Multiple ways of doing things are great, but one shouldn't always be clearly better than another. For example, I never play a true-man tinker because the psychometry power is so OP it is crazy to play without it.
Honestly, Psychometry isn't really the problem here. I've tried playing Psychometry-based tinkers, and the problem is that of course I want to raise Ego in order to get the most out of Psychometry, and if I'm doing that I might as well buy a bunch of other mental mutations and take Esper, and honestly is it
really worth putting 24 points in intelligence to get Tinkering III and Expert Disassemble, and all of a sudden I'm a psychic who dabbles in tinkering rather than a tinker.
And I usually end up not buying Psychometry,
even as a psychic tinkerer. Psychometry itself is, honestly, a really weak mutation compared to other options. Maybe it looks tempting to a tinker, but at the end of the day all it does is let you get consumable recipes faster -- which are the cheapest ones to buy disks for -- and get the recipes for stuff you already own, which is virtually worthless for non-consumables because you rarely need huge numbers of copies of stuff. It's a mutation that becomes worse and worse the further you go into the game, since eventually you reach the point where you would have gotten all the recipes you wanted elsewhere. I'd go so far as to call it one of the worst mental mutations. The problem is that tinkering is so terrible that even one of the worst mental mutations in the game looks tempting to someone using it.
Right now, tinkering is just weak across the board. There's no particular long-term value to being able to create stuff, because you can eventually find or buy everything you need anyway, at which point all your investment in tinkering is utterly wasted. Grenades, turrets, and recharges are the only things tinkering really offers, but those are also the easiest things to get, and not
that great compared to most other options (especially considering the investment involved -- intelligence is not actually a great stat at high levels, since extra stat points has diminishing returns, especially if you lack the stats for other powerful skill trees on account of raising intelligence.) Data disks are horribly expensive (and often, for anything but consumables, you might as well just buy the finished product.)
The whole way tinkering works needs some fundamental rethinking from the ground up -- tinkers need some ability to improve on their existing equipment, say (or cybernetics, for True Kin.) They need ways to access or develop recipes for things they don't already have beyond paying nearly as much as you would for the finished product or relying on the scant three random things you get from the Tinker skills. I still think recipes for robots (maybe with a skill that gives you a chance of having a defeated robot drop its data disk) would be a good idea, too, since companions are something you actually benefit from being able to create repeatedly on the fly.
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Topic: Caves of Qud: Now in Open Beta (Read 570149 times)