CHANGE SEARCH has the last update to TK skills timestamped 2017-10-04 01:31:40, psychic fist was changed to accomodate an overhaul change 2017-10-01 00:41:29.
Take another tert: Hexes. Last report was... 2013?
CHANGE SEARCH has the last update to TK skills timestamped 2017-10-04 01:31:40, psychic fist was changed to accomodate an overhaul change 2017-10-01 00:41:29.
Great. Psychicfist is still in the "possibly useful" column though and it's still listed as causing broken jaw when it does not in fact cause that. Plus it's not an envoy report, people aren't flocking back to the skill and the skill is still derelict.
Everything in my first post is up to date and applicable right now and most of it has been applicable for over a year, as far as I'm aware. Which seems to be true, based on the "we're already aware of this problem" responses I got.
Take another tert: Hexes. Last report was... 2013?
That's exactly what I'm talking about. I'm already to the point where I want to switch skills. TK is not my "favorite and I can't do without it, please make it OP for me!" skill. I just want something that is useful relative to other offerings that are currently wiping battlefields clean. I don't care what it is. It could be throwing rocks at people for all I care, just keep it up to date and not useless.
As an aside, if you haven't put in an ABBUG about it being listed as doing something it doesn't, you're not being particularly helpful. We'd all love a magical system whereby changes are automatically reflected everywhere they're mentioned, whoever is reading my bug reports that are half about "This help file has a typo" probably most of all, but that's not how it works yet.
- TK is a dated skillset, with stuff that's not nice and shiny compared to other skillsest and it's missing a lot of the bling of the newer skillsets. Terts for mage / druids are being looked at as other people have said and personally I have high hopes in TK and TP getting a dusting off to make them more interesting again, as well as illusions/phantasms. - TK is still a viable way to kill people. It's not the fastest, but you can pull it off, especially if you're holding a meld / can provide some pressure to keep clot curing down. It's one of the skillsets that require a little more timing relevant / lack passive pressure to their kill method, but I've seen it pulled off. 1vs1 viability may not be totally given, depending on who you go up against, but it also won't 100% reset if you miss a beat. - Something I'm still noticing after ~2 years of active combat experience, is that it's sometimes easy to miss how a skill intends you to build your pressure / miss a common available way to assure your pressure. I would highly recommend brainstorming with other people. Sometimes something perceived rather small can make a huge difference. - If you feel change is neccessary, do talk to your orgs envoys. There's a lot of skills in each orgs and it's somtimes easy to miss where change is needed. Thus, talking to people helps. - Maybe you can find someone who's good at TK who's willing to review your offense and point out something you may have overlooked.
Avatar / Picture done by the lovely Gurashi.
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Cyndarinused Flamethrower! It was super effective.
edited November 2017
Well, not the derail the complain train, but I was a Telekinetic when I won the War Seal which ultimately lead to becoming the 10th True Ascendant. As far as I know, there have been no substantive changes to it since then.
In our match against @Kaimanahi and crew, Telekinesis was ultimately the key player in our victory in that Kaimanahi and crew opened with a Aquamancy Preserve strategy that would have wiped out either Shuyin or Sidd. It was forcefield that allowed me to survive (though they did burn out my psionics), and ultimately put a win in our column.
Telekinesis absolutely has its flaws, and it does suffer from being severely dated. It was, at one point, too easy to stack vessels and was overtuned to being too difficult without a lot of time and require passive stun that not all demesnes have. I had a list of updates to TK I was working on as my next project (the moving break/burns to ice @Ianir got updated was a specific suggestion from me to fix Telekinesis Pyromancers), but ultimately retired. Some of the changes, like the magnetize change to bruising, I did vocally oppose because adding bruising to psionics was a dumb way to fix a valid complaint, which was magnetize was too good. Correct problem, incorrect solution. Skill sucks now, but it wasn't used all that much anyways.
That being said, TK is a melder tert and is absolutely successful at that. Offensively it suffers, but has some niche value for some mages more so than others. Which is true for Telepathy almost in reverse, and for every tert for every class out there. Some just get more value out of terts than others. TK is not terrible, by any stretch of the imagination. It is limited and somewhat uninteresting, but what it is good at it is great at.
