Warp Storm Psyker BUILD GUIDE – Season of the Warp Surge

Overview

This end-game Psyker build uses a lot of the new items and reworked psychic powers to quickly destroy enemies in a storm of pure warp damage!

Introduction

Video Version of this same Guide –

Better Text Version – [link] – This has much better formatting and pictures because Steam Guides are too Tedious to add that stuff

The season of the Warp surge brought in a whole bunch of items, and heavily reworked the psyker class. This build is taking advantage of both of those things, using a lot of these really cool new items, and these new reworked psychic powers to create a fast and epic pure warp damage build that I like to call Warp Storm.

The main idea behind this skill is to use Maelstrom to channel a bunch of small hits that apply a ton of different debuffs, which is enough to kill most enemies, but if not, we also have Empyrian Hail to rain down warp meteors to deal a ton of damage and apply some more debuffs.
We scale the damage with critical hits, vulnerabilities, and other debuffs that stack dirty fighting. We scale our defence with an absurd amount of energy shield, dodge chance, and berserker tokens.

SKILLS

We use two damaging psychic powers for this build, Maelstrom from telekinesis, and Empyrean Hail from Divination.

Maelstrom is our main skill we spam, it basically has no cooldown. It’s a channeled skill that will continuously deal damage to any enemy nearby. For masteries on Maelstrom we have enlarged area because the original area was too small, Warp energy redirection to constantly re-gain shield during battles, and Vulnerability to stack debuffs on any enemy hit, since maelstrom hits so fast, each stack of vulnerability increased their damage taken by 10%, stacking up to 100% and also boosting the dirty fighting passive. The damage from Maelstrom alone combined with our mobility skills is enough to get through up to 5 difficulty missions without breaking a sweat, but whenever we need more power, we use

Empyrean Hail to rain down heavy hitting warp meteors. There’s 2 ways I tend to use this, either jump in a tough pack, cast this skill and start channeling maelstrom for some insane single-target damage that takes down elites in a second, or I’ll use this skill on one far away pack, and jump into another to channel maelstrom for more clear speed. For masteries we have Enhanced effect for 30% more damage, Reduced cooldown because it’s cooldown is pretty high, and exploit weakness for some extra crit chance to make sure this is as heavy hitting as possible. Empyrean hail goes really well with Maelstrom and how fast it applies debuffs, it’s a great finisher.

The third power we have on this bar is Telekine Dome, which gives you 30% damage reduction from any enemy outside of the dome. This is the perfect skill for Maelstrom, since it shares a similar area of effect, so any enemies inside the dome will be dying and getting leeched shield off of, while enemies outside the dome that you can’t currently hit will deal a lot less damage to you. The masteries are increased power duration, increased power effectiveness to increase the reduction to 36%, and then reduced cool down so we can use it more often.

We dual wield, with a warp rod on the right hand giving us warp blast, a decently powerful long-ranged attack if you ever need it, and an aether blade in the left hand, which gives us aether strike, a really strong mobility skill with less than a second cooldown that we use to jump around the map and get in range for maelstrom.

Our second bar on weapon swap is just for buffs, it doesn’t matter what weapon you have here, as long as it’s two-handed to allow for 3 psychic powers.

Warp Speed Simply gives us a good damage bonus, and a huge 20% cooldown reduction bonus, which increases our general speed by a lot, especially with aether strike. The masteries we have for this are increased power duration so we don’t have to recast this as often, increase power effectiveness to give us even more damage and CDR, and damage boost, to boost our base damage which is scaled by other damage increases.

Endurance is a buff that gives you 10% more HP and 1% max HP regeneration. This may look weird since we’re relying so heavily on energy shield rather than HP, but your maximum energy shield is double your maximum HP, so this effectively gives you 20% more energy shield as well. The HP regeneration is kind of wasted since we’ll almost always be at max hp, but reflect damage does go through energy shield straight to your HP, so some HP regen, and hp on hit we have on gear is good for dealing with that. Endurance have the exact same masteries that we had for warp speed.

