Mindpower on artifacts

[donkatsu]

Mindpower is too hard to get. It should be more comparable to spellpower and not physical power, because there's no freely available generic talent that gives you 65 mindpower. Yet, spellpower stuff is everywhere and mindpower stuff is meager. Things that do basically nothing except boost mindpower, boost it by about 12. On the other hand, Black Robe gives a ridiculous 30 spellpower on top of some other bonuses that put all of the mindpower artifacts to shame all by themselves. Eldritch Pearl is a free 12 spellpower in your lite slot, along with other nice bonuses, while the non-magic alternative... gives no mindpower whatsoever. Telos (Top half) + Life Drinker is 55 spellpower in your weapon slots, whereas two tier 5 artifact mindstars would give you barely over half that-- 30 mindpower total, if you're lucky. An easy solution is to just throw mindpower on top of a bunch of pre-existing artifacts, and increase the mindpower bonus on others: Black Mesh, Chromatic Harness, Dragonskull Helm, Eden's Guile, Fists of the Desert Scorpion, Flamewrought, Goedeleth Rock, Guidance, Nature's Blessing, Nexus of the Way, Serpentine Cloak, The Gaping Maw, Vargh Redemption.

[ghostbuster]

I agree with that.
The same is true for mindcrit. Few artifacts increase it and it is the only crit whose chance cannot be increased by brotherhood quest. So I would suggest to replace the elixir of precision and the elixir of explosive force by

* elixir of expertise
increases all crit chances by 4%

* elixir of power
increases physical-, spell- and mind-power by 4

[edge2054]

Conversely, a lot of artifacts give a huge amount of willpower and cunning. I was looking over a recent solipsist in the vault.

Guidance gives +12 Cunning and Willpower.

Crown of Command gives +10 willpower.

Rope belt gives 7 cunning, 8 willpower, and 12 mindpower.

I agree in principal that mindpower on artifacts could be a bit better. But the stat bonuses willpower classes get right now blow everyone else out of the water.

[SageAcrin]

And equalling Spellpower is also iffy.

Mindpower works on lower margins in general-enemies have less saves for Mind than Magic or Physical on average, I believe(hard to say for sure without a statistical study I guess), and the powers of the skills are higher.

Still, I agree with the principle. Items like Guidance or the Rope Belt work as non-robe heavy boosters-dedicated mindpower robes/armor shouldn't be on the same level as Black Robe due to that-but random ego items just utterly lack on Mindpower as do many artifacts. It could use a bit of a retool.

Still not as bad as Mindcrit though.

[PureQuestion]

Nexus of the Way is sort of weird and I need to fix it. It's got +15 mindpower on it but the racial bonus for yeeks is a frankly absurd additional 15, doubling it. I'll probably move some of that out of the racial bonus and into the basic stats.

But yeah mindpower items are highly neglected and I'll be making more of them in the future...

[ghostbuster]

Also there no equivalent for mindpower of spellsurge_on_crit which can give a very large boost on spellpower (maybe up to 60 or 70 with the revamped spellblaze echoes and a surging staff).

[darkgod]

But wild gifts/psionics are made to work with the current values

[edge2054]

I tend to agree with Darkgod on this.

The biggest pita is mind save of course but if you look at the new class I took that into account in a few places. I also took it into account on sleep and gave them a talent that can give a ton of mind power.

I plan to add more mind power on egos though over the next few days. But I think wilders/psionics getting a ton of stat instead of a ton of mindpower makes them different and that that's good.

Do we have specific instances of a class that has trouble dealing with mental saves? Doomed maybe? I don't play them enough to really know. I do know their damage values are built around not hitting the same level of mindpower as mages do.

[donkatsu]

The mindpower doesn't really matter until the final boss fight. Focusing on nothing but stacking mindpower, I got to 68. Their mental saves are like 65 or something, which led to them shrugging off a lot of my mental statuses nearly half the time. My spellpower classes, on the other hand, had about 85 spellpower by the final boss fight, and were not only overcoming their saves with ease, but also applying spellshock. Maybe this just means spellpower items are overpowered. Or maybe the mind saves of the final bosses need to be nerfed instead, but then that leaves the potential problem of mindpower-based talents that inflict physical status effects.

