Reckless Rush were nerfed, before Seize the Initiative was nerfed, before Bring It Down! was nerfed, before Finest Hour was nerfed, before Reveal The Light was nerfed, when No Respite was bugged and would skyrocket your stats, etc., but you could end up hitting for around 10k damage total per hit between your base hit and the two fire pings afterward. Though you'd rarely spin up to that potential because you'd kill everything in the fire before that happened.

Those days are gone now, and along with the specific targeted nerfs to Arch-Militant most of the ancillary nerfs to the action-economy will have hit the Arch-Militant build more than Vanguard since they make it harder to spin up the Arch-Militant on Turn 0/1 and more likely that tanking is actually relevant since some enemies will actually get to act. And as said, shooting for those damage numbers was honestly gross overkill anyway, Melee Pyro Vanguard's damage potential was/is still so insanely high as to (at least back at release, but I don't think it will have fundamentally changed much) be able to brute force through every enemy and boss in the game Turn 1 without issue.

Though talking about this does make me want to start another run in this post-1.2 world and run Melee Pyro again. I've always had a real soft-spot for Pyro Psykers, but the blaster-caster Pyro ended up being so weak on release that my first run on release was a Melee Pyro since that was the only Pyro build that worked, initially as a Vanguard then trying Arch-Militant. I just finished revisiting Pyro, but as a Soldier blaster-caster throwing Molten Beam at everything to try out the buffs.

You can oneshot enemies with 100-200 damage per hit. Those numbers you're mentioning are completely busted. I wouldn't even call that a nerf, but more of a fix. In my opinion though Officer needs to be nerfed to the ground. Free turns are too overpowered. All the stacking of power is far too easy. You can make yourself completely invulnerable while oneshotting bosses. Not sure how that is fun beyond the first time you see it. The game is far too easy already. In my own playthrough on daring most combat was over in 1 round with enemies hardly able to act at all.

[Pixie1001]

Yeah, I've come back to the game recently to finish it after waiting for Act 4 to be patched, and realised I kinda miss act 1 combat.

Making a build that killed everyone during turn one was fun, but combat feels hollow now. I look through the talents, see a bunch of cool synergies and concepts, and realised that 90% of them are useless, because if I can't kill every enemy by the end of round 1, the enemy probably has such high stats that I've lost the fight.

Any kind of long term planning or build up that can't be artificially created using Officers is meaningless, and the enemy stats are so bloated that fixing that design would take a total overhaul of every encounter in the game, and stripping the levels down to like 15-20 max to control the ridiculous power creep.

So sadly Pyro dot damage builds will just never be viable, because the end game fights aren't really designed to drag on for multiple rounds.

[reevestone]

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You can oneshot enemies with 100-200 damage per hit. Those numbers you're mentioning are completely busted. I wouldn't even call that a nerf, but more of a fix. In my opinion though Officer needs to be nerfed to the ground. Free turns are too overpowered. All the stacking of power is far too easy. You can make yourself completely invulnerable while oneshotting bosses. Not sure how that is fun beyond the first time you see it. The game is far too easy already. In my own playthrough on daring most combat was over in 1 round with enemies hardly able to act at all.

Perhaps I wasn't clear, I wasn't giving value judgments. The numbers were completely busted. The game was completely busted. There were two dozen different ways to annihilate every encounter in the game on Unfair on Turn 0, not even Turn 1 (since Seize the Initiative used to let you act before Turn 1). You sound as though you're thinking "nerf = bad lowering of effectiveness" and "fix = good lowering of effectiveness". That's not what I meant, I tried to be very precise. No Respite was actually bugged and didn't work as it said it should, it gave you spiraling high stats completely disproportionate to what the talent said it should do, hence why I said it was fixed when it was made to have its effect correspond to its description. Bring It Down, Finest Hour, Wildfire and Reckless Rush, among some others, worked exactly as described, they were just in various ways wildly overtuned and completely warped combat beyond all recognition, thus their effect was changed in some way or another and their effect was lowered, which is why I say they were nerfed.

I mean, this is kind of a side tangent from the discussion on Melee Pyro, but I am not endorsing the release-day balance, it was absolutely atrocious and not fun. I mean that very literally, it made it basically impossible to have fun with the game when you couldn't engage with its systems because, if you knew the systems and made effective builds, the system would completely break down before Act 1 was over and the enemies would never stand the slightest ghost of a chance. To even try to have fun with the game I had to create self-imposed limitations like No Officers and completely avoid several busted builds. If you just picked completely random Navigator Talents on Cassia she would be soloing all encounters before the end of Act 1. The most powerful party in the entire game was five merc Officers supporting a Sanctic Psyker Officer, who'd be spamming out 10K+ damage repeatedly on Turn 0 in an AOE. The nerfs and fixes, or just fixes if you prefer, have been pretty universally sensible and have gotten the game balance in an indescribably saner state than the release version.

