[b40] psiblades bonus not correct

[MisiuPysiu]

Hi,

Lev 1 mindstars benefit from 30% Wil, 10% Cun,

According to the description of the Psiblades talent (lev 1), the damage modifiers are increased by 141%.
So after using the psiblades sustain, the damage modifiers should be 72% Wil, 24% Cun.
When I turn the talent on i see just 42% Wil, 14% Cun which would translate to a 41% increase.
Does this work as indented or is it a bug.
IMHO together with the offhand penalty bug, the mindstars are still sub-par in comparison to every other weapon type.

[PureQuestion]

They are increased to 141%.

[MisiuPysiu]

If so, then the talent description is wrong.

[Sradac]

you must have never been a tripple-mindstar wielding mindslayer. They can get insane mindpower bonus that way. Was easily doing 900+ damage per turn in melee combat against the master with conduit.

[Sirrocco]

Lets look at who's intended to use mindstars...

First Tier:

- Mindslayers love mindstars to death - especially casting mindslayers. You get to utterly ignore str and dex, and get gem effects in your TK slot while also dealing damage from the autoattack and also getting a mindpower bonus? Yes, please.

- Summoners finally get a weapon worth wielding. They get a mindpower boost from their weapons, which is aawesome, and again, they get a weapon that runs off of will/cunning, which is all they *really* wanted to invest in anyway. Also, tehy get the nifty tree. As far as summoners are concerned, mindstars mean that they actually get to function in melee (while also getting a mindpower bonus).

- Doomed are right on board with loving the fact that str/dex/magic doesn't matter while also getting a mindpower boost.

Oh, and none of these are objecting to the boost to mind crits, either.

Second Tier:

- Wyrmics aren't really intended to use mindstars, but some might anyway. There are some fairly nice egos on mindstars, as far as wyrmics are concerned, and they're probably intending to go antimagic anyway, so they may well have access to the psiblade sustain that way. It's pretty unlikey that you'd want to dual-wield, but I can see a build that wanted to slap a mindstar in an offhand slot - espeically with the fact that mindstars don't suffer from offhand penalties.

- Cursed are actually a bit more in tune with the idea - they actually have a specific build for dual-wielding, and they don't *really* want to spend the dex to qualify for daggers. Who knows... maybe there's some sort of hate management mindstars out there, too, aimed at the Doomed. Again, it's not a primary hand thing, but, again, this is where the mindstar offhand bonus really shines.

So... they're a *very* solid choice for three classes, and an odd little niche build choice for two others. Honestly, that's better than slings/bows.

[Dervic]

So... they're a *very* solid choice for three classes, and an odd little niche build choice for two others. Honestly, that's better than slings/bows.

I've actually tried to use mindstars on a few toons, so I'll give you my opinion on this:
- Doomed: they have a talent which replaces melee with an auto-hit mind attack. If you actually wanted to use Psiblades for extra damage you'd run into the general issue against psiblades - Doomed have almost no accuracy, so it's almost always miss. For psiblades to be viable for Doomed you'd have to pump dexterity or at least 5 points into accuracy. Too little return for the investment made.

- Summoner: same problem as Doomed. can't hit.

- Mindslayers: Yes it works. Everything lines up perfectly, so a triple mindstar wielding character is a menace. Only problem is that the 0 cd Mindlash spam is much more reliable, but that's bound to be fixed sooner or later.

- Cursed: theoretically viable, however the damage multipliers are too low for class skills. A 200% attack is meaningless when the base damage of your weapon is 20-30. It might be usable by a level 30+ Cursed with maxed Wisdom and tier4/5 mindstars, impossible before that.

- Wyrmic: theoretically viable, having one more equilibrium sustain and even more abilities playing off equilibrium doesn't make for a balanced character though. Same problem as cursed, damage multipliers on class skill are too low for use with mindstars.

If Psiblade mastery gave bonus accuracy instead of APR, they'd be useful for Doomed and Summoner. As it stand now, only Mindslayers can use Psiblades to full benefit.