As a melder, your number one job is staying alive. Forcefield is one of the absolute best survival skills in the game, period. It is not just an alternative health pool, it is an additional health pool you can turn on and off WITHOUT A COST to juggle incoming damage between health and ego. It's fantastic, much of my success as Gaudis melder was how I managed forcefield. As some players here will attest to, in most cases (minus aeon locks and some others), I was very hard to kill. Without a mana kill, the opposition has to default to damage (or a timed insta which a good team will stop). They hit your barrier until you get low, you turn it off, they hit your health until you get low ALL THE WHILE your ego regenerates/sparkles/scrolls back up and then you turn it back out. It doesn't just double your survivability, it can potentially triple or quadruple it. It's crazy good. Melders are always the first target in a group fight because of the immense value they bring to a fight, and I managed to break that rule with forcefield. You're just wrong on this one.
Barrier is a one of a kind skill in Lusternia, and while it can be a double edged sword, it is absolutely amazing for fortress meta fights, and splitting/containing enemies. It's a hard counter to physical group splitting like beckon, and it allows your side to guarantee a kill on anyone you can summon/split off from the opposing team because you eliminate almost every escape mechanism. As a melder, your number two job is map control, and barrier is a big f***ing wrench in your toolbox to do so. I don't know how many faethorn fights we had where we were able to pounce on someone and pick them off with barrier to prevent their escape.
Fling is horribly underrated. It's one of the few skills that separate groups by changing the elevation of the caster, which is huge when you're breaking up mid tier or less experienced combatants. Most are expecting and used to same elevation group splitting like Acro scissor or Rad. When less experienced combatants see that they are suddenly in a room on their own, their immediate reaction is to move rooms and find their team. Unless it's been changed, it also ignores rooting which is unheard of in a forced movement skill. Again, map control. It doesn't work indoors, but most fights aren't indoors.
Psychicpush is just another forced movement skill, but can be used with beast gust in the same action to double your chance of moving the target. Any active forced movement is a good skill to have in group fights. Anything you can layer with beast gust is better.
Pyre is awesome. Pyre is a flat percentage of current health (25% if I recall correctly), so a pyromancer can use beast breath fire (which ignites the target) and pyre in the same combo as their opening salvo. It's significantly better than staff if they are high health targets. My staff macro had discern built in to check their health, and pyre if beast had balance and they were over 75% health cause it did more damage than staff.
Choke is great. Blackout is just always great. On command active blackout is rare and awesome. (choke 5 rooms away sucks and is pointless, which is why the HERE command was added)
The clot/burst mechanic has some wonky RNG, and I don't think it's ever been fixed. So, generally, no you don't have a 1v1 kill method within psionics. But this is Lusternia and 1v1s are a thing of the past, and that's been the collective decision of the game population. So, ultimately, not a huge deal. Don't play a mage if you want to 1v1.
As far as melder redundancy, such is the reality of melding, and has always been the reality of melding. Melders don't stack out of necessity (lol cash cow), so yes, you can find yourself redundant very quickly should you be in one of those rare orgs that is oversaturated with melders. The solution to this isn't TK, it's to switch to the Chem counterpart.
Choke is great. Blackout is just always great. On command active blackout is rare and awesome.
I think your post makes a lot of sense, I’m excerpting this line not to disagree but to underline. Blackout is even better right now than it used to be, as it is (IMO) the biggest weakness of SSC at present. SSC does not pick up affs based on symptoms NOR can you tell it manually that you have an aff without diagnosing. Even if your screen is full of “You are blind” and “You can’t clot,” SSC will go on its merry way. This is the primary reason I was able to do well in the SSC test FFA.
Now, this won’t last forever, as SSC is still a work in active development, but it points to another thing that I think will be relatively uncontroversial: the game, skillsets, players, meta etc change. Even without direct buffs or nerfs, skills can wax and wane in both apparent power and unapparent power that takes a particular person to think of/use correctly. To me, this is a huge selling point.
On the subject of the psionics skills in general, the fix to stratagems was a big help. But if I had to identify a main weakness, it would be having 3 asynchronous balances. It’s a really cool idea in theory, but never having full ex (or having it potentially a long way away) makes some important things very hard to do, like beast spit. Also makes it impossible to both chase balances and time the relatively minor per channel effects to hit at the same time. Psymet monks - at least outside Glom/Mag - have it easy since Kata and Harmony/Zarakido are very good, having set-and-forget abilities is great. I think a person could contribute a lot with even base psionics IF the async balances were changed. Not 1v1 viable, but as said above, that’s not really the point.
