Solipsist help

[laru]

Tried to play a solipsist today, and it seemed a really interesting class, but I have to say I'm a bit confused with it. Clearly there are many different paths you can take in character creation, the skills have a lot of synergism and I don't understand feedback at all. I would greatly appreciate if someone could do a quick overview of how the class plays and basic char creation options; I just don't have the time at the moment for trying everything out by myself. Thanks in advance!

[achoice]

Check here: http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=4 ... 0&p=142210
I got inspired and have my own successful Solo going strong. My guy relies more on Mind Sear.

[sofocles]

yeah i did exactly that build but no pets all on mind sear , still mind sear alone cant help me kill fast enough. I need to escape and , at that moment, he regenerates

[Kaja Rainbow]

Solipsist's been nerfed with every version since its introduction but is still a strong class. You might want to try checking out more recent solipsist winners. For an example my own winner had a relatively invincible feeling nuke build. The only two non-plot deaths were due to my own stupidity. The first being walking back into the Room of Death and getting blasted by multiple wyrms at once. I should've just tossed some AoEs in there or the like and let the enemies come out. The second was from nuking myself for more than 1.2K damage on an enemy's Displacement field. I should've checked said enemy's active skills and avoided point-blank nuking. Exactly which enemy were you having trouble killing, by the way?

Feedback is great. What feedback does is, your enemy damages you and you get feedback based on how much it did. You can then use skills that spend feedback. Resonance Field and Conversion are great skills to max as they turn the damage you receive into increased survival. But you don't really need the other two skills in the same tree, especially Amplification--you get more than enough Feedback at the baseline, at least for the tree itself.

I'd say that you don't really need more than one or two sleeps. It's a very useful condition that I used pretty constantly on my winner, but Insomnia limits how much you can chain-sleep the same enemy and a few enemies are immune to it. Bone giants, a few other construct/stone/metal type enemies, vampires, and snow giants were what I noticed. For those reasons I wouldn't do a build exclusively focusing on sleeps. However, you can do pretty well leveraging some skills that benefit from sleep, like Night Terror and Lucid Dreamer.

The Disruption tree is interesting but mainly has synergy with itself. It's pretty useful for a nuking focused build, just a bit fiddly to set up for max effect. Still, it served me well. It mainly offers damage, position control (knockback and the pull into the center of the AoE DoT), removal of physical sustains, and a source of stuns that works on enemies immune to Nightmare skills (unless they happen to have substantial stun resistance as well).

Psychic Assault is primarily a nuke tree and thus more for those interested in a nuke build. Not really much to say about it otherwise, though it does offer a single-target confusion. Nevertheless, Mind Sear is useful for nearly everyone with its really low cooldown and rather high damage.

Dream Smith is primarily for melee oriented builds. You'll probably want Mindstar Mastery to go with it, and also the Dream Forge tree. From what I've heard (I haven't tried it yet), Dream Forge is a fairly good survival tree in general. It offers extra durability on top of what Solisipists get already and a skill that can help block mages and archers' lines of sight.

The Nightmare tree is easily my personal favorite tree as it offers the best sleep (which actually kills while it sleeps them), Inner Demons which can get hilarious on bosses especially ones susceptible to sleep, Waking Nightmares which helps to control most enemies immune to sleep as well as messing up bosses while Insomnia's still active, and Night Terror which helps you do massive damage bursts on sleeping targets as well as turning them into distractions for the enemy to deal with (they aren't really worth much more than that, though they can kill weaker enemies by themselves if they gang up--and they go through walls).

The Slumber tree is mostly for synergy with sleeps, and fairly unimportant synergy in my own opinion at that. So far I've heard reports from people focusing on heavily sleep focused builds that they just don't deal enough damage. I'd say that Nightmare's the more vital tree with its damaging sleep and damage increase versus sleeping targets (which actually boosts the damaging sleep!). If you have points to spare, you could still invest in Restless Night for a little extra DoT or Sandman for slightly more durable sleeps (but they still won't last long if you're doing good damage) and I've heard Dreamscape at least has the interesting application of using it on an weak enemy to give yourself more time to recover and let skills come off cooldown. But for actually killing tough enemies, it's not that great.

