Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Robsoie]

For a change i decided to play seriously a Dwarf Mindslayer.
In the past i played a few without reading any guide and wasn't really impressed.

So for this one i read a few things, apparently in order to do any reasonnable damage and get some resistance, the mindslayer need to have a bunch of sustain active due to the synergy between them requiring other sustains or you'll get only weak effect for each, letting then only few psi for the psi spells (the best one being mindlash)
Fortunately there's some psi skills that help refilling, but still in the end with all the required skills, that's a very lot of points you need to invest everywhere, difficult to specialize in such conditions.

Then one of the nice thing of the mindslayers is that they can "telephatic wield" a weapon, on top of the ones you're already wearing, and get your willpower/cunning replacing strength/dex for the damage/accuracy for it (good as mindslayers wants lots of willpower/cunning)
As they're not exactly great for health, i took a dwarf to help a bit.

Now all was good until i noticed that the "best damage spell", the mindleash was still dealing ridiculous weak damage despite i started to have some levels and maxed it.
Then reading from closer, to actually get the best of the spell, the "telepathically wielded" weapon must be a mindstar, yes, those weak damage things ... oh well, at least mindlash is good now, but still not impressed by the damage dealt when maxed in comparison to other classes i played at equal level.

After a rather boring time noticing that damage weren't all still not that good despite what i hoped and the conduit sustain joining my bunch of already enabled ones, i finally reached level 21 after completing all tier 2 dungeons and killed Urkis (that for once i found surprisingly easy despite i had only 35 lightning resist) i remembered that i forgot to get to the lake of nur to get my fortress running.

So i did and once reaching the weirdling beast, i noticed it had some nice skill "taint".
And what does taint does when it use it : it disable all your sustain back into cooldown.

Oh well ... but wait a minute, a mindslayer to do anything that is not ridiculously weak damage need those many sustain synergies , and so it began a game of me re-enabling sustains when they were available, while hurrying to heal (good i got the healing light from an escort)  and regen as without sustain not only the damage is weak but the resistance are.
And when i was near to be fully online with my most important sustain enabled, "hey my friend, how about another use of Taint" , and back to square zero with pathetic low damage and resistance.

Oh and taint basically heal the beast for 75 health by sustain disabled apparently, so it was near full health each time it used it.

I decided to give up that character there as boring was too much boring, never going to play mindslayer again that's a given.

[Darkmere]

(I really like Will classes, sorry for the infodump)

There's two different ways to play mindslayers, and all the guides I've seen were written before mindlash got nerfed, so the "ultimate killer mindlash every turn spam" is outdated and misleading.

You can be a tanky melee class with lots of bump damage, which requires dual-wielding and mind-wielding a big 2-hander, using Conduit to boost the mind-wielded weapons attacks, or triple-wield mindstars and play a Will-based caster. It kinda sounds like you wanted to do both at once, and there's just not enough points to go around.

Weirdling beast: leave one unimportant sustain up and keep your distance for the first part of the fight. When that's removed by taint, activate everything else (almost all of a mindslayer's sustains are instant) and charge it, doing as much damage as possible. after a few turns, spike your shields and disable all but one cooldown til it uses taint again, then wait for a purge, repeat. It should be dead after two taint casts.

Mindstars: They don't work like any other weapon in the game. The low-level ones have crap damage multipliers (15% will 15% cunning or something awful), but the LATE game ones are much better (40% wil 40% cun) AND they don't have the offhand damage penalty. If you take Mindstar mastery in zigur and max psiblades, there's an additional multiplier on them that makes the tier 4 and 5 ones get the best damage mods in the game AND they have no dual-wield penalty. But you have to get there first. I did a mindstar wyrmic who ended up VERY strong endgame by meleeing with psiblades.

[Robsoie]

I played some mindstars builds with summoners even won a couple of them (with mindstar mastery tree it can lead into real melee monsters), but for characters that are not mindstar primarly focused, it's a real pain to have to use mindstar in order to get that Mindlash spell doing something not ridiculous.

Though i had no idea it had been nerfed, if i knew i would have gone with some of the nice 2 handed weapon i had found to telepathic wield, very likely why i got so disapointed by it in comparison to nearly all other class ranged main damage dealer, and wouldn't have bothered with that spell.

My problem was that i was trying to play it mixed : having decent ranged attack (what i though mindlash would be) due to the lack of Rush skill (and finding boots with it is too dependant on your luck in loots) and having decent melee (as i noticed psi go down very fast with mindslayers spells+sustains) and it appeared that it result in everything being weak.

Conduit sounded good in theory and in its description, too bad the aura even maxed aren't the big damage dealer they sounded to be, the damage by turn is rather low (fortunately conduit a bit more than doubled it) but nowhere near an AOE spell from another class.

