They'll be here very, very shortly. They don't play like any other class in ToME, so I decided to highlight some of their oddities and point players in the right direction. Some things to note:

1) Talent info texts refer to 'energy' while the resource bar on the left side of the screen says 'psi.' It's all the same stuff.

2) You're never going to have much energy. It goes up by one per character level and one per point of willpower.

3) Energy doesn't regenerate naturally. You have to absorb it through damage shields or various other means.

4) Mindslayers are all about sustains, though it's not as simple as just turning them all on. You'll never have enough energy to do that.

5) Many key abilities are triggered by turning sustains *off*.

6) Telekinetically wielding a weapon requires a special talent that mindslayers start the game knowing. Use that instead of the 'w' command. Use 'w' for wielding weapons in your actual flesh and blood hands.

7) Mindslayers are perfectly happy wielding two-handers, one-handers with shields, bows, or slings in their flesh and blood hands. Don't feel confined to a single weapon type. However, you can only telekinetically wield a single melee weapon, so it's usually best to make that one a two-hander.

8) ToME still gets a little confused when you try to equip a shield while telekinetically wielding something. For now, just remove the telekinetically-wielded weapon, equip the shield, then re-equip the weapon. Sorry!

9) The entire Focus tree is designed around telekinetically wielding gemstones instead of melee weapons. Try it out if you want to play a mindslayer like a caster.

10) Mindslayer abilities scale powerfully with stats and talent points. If some talent doesn't look worth investing in, check again later.

11) The Conduit talent interacts in a complicated fashion with the various aura talents. If you're wondering why an aura isn't cooling down, it's because you've got it tied up in Conduit.

12) The shield and aura talents are exceptional tools for absorbing and dealing damage spikes. And, of course, managing damage spikes is how one wins.

I started an Archmage in svn and was doing just fine thank you, until I got to Bill the Bloody Troll and he had a regen infusion! Thank you very much, Darkgod.

Between the big damned troll rushing on me when I would phase away and having to use my own meagre regen and manasurge I just didn't have the DPS to do in bloody Bill.

Made an archmage.

Escorted a warrior at trollmire 4. Chose +2 strength. Trollmire 5 lost my escort. At least i managed to kill bill (no pun intended) with some kiting. Wow, he bumped me from level 3 to level 7!

Died stubboringly to skeleton mages at Korpul level 2.

Created a rogue - got bored fast. Created an archmage - this time died in disbelief to Bill. Next time i'll wait for level 4 and teleport.

Archmage again. Escorted an alchemist in Trollmire 2. Tough choice. I'd love Stone Touch but it costs 80 mana! Imbue item requires gems and who knows if i'll find any? Channel Staff seems nice but what if i find a nice shield? Bah, +2 to magic it is.

Just noticed i only have 35 mana - seems like the RNG screwed me during character generation. Nope, it turns out it's from sustaining arcane power level 5.

Rescued a warrior at Korpul level 2 for 2 strength. Level 3, another warrior, another 2 points of Strength.

At Korpul 3 a skeleton warrior resisted freeze, stuned me and proceeded to whack me till i was dead. Totally forgot about tidal wave. Remapped keys.

Too scared to visit level 5. Died to a trap while running away from the shade. Bah, i should have stayed put, tidal wave worked fine on him - dunno why Strike didn't. Level 11 now.

Old Forest 2 - noticed that when my mana got too low my sustained spells disappeared. Old forest 3 killed a bazillion wolves. Old forest 4: yet another warrior escort. My strength is as high as my willpower now.

Apparently i had the Skin of Many unidentified in my inventory for some time now. Didn't prevent a Naga Myrmidon from killing me at old forest level 6.

Killed Treeroot. Dropped Penitence but i alrady had Kor's Fall (bought it for a measly 5 gold!)

Sunk a bunch of points to get Nature's Call. I haven't seen it hit an enemy yet. Oh well, i'm still learning.

Calling it a night before the storm quest. Next day - i'll park this archamge and start another one since i'm not happy with the way i distributed talent points - i should have picked one of the seer's talents instead!

I keep getting warrior escort quests - this time Trollmire 3 - for +2 strength. I realized that by impatiently sinking all my points to Flame in order to get it to become a beam i am now level 4 without teleport. So i'll have to wait a bit more before i face Bill.

Hit level 5 just after descending the stairs to Trollmire 5. Got Teleport, Freeze and Manathrust. I hope i won't die to Bill this time. I didn't. He dropped the Burninator. It packs a punch but it wastes a turn. Might be useful to clear honey tree clumps in the old forst. There's a vault over here but i'll visit the town first, i'm going to be careful this time, a little backtracking won't hurt. While diving back to finish the vault i found a bright dwarven lamp.

I noticed that my spells mana cost keeps increasing. And now there's this message "Lucinda's spells looks more powerful". Do they scale by use? By some stat?

Went to Last Hope, bought Martial Training, dumped all my remaining points to constitution and got level 1 Health. Went from 163 to 268 hitpoints. Going back to Korpul, I found a hidden trap door but i won't pursue the quest.

Found a summertide Phial but my dwarven lamp is brighter. Found an orange bow that had "Damage on hit(melee) : 5 poison" o_0

Note to self : tidal wave hurts escorted allies! It does turn The Shade visible though. The anorithil finally died after walking into 2 red traps. Oh well at least i got to level 11. Found a thief in Old Forest 4. Got another Trap Disarm. Found a +22% nature resist at Old Forest 4. That'll be handy against the dungeon boss.

