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[chaoticag]

Man,this is embarrassing. I just keep on dying now. I used to make it past the first dungeon before at least. Anyone got advice on building a mental mutant? Or any newbie advice in general? It's been years since I last picked this up.

[Arcvasti]

Anyone got advice on building a mental mutant?

This is probably horribly outdated, but I like to grab Force Wall, Pyrokinesis and Light Manipulation. Put Force Wall around enemy. Use Pyrokinesis on enemy. Watch enemy die. If enemy did not die, repeat process. Light Manipulation gives you A) A light source and B) A decent CONSISTENT ranged attack. There's probably better choices, but I can't think of any off-hand. Also, put as many points as possible in Ego. Willpower is useful too. If you use Force Wall/Pyrokinesis on the Equinoxes[EquiSOMETHING OR OTHER], you can get tons of XP if you kite them enough. The main danger with this build is walking into the invisible flaming residue of your Pyrokinesis and dying from losing one HP a turn forever.

[Angle]

If you accidentally set yourself on fire, you can put it out by standing still, which has you beat at the flames.

[beorn080]

Or pouring water over yourself.

Personally, my mental mutant build. 24 ego. 24 Will. 14 toughness. Sunder Mind, Force Wall, Temporal Fugue. Pick up a defect if you need the points, and drop a point in Esper if you can. At level 5, if you picked up esper, you get a new mutation just as powerful as the rest you already have, thanks to all the ego you have. And sunder mind's cooldown is nearly as fast as the Hands physical mutations.

[Nighthawk]

The main thing when it comes to surviving the early quests is simply don't go into the first dungeon without grinding a while first. This is especially applicable when playing a mental mutant, because your HP will probably be pretty low at early levels, making it all too easy for anything stronger than a snapjaw to eviscerate you.

[Aquillion]

The main thing when it comes to surviving the early quests is simply don't go into the first dungeon without grinding a while first. This is especially applicable when playing a mental mutant, because your HP will probably be pretty low at early levels, making it all too easy for anything stronger than a snapjaw to eviscerate you.

It depends on your mutations and starting build.  With Light Manipulation and Proselytize (use the latter on a Watervine farmer), it's pretty safe.  Most other mutations are less effective in the early game, although Force Wall is nice in case things go wrong.

Also, I recommend not neglecting HP as a mental mutant.  I feel that one good stat spread for a mental mutant is 10/10/18/18/18/24 -- the advantages of raising your Willpower to 24 aren't enough to be worth neglecting intelligence and toughness IMHO.

[beorn080]

The main thing when it comes to surviving the early quests is simply don't go into the first dungeon without grinding a while first. This is especially applicable when playing a mental mutant, because your HP will probably be pretty low at early levels, making it all too easy for anything stronger than a snapjaw to eviscerate you.

It depends on your mutations and starting build.  With Light Manipulation and Proselytize (use the latter on a Watervine farmer), it's pretty safe.  Most other mutations are less effective in the early game, although Force Wall is nice in case things go wrong.

Also, I recommend not neglecting HP as a mental mutant.  I feel that one good stat spread for a mental mutant is 10/10/18/18/18/24 -- the advantages of raising your Willpower to 24 aren't enough to be worth neglecting intelligence and toughness IMHO.

I tend to agree, except that boosting willpower to the max is insane. So for me its either give it a few points to negate te penalty, or max it all the way out and spam stunning forces and sunder minds on everything. The only problem is that it takes quite a while to bring fully online, and you're a bit weaker early on.

Edit: Just tinkered up a pair of gaslight flyssa's, and, well, I can't tell if they're bugged or not. No cell, fancy colored name and 9 pen. Put a drained cell in, lose the color and go to four pen. Charge the cells in the weapon, and name and pen don't change. Have NOT actually tested it in combat yet. Stealthedit: Swapped out the charged but had been drained cell for a full cell, pen and name both changed back to where it should be when powered. So, seems two bugs here. One, name and penetration of constructed gaslight flyssas is for their powered state, but am unsure if this translates to combat damage. Two, recharging a completely drained cell while it is in the flyssa does not change its name and pen, but swapping the cell out and back in does.

[Arcvasti]

Yeah, usually I go 18 in Toughness and Willpower and pour all the rest of the points into Ego. Sunder Mind is probably a better choice then Light Manipulation, but then I don't get Esper, which is bad. Mass Mind and Temporal Fugue are both awesome. Other strategy I've had success with is a mutated human Warden with Carapace and Regeneration who melees with a sword and shield combo.