Oh yeah, I think the point about asynchronous balances is very valid, but on top of this they are three very long asynchronous balances. The longest one by default is super, at 6 seconds, though in theory id can be longer if your ego is very low. These cannot be modified by anything and when you're talking about sub-3 second balances being common you could easily find yourself in a situation where you just used your super balance and have to endure two rounds of attacks without being able to realistically react. I think the only way to truly "fix" TK, and psionics in general, is to make psionic channels free channels and dial back some effects if necessary.
Well, not the derail the complain train, but I was a Telekinetic when I won the War Seal which ultimately lead to becoming the 10th True Ascendant. As far as I know, there have been no substantive changes to it since then.
In our match against @Kaimanahi and crew, Telekinesis was ultimately the key player in our victory in that Kaimanahi and crew opened with a Aquamancy Preserve strategy that would have wiped out either Shuyin or Sidd. It was forcefield that allowed me to survive (though they did burn out my psionics), and ultimately put a win in our column.
Telekinesis absolutely has its flaws, and it does suffer from being severely dated. It was, at one point, too easy to stack vessels and was overtuned to being too difficult without a lot of time and require passive stun that not all demesnes have. I had a list of updates to TK I was working on as my next project (the moving break/burns to ice @Ianir got updated was a specific suggestion from me to fix Telekinesis Pyromancers), but ultimately retired. Some of the changes, like the magnetize change to bruising, I did vocally oppose because adding bruising to psionics was a dumb way to fix a valid complaint, which was magnetize was too good. Correct problem, incorrect solution. Skill sucks now, but it wasn't used all that much anyways.
That being said, TK is a melder tert and is absolutely successful at that. Offensively it suffers, but has some niche value for some mages more so than others. Which is true for Telepathy almost in reverse, and for every tert for every class out there. Some just get more value out of terts than others. TK is not terrible, by any stretch of the imagination. It is limited and somewhat uninteresting, but what it is good at it is great at.
As a melder, your number one job is staying alive. Forcefield is one of the absolute best survival skills in the game, period. It is not just an alternative health pool, it is an additional health pool you can turn on and off WITHOUT A COST to juggle incoming damage between health and ego. It's fantastic, much of my success as Gaudis melder was how I managed forcefield. As some players here will attest to, in most cases (minus aeon locks and some others), I was very hard to kill. Without a mana kill, the opposition has to default to damage (or a timed insta which a good team will stop). They hit your barrier until you get low, you turn it off, they hit your health until you get low ALL THE WHILE your ego regenerates/sparkles/scrolls back up and then you turn it back out. It doesn't just double your survivability, it can potentially triple or quadruple it. It's crazy good. Melders are always the first target in a group fight because of the immense value they bring to a fight, and I managed to break that rule with forcefield. You're just wrong on this one.
Barrier is a one of a kind skill in Lusternia, and while it can be a double edged sword, it is absolutely amazing for fortress meta fights, and splitting/containing enemies. It's a hard counter to physical group splitting like beckon, and it allows your side to guarantee a kill on anyone you can summon/split off from the opposing team because you eliminate almost every escape mechanism. As a melder, your number two job is map control, and barrier is a big f***ing wrench in your toolbox to do so. I don't know how many faethorn fights we had where we were able to pounce on someone and pick them off with barrier to prevent their escape.
Fling is horribly underrated. It's one of the few skills that separate groups by changing the elevation of the caster, which is huge when you're breaking up mid tier or less experienced combatants. Most are expecting and used to same elevation group splitting like Acro scissor or Rad. When less experienced combatants see that they are suddenly in a room on their own, their immediate reaction is to move rooms and find their team. Unless it's been changed, it also ignores rooting which is unheard of in a forced movement skill. Again, map control. It doesn't work indoors, but most fights aren't indoors.
Psychicpush is just another forced movement skill, but can be used with beast gust in the same action to double your chance of moving the target. Any active forced movement is a good skill to have in group fights. Anything you can layer with beast gust is better.
Pyre is awesome. Pyre is a flat percentage of current health (25% if I recall correctly), so a pyromancer can use beast breath fire (which ignites the target) and pyre in the same combo as their opening salvo. It's significantly better than staff if they are high health targets. My staff macro had discern built in to check their health, and pyre if beast had balance and they were over 75% health cause it did more damage than staff.
