- The early game was a pretty interesting balancing act which required some shield spiking and management of the psi bar. However, after getting conduit damage was no longer a problem: triple-wielding with one or two auras made short work of most enemies. After that, the base shields + armor became sufficient to steamroll through the game. The only question was whether to add class points to bumping damage or throwing some points into augmented mobility.
Specific skill thoughts:
- Overall, I ended up with 7 or 8 extra class skill points by the end that I didn't use. I was definitely limited in generic points, I thought those were about right as they made me choose between useful skills. One suggestion would be to make the voracity skills class instead of generic, none of the high level mindslayers seem to use them and they seem pretty weak, could be a good class skill sink if buffed a bit.
- Auras are currently too similar. I think they would be more interesting if you ever turned them off, as the damage scaled pretty well even to the end game, but once conduit is up and running that never happened because a) I never needed the damage/effects, and b) too much micromanagement to turn off all shields and augmentation, turn off auras, turn off conduit, etc. and boot them up in the right order.
- Conduit removes interesting options from the game. Conduit is pretty much a no-brainer to run a mindslayer, as there is virtually no downside (apply auras three times on triple wield for free, as opposed to paying large sums of psi for one hit per monster). One possible solution to this could be to make conduit an activated rather than a sustained skill for short-term spiking of dps. This would make aura discipline more interesting (none the three mindslayer winners in b20b used it) and make managing the psi bar more fun.
- Shield spiking never became necessary. I like that it takes no time to spike shields, and I bought a point in absorption mastery so I could double-use them in case, but never needed to. Furthermore, I can't really imagine having to spike thermal or charged shields more than once or twice a game. Maybe toning down the base absorption at high levels (maybe decrease the scaling with willpower) and buffing the spiking would help. Other effects on spiking would also make them more interesting options, e.g., increase stun resistance on spiking a charged shield, increase freeze resistance on spiking thermal shield (not sure if those are different))
- Mobility skills: too many and uneven. Shattering charge seems way underpowered. I like the idea of it (get from here to there with some bonus damage and knock-around) but very high costs compared to superhuman leap (which also lets you get past intervening enemies). I'm not sure mindslayers need four mobility skills; I ended up rarely using mindhook. Quick as thought actually worked out pretty well for me; the very high cooldown and 1-turn cost does balance it out.
Overall, really fun class to play, there is good late game fun in smashing through everything as quick as thought