Thoughtforms is, well, the pet tree. I've heard it's fairly good, but I decided to skip it because I wanted to focus more on nukes+sleeps since I've already played pet classes. Really up to you depending on your desired build. It does offer an interesting way to cheese some dangerous situations like the Room of Death by sending your thoughtform in alone (the wyrms will actually breath each other to death if their target's in between them).

No real opinions on the Discharge tree. I haven't tried it, nor heard any opinions from people about it. Nevertheless, you naturally need Feedback to make use of it. The first skill doesn't really look that good (you have to stand still in one spot doing absolutely nothing that consumes a turn), but it might work out better in practice. I'd definitely invest in survival skills if you want to try it out.

The Dreaming tree is, again, another sleep focused tree. Nevertheless, Lucid Dreamer's easily worthwhile for the saves it offers which stacks well with the Solipsism tree as well as for the damage bonus on targets suffering from Insomnia. I only put 3/5 into it because of the diminishing returns, but you can easily max it out if you've the generic points to spare. Dream Walk's also a must-have as it offers a much-needed escape option. You can't really go wrong with investing points into it for the added accuracy, but I didn't really have the generic points to spare. Sleep is probably the second best sleep despite its fragility. Dream Prison doesn't look like that great a skill, though it may have some synergy with Thought Forms and DoTs (except for the Nightmare one, which's halted while Dream Prison's running).

Mentalism is a tree I'm pretty meh about. The first skill might give some nice additional mindpower, but there's still way too many other uses for generic points. Mental shielding might be useful for a race without heavy confusion immunity, but it's still probably not really worth more than one point in. As for the projection skills, you can at most deal damage to one target and you're far from immune to damage. Honestly, they look like garbage to me.

And now for the tree that gives the Solipsist its name. The Solipsism tree has a number of great skills that easily reward heavy investment. However, the first skill you might not necessarily want to invest fully into. Find the balance between health damage and psi damage that works for you. I do recommend a decent investment for Yeeks because of their low HP, though higher than about 4/5 isn't strictly necessary and you might be able to get away with 3/5. As for the rest of the skills, Balance lets you turn a massive Mind Save into massive Body and Spell saves. Easily worth 5/5ing and focusing on pumping up your Mind save. Clarity offers you a lot of global speed, though you do have to keep your psi pool up to benefit. Dismissal is really good and yet another powerful benefit for a massive mind save.

Finally a special note on antimagic. Antimagic has massive synergy with Solipsists, so much that most of the winners're antimagic. Antimagic shield helps you take a lot of the bite out of mages' spells and similar attacks, and Solispists easily have the mindpower for it plus they don't need to use equilibrium on other things. The other talents're good if you have the generic points for them (but you might not--I sure didn't). The Fungus tree is crazy good--the first and third skills let you basically put your regen infusions on auto and get permanent, constant regeneration without spending a single turn on those infusions. Plus it helps you clear away the equilibrium from Antimagic Shield. Fun fact: Conversion also helps clear away equilibrium, which just makes Conversion even better.

[Mewtarthio]

As for the projection skills, you can at most deal damage to one target and you're far from immune to damage. Honestly, they look like garbage to me.

You don't want to use projection to deal damage. You want to use it to cast Dominant Will with impunity. You can also do the Sleep + Inner Demons combo through walls: Your projection can't deal damage, but the things it summons can. Used properly, Projection can get downright cheesy.

[Kaja Rainbow]

You don't want to use projection to deal damage. You want to use it to cast Dominant Will with impunity. You can also do the Sleep + Inner Demons combo through walls: Your projection can't deal damage, but the things it summons can. Used properly, Projection can get downright cheesy.

Okay, those're actually cool uses for it (and indeed, Solipsist does seem to have a number of skills with non-obvious uses, see my note about Dreamspace). It's not like I know everything about the class, after all. Still, that sounds like it's still a one-point wonder?

Also, I feel like doing another playthrough to get a better sense of the skills I'm less familiar with.