Question: Do you actually use psycasts?

Started by Jam guy, May 01, 2021, 08:45:18 AM

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Jam guy

Hi all! I'm planning out some large mods, and wanted to ask about this.

In my experience, upgrading and using a psycasting pawn is a goal I always set for myself, but, by circumstance or opportunity, never achieve. I would love to have a powerful psycaster, and usually am cool with taking the Empire route, but it always ends up being too big of an investment to be worth it.

So, do you actually use psycasts? And if you do or do not, what changes/additions would you like to see for the psycasting system as a whole? I'd love to hear any and all thoughts you have!

Canute

Some psycast realy useful
During combat:
Skip to teleport enemies into your mellee trap, or rescue some pawn's from enemies.
Berserk, to keep enemies busy, and maybe 1 or more enemies less.

Out of combat:
Farskip, to travel to one scout while moved ahead, and then back home.
Inspiration, to give your crafters some inspiration, maybe they got the right one and can craft legendaries.

Btw. the most psycast you can get with tribe's. On a playthrough with a tribe i got 5-6 lvl 6 psycast.

ShadowTani

Oh yes, I'm a hardcore psycast user myself, lol. There's always room for improvements as they say, but I do think the Psycast system is pretty solid as it is and makes for a more fun and interesting game as it gives Rimworld a more tactical layer for solving various situations. Though if there is one thing then I have to say the last tier (level 6) of psycasts are pretty terrible considering the effort it takes to get to them. Personally I generally try to get as many psycast users developed as possible even if I keep most colonists at Yeoman rank; additional levels can be acquired if you pick neuroformer quest rewards or meditate at the Anima tree with tribal recruits. This is my general take on each psycast:

Level 1 Psycasts:
Burden: Very useful. Slow down attacking or fleeing raiders. Also good on revenge triggered animals which essentially makes hunting Thrumbos rather easy as you can have one pawn of average speed bait one while the rest fire at it.
Chunk Skip: Somewhat useful. Quick emergency cover for you, or remove/steal the enemies cover.
Painblock: Useful, but risky if you use it to prolong your melee units fighting time. Good for when you need a pawn to stay on their feet a bit longer, and/or get up sooner. Have saved me from failing a few emergency landing quests by getting unconscious pawns required for completing the quest back up on their feet and into their pickup shuttle within the limited time. Relieving pain related penalties to manipulation and movement is often good too.
Solar Pinhole: Not too useful. I use it a few times if I get it before I have full electric coverage to light up workstations and similar. It's too much micro to keep it going consistently though. Might have some use as an emergency heat source in colder biomes (but haven't tried this).
Stun: Useful, but Burden is better in most situations imo due to Stun being more expensive and having a shorter range. The complete stop also doesn't seem to make up for the shorter duration in my experience, but do have the useful effect of causing the affected target to block the path for anyone else in a single-path corridor for the duration. I find myself using it most often when I need someone escaping a melee engagement quickly and safely while my other colonists take out the offender.
Word of Trust: Very useful. Reduces the time needed to break a prisoners resistance from several weeks if not months down to a day or a few. Allows you to recruit prisoners much faster if you have no luck getting recruitment inspirations.

Level 2 Psycasts:
Blinding Pulse: Somewhat useful. Reduces the accuracy of those affected which is particularly good against single-shot precision weapon users. Using a smokepop utility is generally better however if you need to reduce the accuracy of several hostiles.
Neural Heat Dump: Somewhat useful. Tend to use it more often as an early time out on units that remain conscious despite having taken severe bleeding wounds and are moving like a snail to the hospital. Might be useful for spamming psycasts more safely if you only have a few dedicated psycasters, but as I generally raise psycasts for all my colonists I'm able to spam psycasts safely across multiple casters.
Waterskip: Useful. Puts out fires, but also prevents fires from starting in the water puddles they leave behind; water puddles also take priority over chemfuel puddles. The water puddles will unfortunately not prevent colonists from catching on fire when facing incendary launchers, but the flame won't grow in intensity while they are over the puddles and fizzle out relatively quickly; often this means the pawn won't even move from their spot. Thus it's a good idea to use waterskip preemptively whenever your pawns are in a situation where they could get caught on fire.
Word of Joy: Useful, but expensive. Improves mood for several days. Can be used on prisoners to increase the success chance when recruiting.