Choke is great. Blackout is just always great. On command active blackout is rare and awesome. (choke 5 rooms away sucks and is pointless, which is why the HERE command was added)
The clot/burst mechanic has some wonky RNG, and I don't think it's ever been fixed. So, generally, no you don't have a 1v1 kill method within psionics. But this is Lusternia and 1v1s are a thing of the past, and that's been the collective decision of the game population. So, ultimately, not a huge deal. Don't play a mage if you want to 1v1.
As far as melder redundancy, such is the reality of melding, and has always been the reality of melding. Melders don't stack out of necessity (lol cash cow), so yes, you can find yourself redundant very quickly should you be in one of those rare orgs that is oversaturated with melders. The solution to this isn't TK, it's to switch to the Chem counterpart.
If all a mage does is push people around, tank, have a meld and run away from single opponents because "1v1s are in the past" therefore my skills aren't balanced around it, that sounds INCREDIBLY boring. Are you even really fighting at that point?
Maybe mage just isn't for me. I mean, the only kills I've really gotten since I've come back are from phantomspheres and that strikes me as an incredibly cowardly way to "fight". But eh.
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Cyndarinused Flamethrower! It was super effective.
edited November 2017
Yes. Welcome to Mage. It's not for everyone.
Technically you can fight someone 1v1 if they feel inclined to watch you meld around them and wait. Most don't.
It is boring for a lot of people. I didn't even like it all that much, but melds are a necessity in the fortress meta, and killing 7 people at a time with Holocaust then reading their complaints on forums satisfied the deepest, darkest parts of my black griefy heart.
Technically you can fight someone 1v1 if they feel inclined to watch you meld around them and wait. Most don't.
It is boring for a lot of people. I didn't even like it all that much, but melds are a necessity in the fortress meta, and killing 7 people at a time with Holocaust then reading their complaints on forums satisfied the deepest, darkest parts of my black griefy heart.
Then they nerfed that.
Maybe it's just me, but I have noticed there aren't many mages in general around. There are enough, but really I think they're just throwing themselves at it because at least one person needs to be around with a demesne.
I think they're just throwing themselves at it because at least one person needs to be around with a demesne.
I think thats fairly accurate. "We need a melder" is a common phrase you'll hear everywhere. Melders are vital to have if for no other reason to just counter an enemy melder. Doesnt make them fun to play though for sure.
I can't say I miss having Druidry. Wildewood is ever so much more fun. I wouldn't mind having a censor, but being "the Druid" is more responsibility and less enjoyment than I wanted.
There generally tend to be not a lot picks upon the the melder part of mage/druid skillsets, as stated above, very few people actually enjoy it. And even then, melding is going to make you a rather primary target in general. Few people are melders on demand ( aka chemist mages who can switch to their melding variant at no lesson cost ). I think the mage/druid tertiaries have suffered from the problem of being melder for a long time, drawing people away from actually intriguing and thematically interesting skillsets. The introduction of chem/wood skillsets seems to have lessened that some, but still mages are far and few in between, but as long as they're still a gamechanger, they'll stay in high demand.
I suspect/hope that the core issue at hand with the hinted at upcoming special report for melders will be the melding mechanic itself and the concerns brought up in the last few posts
As a melder, your number one job is staying alive. Forcefield is one of the absolute best survival skills in the game, period. It is not just an alternative health pool, it is an additional health pool you can turn on and off WITHOUT A COST to juggle incoming damage between health and ego. It's fantastic, much of my success as Gaudis melder was how I managed forcefield. As some players here will attest to, in most cases (minus aeon locks and some others), I was very hard to kill. Without a mana kill, the opposition has to default to damage (or a timed insta which a good team will stop). They hit your barrier until you get low, you turn it off, they hit your health until you get low ALL THE WHILE your ego regenerates/sparkles/scrolls back up and then you turn it back out. It doesn't just double your survivability, it can potentially triple or quadruple it. It's crazy good. Melders are always the first target in a group fight because of the immense value they bring to a fight, and I managed to break that rule with forcefield. You're just wrong on this one.
Since I'm being told I'm flat out wrong on this one, I suppose I should respond: Opponent has a kill method that relies on your ego being below 50% + you use forcefield OR your kill method is fueled by ego use = quick defeat
Either the opponents you had were dumb, you've got some incredible ability to heal or I'm missing something. Either way, all it would take is one Dreamweaver, Telepath or whatever other skills have ego kills and you'd be done. I know I would be anyways.