Then there’s precognition, which got a huge change this season. Now it just gives you maximum energy shield on cast, it’s an extremely simple but still powerful skill. We’re able to sustain max energy shield through maelstrom’s leech in low difficulty missions, but once you start dealing 90% less damage, it becomes more difficult to leech, that’s where precognition comes in to get us to max in one button press. It’s also good in low level missions when you’re just starting, and when there’s no enemies nearby to leech off of. We picked the only 3 masteries available for this skill, cooldown reduction, heat cost reduction, and power effectiveness.

For the final slot on this second bar we have Constrict, a very heavy hitting single target attack that only deals damage to enemies with a red suppression bar, or no suppression bar. We barely ever use this skill, but it’s nice to have in our back pocket to deal with turrets, warp gates and other high HP enemies. The masteries are increased effectiveness, increased crit chance, and cooldown reduction.

ITEMS

The two most important items are our weapons, which I lightly touched upon in the skills section.
For pictures of these items – [link] – cuz steam wont let me upload

Our main hand has a warp rod, any old warp rod will do, until you get your hands on The Dark Maw, a new archeotech relic added in this season that gives all of your warp damage hits up to a 34% chance to slow and half that chance to stun. These are two really powerful debuffs, and we are hitting so often with maelstrom that even the lowest roll of 24% would apply slows and stuns very often. Slows reduce enemy speeds by 40% for 5 seconds, and stuns completely disable the enemy for 3 seconds. The enemies do need yellow or red suppression levels, but that’s pretty easy since maelstrom has the “High Suppression” Tag that deals 200% suppression damage.

The other hand will have a relic aether blade with the enchant “Every 10th enemy explodes on kill dealing 100% of their HP as damage”. This is the most important item for clear speed, maelstrom requires us to be up close, and empyrean hail is kind of random with where the meteors hit, so being able to potentially kill a few enemies and have them explode the entire pack is a must-have, it makes this build feel a thousand times stronger.

The power of these items comes in how many primary and secondary enchants they have, so you’ll almost always be on the hunt for an upgrade. On your weapons, the best things to roll for straight damage are damage bonus for AOE skills, crit chance, crit strength, and damage bonus to telekinesis powers where maelstrom is.

I have a psychic focus on my belt and an Empyrean armour with the time warp skill on my chest, but these two items are interchangable depending on your preference. If you have a belt skill that you like using, feel free to replace this psychic focus, but be sure to also replace your chest slot with a warpbound armour to get that fourth psychic power.

The armour is a relic with the enchantment “Getting a killstreak or massacre grants an innoculator charge”, which isn’t at all necessary, there are a lot of really good options even in archeotech or morality relics, but this really helps me keep my innoculator buffs up and goes well with another on massacre effect that I’ll talk about in a bit. Try to roll solid defensive stats like resistances and HP on your armour.

The Innoculator is a relic with the enchantment “40% to inoculator effect duration when an energy shield is active”, which is super powerful since we always have an energy shield active. This with my armor constantly giving charges back, let’s us keep these absurd inoculator buffs up nearly indefinitely. Your compontents will be entirely based on what colours you roll, and your own personal preference. I prefer to have as many yellow as possible, with one red for Kalma that removes all debuffs and reduces the cooldown by 10 seconds. In the yellow slots I have psychon for a 200% damage boost, and Rosarium for 50% damage reduction, both lasting 5 seconds, which can potentially be boosted to last 10 seconds with the relic enchant and the primary enchant increasing the duration. The fourth one is up to you, I’ve tested a lot out, but right now I’m just running Murderlust to make our critical hits more consistent. This set-up is on a 10 second cooldown, and these powerful buffs can last 10 seconds with the right enchantments, our armour enchant gives us charges back on massacres, so I really like this set-up. If you don’t want to go this route, the refugee’s wail is another powerful option that has a chance to give you a bunch of energy shield on inoculator use, which can be useful for high difficulty missions.

