Needs a massive boost!

For the most damaging Disciple, its strange that "Assail", the first on the Telekinesis branch, is actually considerably more dangerous.

The entire left side of the branch is HORRID!

The Fiery form Power does NOTHING! Its only for show, on a branch that is supposed all about massive destruction.

Mathias, the Scorcher of Earth, used it to great effect to scare TWO pcs for a couple of rounds, and then sustained it for show, when in reality... there was no real reason to keep it sustained.

It should for all intents and purposes, be the equivalent to the power in DH 1.0 - Ironically, he because he was on FIRE. at the very least, It should give Immunity to fire & melta and LOTs of resistances. An extra TB, Halve damage from Laz, Natural Weapons dealing energy damage- and an aura of fire would all be great instead of +10 to intimidate.

300exp to cauterize blood-loss? I was thinking of having that as a nifty origin ability for a feral worlder. Buying medicae is probably a better idea than taking this particular power.

Flame breath is.... good... it hits the entire team though....

Inferno is good... but again, not nearly as good as, for example, Assail.

And Molten beam is good, but too random. It needs to scale with some sort of minimum damage. 3d5+5 or something.

Combustion is great in theory- but with burning being as it is, its quite weak.

Make this thing a LOT more destructive. A LOT. All of the abilities should have some sort of blast. And Sustained these powers should directly reflect the destructive nature of this disciplines by, instead of hurting the psyker, causing things around to catch fire. He'll think twice about using his powers when the entire-warehouse blows up or collapses onto his heads- but gives him that very good "Firestarter" effect when he's completely pissed off.

Okay, you really are underestimating how powerfull pyromancy is here...

Okay say you Psychic level is 3, and you use flamebreath giving you a range a 30 meters and in a spray, so it can hit several enemies at a time your RoF is 1d10+PL so say 9+3 giving you a rof of 14 for this attack. with your 55 wp you rolled a 10 so 4 dos meaning 5 hits, the guy attempts to dodge, and fails, tries to avoid catching fire, and fails... now what.

He gains burning 5 times meaning burning (5) an it counts for 5 wounds, so next hit would deal +25 damage, okay, it is his turn, he is on fire takes 5 damage from burning 5 +25 making it a +30, you attack again, your rof is 5 for this attack you roll a 23 on your wp test to attack so 3 dos meaning flame breath hits 4 times, he fails to evade and fails to stop the fire, so his burning is now 8, he got a total 9 wounds, so the next damage he takes will either remove a limb, or outright kill him.

Okay, you really are underestimating how powerfull pyromancy is here...

Okay say you Psychic level is 3, and you use flamebreath giving you a range a 30 meters and in a spray, so it can hit several enemies at a time your RoF is 1d10+PL so say 9+3 giving you a rof of 14 for this attack. with your 55 wp you rolled a 10 so 4 dos meaning 5 hits, the guy attempts to dodge, and fails, tries to avoid catching fire, and fails... now what.

He gains burning 5 times meaning burning (5) an it counts for 5 wounds, so next hit would deal +25 damage, okay, it is his turn, he is on fire takes 5 damage from burning 5 +25 making it a +30, you attack again, your rof is 5 for this attack you roll a 23 on your wp test to attack so 3 dos meaning flame breath hits 4 times, he fails to evade and fails to stop the fire, so his burning is now 8, he got a total 9 wounds, so the next damage he takes will either remove a limb, or outright kill him.

Your example is the one power he acknowledged was good, though, disregarding the friendly-fire component. What do you think about the examples he specifically sited as being problem areas, like Fiery Form?

okay, lets go about every pyromancy skill.

First things first, Psychic level you gain passivly by spending experience to hit ranks, to it scales from 1-10

Cauterise

Used to reduce blood loss, something that is much more damaging in dh2.0, and you will suffer from bloodloss often,

Now with Medicae you can do a first aid and remove wounds, but with cauterise, you can reduce bloodloss by your PL.

Fiery Form

Give you fear (fleeing) gain a 5xPL to intimidate tests, so if you intimidate them, and they fail, they must flee from his fear for as many rounds equal to his degrees of failure, if he is prevented from fleeing, he suffers -20 to all tests.

So yeah, fear is a great tool now.

Fire Shield

Attacks anyone that successfully attacked you doing 1 wound per DoS on your focus power test,with a flame quality attack that if not evaded causes burning (x) that deals x amount of damage at the beginning of that guys turn, so here we basically have a defense that attacks back, now in the beginning this won't be all that great due to the short range it has, as most ranged combat is fought at 20-100 meters range, so at rank 5 this is a good skill to have.

Inferno

Why is this great?

High RoF flame(4) and blast(pl) that is really good.

Molten Beam

Why is this great?

Melta Quality, when the attack is used at under half its range, armor is irrelevant, you can attack a guy inside a chimera, he will die.

Manipulate Flame

Control the flames, really important if you don't want everyone to burn to death by accident, can be used in clever ways.

Spontaneous CombustIon

Why is this great?

Because it is WP vs WP, if the opposed WP test fails, he gains burning (pl)

So, I am not particularly good at balancing- but I am afraid I don't agree with most, if not all, of what you just said.

First off, as per the Psy rating elite advance, you actually need to spend EXP on raising your Psy rating, it does not raise passively [And its quite expensive to boot].

