Goon Mindslayer Guide 1.1.5
Contents
Melee Mindslayer Guide 1
Mine was something like:
At the start:
- Hit Wil and Cun hard at the start, primarily the former.
- Start with Kinetic Shield 1, Kinetic Aura 1, Telekinetic Smash 1. Get Mindlash to 5 asap for a ranged option and for survivability early on.
- Get Augmentation to 5. If you've been pumping Willpower this should give you enough STR along the way to get Armor Training. Keep getting Armor Training as it becomes available, because you want to be a walking steel blob if possible.
- Meanwhile, put points into accuracy and damage masteries, but only ever 3 at once and remove them each level before you spend points you actually want to spend. They'll be useless once you get mindstars.
- Once you complete Norgos, you should have just about enough money for an infusion, so check the towns for a beefy wil or cun regeneration infusion. If you don't get one, restart.
- Clear out the T1s. You should be over level 10 with a decent stack of money. Take it to Zigur, get mindstar training, get a T3 mind mindstar if possible. Get a second when you can for kicks, but having one of them is important because that'll affect your mindlash cooldown and important mindslayer abilities. Immediately take all those generics you've been saving up and dump them into 5ing anime mind blades. Keep saving the rest, you'll need them.
- Once Augmentation's at 5, get all three shields at 1 and Shield Mastery. Get two auras at 1 and Conduit them.
- When you hit 20, get Mindslayer / Finer Energy Projection. Take all those points you've been spending and 5 Reshape Weapon and 5 Reshape Armor as soon as possible. Once you've got these, lay off the Cunning and switch to getting your Constitution up to par. Meanwhile, reshape all your heavy armor and mindstars to seriously beef yourself out.
General mid-late game:
- Ideally you want to end up wielding three reshaped mind-damage mindstars, and be collecting all the +mind% gear you can get... but mindstar tiers are much more important than weapon tiers, so you might have to deal with Nature stars for a while. Check Zigur and Last Hope for a nice purple massive T3 armor.
- Class skills generally focus on getting my shields maxed out, then beefing up my conduit auras. Mindblades do enough damage that I generally find you can leave the auras and sort out your defences first. After I've got 3 shields and 2 auras up to par I'll generally hit up Focused Channeling for kicks.
- Generic skills max out Thick Skin and Armor and a critical race talent or two, then save for Fungus. You're probably not going to have enough points for Fungus and AM, but Fungus helps keep you in top shape while you're waiting for shields to come back up.
- If you've not had good loot luck - or even you have - consider running a couple of farportals to get to level 30 before Dreadfell. It'll make Dreadfell harder, but Superpower will push your damage through the roof and bumping the Master for 1k is very big and clever. (I think the maths work out better than Mental Tyranny at this point, especially on mindstars.)
- Level 36 and Wrym Bile went towards Fungus and a movement infusion.
Beamed is probably correct, you should probably get shields earlier than I do, but the T1s will get you to about level 12 so it's not too much of a big deal if you can kite things with mindlash and careful play or tank them with a beefy regeneration infusion or a T3 heavy armor until then. I had a hard time around level 25, but once you bull through to 30 Superpower will mince things so hard it's untrue.
Melee Mindslayer Guide 2
Here's a guide to melee mindslayers, since people have been requesting guides lately.
Rather than focusing on aura spikes and making your mindlash as ridiculous as possible, which is probably the strongest mindslayer build, melee mindslayers are all about bump attacking. The mindstar mastery tree (which must be bought from Zigur) is essential to making this work. Regular melee weapons don't have the mind stats, and non-psiblade mindstars do no damage. Antimagic is also highly recommended; with the fungus tree and antimagic shield you go from squishy to nearly invulnerable. Here's some details on how I built mine:
Stats
Start off by getting cun and will as necessary to unlock your various talents. At that point transition to an even mix of will/cun/con. Once those are maxed out put the remaining points in strength.
Class Talents
Your class talents actually aren't that interesting. I ended up dumping a lot of points into thing because I wasn't sure where to put them. You'll definitely want to spend a cat point to unlock mobility, unlocking grip is up to you, but if you don't unlock it you might struggle to find a way to actually use all your points.
