Mindslayer health

[aristalis]

They have similar abilities to arcane blade and wyrmic, who are both at +2/lvl. Given that they have great defense but bad CDs on their range I think they should be at +1/lvl, +2 max

[SageAcrin]

The CD on their range can go down to 0 with Mindlash. It scales downward with gem tier.

Strictly speaking, you're probably right that they don't need to be -4, but they function pretty well at that level. Their defensive skills are quite good, and raw damage on their ranged offense are certainly better than both of those classes(It is not unreasonable for Mindlash to do into 2000, and with heavy tweaking 3000 is possible). They also have comparable melee capabilities, if not better, than Wyrmic and an extra slot to put equipment in, among things... but -4 is a big gap from +2. I admit, it wouldn't necessarily be horrible if it was higher than tied-for-game-worst.

Having said that, as someone that hates Mindslayer due in large part to paranoia about their incredibly low life rating...I don't think it really needs to be buffed, per se. They used to be pretty bad about getting splattered by off elements, but after Absorption Mastery got buffed, it's a manageable problem. They're not an incredible class, but they definitely function as it is.

[King Gainer]

I think they could stand to be at -2 or -3. Personally I avoid them mainly for their low life and how boring a mindlash build is.

[aristalis]

Oh, thanks for the tip.

[Parcae2]

Mindslayer is one of the few classes to have beaten Insane/Roguelike. They definitely don't need a buff; they need to be made more interesting.

[SageAcrin]

Mindslayer is one of the few classes to have beaten Insane/Roguelike. They definitely don't need a buff; they need to be made more interesting.

In fairness, that player was Stition.

Stition either savescums(Which seems kinda unlikely, given that he's complained that Insane isn't hard enough, IIRC. Also given his massive playtime and generally believable strats from talking to him.), or he is completely and utterly ridiculous at this game.

[ohioastro]

The mindslayer class is an interesting concept. The key is realizing that you can stack their defensive abilities. For example, armor has wonderful benefits when combined with their shields, which in turn benefit if you combine them (either with shield runes or anti-magic shield). Add in fungus and anti-magic and you have a class that barely takes damage in the endgame. Run a dwarf and you don't have to worry about status effects.

The biggest defect of the class is that it's tedious to rotate around the shields and to pop and drop them to deal with individual opponents. I'd favor increasing the health, dropping shields to two (or allowing three) to make the class less mechanically annoying to play, and dropping the percentage of damage absorbed by the shields. "Less fragile, less able to mitigate damage" would be a better build in my view.

One of the biggest issues that TOME has, at least for me, is that there are classes that have "hassle factors" built into them. In other words, you can get big advantages by playing a certain way - but the cost is making the game very slow to play and mashing a lot of buttons. Mindslayer is one of the biggest offenders.

[Parcae2]

I made an addon a while back that gave the mindslayer one button to spike all its shields. You might want to check that out.

[Sedrahl]

Mindslayer has a lot of micromanagement but it only gets really bad if you're playing a melee style and by extension need to eat a lot of damage up-front. With mindlash and aura spikes they can make quite reasonable tanky casters, and don't need to play around with shield spiking as often due to being able to fight from range.

I'd personally prefer to see a proper melee-focused psionic to the game, who can utilize either melee weapons or mindstars effectively and natural beefiness on par with other close combat classes. Mindslayers simply do too poor of a job of this due to their downright bad mobility, lack of melee techniques, as well as bad HP gain. They simply don't have any of the key features of a proper melee class.

[Kaja Rainbow]

In fairness, that player was Stition.

Stition either savescums(Which seems kinda unlikely, given that he's complained that Insane isn't hard enough, IIRC. Also given his massive playtime and generally believable strats from talking to him.), or he is completely and utterly ridiculous at this game.

From what I recall, his win with that rogue was due to abusing Gravity Trap. Likewise, his Shadowblade win abused Ambushcade to kill things out of LoS. He's one of the people who lobbied for the upcoming pet AI aggro fix, to plug up that exploit. Still, he did have to get up to the levels where he could get those strategies running, which's no mean feat on Insane.

The few people I know of who routinely play on Insane seem to consider Mindslayer one of the few Insane-viable classes. By contrast, they actually consider the oozemancer and solipsist underpowered because their survivability talents just don't scale high enough for Insane's damage! So Mindslayer can apparently achieve ridiculous survivability, but that requires a very specific playstyle.

[SageAcrin]

Mmm, but it's also worthy of note there was a time when Conduit would allow you to effectively deal Mindlash damage across infinite range and through walls, allowing you to kill any enemy you knew the location of without retribution.

So, Mindslayer has, since that clear, had an exploit closed up too. Still, they're probably one of the better options; Nightmare tends to reward defenses that are both instant and overkill, and spiked barriers fit into that range.

By the way, having cleared Nightmare, I agree with that assessment of Solipsist/Oozemancer. The figures seem to back it up, too; There's one Solipsist Nightmare/Roguelike clear and one Oozemancer clear, IIRC. (Better than half the classes in the game, or so, though.)

Carving a few hundred damage out of everything isn't saving you at those damage values, and resistance gains are only so good when every enemy past a point has 40% all resist penetration.. It's possible to clear, but they aren't nearly as good-more of a tier 2 to the Archmage/Summoner tier 1. The changes to extremely high level scaling that are going in may change that, but I rather doubt it'll be enough to make them dominate. Will be interesting to see, though.

[jenx]

Mmm, but it's also worthy of note there was a time when Conduit would allow you to effectively deal Mindlash damage across infinite range and through walls, allowing you to kill any enemy you knew the location of without retribution.

So, Mindslayer has, since that clear, had an exploit closed up too. Still, they're probably one of the better options; Nightmare tends to reward defenses that are both instant and overkill, and spiked barriers fit into that range.

By the way, having cleared Nightmare, I agree with that assessment of Solipsist/Oozemancer. The figures seem to back it up, too; There's one Solipsist Nightmare/Roguelike clear and one Oozemancer clear, IIRC. (Better than half the classes in the game, or so, though.)

Carving a few hundred damage out of everything isn't saving you at those damage values, and resistance gains are only so good when every enemy past a point has 40% all resist penetration.. It's possible to clear, but they aren't nearly as good-more of a tier 2 to the Archmage/Summoner tier 1. The changes to extremely high level scaling that are going in may change that, but I rather doubt it'll be enough to make them dominate. Will be interesting to see, though.

Well I've been trying to clear nightmare with a solipsist for 2 months now on nightmare, and it's hard. I"ve only got to the East about two times,and never to a pride even. And I"ve won on normal many times. so its' very tough.