I was not aware skills were supposed to have zero drawback or risk.
His argument was that forcefield can help you stay alive in the role of a melder. I would argue that as a known psionics user, you're just ego drain bait in PVP. Therefore, forcefield is likely to only make that scenario worse against any competent grouping. After all, "1v1s are the past" and there are plenty of dreamweavers running around.
Besides that, using forcefield is likely to cause psionic burnout if you're not incredibly careful and you live in the first place. Burnout is more than just a little risk. It potentially shuts down your only standard offense, outside of phantomspheres or chasm.
I'm well aware of what Celinabear (@Cyndarin) said. And she is correct. You can turn off forcefield at any time. I'm also aware of how psionics works. If you see a dreamweaver or (lol) a telepath around then you don't use forcefield.
Would you unleash staff if any manakiller was hanging out nearby? How about a healer throwing out a bunch of auras if these same dreamweaver/telepath exists? Aeonics using aeonfield around a manakiller? Healers/Sacraments/Stag users sacrificing in heavy damage?
I think it is appropriate that some skills have potent threats. Telekinesis is not the entirety of your skill pool and it should not be the sole focus of your abilities. Forcefield should not be a 100% reliable extra 6k health without risk.
The Divine voice of Ianir the Anomaly echoes in your head, "You are a ray of sunshine in a sea of
I'm well aware of what Celinabear (@Cyndarin) said. And she is correct. You can turn off forcefield at any time. I'm also aware of how psionics works. If you see a dreamweaver or (lol) a telepath around then you don't use forcefield.
Would you unleash staff if any manakiller was hanging out nearby? How about a healer throwing out a bunch of auras if these same dreamweaver/telepath exists? Aeonics using aeonfield around a manakiller? Healers/Sacraments/Stag users sacrificing in heavy damage?
I think it is appropriate that some skills have potent threats. Telekinesis is not the entirety of your skill pool and it should not be the sole focus of your abilities. Forcefield should not be a 100% reliable extra 6k health without risk.
I agree with you more than I don't. You're right, you shouldn't use it around an ego killer. How many mages went dreamweaver again? So just how often will you actually be using forcefield safely? Not to mention it locks a pretty useful channel and boasts the hefty penalty of burnout if you mess up. Personally, I think TK is far too defensive and forcefield is actually obsolete. When I think of a Telekinetic user, I think of throwing objects, ripping things apart, crushing them... The whole barrier thing is so Mr. Mime.
I also agree that the tertiary shouldn't be the entirety of your skill pool, but alas that's where some mages find themselves. As a melder I have "damage", chasm, phantomspheres and my tertiary. That's assuming I even have the meld, if I don't you can erase damage and phantomspheres. That leaves chasm and tertiary.
Welcome to melding. Hopefully things will become better when mage/druids get their turn under the microscope.
I think I've realized mage is actually the reason I stopped playing way back. It was a little after Gaudiguch first showed up and the pyros got their round of nerfs, meanwhile Hallifax was running around balestoning and w/e else they were spamming to victory. It was a sad time, and the only mage combatant I had to look up to in Gaudiguch at the time was Munsia! I have come to think the mage class is possibly too difficult to balance with the demesne mechanic, which has resulted in it varying from quite good at combat to nearly useless (except the meld of course!). Melding is held as too good of a thing to give them much of anything else at the same time, and for good reason. Which is why I think demesne should just disappear and be replaced by a more mobile and active version of each element.
Despite the costs, I'm going to temporarily forget my mage skills soon and switch to a different class. I'm tired of it making me rage when I'm pretty sure I could perform at least marginally better in a different class.
If this "special report" finally goes through, maybe I'll switch back.
Uhh, I'm gonna go ahead and say you really shouldn't knock the damage aspect of your meld, especially as a Geomancer. You have access to 100% poison damage (harder to mitigate than most other damage types) in your staff, and rockslide does really respectable damage, and a 100% poison unleash-staff.
Like 80%-90% of my kills as Aeromancer are from my meld damage or from point staff. I understand that's not very fun for some people, but functionally-speaking, damage is always going to be solid unless you're facing some seriously artied people. It's always very gratifying to get a Miasma or an Eternalsleep though.
Bit of a nitpicky thing, but I really side-eye'd the quote marks on "damage". Otherwise, I don't know why you're still preaching to the choir. I hope you find better success with a different class.