Absorption 5/5/5/5, no question. Mindslayers have a pretty heavy negative HP modifier, and these go a long way towards keeping you from dying. You want 5 in the first three shields for maximum damage reduction, and 5 in the last talent so you can cover every type of damage. You'll normally roll with 2 of these active (you can't have all three active) to suit whichever area you're in. If you ever find yourself in danger, say you're below 50% hp or you're in LoS of a ton of high damage enemies, you immediately spike all three shields, then use absorption mastery and turn back on your appropriate shields. This takes no game time and will give you a huge damage buffer while you kill the threat or run away.
Projection I recommend going 5/5/0/0, but giving this tree a fairly low priority after the first two points. Spiking these is a good source of damage before level 15 or so, after which you'll just be using them with the conduit ability to buff your mind weapon. There's no point in putting any in the mastery, since cooldowns are not relevant when you're using them with conduit.
Psi-Fighting I don't have any strong point guidelines for this one. Telekinetic Smash is a nice damage spike at 1 point, but adding more doesn't increase its damage all that much. Augmentation will make you a bit stronger with every point you put in it, dump points in here when you're unsure what else to do with them. Conduit will buff the damage your telekineticly wielded weapon does at the cost of disabling your auras. Put 1 point in this ASAP but max it late. Frenzied psifighting looked gimmiky so i avoided it, but that could have been a mistake for all I know.
Augmented Mobility 1/1/5/5. You need mobility as a melee character and this is the main way to get it. Mindhook is handy but not really necessary. You can add more points if you like. I never found much of a use for quick as thought, it's like a crappy movement infusion that costs a ton of psi. You won't need it on top of your other mobility. Telekinetic leap is great, hop over enemies with a decent range and low cooldown. Shattering charge is your burst damage skill. Great for 1 shotting mages (who don't have bone shield). Note that you need to have your physical shield spiked or available to be spiked or this move will be unusable.
Grip If you take it, at least get 1/1/5/5. Deflection makes you tankier, but by the time you can start pumping points into it the main ranged threats will be beams and AoEs which it doesn't help against. Bind is useful in edge cases, but it's not worth spending points to increase the duration. All it does is keep your target from non-magically moving. Implode is a large slow and decent DoT. Combine with your other slows to really lock down bosses. Grasp makes your telekineticly wielded weapon stronger, you should eventually have 5 points in it.
Focus 0/0/0/0. Far and away the worst tree in the game. Do not touch.
Generic Talents Since you're adding fungus, mindstar and AM here, your points are actually pretty sparse. Spend them wisely.
Survival 0/0/0/0. Not worth the your precious generic points. Piercing sight and heightened senses can be picked up from thief escorts, though.
Combat Training Before you get psiblades you'll need some combat accuracy to actually hit stuff, but be sure to keep the points in it re-assignable because it will be useless once you translate to mindstars. 5 thick skin because it's thick skin. Eventually you should have 3 armor mastery because the best mindslayer armor in the game is plate. That said, before you find those tier 5 artifacts you should just prioritize life, heal mod, cun, will and mindpower on your body armor.
Voracity 1/1/1/0 1 point wonders that can restore your psi in a pinch. The one that slows is good for stacking slow on bosses. The one that freezes is actually pretty strong CC. It might be worth putting more points in if you can scrounge them up. You don't need insatiable, I never had trouble managing my psi without it.
Mental Discipline 1/1+/4/0 1 point in aura discipline to unlock the others, you won't be using it. As many points as you can fit in shield discipline, but it's pretty low priority. 4 points in Iron Will for stun resist, the 5th point has severely diminished returns. Highly Trained Mind isn't good enough to justify using your generics on it.
Fungus 5/1/5/1 It's one third of the equation that makes you nearly invulnerable. It's also your main form of equilibrium reduction.
Antimagic 1/1/5/0 You need the damage reduction from antimagic shield. Resolve and silence are still strong at 1 point each. Give mana clash a pass.
Mindstar Mastery 5/1+/1+/0 Buy this at Zigur as soon as you can scrounge up 500 gold. Then upgrade it there as soon as your can scrounge up 750 gold. Getting psiblades to 5 is essential for your damage output. Thorn grab and leaves tide are good at one point. They're even better with more points but are low priority. Thorn grab is a dot and a slow that is instant usage. Use it on threatening enemies. Leaves Tide is a strong AoE dot AND evasion booster. It's good both for clearing groups and tough fights. Nature's equilibrium might be worth 1 point just for the damage, but the weird heal made me avoid it since you don't have anything to heal with it.