Level 3 Psycasts:
Beckon: Very useful. Get hostiles shooting from behind corners to come out. Bait hostile melee units away from undesired targets (reasonable if one of your melee units have this psycast). Call fleeing raiders back to be executed properly instead of running after them.
Chaos Skip: Useful, but a bit risky. Get melee hostiles or mad animals disengaged from a target quickly. Get that mechanoid centipede temporarily out of the way just in time before it fires at you. Get hostiles hiding behind corners repositioned. Get a colonist out of harms way. If you use it on anything that would be better off popping up behind you (worst-case) than being where it is right now then you can't go wrong with this psycast.
Vertigo Pulse: Very useful. Can make a whole group of raiders go around puking up your place instead of shooting back at you. Great way to intercept sapper teams trying to breach your walls. Also efficient against Mechanoids despite their lack of vomit protocols as this is pretty much AOE Stun with prolonged duration.
Word of Love: Somewhat useful if you want to manipulate who hooks up with who. Can be a bit of a micro before you get the desired outcome though. Alternatively its useful for preventing a pawn from breaking up or divorcing their partner that happened to be the one who killed their precious, but hostile, family member.

Level 4 Psycasts:
Focus: Useful. Use before trading/recruiting/operating and similar to improve rates and chances for success. Use on snipers to improve their shots. Use on anyone to make them speedier and more accurate.
Skip: Very useful. Basically a more expensive version of Chaos Skip that lets you determine the transfer location. If the transfer location isn't that important though use Chaos Skip instead.
Smokepop: Useful if you want the pawn to use some other utility than a smokepop belt. Outside of reducing the accuracy of anyone firing at the pawns within the smoke screen it also makes turrets unable to detect you and thus unable to shot at you.
Wallraise: Somewhat useful. Creates hard cover when needed. Personally I've also designed my killbox so that I can plug it using this psycast if I need to cut an attack wave off for a bit.
Word of Serenity: Somewhat useful, but expensive. Ends a mental break on a pawn. Doesn't have any risk of diplomatic consequences and as such is the best way to end mental breaks for pawns tied to a quest. It claims to work on animals too, but that unfortunately seems to not be the case in practice (e.g. don't work on revenge, manhunter, or mental breaks (like daze) caused by the death of a bonded pawn).

Level 5 Psycasts:
Berserk: Useful. Especially effective on hostile melee units and inside single-path corridors as other hostiles cannot advance past the berserking unit. Often a waste when used on ranged units though, unless they have a one-shot weapon like a triple rocket launcher or Doomsday launcher, as Vertigo Pulse is often a better alternative. Otherwise you can use it to have a nearby wild animal join the fight, bigger animals like elephants or bears is strong enough to potentially take down several hostiles for the duration and shouldn't be underestimated.
Farskip: Very useful. As Canute mentioned you can send your attack squad using this skill after having sent a scout, preferably alongside your pack animals, ahead beforehand. This ensure you keep most people working and defending your colony for the duration of the travel. It's an expensive psycast though (70% psyfocus) and it's hard to meditate efficiently in the wild so personally I send backups using the transport pods and use farskip to transport people back when they are done with the attack (this also ensure the psycaster retain enough psyfocus for the battle as well).
Flashstorm: Not too useful. Only slightly more useful than a mortar versus mortar shootout against sieges, where both solutions destroy loot indiscriminately and are inferior to a single sniper provoking the siege into attacking. Neither is this psycast effective against mechanoid clusters at all. As such I've unfortunately found less uses for this one than Solar Pinhole.
Invisibility: Somewhat useful. Primarily used to avoid aggro and escape hairy situations. I often use it for hit and run attacks with grenadiers to take out mechanoid turrets or shields whenever smokepop isn't an option.
Word of Inspiration: Very useful. Especially if it triggers creative inspirations which are the only source of legendary works. Combine such an inspiration with Word of Joy and Focus and you're almost guaranteed a legendary.