[Sirrocco]

Mindslayers: even when you are using the 1cd mindlash... well, first it ain't free, and second, TK mindstars means that you get that 0cd mindlash and *also* get your autoattacking TK weapon (and both get conduit damage, if you go that route).

Summoners: I've not tried them myself, but http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=34002 is an AAR from a summoner winner who had mindstars and was really quite happy with them. Anyway, even without the mindstars as somthing-to-hit-people-with, they're *still* solid gold for summoners. As a summoner, if you aren't hitting with your mindstars, you aren't hitting with anything, and it's something to fill your hands with that doesn't require any stats you don't already have, doesn't require any armor proficiency, and gives you both an inherent mindpower/mindcrit bonus and a wide variety of potentially useful egos (damage when hit, including slime damage, healing when you summon, and equilibrium recovery off the top of my head, though I'm sure there's more)

Doomed: I know very little about Doomed. I just figure in there case, again, something that you can fill your hands with that won't require you to invest in off-stats, and will give you mindpower/mindcrit can't possibly be a bad thing. If you want to keep your gestures, you only fill one of your hands. Still, there's a definite argument to be made that it's at least competitive with pushing magic so that you can wield a staff for the +%dam to darkness, which was the only other choice I knew of for them that had any meaning.

Cursed/Wyrmic: I wasn't suggesting that you use them as your *primary* weapon here - much more a "main weapon + mindstar", where they're essentially replacing a dagger in the offhand. Yes, it does mean that you're losing a bit of damage on that hand, though not as much as you might think (since your dex will be lagging, and mindstars get to ignore the offhand damage penalty). It's nto a core build by any means, but it does seem to have enough potential to be worth exploring - and the great thing is that if you do go with it, and it turns out that it sucks and you have to switch to a two-hander or something, you haven't lost much. Part of the point is that it runs off of the stats you already had.

[Dervic]

I'm not saying that mindstars aren't good, because they're really good for the proper classes. Any summoner, mindslayer or doomed character will want to dual wield mindstars as their first option.
I'm just saying the whole Mindstar mastery tree isn't practical in actual play, even though all of the talents are pretty solid.
At this point in the game, Mindstar mastery tree is just something that Antimagic Mindslayers get to use for fun. Other classes won't get to benefit from anything except Leaves Tide (because Leaves Tide IS awesome).
Summoners and Doomed lack the Combat Accuracy to actually use the 3 other talents, and Cursed and Wyrmics need much more weapon damage than Psiblades are capable of dealing before tier 4/5 and 5/5 Psiblades.

Just change the Psiblades talent so it pumps accuracy instead of APR and both Summoners and Doomed will strongly consider going for it.

[Parcae2]

I beat the game with a dual psiblades wielding Cursed, so it's viable. It's not optimal, but it can be done.

[SageAcrin]

As someone that ran a b40 Doomed; I would be rather surprised if you can get as useful of damage off a staff, or anything close.

The thing about Doomed is that, while Physical damage boosts in staff-level degrees are useful(assuming you have the swaps to actually equip that staff, because you're insane if you build Magic), Doomed critical multipliers are absolutely insane, and the base damage is not very good. This means that you can, say, boost Blast up to 500 damage base, and do 1500 25% of the time, or do 350 and do over 1000 closer to 50% of the time, towards endgame.

The latter tends to be more worth it on average, because you kill or can easily mop up(with damage over time effects like Creeping Darkness) that group when you get the crit, but not when you don't-there's not a lot of large AoE blast spells on Cursed that do frontloaded damage, in fact it's basically just Blast and Hateful Whisper(which is not that fast anyways in practice). This is even tossing out useful things like on-crit and on-kill Hate and any support resists you'd get from the Mindstars.

Basically, there are very few ways to boost Mindcrit besides Mindstars, and Mindstars are very good at it. This makes them important for Doomed.

Of course, for Mindstar Mastery, they would probably just dip into later skills and put one token point into the blades. There's no point in boosting the blades for them, even an L1 Gesture can do 500+ on a crit and is more likely to actually hit something. But Equi/Mindpower offense certainly isn't bad for a Doomed, in theory.