Upper Ends of the Psyker Gift

By venkelos, in Only War Beta

What's the upper limit to the psykers in OW? For being low-power, DH gets you to 5 or 6, depending on choices, and Ascension lets you fly up to 14, or so, which is ridiculous. DW hits 10, I believe, and RT lands around 8, though that might be more to boost communication range, when they didn't have the Choir rules in Core RT. Barring incident and injury, how powerful can the Psyker in OW become? I didn't get the beta, so I can't just look. I remember, along with the system, many people complained how high the Psy Rating could get, and then making the powers outstrip the other party members. Assuming OW uses one of the later, more tested and balanced power and manifestation systems, how strong are they willing to let your Psyker become, before they cap him off for shenanigans-balance?

Goes to PR10. Of course there are no limits on powers known if I recall.

Goes up to Psy Rating 10, with each advance costing PR x200. However, that would cost a few thousand xp to get to that cap; it makes more sense to get to PR 4 or 5 and then invest in some psychic Talents, extra powers, or non-psyker stuff.

I agree with plushy. I have a psyker in my game right now. He went up to psy rating 5 because when you use a power at fettered it's half psy rating rounded up. So when playing it safe psy rating 5 and 6 are equal, and if you really need the extra power you can always push.

Trying to raise your psy rating past 5 starts to get prohibitively espensive and you start going multiple sessions without spending any xp and your character ends up being terrible at anything that isn't melting someone's face. Not to mention the OW powers are all strictly direct damage or combat buffs. If you're using OW rules to run a DH/RT style game they are much more limited because you can't do all the crazy utility stuff that regular DH/RT have.

So theoretically a psycher could end up being the strongest character in the game at high enough xp levels but if you focus on it too much you'll simply be 1 or 2 shot against high powered enemies because you lack wounds, toughness, dodge, etc.

That all sounds pretty good. I was hoping that the Psyker wouldn't be a total casualty of "Wizard Syndrome", where they either die way to easily, or throw around "simple" stuff that makes every other character feel useless. Based on this stuff, the Psyker sounds like it will be an interesting, fun character to later play, and maybe even one where the people won't write 50+ threads saying how broken they are.

Now, if the game could just get a release dateā€¦ :)