What was interesting with the aura what the "spike" mentionned that is supposed to happen when you have dealed a few rounds of damage with it and can really deal some good beating.

But in practice at absolutely no point of all my 21 levels i saw my maxed best aura (i took the one with lightning to max) doing a "spike" under Conduit, only the regular damage (doubled by conduit, so roughly 74 lightning damage to melee-distance characters by turn)

If the spike was actually working, yeah that would have certainly been an amazing class as when it is supposed to happen it can deal actually more damage than the disapointing Mindlash and would deal it to nearly every monster around you.
But that never happened ingame, at some point i even tried to play with the aura regularly (Conduit disabled) to see if it was Conduit interfering, but no, still no "spike" ever happened

[Darkmere]

"Spiking" an aura is the same as spiking a shield, you deactivate them manually to get burst damage on demand. All conduit does is add free damage to your mindwielded weapon or mindlash with no psi payment, but at the cost of you being unable to spike the aura at all until you deactivate Conduit and let them cool down.

The spike damage scales with Mindpower, which mindstars have as a base modifier, so you can use spiked auras with triple-wield mindstars to play like a mage-type. I did get to use the spiked lightning aura at rank 5 on one character, and it hits 10 targets for decent damage. Spiked kinetic auras have some knockback as well, so they're good even with 1 point just to have a defensive ability. All the auras are instant as well, so as long as you have the psi you can activate and spike them in one turn.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Hey so what does increasing mastery of a category do? Like when you put a category point into a category you already have unlocked?

[nenjin]

It makes the effective level of the Talent higher. So if you're at 1.3 effective talent level and you put a category point in it, it'd bump it to like....2.6?

But there are diminishing returns on higher level skills, so you're not actually doubling the effectiveness of said talent when it goes from 1.3 to 2.6.

Early on, I think it's a good way to supercharge a talent category. Late game, I think it ends up being a waste of your Cat points.

[Robsoie]

"Spiking" an aura is the same as spiking a shield, you deactivate them manually to get burst damage on demand. All conduit does is add free damage to your mindwielded weapon or mindlash with no psi payment, but at the cost of you being unable to spike the aura at all until you deactivate Conduit and let them cool down.

Ah thanks, that was my problem, i thought the deactivation was only for the absorption tree , i thought the projection tree was all about accumulating psi points and then those skills would spike automatically once they got there.
should read more closely the descriptions instead of reading half the words

Oh and no wonder i never saw any spike under conduit then, as the wanted projection skill is deactivated constantly under conduit.

Will have to give another try now, hopefully it will end better, though those sustain nullifier rares will be a pain for this kind of sustain heavy class.

[Frumple]

Mm... another thing to remember re: mindslayers, if you hadn't noticed, is that many of their talents scale with gem (/mindstar) tier. So if you're going the lash route, you want the highest tier gem or mindstar you have access to being psi-wield, usually. Also you can psi-wield gems, if you don't find decent mindstars. Forget the particulars, but it's the effects of high tier gems (/mindstars) that make mindlash particularly powerful.

Re: mastery, it's mostly as Nenjin says, but there's caveats. Some talents run (or did, anyway... dunno if that's changed recently?) off raw instead of effective talent level -- which is to say, all and only what matters is how many points you put in them, mastery be damned. Extract and imbue gems in the stone alchemy tree, ferex, run off raw instead of effective (incidentally, one of the reasons I like stone alchemy as an escort reward, since the reduced mastery level is irrelevant for the good bits) talent level.

In regards to whether it's a waste... that depends incredibly on the talents themselves. Some talents and some trees benefit considerably from extra mastery (fungus and aegis both did at one point... not sure about right now, but they're potential examples), while others benefit little or not at all.

[Darkmere]

I pretty much never use cat points to boost trees, even fungus. Unless you're a cornac who's completely strapped for generic AND class points and already have 5 infusion slots and Celestial/Light and STILL have a cat point leftover or something. I don't personally think the boost is high enough to give up what you could get out of another tree, especially considering it's like a 0.1 or 0.2 boost (at least it used to be, no idea what it is now but I think it's still pretty small).

[Frumple]

Fairly sure it's .2. If for some reason you've maxed out a tree and everything runs off effective, that's equivalent to four or so talent points. To put that in perspective, there's only three, iirc, class talent points available beyond natural leveling, and only five generic. Which is to say, it's potentially an actually pretty hefty bonus, close to equivalent to the max benefit (talent point wise, anyway) from the alchemy quests.

From what I remember, a base 1.3 mastery tree will max out at tlvl 7.5 with a cat point investment. There's a few talents that... react well, so to speak, to that. I personally invest cat points pretty often, but that's only because I rarely run with more than four infusions (and even then, the fourth is usually my last cat point).

