Mindslayer Gestures

[Faeryan]

What if I were to use Doomed Gestures on a Mindslayer who's using mindstar mastery and stuff for awesome triple wielded mindstars. Will I lose any damage cause of the gestures since it says it adds base damage from mindstars or will I get the mindstar hits added with gestures stuff?

[Mewtarthio]

The sum of the base damage of both your mindstars is added directly to the damage listed in the talent description. So, if it says your gesture deals 10-20 points of damage, and you've got two mindstars that both deal 7.0-7.7 damage, your gesture will list (7.0 + 7.0) = 14 bonus damage, and will ultimately deal 24-34 points of damage.

However, you will not deal any on-hit bonuses, nor will you benefit from anything that kicks in when you attack with a weapon (including Psiblades' bonus damage). In all respects, you are firing off a mind talent with a range of 1, not hitting someone with a weapon in melee (with one slight oddity: Rare archers with the Intuitive Shots talent can still disrupt your attack, if I read the code right).

Note that your TK weapon should work as normal. Note also that any talent that explicitly states you are using a particular weapon (such as TK Smash, which always uses your mainhand weapon, even if you have two weapons equipped) will work as normal.

[Mewtarthio]

By the way, since I'm assuming you're asking for an Adventurer (if not, then I'm sorry to inform you that Mindslayers cannot get Gestures), there is one area where Gestures interact strangely with other talents: Namely, weapon talents that don't specify exactly which weapon you use. This includes talents that just say "hit the target with both weapons." See, in the code, a talent like Flurry or Dissolve is defined as "attack the target X times with a Y% damage modifier." Similarly, Whirlwind and Giant Leap are defined as "attack every target adjacent to the user with a Y% damage modifier." Gesture of Pain will replace such attacks as normal, but it will not use their damage modifiers (nor will it change its damage type, in the case of talents like Dissolve).

What does this mean for you? Well, for starters, it means that talents like Ice Claw are totally useless, and Sweep and Whirlwind just let you use an ordinary Gesture on multiple opponents (though, oddly enough, they'll still bleed from Sweep, though they won't freeze from Ice Claw)*. Much more exciting, though, are the multi-hit talents, which now deal full Gesture damage with every hit. Dissolve, for instance, might say "make four attacks at 30% damage each," but what it means is "make four full-power Gesture of Pain attacks." With a single talent point. It's quite awesome.

*In case you're curious, that's because the Sweep talent applies the bleeding effect to any opponents hit by its attacks, while Ice Claw changes the attack's damage to Ice (cold + freeze) and lets DamageTypes take care of the side effects. Gesture of Pain always deals Mind damage, even if the invoking talent tells it otherwise, so the Ice effect does nothing; it can, however, still "hit" the opponent by beating its mind save, so talents that explicitly invoke effects on hit work as normal. Regrettably, you pretty much have to code dive to find out which talents use a special DamageType and which ones apply effects on hit by themselves. Though I will tell you that Dissolve uses Acid Blind damage to do its blinding at high levels, so there is absolutely no benefit to spending more than one point on it.

[Faeryan]

Correct about adventurers. Was gonna try a Wil based Psiblades minstar triple wielding gesturing antimagic rampager, but since psiblades gives hefty bonuses I think I'll leave gestures off.
Not like I was gonna have enough generics anyways.