EDIT: Believe me (or all of us) when I/we say I get the "not-the-primary-melder" woe though.
Like 80%-90% of my kills as Aeromancer are from my meld damage or from point staff. I understand that's not very fun for some people, but functionally-speaking, damage is always going to be solid unless you're facing some seriously artied people.
There are people participating in combat, that aren't me, that aren't artied up? I say that somewhat tongue in cheek. Most of the people I fight on any given day have a lot more invested than I do. Timeslip, damage absorption, resistance arties/curios... I probably hit them with less damage than end game denizens. Besides, damage kills generally occur in groups and anyone can do damage. Why bother being a mage when you're just one member of the party adding damage like everyone else? It's not like I can damage kill someone in a 1v1, as far as I'm aware. So it's not really a kill method unique to the mage skill set, hence the quotations. Classes that aren't mage have other methods of killing available to them and usually some damage to toss in as well.
Mages can do damage to lots of different people at once, but so can other classes. (and they don't need melds) See the balestone example from my story above. Even though mage can do that, what's the point exactly? Most of the time, the plan is to focus down the current threat so you end up killing one person, maybe two. You can do that with lots of classes and their damage.
@Daedroth I'm really not being facetious when I ask this, and I really hope you'll accept the question at face value:
What is it that you want?
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Cyndarinused Flamethrower! It was super effective.
Sure, if your opponents are running dreamweavers or telepaths, they can take advantage of your forcefield. It happened to me sometimes. Telepathy is just really unpopular (because it's terrible), and dreamweaving was only marginally more popular. I don't know how more prevalent DW or mages in general are now.
However, most people don't pick up crappy terts just to counter your one skill (that can be turned off), rather they just bring disruption scrolls.
My forcefield had an automated toggle I could adjust. The only thing that prevents psionics is prone, so you can turn it on and off in most circumstances. The boon of forcefield isn't that it's just a second health pool, it's a flexible second healthpool you can generally control pretty easily.
If you're just setting it and forgetting it, people can leverage that.
I don't know what else to say about mage other than that if you don't like it, don't play it. There's nothing wrong with that. I loved pyrochem and the golden gun pew pew infinitely more than I ever liked pyromancy.
I don't know what else to say about mage other than that if you don't like it, don't play it. There's nothing wrong with that. I loved pyrochem and the golden gun pew pew infinitely more than I ever liked pyromancy.
I switched classes earlier today. I'm pretty happy about finally being rid of the whole demesne thing to be honest.
Comments
Take another tert: Hexes. Last report was... 2013?
Everything in my first post is up to date and applicable right now and most of it has been applicable for over a year, as far as I'm aware. Which seems to be true, based on the "we're already aware of this problem" responses I got.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. I'm already to the point where I want to switch skills. TK is not my "favorite and I can't do without it, please make it OP for me!" skill. I just want something that is useful relative to other offerings that are currently wiping battlefields clean. I don't care what it is. It could be throwing rocks at people for all I care, just keep it up to date and not useless.
- TK is a dated skillset, with stuff that's not nice and shiny compared to other skillsest and it's missing a lot of the bling of the newer skillsets. Terts for mage / druids are being looked at as other people have said and personally I have high hopes in TK and TP getting a dusting off to make them more interesting again, as well as illusions/phantasms.
- TK is still a viable way to kill people. It's not the fastest, but you can pull it off, especially if you're holding a meld / can provide some pressure to keep clot curing down. It's one of the skillsets that require a little more timing relevant / lack passive pressure to their kill method, but I've seen it pulled off. 1vs1 viability may not be totally given, depending on who you go up against, but it also won't 100% reset if you miss a beat.
- Something I'm still noticing after ~2 years of active combat experience, is that it's sometimes easy to miss how a skill intends you to build your pressure / miss a common available way to assure your pressure. I would highly recommend brainstorming with other people. Sometimes something perceived rather small can make a huge difference.
- If you feel change is neccessary, do talk to your orgs envoys. There's a lot of skills in each orgs and it's somtimes easy to miss where change is needed. Thus, talking to people helps.
- Maybe you can find someone who's good at TK who's willing to review your offense and point out something you may have overlooked.
In our match against @Kaimanahi and crew, Telekinesis was ultimately the key player in our victory in that Kaimanahi and crew opened with a Aquamancy Preserve strategy that would have wiped out either Shuyin or Sidd. It was forcefield that allowed me to survive (though they did burn out my psionics), and ultimately put a win in our column.
