Got a yeek doomed on insane to the Master. Lost him to a ridiculous welcome party of the Master running at me almost immediately at the start and waking up 2-3 randbosses between me and my shadows teleporting around, including a paradox mage who teleported me into a stunlocking skeleton party among other things, along with a ton of rares in the process. A couple comments.
I tried out fears early a bit on a lark, was running 4/4 instill fear and heighten fears, and they worked pretty well on the things that weren't fear immune, which was unfortunately a lot of the enemies, including said paradox mage skeleton magus. Horrors are fear immune, which is really bad due to how many of them are dangerous, as well as plants, skeleton undeads, dreads, and some other things. A lot more undead were fearable than expected.
Paranoia caps out at 60% chance with a ton of mindpower/points, and each turn the enemy will do a mental save to half the chance of it going off. It's not useless against solo enemies, since it will force them to melee a shadow or another of your minions if you have them adjacent. Terrified also caps out at 50% for an action fail, and funny enough it looks like it can also cause the paranoid attack to fail, which can be counter productive.
The Distressed effect that reduces saves is not useless, though that is for a reason that is not at all obvious: brainlock. Cross-tier effects aren't amazingly well documented, but when I looked at the code I was a bit surprised, as the duration is determined by the following, line 329 of combat.lua:
Code: Select all
return math.max(0, math.max(math.ceil(atk/20), 1) - math.max(math.ceil(def/20), 1))
So duration of the cross-tier is the difference between the "tier number", with save or power of 20 or less being tier 1, save or power of 21-40 tier 2, and so on. If you can beat the saves by more than one tier, then the brainlock will last even longer than 1 turn, and given that punishments have a 25% chance of cross-tier on damage, that can be a big deal to help lock down enemies on doomed. Distressed scales up to the 30s all save reduction at endgame mindpower, so if you land that on something with saves close enough to lower the tier you'll get an extra turn of brainlock, or even open up the chance for brainlocking if you were the same tier prior. Ironically, due to scaling that's harder to do on something with high enough saves that you aren't guaranteed to land the fear, though you'll get a higher chance to land debuffs afterwards. I don't know the save values tough stuff gets to typically offhand, but the EoR end boss on nightmare had saves in the mid 80s, which might be close enough to reduce the tier even with rescaling. (Seriously don't run fears on endgame EoR, though, way too many horrors).
With the stacking damage reduction and various other doomed debuffing you can stay in LOS long enough for heightened fears to work and pile on the fears, so I thought overall it was worth the points.
I didn't bother with tyrant, though, it did look like garbage. The "mindpower for save check" passive is pretty low at high levels, and the fears look like they pollute your pool of fears more than help. You're right that haunted can't crit, code explicitly said so, so not sure what it's good for beyond some extra madness checks. Maybe if you have a bunch of paranoid enemies in a pile refreshing on each other you can get lots of extra madnesses? But it's a lot harder to set up the paranoid pile if instill fear only has 1/6 chance of bringing up paranoid.
I think you also underrate hateful whisper a bit, the damage really isn't that much less than reproach, and higher than willful strike. According to tometips, at max points and 100 mindpower hateful whisper does 426 base damage, reproach 456 base damage on the first hit, agony 665 base damage over the duration, and willful strike and stone about 396 base damage. The mechanics on it are a bit weird, and you are right that you don't want to put points into the skill if you are running Malslek the Accursed's Hat. You can only cast it on enemies that don't have the debuff, then the debuff will do the check every turn whether to spread to an enemy in range that doesn't have the debuff, and the initial debuff from the cast or proc is the only one with guaranteed spreads. Sort of like a lazy, debuff based chain lightning. You can hit the same target multiple times if it's debuff wears off sooner than a neighbor's and the neighbor spreads back to them, though that is very unreliable in practice. Malslek's hat will make the base skill close to worthless since it will be spreading level 2 whisper debuffs all over the place on it's own, and lock out higher level player cast versions from spreading.
Final point, for prodigies the range amplification drone really seems like it was made for this class, and deserves mention. I may not be the best salesman since stunlock is what killed my doomed, but it really makes a huge difference when you have so many piddly range skills increased to at least range 6. It also works on ruined earth, so at max level the effect has an AOE of the full range 10 line of sight.
Overall though, playing my yeek doomed on insane is about the slowest I've ever played tome, it's not a straighforward class if you want to do it right.
