ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I haven't unlocked the class from hell, solipsists, so can someone who has please explain the best way to kill them, based on their (near) death experiences?

And can someone explain why they keep moving away when you get near them and how they often don't seem to take much damage when you whack them?

Generally, hit them hard, hit them fast, and then bounce away, heal, and do it again. You probably can't out sustain them, so breaking it up into two or three encounters is likely necessary. Kill the thought-forged first, usually, if it's there, unless you're bloody sure you can kill the solipsist before it gets to you; while the thought-forged critters are up (and beyond the critters themselves being pretty dangerous) the solipsist gets some pretty major bonuses (Mindpower/resall/mind speed from warrior/defender/bowman, respectively.). You almost never want to engage at range, if you can avoid it.

Sleep, unfortunately, is a bit of a special concern. I'm still not entirely sure how to deal with it successfully beyond an already running providence or high mind save. Depending on the solipsists talents, it's basically an improved daze only instead of breaking on any damage, it only breaks after a certain threshold. Given that enemy solips can break the talent level limitation, it can get seriously nasty.

As for the specific questions. They move away because of the tactical AI designating them ranged attackers; they don't want to be in melee with you, ever, and will generally step away in all situations, if you're beside them and they can.

The second question is because of the eponymous solipsism talent. What that does is convert a set percentage (Most enemy solipsists are probably going to have it at 100%; human solips need a category point and 5/5 in the talent to hit that.) of all incoming damage and all healing into psi damage -- that is, the damage is taken out of their psi resource instead of their health. This basically converts their psi bar into their health bar, which is why they seem to be so incredibly tanky.

There's a couple of downsides to that. The primary one is that it means you basically eat into their offensive capability at the same time you eat into their effective health. The more damage you do to them, the less psi they have to power their abilities. This is offset to a decent degree by the fact that their psi bars are generally pretty huge, because the solipsist tree talents all (and cumulatively) reduce the HP gain from con and boost the psi gain from willpower. The secondary downside is that once they're below a certain threshold (50% is the important one) they start taking penalties. A full psi solipsist is going to have at least 150% global speed, ferex, while one with 25% psi is going to have like 75% global (-25% global speed malus), and the precise global boost or penalty is going to fluctuate with the psi bar. There's another penalty involved that I forget the specifics of, yeah.

So this means that the more you hurt them (and more specifically, their psi bar), the worse they are, but when you first encounter them they're at their absolute strongest. This is one of the reasons they're particularly nasty, I guess. But yeah, the more damage you do, the worse they get, so, as stated, hit hard, hit fast. Try to knock off as much of their psi as you can, so you can start getting their penalties rolling and block off some of their nastier stuff. If you can get their psi low enough, they become pretty helpless. It's just the getting there

Solipsists have the ability to essentially tank with their minds: They don't believe in your ability to hurt them, so a certain (large) percentage of your damage goes to psi points instead of health. Similarly, they pretty much use mental save in place of all their other saves and can "dismiss" minor attacks outright. What this boils down to is that you need to get them to expend their psi, at which point they'll fall very quickly (their life ratings are terrible, and they get global speed penalties at low psi as well). The blunt way to do this is to just attack them a lot: You will power through their stubbornness eventually.

One thing you need to be really careful of is their various sleep debuffs. It's like getting dazed, except that just any attack won't wake you: Instead, every X points of damage shaves a turn off the debuff's duration. Stoning could very well be the only debuff in the game that's worse than sleep. SVN has the Dreaming tree available from escorts which can give you Lucid Dreaming, which is easily the best defense here. Unfortunately, only solipsists can get Lucid Dreaming in b42, so that's not an option. Sleep is a mental effect, so you should probably throw on a torque of clear mind once you see the tell-tale thought-forged enemies running around. And make sure you keep your health high: If you get put to sleep right before you were going to use that healing infusion, you probably won't wake up.

Lastly, beware the Dreamscape. There's unfortunately not much advice I can give you here, as the Dreamscape is currently seriously skewed in the solipsist's favor. It's a little less overpowered in SVN, but it's still really deadly. I think the only real countermeasures are Lucid Dreaming and Corrupted Negation. Other than that, just remember to focus on surviving. If you manage to make the solipsist flee, don't chase after him, or you will end up suffering a "tremendous loss of self."

Thanks! that explains a lot and I'll adjust accordingly. Would a brawler's grapple be a good option? Then they can't move and takes lots of damage fast.

Hit them HARD and fast, higher damage attacks are better at getting past the dismissal talent, and as other people have stated, they get speed penaltys at low PSI.

So, just hit them as hard as you can.