He went down fast. I'm doing the maze now but i'm starting to have too many unique items. I'm dropping Bill's trunk at trollmire 1. Put 2 points in Strength and got heavy armour talent, just in case.

This is the end of my extended weekend, maybe i'll be able to play some more next week. All in all, a great experience.

I think Ruu was the first rogue I ever got past level 10. The first one who ever got to use the nightshade trap. Quite nice. Good chunk of nature damage, and stun too! She's also the first one who ever survived to actually use Flurry. In retrospect, I probably should have sent her through the Maze before tackling Korpul. *sigh*

I've just checked character vaults... Every alchemist have 5\5 bombs throwing but almost nobody has Invoke Golem and other powers.
In my opinion, golem is a main Alchemist's force - you can freely send him to enemies and strike them, stun them, heal golem then summon golem back or recreate without fear of fail - because your main character is standing on the stairs in safety. I've got only to level 24 so far - maybe things will change later.

Even more - on the insane difficulty golem-driver seems to be easiest character to play - golem has elite rank and I think he has no penalties to damage taken.

This was Sirracco's idea but I figuring out to actually do the effect ended up taking a lot longer then anticipated. The idea was to pull power from other time lines. As much as I love Sirracco's initial idea of casting a spell, cloning the player and the bolt to reload the level, then doing it all over again, it sounded like a lot to implement. So I ended up going with a next spell cast inflicts X more damage route (I know, a bit boring but hey).

So at first I tried to use something like Martyr except having the spell hit the target again rather then hitting yourself. I ran into an infinite loop here and after a failed attempt to fix it decided to scrap that idea.

Second idea was to have this be a stacking buff that broke on cast. So the first turn you get a big bonus to damage and if you don't use it right away you can stack more damage on top of it, though in much smaller percentages. After five turns of this you'd lose the gathered damage if you hadn't used it. Casting a spell at any time would also end the effect.

So I created a time out effect and the activate/deactivate for my new timed effect and I started testing. The power on the tooltip updated as I wanted it to but the power on the character sheet never went up. At which point I realized that activate happens once (on activate) and whatever number it pulls at that time is the number it will have.

Next I tried putting the damage buff in the time out effect itself (time out effects happen everytime the timer ticks down) which led to the character ending up with +1000% damage. It was putting the value on everytime as I wanted but wasn't clearing the old values out.

After wracking my brain for awhile I remembered that on merge effects work for damage so they could probably work for this (I'd used them for stuff like damage over time effects but never anything else). I looked over a few on merge effects, specifically bloodlust and the berserker strength one (bloodrage?) then went to work modifying bloodrage for my stacking damage effect.

Here's how everything came together and the guts of what a self stacking timed effect needs.

Activate - This is your base value you want to happen the first turn.
Deactivate - To remove the effect completely at the end.
Time Out - This is your trigger for reapplying the timed effect (we're applying the exact same timed effect so our merge code can merge them.) Put whatever value you want to add or remove as the power.
On Merge - Here you need to remove the old timed effect and make sure your new timed effect gets the correct duration and updated power before it gets applied.

The rest of the talent was pretty easy once I got that out of the way so I won't go into it. I'm sure anyone that needs to deactivate a talent when another talent is used can search for stealth or lightning speed and figure it out ;)

I'm pretty happy with the end result and may update my speed control tree now that I know how to do this. A slow that starts off big but loses power every turn could be fun as would a speed effect that gave you a big boost but lost power each turn.

The most irritating thing about this is after the Elf dies the counter still continues. It makes you wait until the very end before updating the journal. The 2nd most irritating thing about this quest are the darkness inducing Demons. I used track to subvert the purpose of them but it still annoyed the crap out of me.

The 3rd most annoying thing was knowing that from the start it was a futile attempt. There is no way for a fighter without massive room clearing spells or attacks to deal with the horde that comes through those gates enough so that the jeweler lives through it.

I managed it (barely) with my Archmage by making sure that I blasted everything in sight. Even so the purple and pink Us almost put an end to him. In terms of difficulty for melee types I would rate this about 10 points higher on a scale of 1 to 20 than the Crypt where the Crypt is at 19. I assume the berserker ability to swing around is probably equally ineffective because some of these demons have 2kish hp and most have over 400hp.

All in all a very upsetting side quest. The reward is certainly worth it but that makes it even more tantalizing and painful in the end since it is something that I just can't get. Even have the double diamond/pearl combo ready.

blackened the dwarven cursed cleared the final fight in under 20 turns. This was by FAR the easiest to play character I've made. I probably only used infusions 10 times, and that was in trollmire. Very fun game! I'll probably try to get a doomed there next, i love how the hate resource works. Times i died were in the beginning when i was not sure what talents to raise.

http://te4.org/characters/2042/tome/11efb5e6-21d3-11e0-89d9-001cc000edf0

Today when I recently started mages again I looked closely at some of the categories I never use. This lead me to look at stone skin and other close combat talents. I noticed that Stone Skin and Phantasmal Shield create an effect very similar the wyrmic ability Icy Skin. So I decided to try to play a mage character like a wyrmic or warrior. So far it bin pretty easy but I have not faced any hard bosses yet. The 2 times I have died was caused by my bad judgment and skeleton mages. Here is the character link:
http://te4.org/characters/931/tome/e0d028f3-25b6-11e0-a46f-001cc000edf0

If any one has any ideas of what I should try I am open to suggestions