Even now after 1.2, if you build optimally then even Unfair is very easy by CRPG standards, but at least we're getting there. Not every single fight gets wiped in Turn 1, enemies sometimes get to act, some fights like the Act 3 final boss require at least a modicum of setup and thinking. But we are in a much better place than we used to be.

[Razer]

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You can oneshot enemies with 100-200 damage per hit. Those numbers you're mentioning are completely busted. I wouldn't even call that a nerf, but more of a fix. In my opinion though Officer needs to be nerfed to the ground. Free turns are too overpowered. All the stacking of power is far too easy. You can make yourself completely invulnerable while oneshotting bosses. Not sure how that is fun beyond the first time you see it. The game is far too easy already. In my own playthrough on daring most combat was over in 1 round with enemies hardly able to act at all.

Perhaps I wasn't clear, I wasn't giving value judgments. The numbers were completely busted. The game was completely busted. There were two dozen different ways to annihilate every encounter in the game on Unfair on Turn 0, not even Turn 1 (since Seize the Initiative used to let you act before Turn 1). You sound as though you're thinking "nerf = bad lowering of effectiveness" and "fix = good lowering of effectiveness". That's not what I meant, I tried to be very precise. No Respite was actually bugged and didn't work as it said it should, it gave you spiraling high stats completely disproportionate to what the talent said it should do, hence why I said it was fixed when it was made to have its effect correspond to its description. Bring It Down, Finest Hour, Wildfire and Reckless Rush, among some others, worked exactly as described, they were just in various ways wildly overtuned and completely warped combat beyond all recognition, thus their effect was changed in some way or another and their effect was lowered, which is why I say they were nerfed.

I mean, this is kind of a side tangent from the discussion on Melee Pyro, but I am not endorsing the release-day balance, it was absolutely atrocious and not fun. I mean that very literally, it made it basically impossible to have fun with the game when you couldn't engage with its systems because, if you knew the systems and made effective builds, the system would completely break down before Act 1 was over and the enemies would never stand the slightest ghost of a chance. To even try to have fun with the game I had to create self-imposed limitations like No Officers and completely avoid several busted builds. If you just picked completely random Navigator Talents on Cassia she would be soloing all encounters before the end of Act 1. The most powerful party in the entire game was five merc Officers supporting a Sanctic Psyker Officer, who'd be spamming out 10K+ damage repeatedly on Turn 0 in an AOE. The nerfs and fixes, or just fixes if you prefer, have been pretty universally sensible and have gotten the game balance in an indescribably saner state than the release version.

Even now after 1.2, if you build optimally then even Unfair is very easy by CRPG standards, but at least we're getting there. Not every single fight gets wiped in Turn 1, enemies sometimes get to act, some fights like the Act 3 final boss require at least a modicum of setup and thinking. But we are in a much better place than we used to be.

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not disagreeing with you or saying what you said was bad. Just confirming that the original way the game worked doesn't sound fun at all. Even right now most fights don't last longer than a single round. It's for that exact reason among others that DoTs are very ineffective. There's this talent that gives poison on psyker attacks to enemies. It's completely useless because you want to/can kill enemies in one hit most of the time. So it'd be ok for boss battles, but then not even because the damage is so small it's overshadowed by everything else. Boss battles are maybe 2-4 turns depending. So they would take what... 50 damage per turn on a 6K HP pool? That's a complete waste of a talent imo.

Highest damage for a single hit I've seen is 1K on my melee psyker by end game. I'm playing for the first time so it's likely not optimal build. But I thought it was already pretty crazy.

[Giant Space Hamster]

Warrior/Arch-Militant melee self-immolation pyro is pretty fun. Duel-wield with double-slash to maximize the bonus fire damage. Forge world with the armor buff and the fire resistance talent helps a lot. With ultimates or whatever they're called you run around a massive area killing everything.

[Echoside7]

I've had quite a bit of fun playing a Debuff DoT Pyro/Biomancer Forge-world Dogmatic Operative/Assassin Sniper.

I use Analytics System, Blazing Inferno, Sparks of a Greater Flame, Melting Armor, and Biophysical Distortion. So in combat I apply Burn/Toxic DoT, it melts armor every turn, and both my Burn/Toxic DoTs are capable of crit'ing. Makes my PC very good at dealing with big bads, add in Firestorm and Enflame... And well the map melts.