Cauterize:

This is a relatively minor that doesn't even heal a wound, simply removes blood loss- a condition that, though deadly, will rarely finish anyone off in combat. [For it to kill, a player needs to accumulate TWICE his TB+WP in fatigue.] and using a psychic power out of combat, save for an extreme emergency, should be discouraged. If a dedicated class exists for this, why step into their niche? Not to mention it costs 300 exp and directly relates to your Psy-rating. So it doesn't even completely eliminate the deadlier blood-losses. And its a "healing spell" [though quite thematic] in the "deadliest branch most knock for its collateral damage." At best, this should be one of the suggested application of control flames- or its Exp cost should be reduced drastically and it should be moved to the first branch.

Fiery Form:

Intimidate is a social skill used in social situations. Sure, intimidate people in a fight to AVOID IT- but in combat, any effect from Intimidate is left to GM's fiat. It is not, in any way shape or form linked to fear- which is a WP test to avoid the effect described [which, in this case, is running away: in other words, if a NPC uses it, that's a few rounds of players not doing anything, and if a PC uses it, that's a few rounds of NPCs not doing anything, needlessly delaying combat.] It provides no protection from flames, no extra resistance to heat. This spell, for all intents and purposes, does nothing but look good. Ont he most destructive branch.

Flame Shield

Its better than most spells on this list, but not only is it defensive- so no effect unless people attack you, but its sustaining cost is Horrendous. Weaken 1!? You loss Ten to all of your stats. Ultimately speaking, this is a "Mook Psyker" spell- to kill even a mook witht his thing requires at the minimum two hits [Were not counting critical for now]. n a game where your supposed to want to avoid getting hit- and without the backup of a true molten man, casting this thing is more akin to suicide than anything.

Inferno

Requires 3 Action points to cast- and Flame Four only means you roll agility -40 or get "Burning Four". Which means that at the beginning of your next round your going to take 4 damage. The vast majority of enemies aren't going to feel the damage, and shoot you back in the face. Blast [pSy level] also means your likely to kill your friends with this thing if you roll- and likely not to affect anybody if you roll low. For a blast supposedly this powerful, 2d10 is too random- as Mathias the scorcher of earth proved when he rolled a 1 & 2 + 4 and failed to seriously affect anybody with the explosion [those people that didn't dodge the explosion that is, seeing as its an attack action and Deny the Witch allows you to evade it]. 1d10+6 + 1d10xPL would have been considerably better for the final skill on this tree and considerably more horrifying - but a bigger blast, means a bigger chance to wipe out your friends as well.

Molten beam-

No he won't. Its 2d10. At best, he'll take a wound. At worst, there'll be no effect. Again, though Mathias was unlucky with his rolls, he was only able to inflict 6 damage on a PC, causing him to be "singed" but no further effect. By a beam of MAGMA.

Manipulate Flame-

Is the first power for a reason- it doesn't have nearly as many options as the one from DH 1.0 for some reason, but i believe its because its mostly cosmetic. Its nice to play with fire, but ultimately it won't prevent neither Inferno not Firebreath from burning your friends to death by accident.

Spontaneous Combustion-

Again, amazing power: the problem with this one is that Burning PL itself does nothing. NOTHING. You have to hit Burning 7 before it starts affecting anybody.

For a psyker specializing in massive amount of destruction, he simply fails to deliver. There's no lack of powers in DH 1.0 that could have been moved here- from Burning First, to Molten Man, to Inferno and Fireball. Some were superfluous [fire wall] and some were overpowered [Holocaust], but ultimately speaking, the Pyromancer was still rather dangerous [even if Force-barrage kicked his ass.]

Here, the Pyromancer can manage, at his very best, to light up a couple of candles.

seems like the guy above me is right about one thing, psy rating is like a skill, price of 250 exp and costs 250*PR for your next upgrade making a total cost of 13750 exp to reach a psy rating of 10.

Even then, do remember you can get 4 wounds fairly fast, dealing a high blood loss, and without a tech-priest with a medicae mechadendrite, getting this is a good idea...

Ohyeah, fatigue threshold is TB+WP, blood loss deals a fatigue every round, and is reduced by one, if the characters passes out, then the blood loss won't reduce, so the character will still loose fatigue.

Now, if you have a fatigue of 7, but still not unconcious, then every characteristic with a bonus lower then 7, will use an extra ap, when doing anything with it, or in narrative effect, take the double amount of time.

Ah, I didn't think blood loss continued, you're quite right.

Still, I believe the power should be cheaper and accessible sooner for what seems to be a "side-use" ability of the branch.

What about the rest then, you still don't agree that the branch is lackluster?

compared to the previous version, where a good pyromancers could one hit everything, then yeah, it is lackluster.

But in this system, pyromancy works...

I do feel that Burning is too weak, as discussed elsewhere. If Burning ignored Armour, then some of these powers would be much more deadly.

As for Fiery Form, I love it. I think one weakness of DH2's psychic powers compared to DH1 (disclaimer: I've only skimmed the psychic powers - I might just have missed some of them) is the relative lack of non-combat spells. Everything seems to be about killing things.

Even if we only consider it a combat spell, Fear can be a very big deal. As a GM, I wouldn't just have those who are fleeing run around in circles for the duration - they'd try to get the **** out of dodge. If they manage to flee the combat "area" while under the effect, I'd probably count them as defeated, depending on circumstances.