Talents that lower mental save are of limited use, unless they themselves ignore mental save, which most (all?) of them don't.

Will/Cunning stat boosts are a lot less impressive when put it terms of mindpower, because of the way mindpower is split between the two stats.

+12 Cunning and Willpower is only +13 mindpower.
+10 Willpower is only +7 mindpower.
Rope Belt, the best of the bunch, is only 20 mindpower and it doesn't do anything else.

I'd hesitate to add too much more mindcrit though, because with 60 Cunning and two mindstars you're already at 40% crit. I just personally don't like the idea of it being normal to have more crits than non-crits. The reason I emphasize mindpower is that when it matters, it really matters. Not being able to land status effects is considerably worse than just doing less damage.

[SageAcrin]

Oh, yes, Mindcrit doesn't need a lot of presence, either. It just feels like some sources existing outside of a lucky Rare, a Mindstar, Luck boosting or Cunning should exist. It's a little silly how few sources besides those four exist.

Having also ran a Doomed through the entire game, I can't say that the Mind Save on the finale really bothered me-I just switched to physical damage oriented techs and played keepaway. And with Mind now doing halved instead of no damage on save, I can't imagine it being impossible to deal with. Cursed simply have too few skills to focus on solely Mind damage, so they'll pick up an alternate damage source before that, and they should.

85 Spellpower, yes, but the base powers for spells are designed to keep this in mind-that's why you get 20, 230 on standard Archmage blasting spells(not inordinately high or low). By contrast, Mind Sear is 10, 300, and that range of much higher damage is in all Psi/Gift Mindpower formula.

In other words, the game's designed around there being less Mindpower around, and it took a while for it to actually balance. Changing it again would require another round of rebalances, which is a little weird.

Having said that, I would like to see more separate sources of it, at least, in the same slots that the artifacts that are good at it are in.

Thaloren Ropebelt is great, for example...but what if you don't get it? There's not a lot of alternate Mindpower belts. Guidance is good, but what if you're not AM? Eldritch Pearl doesn't grant Mindpower-maybe it should, seeing as how it grants the other two powers. There's multiple body armor options(Chromatic Harness to a lesser degree, Robe of Force and Spydre to a greater one), but I don't think any egos really give enough Cunning/Will, or any real Mindpower bonus, to compensate if you miss the artifacts. Etc, you see where I'm going.

[donkatsu]

Again, you're missing the point entirely. Who cares about damage scaling? You can always nerf damage. The problem is that mindpower classes, and mindpower classes only, are denied the ability to use all the neat little tricks that they've built up over the course of the game when hit by a big fat wall of mental saves, and reduced to blandly taking and receiving damage. Gloom? Useless. Dominate? Forget it. Sleep? Not happening. Sure, you can get through it without them just fine. But it makes the fight boring. What's the point of giving you all these neat toys to play with, only to take them all away at the end? That's not balanced. You can't balance that. There is no way to balance "your status effects are awesome but for the final fight you just can't use them if you're a mindpower class."

Remember when Fearscape couldn't be used at High Peak? That awesome, character-defining talent that made you feel like a badass, only to let you down when you needed it most? It's like that.

[SageAcrin]

What big wall of Mindsaves?

Outside of the finale, what breaks 60? I think Nightmare Horrors do, but I can't recall much else besides a few elites.

(I wouldn't cry if the final bosses lost some Mindsave, mind you. But I'm thinking this isn't actually a problem in practice-I certainly never noticed it being one when I ran my Doomed through the game, outside of the finale.)

[edge2054]

I can't speak for Doomed but all the mental save reducing Solipsist powers have a 100% application rate (Sunder Mind for example).

Dreamforge had a bug in it though and broken dreams was only getting applied once per cycle. (fixed in trunk)

I agree that mind power is still the red-headed step child of ToME stats. It simply doesn't exist on a lot of artifacts and a lot of egos. I think it needs to be more prevalent yes but I don't believe it needs to be at spellpower levels.