Our main Implant is Heart of Darkness, another new item in this season, that has a 10% chance to gain a berserk token and blind enemies on being hit. The blind is another debuff that helps us, while you have a berserk token you have 10% more movement speed, and each token gives you 1% damage and damage reduction. You lose 1 berserk token each second, these tokens are best utilized at large amounts that this main implant alone can’t sustain, so we have a

Relic Neural Implant that gives us 11 berserk tokens whenever we activate a massacre effect. A massacre is killing 30 enemies within 5 seconds, which is pretty easy to do in large hordes, especially with the enemy exploding enchant on our aether blade. This lets us sustain a decent amount of berserk tokens, the damage isn’t nearly as strong as enrage tokens we could get on enchantments, but the damage reduction and synergy with heart of darkness is worth it.

The Purity Seal has the relic enchantment “48% of damage taken to energy shield is gained as suppression”, which is extremely important for sustaining out suppression so we don’t get stunned and killed. Before equipping this, I had to run a suppression regen component on my inoculator, so this has saved me the slot to get more damage with a yellow component instead.

The Eye implant is the vortex of despair, which was added this season. This item gives you a damage overtime aura around you for 5 seconds every time you interact with a warp anomaly, potentially stacking up 5 times for 750% base weapon damage per second. This isn’t at all necessary, I was just lucky enough to get one with 5 primary enchantments, whatever you have will work, as long as it’s a solid damage increasing enchantment.

Both of the signums have the very high % critical damage relic enchantment, alongside some powerful damage increasing enchants. This build’s base crit chance is 30% and can go over 50% under the right circumstances with our perks and passives, so these critical damage signums are scaling our damage very hard. The Archeotech relic signum that gives up to a 40% chance to apply a general vulnerability when the target gets a debuff would definitely be best in slot, as the general vulnerability is another debuff that can stack 10 more times for way more damage, if I had one, I would switch out one of these crit signums for it, if you have one, you’ll deal a lot more damage than me.

PASSIVES

The most important passive for this build is one I’ve mentioned a few times before, Dirty Fighting, the final point in the debuffs tree that makes enemies take 5% more damage per debuff on them, which synergizes with our whole quickly stacking debuffs thing. There are some other points on this tree that stand out, like Castigation that adds a 3% crit chance per debuff, increasing damage to slowed enemies, and losing 0.5 warp heat on it for every debuff on the target which lets us stay out of the red.

The Movement tree is really important to get early to level up quickly and just make any build feel a lot smoother. The left side gives us a lot of speed, and evasive bionics gives us up to 6% damage reduction when we use mobility skills like aether strike. The right side of this tree gives a lot of cooldown reduction, which is effectively speed since it affects aether strike, and it’s also great for empyrean heal with a point like cerebral feedback lowering cooldowns when you critically hit. I didn’t go for the middle point, because it’s only effective when you’re missing HP, and we rely on energy shield to keep our HP maxed.

In order to actually use the runes we’ve chosen for our psychic powers, we need to put points into the psychic combat and psychic debuffs trees. My psychic combat has 5 points spent like this, and the only point in the psychic debuffs tree is vulnerability.

We grab literally everything in the area effects tree, because everything in here is really strong for all of our AOE skills. This tree gives us a bigger area of affect, a lot of damage, and the last point even gives us more cooldown reduction, this tree is pretty much a no-brainer.

We also take everything in the critical hit tree, because this build relies heavily on scaling critical hits. All of these points give us a ton of damage, especially the final red thirst that can potentially stack up to 100% damage bonus for 10 seconds, and Feeding on pain is another point that helps us stay out of the unhinged warp heat status most times.

I’ve spent some points in the defense tree to grab the really powerful things, like invulnerability upon entering unhinged state, which we can do by casting empyrean hail, and quickly get out of with other passives. Defensive Stance and Psychic parry both give us a lot more dodge chance, I’m currently sitting at 31% chance to dodge which really helps me survive. I haven’t fully went through this tree, because I felt like my points were better spent elsewhere after getting these few really powerful defensive points.

The rest of my points are being spent in the Health tree, just getting all 5 of the flat health points, to help scale endurance, which scales our maximum energy shield times 2.

The Radical Tree has a lot of really strong damage passives regarding Warp damage, like Touched by the Empyrean giving a straight 40% bonus, and soul harvest ritual giving a ton of crit strength, but I just don’t have the morality unlocked for it. If you have this unlocked, you can spend even just 2 points in here instead of HP or whatever you don’t want to get these big damage boosts.

