ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

There are a few classes that ordinarily use strength-based weapons on which people talk about the option of using mindstar builds. I'm thinking of Cursed and Wyrmic, mostly. There are probably others. I've messed around with mindstar cursed a few times now. I used to just die in the early game because I avoided putting any points into strength, leaving me useless while I tried to save up for mindstar training. I've come to realize that mindstar players don't have to avoid buying strength. It's okay to bring strength up to base 25 or 30 so you can use armor and get your actual class skills; it also grants physical power that will carry over to your mindstars. The stat savings come later, when you leave your strength at 30 instead of bumping it to 60. So now that I've figured this out, I'm doing better, and I just got a thalore cursed to the mid-teen with maxed willpower and secondary points all in strength, plus the gold to buy into mindstar mastery. I put some points into psiblades, grabbed some tier 3 mindstars and started punching fools. I can confirm that they do indeed die, and my damage is comparable to what I'd have gotten from conventional arms.

My questions is... why? Why did I do this? Now that I've arrived, how does it help me and what skills and items should I be using to make the most of it?

CURSED
Sure, it's nice to have more mindpower (I don't think mindcrit does anything for cursed?) But so many cursed skills undermine the utility of mindstars

Frenzy and Charge both make large numbers of low-multiplier attacks. These are great for exploiting procs, but mindstars don't get procs. Also, several weapon attacks scale their ratios with strength. There are a few skills that scale on willpower, but in the long run both builds will max their will anyway. In the short run, most of them work well for mindstars, but the accuracy from stalk is better with weapons. The Rampage tree has +physical damage and strength-scaling damage reduction. On the mindstar side, you can brainlock people with gloom, and maybe unlock the fear tree, but that's about it. You get the defense from Surge. Can you disable 4 talents with harass prey? What am I missing?

WYRMICS
Wyrmics at least can use mindcrit, and the various elemental bonuses on mindstars. They can also stack +nature damage gear and have it improve swallow, venemous breath, and their autoattacks. That said, breaths scale on strength, not mindpower, and you already have 2-3 amazing generic trees to invest in.

General Thoughts on Mindstars as Gear
I tend to think that my problem is that I haven't good mindstars, or maybe I don't know what a good mindstar would look like. I'm rarely getting anything useful from my mindstars beyond damage, mindpower, and mindcrit. Real weapons roll all kinds of useful enchantments all the time. The ranged utility of arcing or projection weapons is big for me. Even if I don't roll my favorite enchantment, it's easy to find something good. Lots of weapon have strong damage procs, or stuff like attack speed. Plus, there are a lot of artifact weapons and by the time I can afford to buy mindstar training, I've usually found a really overpowering artifact. Artifact mindstars are rarer, and some of them are quite weak if you're not built to take advantage of them, and of course you need two. The mindstar enchantment pool is full of specialized enchants for too many classes, so finding something appropriate is really hard. A Cursed doesn't want stars with psi, equilibrium, heal-on-summon, or acid damage. A Wyrmic doesn't want hate, mind damage, psi, summoning, etc. Then there's set bonuses. I have never, ever gotten a set bonus. Some of the necessary enchants seem very rare (wyrm's?), but the big problem is that even if you find two matched stars, they may be saddled with irrelevant enchants from another class. For instance, a hateful/wrathful set would be good for a Cursed, but there doesn't seem to be anything stopping you from spawning a Wrathful Mindstar of Calling and a Hateful Mindstar of Storm.

Is failure to secure good mindstars my problem, and if so how do I solve it?

The skills in the Mindstar tree (especially Leaves Tide) are pretty good.
Also, high level mindstars give loads of Willpower bonuses.

There are wildcard egos that form sets with a multiple other egos.
Most of the artifact mindstars are OP once you get Psiblades pumped.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a mindstar with willpower or cunning bonuses.

There was only one ego that gave stats, but I added another three.

Is there a decent way for Cursed to handle equilibrium?

Other than going for a walk in the wilderness? (that is serious)
Going antimagic helps.

I eyeballed it and and it didn't look like there was a reasonable way to pay for leaf tide, but I hadn't considered the possibility of unlocking fungus.

Mindstars use will for accuracy. They don't have an accuracy bonus so stacking accuracy isn't useful, but it does mean that you can save 5 generic points you'd have otherwise spent on boosting it if you wouldn't be building dexterity.

Skipping strength is actually not unreasonable for a wyrmic. All those weapon based talents will scale off willpower and cunning if your weapons are mindstars. That leaves only the breaths and bellowing roar strength based. There are now enough wyrmic talents that don't suck to spend all your generics without touching anything strength based except 1 point in venomous breath and 1 in bellowing roar to get at stuff beyond them.

Well, most mindstars have exceptional armor penetration, so there's that... but mainly, it's about not having to spread your stat points as thin across multiple categories.