Level 6 Psycasts:
Berserk Pulse: Somewhat useful. Berserk on several targets, but sadly with a shorter duration of effect and a rather small area of effect. Results may also vary as berserked targets are also likely to attack one another which doesn't trigger other attackers into aggroing like it would have if a non-berserk attacker is attacked. Can be pretty effective against larger waves of melee tribals though despite mentioned shortcomings.
Manhunter Pulse: Useful. If you want many animals to go berserk you'll rather use this than Berserk Pulse. A meaningful effect duration and big area of effect means you can get a good pack going. Manhunting animals do not attack other animals including colony animals, which means this psycast do not have any of the issues Berserk Pulse have. Just take precautions in case you end up needing to fight them off yourself.
Mass Chaos Skip: Somewhat useful. Chaos Skip on a large scale. Good whenever you need to displace a larger group of enemies from an advantageous position, but you probably won't find yourself needing this too often.
Neuroquake: Not too useful. Penalties and casting time make it very difficult to find a practical situation where it is also cost effective to use it: a large scale attack that is too big for your killbox to handle that will sit around waiting for three hours. If you are willing to burn goodwill and are in a tight spot you may want to call a few of your allies to send you backup instantly instead.
Skipshield: Not too useful. Target can't shot in or out. Mostly used for neutralizing hostile targets temporarily, including turrets, but the short duration and high neural heat cost makes it tricky to find situations it's cost-effective to use.

Tips for getting psycast levels with titles:
Getting all colonists to Yeoman for the first psycast level have no downsides in regards to requirements and is something I personally do and recommend. Beyond that up to Preator is reasonable for many of the colonists too if you don't mind having a big throneroom with multiple thrones, those among them that need armors can use prestige armors. Preators have access to several useful permits in addition to the most useful psycasts in case you don't get the opportunity to level their psylink much further. I generally only max out two colonists (out of about 20) to Count/Countess as they demand lavish meals (and I generally prefer keeping most colonists on fine).

For an optimal source of psylink neuroformers from rewards I recommend turning off acceptance for goodwill after acquiring an alliance with any faction, and also getting an alliance with the empire faction early. I also unselect acceptance for honor once I got the first few colonists to yeoman. Honor doesn't scale well with the other rewards anyway so its better to trade prisoners and gold for honor the further into the game you get. With three item reward choices for every quest you're more likely to get the option to pick valuable and rare quest rewards including neuroformers which you can use to upgrade the psycast level for non-tribal colonists you don't want to take beyond the yeoman/preator title.

Quote from: Canute on May 01, 2021, 09:10:20 AM
Btw. the most psycast you can get with tribe's. On a playthrough with a tribe i got 5-6 lvl 6 psycast.

You don't actually need to start as a tribe for this to be true, as long as a pawn has a tribal background they can meditate and link with an Anima Tree (have Natural meditation enabled), thus just aim to keep an eye for good pawns to recruit from any tribal raiders. Use Shock Lance or Ressurector Mech Serum to secure a pawn outside of just the random luck of downing them. Shock Lance is for that reason one of the first things I try to get my hands on early.

Parallelkey

I think it's worth considering tribals as well when you're rating psycasts. In particular, Solar Pinhole is a godsend if you're in a sparsely-forested biome. Blinding Pulse and Smokepop are also quite powerful if you can't just build smokepop belts (and I'd argue they're still useful regardless: Blinding Pulse can stack with smoke, and psychic smoke can be cast forward to cover your approach to a cluster and also frees up your utility slot for jump packs).

Also, Neuroquake deletes mech clusters, which is especially handy when you get multiple and/or buffed clusters from quests.

ACESandElGHTS

Quote from: ShadowTani on May 01, 2021, 07:53:23 PMThis is my general take on each psycast:

Had to join the forum just to say thanks. It's brilliant. So many sites including Rim Wiki didn't have this basic breakdown of the levels. Appreciate this!