Best Pawns to Give Psy Abilities to?

[coyo7e]

I have come to the realization that AI have basically no idea what I'm doing when it comes to giving Psy abilities to pawns. I usually give them to a pawn who ends up being too important so I don't wanna waste time with them meditating or going on mental breaks because they don't have a fancy throne room etc, or I give them to an ascetic who becomes a lord and then cries all day that everything is too nice.

Which kind of pawns are best for psy abilities? Especially in cases where I'm not taking the royal-route and making them a empire friendly duke etc. I feel like there is probably a much more efficient way to do it than I have been.. Should I be giving it to morbid/pyros so it's easy to meditate? Melee-only pawns so I can use their abilities until the enemies get into range? Etc etc.

[glass zebra]

Disclamer: I have close to 0 experiences with melee psy casters. I basically always go full mage.

Traits that are useful:
- Psychic sensitivity
- Masochist (for mindscrew and scars)
- Maybe any mood one (for psychic harmonizer)
- Great memory (if you wanna use them for some job with quality needs)
- Probably a lot more that I never think about

The morbid/pyro meditation is cheap for early game, but I regard the anima tree/throne/art as pretty much just superior. Art has the highest bonus (especially since you can do it at home instead of having to run through half the map to a tree), the tree can go really high with stones and spawns grass but has the downside of usually requiring tons of running and is often hard to protect, the throne meditation is not super high (but at the high end of morbid/fire afaik) but also grants a small mood boost. Morbid/pyro always felt gimmicky when you consider that most people can just do art meditation without the need for weird stuff like relationship corpse or multiple fire sources that need refueling. It's nice for expressive gameplay though. If they would be much higher then that other meditations, I would consider the traits for a psycaster.

Other than trait it depends on how you use the pawn. If you like gauranlen trees, you could put them around an anima tree and let your pawn work between those to cut down movement time. If you go royal, social passion (and great memory) can be nice for trading and a bit for the speech and even without royal stuff just for the psychic reader. In general your pawn will be less working than others due to meditation, so super crucial work or work that easily loses experience is probably not that great if you wanna go high on desired psy focus. Milking cows once per day might not happen after a raid drained it.

You could also consider blinding them for extra psychic sensitivity and some jobs get heavy penalties, while others hardly any. That is a choice most will likely not do without the meme though.

This is basically just for consideration and there are a lot of different ways to build them depending on your play style and your base planing. I often give the first royal wimp rank to someone pretty bad because I just have bad choices and try to work with that as long as I have to. I sometimes just take a social pawn for the empire trading, but would usually like a psychic sensitivity pawn. Sometimes, I have neither. Sometimes the wimpy royal has to stay and becomes my first psycaster, with the bad trait wimp.

[bearhiderug]

Gonna sound crazy, I myself like to give the caster to someone who can not do much by nature. Like incapable of X X X and X
so letem cast clean and haul =p

[XelNigma]

Job wise, a researcher, cook or planters are alright. As there jobs can be done just fine and have time for meditation too.

Trait wise, psychic sensitivity is questionable. It does nothing for the caster at all. All it affects is the duration of effects cast on them.
So casting invisibility on a melee pawn that is not the caster has the same duration regardless if the caster is sensitive or not.
But if the melee pawn is sensitive they get a longer duration, regardless of whom casts.
How ever self casting focus with sensitive is nice buff for a while that you will probably be doing alot.
You don't want dull because I think that does infact reduce max mana (maybe sesntivie grants more max mana now that I think about it but I could be wrong).

The most important thing is the jobs tho. Don't put too much on just one pawn.

[Ultimate Oddball]

In my current playthrough I'm giving psychic abilities to two groups; my offensive team who go out to complete quests, and my doctors. The first is to help them in combat, the second is because I added a mod which provides new psychic abilities based around healing.

[Wish Granter]

If you cut somones eyes out he also gains 50% more psychic sensitivity. Great for the "slave psychic harmonizer" tactic. Or sight 0%.

Any eltex gear does alot too. Neural heat dumb seems worthless but is great. You put a useless salve next to you level 6 psycaster with mass beserk wave, and just incap the slave with neural heat dumb, giving you zero heat again on the caster.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by XelNigma:

Trait wise, psychic sensitivity is questionable. It does nothing for the caster at all. All it affects is the duration of effects cast on them.
So casting invisibility on a melee pawn that is not the caster has the same duration regardless if the caster is sensitive or not.
But if the melee pawn is sensitive they get a longer duration, regardless of whom casts.
How ever self casting focus with sensitive is nice buff for a while that you will probably be doing alot.
You don't want dull because I think that does infact reduce max mana (maybe sesntivie grants more max mana now that I think about it but I could be wrong).

Psychic sensitivity governs max neural heat, which is why you want a pawn with high psychic sensitivity and that's also the reason why all eltex gear increases that stat (and have their quality increases that bonus even further). Together with the neural heat regeneration effects it's the most important stat for a psycaster.

While high psychic sensitivity does increase duration of a lot of effects, specifically invisibility is not one of those effects. Invisibility is something that people use to solo raids with a psy caster (combined with berserk pulse) and I can see why it being increases to 300-400% would be even more broken. Even if you just use it for melee, you could make an eltex wearing psycaster who slices everyone down invisible, especially with a Kill-focused persona weapon.

Psychic sensitivity also boosts the psychic harmoniser and the psychic reader and since you will already get a bonus on that stat through psy gear stacking gear, trait and implants for those stats on one pawn can be pretty efficient.