• Spoilers
• Classes
• Mindcrafter

Skill Point Usage

Mindcrafters have a fairly small selection of skills to choose from, which means there aren't too many hard decisions.

• Combat: You should be able to afford enough points in this to wear some nice armor. Though sometimes being over-encumbered is a matter of just a few spell points lost -- is it perhaps worth it to be a little encumbered if it means you free up skill points for elsewhere? In any case, don't worry too much about pseudo-id, because when you get Psychometry you can do that instead.
  • Weaponmastery: Some people consider Mindcrafters to be fighting priests, but I couldn't disagree more. Don't waste a single point on Weaponmastery.
    • But see below...
• Magic: Essential for getting heaps of spell points. Max it.
  • Magic-Device: Certainly you'll want to put some points into it. I often max it once other things are maxed, but it's not a high priority.
  • Spell-power: DOES NOT APPLY TO MINDCRAFT! A complete waste of points unless you're going to focus on Prayer and want to beef up your god spells.
  • Necromancy: With a .400 multiplier, it's hard to see how this is a useful way to go. Don't waste your points.
• Spirituality: It's got a great multiplier and is easy to max. I generally find there's no reason not to, but it's only medium priority.
  • Prayer: Yes, Mindcrafters are technically priests, but that doesn't mean you have to sink a bunch of points into prayer. A Mindcrafter can win without a single point in prayer, and not even miss it. Not that it isn't an option.
  • Mindcraft: MAX IT MAX IT MAX IT! Nuff said.
• Monster-lore: Pretty useless. The only benefit you could reap from this is getting a little XP from friendly kills when you charm monsters with level 30+ Domination. Not worth it.

So basically, you've got a high priority on maxing out Mindcraft and Magic, and then your second tier is Combat, Spirituality, and maybe Prayer.

Mindcrafters as Warrior-Magi

PermanentInk: Having beaten the game with a LostSoul Mindcrafter that never used melee after reaching clvl 7, I have to respectfully disagree with the assertions made here. But it should certainly be allowed to stand as an alternative viewpoint.

(Written for 2.2.7. 2.3.0 will change the balance issues talked of here.)

A mindcrafter is like a warrior mage - except that they don't do magic. They have access to the bookless Skills/Mindcraft skill which works like magic but isn't. Still, a mindcrafter is well advised to invest in Skills/Magic to get some more mana. Maximizing Magic will not usually be necessary since the mindcraft skill takes less mana than mage spells.

In the early game a mindcrafter should make good use of Precognition to avoid being surprised by monsters and to detect traps. Precognition is a great "spell", particularly on higher levels. It will be probably be your most used one during the entire game. You should use a combination of melee and the first mindcraft distance attacks. Mindblast, while weak, is good in the early game for monster that are not mindless, smart, or stupid. Pulverize does more damage and works against nearly any monster, and when it levels it becomes a ball, which makes it even more powerful against groups of monsters. Also, casting minor displacement in a bind can save you.

In the midgame a mindcrafter's mental attack powers are at their most effective. Soon after getting line-of-sight mindwave one should be able to take down orc pits with a few castings. Later one can demolish troll pits with ease. This is good to do for fun, profit, and experience points.

In the late game plentiful demons and undeads are not safe to mindwave, and in Spoilers/Dungeons/Angband everything starts to have a huge number of hitpoints anyway. Mindcraft attacks simply do not scale that high. Consequently, one needs to kill monsters the warrior way and use mindcraft for detection, combat boosting (you'll need that), and teleportation. Buying both extra attack abilities and maximizing Skills/Weaponmastery is recommended. High-level minor displacement creates void jumpgates, which is a good idea to keep in mind. Monsters can't use void jumpgates, but the player can.

Since a mindcrafter will end up more than half warrior, Tulkas is the most recommendable god for him or her.

• * Just some numbers to back up the above perspective. Maxing out Mindcraft, Prayer, and Magic, assuming you don't do any god quests, takes 168 skillpoints. Doing every god quest, in contrast, would require only 138 skillpoints. That leaves you with 126-156 skillpoints left over to play with. What are you going to do with them? Well, put some into Spirituality. Dump 40 there and that'll be maxed too. You could put some points into magic-devices, but really Mindcrafting provides everything you could get from items except for recall and disarming, neither of which is urgent (well, and light, but a telepathic, all-detecting mindcrafter has little need for light, and can live until player level 41 when Enlightenment-Precognition can be unlocked). Given that Mindwave maxes out at 250 damage per target, and that past the mid-late game you really don't want to stand in line of sight of multiple casters, you really need some way to take down single targets quickly. Given your options, that method is melee. It takes 72 skillpoints to max out Weaponmastery; this is easily afforded. It takes a further 27 (I think) to unlock the two Extra Max Blows abilities and Spread Blows; the latter is less important than the former two, so skip it if you like. This does in your supply of skillpoints pretty neatly, but short of a lucky Fumblefingers quest (or more accurately, three lucky Fumblefingers quests, to get you up to a .5 multiplier) there's nothing else to spend 'em on.

Chatter

PermanentInk: Okay, so I think I've gotten the mindcrafter-specific information here.

Sirrocco: For race-specific options, going beorning and focusing on bearform combat is a solid response to the need for focused single-target damage. For that matter, I've heard good things about boulder-throwing, if you can stand playing as an ent. Also, if you enjoy cheese, Melkor's autocurse will hook you up in the endgame. Manwe gives some decent bonuses, but most of his spell effects are redundant by that point. Yavanna actually becomes pretty interesting - her focuses on battlefield shaping and melee augmentation are potentially quite useful, and the ability to easily charm with native skill and MP makes grinding for piety a lot easier. Eru is hampered by the fact that both Divination and his divinatory godspells are largely duplicated (as is Mind - not that that matters) but if you *really* want to blast the heathen with manabolts, there's really only one place to go.

• Derakon: I go with Tulkas largely because of Stone Prison (though Dig comes in handy in the early game). The ability to disrupt LOS is vital to my gameplay style, not to mention dealing with some of the later special levels, where Quylthulgs of various stripes (all immune to Mindwave, natch) are far too far away to charge for melee. Divine Aim isn't a bad spell either; it noticeably improves my damage output, by a factor of two at least, I'd say. As far as races are concerned, I tend to go with Hobbits, because I'm a sucker for high-luck characters.

  • Sirrocco: If you want to try to switch things up a little, I believe that Yavanna also offers Stone Prison.

• LordDimwit: Agreement on the Beorning / Mindcraft thing. I found a Beorning Mindcrafter (with a splash of necromancy thrown in) to be one of the most feasible choices for the itemless win character; Bearform and Character Armor will give you the basic needed resistances, and you get some nice peripherals from Precognition (ESP) and Bearform (Free Action) as well. Bearform-Combat does become a little less effective at high levels, but there are ways to counteract this... /me goes back to lurking

  • Sirrocco: I believe that bearform combat also offers resist nexus and resist confusion - though it does lose you all of the other racial and subracial resists.