Mindslayer issue in beta 20 and 20b
There's a bug which will cause mysterious disappearing weapons. It occurs on items that have been wielded at some point using the Telekinetic Grasp talent. Such items, when you try to take them off, will disappear forever. Worse, if you indirectly take the item off by wielding something to replace it, both items will disappear.
Doh!
Now the good news:
1) It only occurs on characters that have been saved and reloaded. If you do everything in one sitting, you should be fine.
2) Yufra was kind enough to whip up a very quick fix and post it here: http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=24592
Sorry for the inconvenience!
Introduction to mindslayers
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.
Mindslayer preview
Mindslayers are the first subclass of the Psionic class. They don't control minds or read thoughts or cloud vision or sow confusion. They don't sense danger or see the future or will changes to reality. In fact, they can barely even manage to apply any forces outside of their immediate reach.
Hey! What kind of psionic is this, anyway?
They're the kind that uses their thoughts to pick up a twenty pound greatmaul without even touching it. And then, without moving a muscle, they use it to murder anybody who looks at them funny.
But what if they want to murder somebody else at the same time, you ask? Well, that's why they have hands! With a little assistance from judiciously applied mental forces, mindslayers can quite easily heft whatever weapons they want and do their blood-letting the old fashioned way, too.
That's stuff you get for free. It's not even in a talent tree. So what else can they do? I'll talk more about it later, but here are some highlights:
-Set people on fire with their brains
-Electrocute people with their brains
-Reshape weapons and armor
-Run and jump like a Yoda-trained olympian
-Erect mental shields to absorb damage and energy
-Project energy through melee-range auras
-Leech energy from surroundings and foes
-Enhance all of the above using gemstones as psionic foci
Hopefully we'll see them in beta 19!