PERKS & ATTRIBUTES

Our first perk is Stagger Exploitment, which gives us crit chance and crit damage against debuffed enemies. All enemies we hit will be debuffed, so this is active all the time, it’s a really nice damage boost. Another really nice damage boosting perk is Psychic Escalation, which gives us a damage buff every time we use a psychic power, up to 65% for 10 seconds. We can keep this up maxed really easily, since maelstrom basically has no cooldown, you don’t get a stack per tick of the channel, but you get a stack every time you press the ability, which still keeps it at 10 indefinitely. Our final perk is a defensive one, Blessing of Saint Victorius, which makes us unable to lose more than 30% of our max HP to one hit. This perk makes is immune ot being one shot, which is a really common cause of death for high difficulty missions. I also have a theory that hasn’t been disproven, where our max HP is 7500, 30% of that is 2250, so no hit we take can exceed that amount, even if it hits energy shield and not HP. Let me know if you’re certain it doesn’t work that way, but from my testing this seems to be the case, which makes this perk way more powerful than it already was.

For Attributes, we try to get 20 in force and 20 in resilience, and I just don’t care about Psy Focus. The milestones for Force give a lot of damage bonuses, 2 and 3 in particular, and we push it to 20 for the 5% crit chance. Resillience gives a lot of defensive bonuses, especially in 3 and 4, which is why we try to roll this stat on our main implant and inoculator enchantments to push it to 20 for that bonus to all resists. I don’t care about psy focus because I’m not worried about warp heat, and I already have enough cooldown reduction, but that first milestone gives a nice 30% damage boosts against certain enemy types.

PSALM CODES

Last but not least, let’s cover our psalm code Doctrines. These Doctrines are one of the strongest ways to scale your damage, but it is reserved for end-game because it’s really expensive to add sockets to your items, and the high tiers of psalm codes are really rare. You’ll have to do a bit of farming before you’re able to get a full set up of your best psalm-code doctrines, the best place to do this is of course void crusade chests, and always using the psalm code tarot card.

The biggest Doctrine we’re running is “200% damage against shocked, slowed, or stunned enemies” in our chest. This is a huge damage bonus that will be active almost all the time, since the dark maw makes our warp damage constantly apply these debuffs on hit. The codes required for this, in order from most to least common, are two static-bursts, one Emantus, two Transonic, and one Nova. The codes themselves give some really good bonuses as well, like increasing the duration of our debuffs, and even further increasing damage dealt to debuffed enemies.

Both of our weapons have the “100% warp damage bonus” doctrine, which heavily scales our damage. This requires two Hyperrgheists, two Phophoenics, two Transonic, and two Neuralis. Obviously 200% warp damage bonus is really good, because we are dual wielding, both of our weapons can hold 4 sockets. The only other 4 socket doctrine that I was considering is reducing reflect damage by 80%, but that would be sacrificing a lot of damage for something so situational. Another 4 socket doctrine that looks good for this build is “Energy shield is doubled but max hp is reduced to 10%”, but it’s bugged and just doesn’t work.

The Inoculator has the 3 code doctrine “All Warp damage becomes Armour Breaking”, which is really strong for dealing with those pesky armoured enemies that usually take 50% less damage from all sources. This is a really easy doctrine to get, all you need is a Terminus, an Iron, and a technomartyr.

The last 5 sockets in our belt and main implant just have Uncreator Psalms that increase vulnerability effects by 50% each, which is an insane boost to our damage. Only one of these per item will work, so fill the rest of the slots with whatever you please.

CONCLUSION

That’s the Warp Storm build guide. Warhammer 40k inquisitor Martyr is a really in-depth and complicated game with a lot of options, I tried my best to keep this guide as simple and short as this game let me, I hope this was able to help you guys, new to the game or veteran. Remember that all of the items I have aren’t completely necessary, it may take a lot of farming and re-rolling until you’re able to replicate this build entirely, just try to get the two weapon enchants first, since they are the most important and build defining. Thank you for reading this guide, and have a great day.