Mindcrafters

[Spellweaver]

What is your favourite racial and playstile choice for mindcrafters?
As for me, I prefer dark elves and, more rarely, drakelings, because of Alertness skill. Survival without it seems to be too hard for me, but what other good choices exist?
And about playstile, I try to use mindcrafting(at least, offencive abilities such as Mind Blast) as rarely as possible and fight in melee most of the time to be good with weapons and, in result, not so weak. Is this good way to play?

[JellySlayer]

Well, there are almost no circumstances where it is a bad choice to pick a drakeling. I guess the only real downside in this case is that mindcrafters have a super hard time training Ma, which is one of drakeling's worst stats, and having extra PP is rather important for mindcrafters since they're deprived of HPcasting. Hurthlings are a respectable choice too, if you want a more missile orient mindcrafter, but have similar problems with Ma as drakes.

Dark elves are a fine choice, I suppose, although the beginning of the game is probably pretty tough since you have a low To class and a low To race. Gnomes might give a better early game without sacrificing too much Ma.

Troll mindcrafters are a weird choice, but actually pretty good. Basically, you just play as a regular troll brute, except that you have free teleport control, confusion resist and can confuse people. Just don't expect to ever use any of your high-power abilities.

I normally play mindcrafters basically as either melee or missile characters, and use confusion blast to make my life easier. Most of the good crafter abilities don't show up until later in the game, by which point my character is probably strong enough that I just forget to use them. There is no bad way to play though. If you want to use mostly mindcraft for combat, there's nothing wrong with it.

[Spellweaver]

About drakes... I love them, but became almost entirely disappointed after one frozen on D:49 and then incapable to fight hordes of ghosts before Gates. Mindcrafters also, as I know, have no good ways to get warm (alchemy only with wish or potion, and I would most of the time find something more useful, no spells, except for potions/wand of Wonder), and this makes me afraid.

[Spellweaver]

And also, what starsign is best? Wiki recommends something like Tree, but Wi is easily trained and not so crucial.

[JellySlayer]

Candle, of course. Raven being second choice.

Salamander is okay I guess, if you really think you want the extra PP. But really, you're just making the game harder if you pick anything other than Candle/Raven.

[edit]D:49 isn't actually that bad for drakes, as long as you're pretty fast. You can get to the stairs in maybe 10 turns, which shouldn't hurt your speed hugely.

[Spellweaver]

Salamander is the thing I never thought about, interesting. Thanks for idea.

[grobblewobble]

As a mindcrafter I usually start the game by taking off clothes, to enable true berserking. Confuse + true berserk is a nice combo to deal with stronger monsters in the early game.

Mind blast is useless in most fights, but there are some exceptions. If you keep the door of the bandit boss closed, you can kill him without any risk or alignment hit from behind the wall. Even the villagers usually don't seem to care if you kill him this way. Similarly, many tough monsters can't open locked doors and are helpless if you lock them behind doors and fry their brains out. For example the assassin prince - nice chunk of XP for a low level mind crafter.

Drakelings are really the easiest mindcrafters. Their acid spit helps you with all the stuff that is immune to confusion blasts.

[_Ln_]

I'm pretty sure you can hit '5' with a wand of fire to get blasted (if you're not playing with Sage).

I mainly use melee with mindcrafters because PP tend to finish quickly, and you can't cast without it. Still, TB (not that TB) and GTB is pretty much the most powerful thing in the game. I recently played with a mindcrafter and remembered a discussion on these forums about which class would beat which in PvP. There were wizards, archers and so on. Now I'm pretty sure that a mindcrafter can beat the crap of anyone given the duel takes places at high clvl (enough for TB).

[Silfir]

I'm pretty sure it'd be rocket tag. Whoever gets to hit the other first with a disabler should probably win. What's the range on GTB? I confess that while I've won with a mindcrafter before, I can barely remember any details about it.

[grobblewobble]

GTB can be cast anywhere in sight range, that's the major strength.

I've wondered about Pvp as well, not sure mindcrafters would win. An immortal necromancer would be hard to beat, archers with access to teleportation, farsight and humanoid slaying ammunition should not be underestimated either. GTB would be a strong offense, but once you're out of spellpoints there isn't much you can do as a mindcrafter, so an opponent with good healing spells could be difficult. On the other hand they do have confusion wave, perhaps the easiest way to disable someone from a distance.