[Aquillion]

The thing is, there are basically three kinds of psychic powers:

First, there are ones with no cooldown.  Mostly, this means Light Manipulation.  You can rely on this to kill weaker enemies.

Second, there are the ones that reduce their cooldown as they go up in level, like Teleport, either of the two forcefield powers, Clairvoyance, and Mass Mind.  Notice that these tend to be defensive powers, or ones that can be used to keep away from opponents.  (This is, I think, necessary for the game to avoid having max Willpower be totally essential to survival as a high-level esper.)

The third group are ones with cooldowns that don't decrease -- Sunder Mind, the AOE attacks, etc.  And yes, sure, high willpower helps with these...  but the thing is, when you have Teleport on a 4-turn cooldown and Clairvoyance + the forcefields at very high levels, does it actually matter if it takes you a bit long to recharge Sunder Mind?  Usually, when I use these powers, it's to finish off enemies I've already dealt with using the powers in group 2.  I don't care about waiting a bit longer to use Sunder Mind, because my other powers are the ones that are actually keeping me alive.

On the other hand, what is a threat to a high-level esper like this?  Stuff that takes you by surprise.  Situations where you screw up.  High HP helps you a lot more against that than being able to Sunder Mind 15% faster -- if I'm unable to hold the enemy down with forcefields or keep my distance with teleport, 15% faster Sunder Mind speed isn't going to save me.

I mean, that's just my theory on it, and I'm sure there are other builds (maxing Willpower instead of Ego definitely lets you do some cool things; clearly there's a difference between being able to teleport every 5 turns and being able to teleport every single turn.  And Ego eventually has diminishing returns at ridiculously high levels, while Willpower eventually becomes worth more and more -- but those are at levels you won't actually reach in-game.)

[unormal]

[CoQ Steam 1-3-2015]
*Updated pickaxe to allow you to bump-attack walls when equipped in your primary hand
*Fixed issues with deeply copied inventory stacks retaining references to the stacks of the original object (i.e. clones should no longer use up your own ammo or items)
*Fixed various effects not displaying properly in the look dialog
*Fixed an issue in mutation metrics collection
*Added a "clone" wish

[Chaoswizkid]

Unormal, dunno if this was asked before or not, but would you rather have bug reports in here or on the Freehold site? I was going to post them on Freehold, but the most recent bug report post is from early December, the one before that is October, and then after that it's from 2012.

[beorn080]

[CoQ Steam 1-3-2015]
*Updated pickaxe to allow you to bump-attack walls when equipped in your primary hand
*Fixed issues with deeply copied inventory stacks retaining references to the stacks of the original object (i.e. clones should no longer use up your own ammo or items)
*Fixed various effects not displaying properly in the look dialog
*Fixed an issue in mutation metrics collection
*Added a "clone" wish

Are you referring to Temporal Fugue clones? If you are,then they should almost definitely use up your ammo and items, as they are basically you, I would think.

[chaoticag]

Well, I always figured they were from different parallel timelines of you? Maybe?

[unormal]

Unormal, dunno if this was asked before or not, but would you rather have bug reports in here or on the Freehold site? I was going to post them on Freehold, but the most recent bug report post is from early December, the one before that is October, and then after that it's from 2012.

You can just report them in the thread, it's not like it's high traffic.

...or you can send me stuff to unormal@gmail.com

[Chaoswizkid]

Alrighty then. Some of this is just polish-y stuff.


You can move the cursor below "Quit" on the main menu, although it just disappears. It will show back up when attempting to move up.

Merchant doesn't appear unless you're in the room with him. This happens only at night I think, which may be intentional. Otherwise, might have to do with similar issue with Starapple Trees that don't have very good visibility at night. I think I actually recall this from the non-Steam version, but still not sure if it was intentional.

Can kill something offscream without it able to hit back. Pretty sure it was a Glowpad since there was a water tile there. I think the area might have been frozen, and wasn't thawed since I hadn't stepped there yet in a while. It was already generated.

Message on the screen once went to "RestiThawing Zone" while resting in the center of Joppa until dawn.

When playing Caves of Qud via Steam, Steam user status changes to "In-Game " without listing Caves of Qud. (May be intentional)