[Robsoie]

I gave a try on a pure melee mindslayer (i mean ignoring completely the weak mindlash tree, as getting high end gem/mindstar is not something you'll get before a long time in the campaign) and it's really a class that -need- a way to rush to your enemy, so if you use a race that does not get a leap/jump/whatever in its racial trees, you're really stuck (as there's no tree with the rush ability for a mindslayer and Reach has a very low range and need unlocking the tree) hoping to find an item that will allow you to jump on the enemy as without mindlash, you're basically a target for everything, as everything seem to have a way to shoot at you in that game

At least the movement infusion can help, assuming you're not a skeleton of course.

Not too much of a problem in early game (though fairly boring to have to walk up a monster or wait for it behind a corner) but with the game progression (especially in the alternate maze and alternate , it's making life very hard.)

All in all it's a class for people that like to micromanage their skills, as you need to deactivate your shield aura often to get a shield (to approach something) regularly and need to deactivate regularly your main projection aura / activate another to get some better damage output when there's too many people jumping on you.

And if you want to go the antimagic path, it's even harder to play as i found so many items i found very usefull for my character but are flagged "arcane" while having very few luck in finding half as good non arcane ones on my run.

Really time to go play something else, mindslayer is definitively not for me, can't enjoy it

[Darkmere]

Sounds like bum luck on drops. I had a pretty great Thalore melee 'slayer going til the bullshit death I mentioned a few days ago that didn't register properly in the logs. I had to pull out the line-of-sight tricks until i got a movement infusion, but once you get antimagic you're really, REALLY damage resistant even without shield spikes.

It's certainly not for everyone, though. Good thing there's so many classes to choose from.

[Frumple]

(as there's no tree with the rush ability for a mindslayer and Reach has a very low range and need unlocking the tree)

The mindslayer mobility tree (augmented mobility) can be unlocked at ten (note: You need to do this, period. Every non-dead mindslayer unlocks augmented mobility first.). Both quick as thought (I broke the game with that, many versions back >_>) and telekinetic leap are pretty alright (albeit somewhat expensive), and mindhook helps get things close to you. Fourth tier talent's pretty cruddy, though.

Beyond that, if you want an early gem, try your chance at the alchemist quests. Takes some luck with targets, but the derth alchie's reward (Lifebinding emerald) is a fifth tier gem, last time I looked at it. May have been downgraded, I'unno. Still be at least third tier, though, I imagine. Just checked, still mat level 5.

All in all it's a class for people that like to micromanage their skills, as you need to deactivate your shield aura often to get a shield (to approach something) regularly and need to deactivate regularly your main projection aura / activate another to get some better damage output when there's too many people jumping on you.

I... I don't think I've ever actually spiked the shield. Any of the shields. Maybe, like, once, twice. Probably over a dozen 'slayers got east, couple won. Aura gets spiked more often, but I usually have thermal and charged tied up with conduit and spike the kinetic as needed. It's pretty painful, so I usually don't find I have to spike it terribly often, heh.

Still, it does seem for whatever reason people have a lot more trouble with 'slayers than I seem to. It's entirely possible the RNG gods have simply smiled upon me most of the times I've played 'em, I'unno.

[Robsoie]

Loots can indeed make or break a character, on a previous archimage character in which i was just testing and not playing seriously, i got early some really great artifacts that nearly were tailored for my character.

Then when i rolled an archimage with the intent to play it more seriously, i struggled for a long while before getting anything worthwile.

That's usually how i get a win, when i roll a character and he gets some amazing item , not just good artifacts, i know that's going to be a potential winner, or i get horrible weaks things for 10 levels worth of battles... characters that usually lose half my lives before reaching level 20 and die somewhere in Dreadfell or in the Prides like 90% of my other characters will do.

 

[Graven]

Ok I'm pretty sure something broke in my Daikara:4.

For the first time ever, I got the alternate Daikara, which was pretty awesome to watch, if a bit laptop-melting.

However, when the last level came, there was that event with the cultists around monoliths. Since I didn't know what it was, and cultists=bad, I started killing them, when a teleport brought me right to the boss, and some more cultists, though still friendly.

"Oh dang!" thought I and hit another teleport, bringing me to one of the cleared corners... when I got an update on my "Into the Darkness" quest and a congratulation on killing the firebreathing dragon... which I had barely glimpsed when I landed right next to it and a cultist before wildly teleporting.

So I got the experience and the loot, all the monoliths are glowing, no more cultists are left alive and I'm not really sure wtf was supposed to happen.

Can someone explain what the normal course of this whole mess would be?