Then from the Assassin's abilities like Deadly Calculation, Disarray, Imminent Demise, and Death Whisper. I get nice things like Vulnerable(Damage UP), Slow, Hemorrhage(More DoT), and Direct damage. Not to mention my PC is a skill monkey thanks to high INT and Calculated Relations, giving me a total of 9 out 13 skills as INT based skills.

Like any good Loyalist, I make the enemies of Man regret their life choices by making them die very painfully.

[Revan619]

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For "Burning Man" Melee Psyker, Arch-Militant *was* (not quite as much now) the way to go if you absolutely, completely, 100% wanted to maximize damage and just evaporate anything you'd ever touch. Though I always thought Vanguard was the more balanced and safer option, since even with them the Melee Pyro has one of the highest damage potentials of any build in the game, while simultaneously being essentially impossible to kill. But Arch-Militant is an option for people that prefer to sacrifice a lot of survivability and Resolve to get damage numbers as high as possible.

How high are we talking about?

It is already doing up to 140 damage a swing from level 23 with full buffs. (Around 60 without). Vanguard from what ive seen people say is objectively the worst class in the game. Arch-Militant just snow balls and evaporates everything from trash to bosses so far. I also avoid everything and my hp with buffs is ahead of all my allies. Currently none of the NPCs can carry as hard or survive as well.

Doing a test encounter that I linked in the post below at level 23 I could do 913 damage in a single turn. Killing all the trash and boss in the process.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RogueTraderCRPG/comments/1eosk1j/melee_psyker_pyromancer_for_12/

Done a little write up so others can look, give feedback or copy. But yeah you are dodging tanking everything as well as one tapping everything with having multiple attacks per round from all ranges. So pretty happy with it so far.

[Razer]

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How high are we talking about?

It is already doing up to 140 damage a swing from level 23 with full buffs. (Around 60 without). Vanguard from what ive seen people say is objectively the worst class in the game. Arch-Militant just snow balls and evaporates everything from trash to bosses so far. I also avoid everything and my hp with buffs is ahead of all my allies. Currently none of the NPCs can carry as hard or survive as well.

Doing a test encounter that I linked in the post below at level 23 I could do 913 damage in a single turn. Killing all the trash and boss in the process.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RogueTraderCRPG/comments/1eosk1j/melee_psyker_pyromancer_for_12/

Done a little write up so others can look, give feedback or copy. But yeah you are dodging tanking everything as well as one tapping everything with having multiple attacks per round from all ranges. So pretty happy with it so far.

Depends on your class/origin etc. Vanguard with Sanctic Psyker can get OP very very quickly. It's why I switched from Warrior/Arch militant to Warrior/Vanguard. Much tankier and a lot more versatility plus a lot more damage. The increase in Resolve just mkaes a huge difference. Faster ramp up for Sword of Faith which has infinite damage scaling. Late game was able to output 1K damage per hit. Can focus on nearly all offensive talents while being totally unkillable.

I think my Vanguard was doing more damage than your arch militant at that level.

[Revan619]

Vanguard doing 900 damage at level 23? Would be curious to see your build o,o

[Razer]

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Vanguard doing 900 damage at level 23? Would be curious to see your build o,o

Not at level 23. I said it dealt more damage than what you gave as numbers. But that was due to being a psyker in combination with being a vanguard more than anything else though. Psykers are very good with Vanguard class.

[Revan619]

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Vanguard doing 900 damage at level 23? Would be curious to see your build o,o

Not at level 23. I said it dealt more damage than what you gave as numbers. But that was due to being a psyker in combination with being a vanguard more than anything else though. Psykers are very good with Vanguard class.

My numbers said 140 per swing thanks to arch-militant, support and pyromancy and you can make 3 attacks fairly easy with bonus ones then on top of that from allies. With AoE procs as per my link you can quite easy turn 1 do 900+ damage. That was why I was curious when you said somehow vanguard is doing more

[Razer]

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Not at level 23. I said it dealt more damage than what you gave as numbers. But that was due to being a psyker in combination with being a vanguard more than anything else though. Psykers are very good with Vanguard class.

My numbers said 140 per swing thanks to arch-militant, support and pyromancy and you can make 3 attacks fairly easy with bonus ones then on top of that from allies. With AoE procs as per my link you can quite easy turn 1 do 900+ damage. That was why I was curious when you said somehow vanguard is doing more

A Psyker Vanguard will out dps an arch militant variant much quicker while also being able to absorb damage. It's superior in every way. Not sure about non psyker. To be honest I don't like the juggle the arch militant stacks to get damage up. In my heretic run I'm going with a crimelord background and going warrior/arch-militant. We'll see how that goes when I get back to it. At any rate, psyker is OP. Give everyone resolve, deflection and massive flat damage boosts. By the end of the game I was able to give over 125 flat damage boost to entire party.