Racial Tree You want a race with 1 point wonder skills. I went Higher, mainly because they're the master race, and got some good use out of highborn's bloom. Highborn's bloom>spike every shield>reset shields>shattering charge can all be done in a single turn, and it's nice to still be at full psi at the end of it. Honestly, any race other than cornac or undead would probably be fine. I'd only go cornac if you want both the grip tree and 5 infusions. Undead require a lot of generic points, have a bitch of a time learning mindstar mastery and can't learn antimagic/fungus so they're not really an option.
Prodigies
Superpower and Mental Tyranny (in that order, if you can manage 50 str at level 30) are so good it's hard to justify any other prodigies. They're big boosts to your damage output, and by the time I hit 50 I had a mindpower of 105 thanks to superpower. The prodigy that buffs your antimagic shield might be worth taking over mental tyranny at 42, but if you can't take superpower at 30, then you should definitely take mental tyranny.
Infusions
Get the two biggest regen infusions you can find and have one of them on all the time. Right click them and set them to use when available once you've put 5/1/5/1 in fungus. Unless you can max stun immunity you'll want a physical wild infusion, otherwise it's your choice. Keep in mind there are plenty of annoying and potentially deadly physical afflictions that aren't stun. Your fourth slot should be a movement infusion. If you can fit a fifth, get heroism.
Mindslayers are extremely reliant on sustains. By the the time you get rolling you should have, at any given time, 2 psi shields, antimagic shield, beyond the flesh, augmentation, conduit channeling 2 auras, mental tyranny if you took it, and wild growth active. This gives you strong bump attacks and makes you incredibly tanky. Your telekineticly wielded weapon should be the biggest, gnarliest 2 hander you can find. Only replace it with a mindstar if you find 3 extremely strong mindstars and have already taken superpower.
A note about your tankiness: Your one vulnerability is single, huge hits. If you take 100 damage 30 times in a turn your shields will eat all of it and any that gets through will be healed by your regen infusions. If you take a single hit of 1500 damage your shields will mitigate 200 of it and then you'll be 1 shot because mindslayers don't have much HP. The main threats you have to watch for are anything with You Shall be my Weapon, and berserker/corrupter/archer boss/vault enemies.
Tips 1
For Mindslayer, max Willpower, put your other stat points into cunning and constitution. If you're going extremely melee, you can put some strength in there somewhere.
Get a point or two in Kinetic Aura to start, then max Kinetic Shield and Augmentation. You also want at least one point in each of the shields as soon as you can. Your shields are instant speed, so you can toggle them all on and off instantly to spike them for damage shields in case of emergency or dangerous enemy. 5/5 Absorption Mastery will let them collectively cover every damage type in the game, but you can only have two up at once so tailor your shields to common enemies in the area. For example, Rhaloren Camp has a bunch of melee enemies (physical), elven mages (physical and lightning) and elven tempests (lightning), so you want to run around with Kinetic and Charged shield.
Mindlash starts out mediocre, but once you pick up a tier-2 or better mindstar gets significantly better. Even one point in Reach will up the range on your leeches, so you want that early, but it's otherwise bad until you get a good mindstar/gem.
Mindslayers generally start off as a melee class with a few nukes and transition into a nuker role as the game progresses, but you can hew closely to one or the other if you want. Focus is the nuke tree,
For generic points, Kinetic Leech is amazing, Shield Discipline is really good, Voracity is helpful if you're trying to go primarily nukey, fatigue will kick your ass so don't wear heavy armor unless you have Finer Energy Manipulations.
Speaking of FEM, you have three locked trees: Finer Energy Manipulations, Grip, and Mobility. All the talents in Mobility are terrible but they are literally your only non-inscription source of mobility stuff so if you are primarily melee you will want to take it. Finer Energy Manipulations will make all your equipment better and can alleviate psi problems. Grip has Implode, which is godly, Deflect Projectiles, which is nice against projectile enemies, and Greater Telekinetic Grip which will improve your psionic focus's melee damage. Focus tree is another option for where to put your category points - Mindlash scales linearly with talent level, rather than logarithmically, so it's actually a pretty big damage boost.
Antimagic mindslayers can be tanky as hell between antimagic shields, fungus tree, and psi shields, but that puts you in a critical shortage of generic and category points, and is best done with a cornac.
One funny strategy I've heard of is beelining the Derth alchemist's elixirs to get the Lifebinding Emerald from him. This can get you a really early tier 5 gem and makes Mindlash really good even fairly early. Getting a nice mindstar from a chest will have the same effect.
