A surprising amount of my blog traffic comes from search terms like “Dark Heresy powergame psyker.” This is odd, because the one time I wrote on that subject, it was about how to twink out any concept. In D&D, combat is king and everything else is an afterthought (playing an intrigue-heavy game of D&D, while something I certainly recommend just because intrigue is fun, will not solve this problem, because it’s still true that it takes a small fraction of your character resources to become good at social skills, but it takes all of them to be good at combat skills). Dark Heresy 2 is an investigation game, though. Totally kicking ass at any one thing doesn’t automatically sort you into a higher tier than the competition. If you’re awesome at combat, great, but the team still needs to look for clues and talk to nobles, so if you’re going to powergame Dark Heresy 2, you start by figuring out what niche you’re going to fill and then you figure out what character options twink that niche out. There can’t be CoDzilla unless there was a character option so ludicrously overpowered that it let you outclass other archetypes in their own niche. This would make your one character practically a party unto themselves.
That said, those who are familiar with CoDzilla might recognize this as exactly what CoDzilla was. CoDzilla is a reference to the Cleric and Druid, two classes which, used properly, were drastically more powerful than anything else from the core books in D&D’s 3rd edition (Druid is nothing special in 5th edition and while the Cleric can pull off a decently broken bone lord build, a Wizard can do it better). They weren’t just better at killing monsters in general, they were even better at specific class niches unrelated to combat (for what little that’s worth in D&D). The Druid can’t just wreck monsters better than the Rogue, the Druid can sneak around and bypass locked doors better than the Rogue. The Cleric can’t just kill things in general, the Cleric can actually wade into melee and hack monsters to pieces as a frontline beatstick better than the Fighter can. At the point when the Druid is outsneaking the Rogue and the Cleric is outfighting the Fighter, why do we even have Rogues and Fighters?
So it’s not unreasonable to think that Dark Heresy might have a similar problem. And usually it’s some kind of magic-y kind of class or archetype who has these kinds of abilities, because when you sit down to design a magic system, what you’re deciding is not what it can do, but what it can’t. It’s magic, so it can have whatever powers you want, and people who abide by the “throw in everything cool” school of design are going to throw in a list of powers so long and so obviously better than a mundane person doing the same thing that these cast-y types can plausibly be better than every single party member at their own specialties.
So is Dark Heresy 2 actually like that? No, not even slightly.
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