Telekinesis absolutely has its flaws, and it does suffer from being severely dated. It was, at one point, too easy to stack vessels and was overtuned to being too difficult without a lot of time and require passive stun that not all demesnes have. I had a list of updates to TK I was working on as my next project (the moving break/burns to ice @Ianir got updated was a specific suggestion from me to fix Telekinesis Pyromancers), but ultimately retired. Some of the changes, like the magnetize change to bruising, I did vocally oppose because adding bruising to psionics was a dumb way to fix a valid complaint, which was magnetize was too good. Correct problem, incorrect solution. Skill sucks now, but it wasn't used all that much anyways.
That being said, TK is a melder tert and is absolutely successful at that. Offensively it suffers, but has some niche value for some mages more so than others. Which is true for Telepathy almost in reverse, and for every tert for every class out there. Some just get more value out of terts than others. TK is not terrible, by any stretch of the imagination. It is limited and somewhat uninteresting, but what it is good at it is great at.
As a melder, your number one job is staying alive. Forcefield is one of the absolute best survival skills in the game, period. It is not just an alternative health pool, it is an additional health pool you can turn on and off WITHOUT A COST to juggle incoming damage between health and ego. It's fantastic, much of my success as Gaudis melder was how I managed forcefield. As some players here will attest to, in most cases (minus aeon locks and some others), I was very hard to kill. Without a mana kill, the opposition has to default to damage (or a timed insta which a good team will stop). They hit your barrier until you get low, you turn it off, they hit your health until you get low ALL THE WHILE your ego regenerates/sparkles/scrolls back up and then you turn it back out. It doesn't just double your survivability, it can potentially triple or quadruple it. It's crazy good. Melders are always the first target in a group fight because of the immense value they bring to a fight, and I managed to break that rule with forcefield. You're just wrong on this one.
Barrier is a one of a kind skill in Lusternia, and while it can be a double edged sword, it is absolutely amazing for fortress meta fights, and splitting/containing enemies. It's a hard counter to physical group splitting like beckon, and it allows your side to guarantee a kill on anyone you can summon/split off from the opposing team because you eliminate almost every escape mechanism. As a melder, your number two job is map control, and barrier is a big f***ing wrench in your toolbox to do so. I don't know how many faethorn fights we had where we were able to pounce on someone and pick them off with barrier to prevent their escape.
Fling is horribly underrated. It's one of the few skills that separate groups by changing the elevation of the caster, which is huge when you're breaking up mid tier or less experienced combatants. Most are expecting and used to same elevation group splitting like Acro scissor or Rad. When less experienced combatants see that they are suddenly in a room on their own, their immediate reaction is to move rooms and find their team. Unless it's been changed, it also ignores rooting which is unheard of in a forced movement skill. Again, map control. It doesn't work indoors, but most fights aren't indoors.
Psychicpush is just another forced movement skill, but can be used with beast gust in the same action to double your chance of moving the target. Any active forced movement is a good skill to have in group fights. Anything you can layer with beast gust is better.
Pyre is awesome. Pyre is a flat percentage of current health (25% if I recall correctly), so a pyromancer can use beast breath fire (which ignites the target) and pyre in the same combo as their opening salvo. It's significantly better than staff if they are high health targets. My staff macro had discern built in to check their health, and pyre if beast had balance and they were over 75% health cause it did more damage than staff.
Choke is great. Blackout is just always great. On command active blackout is rare and awesome. (choke 5 rooms away sucks and is pointless, which is why the HERE command was added)
The clot/burst mechanic has some wonky RNG, and I don't think it's ever been fixed. So, generally, no you don't have a 1v1 kill method within psionics. But this is Lusternia and 1v1s are a thing of the past, and that's been the collective decision of the game population. So, ultimately, not a huge deal. Don't play a mage if you want to 1v1.
As far as melder redundancy, such is the reality of melding, and has always been the reality of melding. Melders don't stack out of necessity (lol cash cow), so yes, you can find yourself redundant very quickly should you be in one of those rare orgs that is oversaturated with melders. The solution to this isn't TK, it's to switch to the Chem counterpart.
Now, this won’t last forever, as SSC is still a work in active development, but it points to another thing that I think will be relatively uncontroversial: the game, skillsets, players, meta etc change. Even without direct buffs or nerfs, skills can wax and wane in both apparent power and unapparent power that takes a particular person to think of/use correctly. To me, this is a huge selling point.
On the subject of the psionics skills in general, the fix to stratagems was a big help. But if I had to identify a main weakness, it would be having 3 asynchronous balances. It’s a really cool idea in theory, but never having full ex (or having it potentially a long way away) makes some important things very hard to do, like beast spit. Also makes it impossible to both chase balances and time the relatively minor per channel effects to hit at the same time. Psymet monks - at least outside Glom/Mag - have it easy since Kata and Harmony/Zarakido are very good, having set-and-forget abilities is great. I think a person could contribute a lot with even base psionics IF the async balances were changed. Not 1v1 viable, but as said above, that’s not really the point.
Maybe mage just isn't for me. I mean, the only kills I've really gotten since I've come back are from phantomspheres and that strikes me as an incredibly cowardly way to "fight". But eh.
Technically you can fight someone 1v1 if they feel inclined to watch you meld around them and wait. Most don't.
It is boring for a lot of people. I didn't even like it all that much, but melds are a necessity in the fortress meta, and killing 7 people at a time with Holocaust then reading their complaints on forums satisfied the deepest, darkest parts of my black griefy heart.
Then they nerfed that.
I think thats fairly accurate. "We need a melder" is a common phrase you'll hear everywhere. Melders are vital to have if for no other reason to just counter an enemy melder. Doesnt make them fun to play though for sure.
Either the opponents you had were dumb, you've got some incredible ability to heal or I'm missing something. Either way, all it would take is one Dreamweaver, Telepath or whatever other skills have ego kills and you'd be done. I know I would be anyways.
Besides that, using forcefield is likely to cause psionic burnout if you're not incredibly careful and you live in the first place. Burnout is more than just a little risk. It potentially shuts down your only standard offense, outside of phantomspheres or chasm.
Would you unleash staff if any manakiller was hanging out nearby?
How about a healer throwing out a bunch of auras if these same dreamweaver/telepath exists?
Aeonics using aeonfield around a manakiller?
Healers/Sacraments/Stag users sacrificing in heavy damage?
I think it is appropriate that some skills have potent threats. Telekinesis is not the entirety of your skill pool and it should not be the sole focus of your abilities. Forcefield should not be a 100% reliable extra 6k health without risk.
I also agree that the tertiary shouldn't be the entirety of your skill pool, but alas that's where some mages find themselves. As a melder I have "damage", chasm, phantomspheres and my tertiary. That's assuming I even have the meld, if I don't you can erase damage and phantomspheres. That leaves chasm and tertiary.
Hooray lucky chasm, I guess?
Despite the costs, I'm going to temporarily forget my mage skills soon and switch to a different class. I'm tired of it making me rage when I'm pretty sure I could perform at least marginally better in a different class.
If this "special report" finally goes through, maybe I'll switch back.
Like 80%-90% of my kills as Aeromancer are from my meld damage or from point staff. I understand that's not very fun for some people, but functionally-speaking, damage is always going to be solid unless you're facing some seriously artied people. It's always very gratifying to get a Miasma or an Eternalsleep though.
Bit of a nitpicky thing, but I really side-eye'd the quote marks on "damage". Otherwise, I don't know why you're still preaching to the choir. I hope you find better success with a different class.
EDIT: Believe me (or all of us) when I/we say I get the "not-the-primary-melder" woe though.
Mages can do damage to lots of different people at once, but so can other classes. (and they don't need melds) See the balestone example from my story above. Even though mage can do that, what's the point exactly? Most of the time, the plan is to focus down the current threat so you end up killing one person, maybe two. You can do that with lots of classes and their damage.
What is it that you want?
However, most people don't pick up crappy terts just to counter your one skill (that can be turned off), rather they just bring disruption scrolls.
My forcefield had an automated toggle I could adjust. The only thing that prevents psionics is prone, so you can turn it on and off in most circumstances. The boon of forcefield isn't that it's just a second health pool, it's a flexible second healthpool you can generally control pretty easily.
If you're just setting it and forgetting it, people can leverage that.
I don't know what else to say about mage other than that if you don't like it, don't play it. There's nothing wrong with that. I loved pyrochem and the golden gun pew pew infinitely more than I ever liked pyromancy.
I switched classes earlier today. I'm pretty happy about finally being rid of the whole demesne thing to be honest.