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Perhaps its not the Metathermics I don't like but rather taking all 4 disciplines that's giving me issues.If you're playing full psi, there's no real point in going more than 75 points into Thought Control, so you can save a bunch of points that way. Also, unless you really want to use Precognition - and it has its uses, and it's not bad, but it's certainly not for everyone - you can safely stop investing in Temporal Manipulation at 55 points if you need those points for somewhere else. Your Uni-Psi headband and Psi Beetle tac vest coupled with your extremely high Will stat will bring your effective TC skills up over the 200 mark, which is all you'll need to reliably defeat Resolve checks. So I'd say a typical "four school" psi build should realistically be a "two and two halfs school" build, which does free up a bunch of points.
How should I use the other Metathermics abilities? Like the Shield and the Shard Barrier?
So it does indeed seem lucky hits with molotovs, flares, psi abilities, outlasting the crawler's alpha strike/s or managing to bump into them before/after are the intended ways of handling them. Doable but tiresome, eh.Luck not required. If you're psi, then you should have Locus of Control, so you can ignore the stun. If you pay close attention to your environment, then most times you can see signs that Crawlers are about, and so you can make some noise, manually start turn-based mode, and hide behind a Force Field while they bunch up at the edge of your force field. When the field drops, you'll go first, and should probably at least see the faint shadows of where they're at so you'll know what you hit. If you deprive them of their first strike ability, they're really easy. If you're not playing a psi character with enough Will to get LoC, then you can make Bullhead to ignore the stun, or perhaps you'd have enough Con to get Thick Skull so you can't be stunned. If you've got Quick Tinkering you may be able to lay a small bear trap perimeter with a gap in it, then go out into the map you're exploring and try to pull via noise. Run back to your perimeter and fill it in with a QT drop then just wait outside melee reach for the Crawlers to entrap themselves. If none of that is an option, then throw on some Antithermic gear of some sort and just drop molotovs at your own feet. Crawlers won't willingly walk into fire while they're stealthed, so the bright illumination of the lake of flame you're standing in should make it easy to see them as they wait right at the edge of the fire.
I'm trying to remove the topic but for the life of me I don't know where is the "Remove Topic" link advertised.
What am I missing about Metathermics? I often find myself in positions where I'm faced with the choice to spend PSI points on a Metathermics ability or something else and I often wind up getting more mileage out of the other ability. To be honest when going pure PSI I feel like I have TOO many options.Metathermics is probably going to be your most efficient bread-and-butter type damage against most organic targets. You're really going to want Pyromaniac and Thermodynamicity for it, though. Pyromaniac is going to give you group crowd-control via fear in that pre-level 14 zone where you can't just winbutton LoC+Enrage and end turn until it's time to loot. It'll also give you a devastating opener in the form of Psionic Mania + Cryo Orb if you've gone Psychosis; that opener leaves bleed debuffs which won't disappear when you follow up the Cryo Orb with a Pyrokinesis, overwriting Chill (a weak debuff) with Burning (probably the strongest debuff in the game if the target also fears burning). Cryokinesis is a cheap, very-long-range puller that also inflicts Chill which means it's your ideal kiting ability against heavy-damage melee types, or an excellent addition to psi slow when facing enemies with out-of-control high move points. The fire avatar ability will both let you cheese stealth melee enemies (Crawlers especially, which do not willingly run into the flames while stealthed and instead wait outside them long enough for you to find them and kill them at no risk to yourself) and also generally disregard fire in all forms, meaning you can safely molotov yourself and also trivially cheese Industrial Bots. If you just hate the idea of challenge at all, then you can just beat almost every fight in the entire game (only four come to mind in the entire game that are highly resistant to this) by just making some noise, manually starting combat, hiding behind a four-turn force field, then popping out and triggering a ThermoD explosion to destroy entire groups in an instant.
I concede maybe I'm just not using it right.Yup, that's pretty much it, right there.
(As a side note, I have never seen any hard evidence that special merchandise is in fact of higher quality than normal goods, other than HEAVY confirmation bias. Anyone got proof of this? AFAIK It just increases your chance of finding something useful.)I would suggest that since any individual is a decidedly finite set, even if it is so that Mercantile does not unlock higher-quality merchandise (and I truly believe that it does - across dozens of characters and hundreds and hundreds of hours, I've never seen base inventories match the quality of expanded inventories though as you say that could just be chance and observer bias) then just having more opportunities to get the better stuff does, for all practical purposes, mean that Mercantile unlocks higher quality loot. It's not reasonable to assume infinite restocks, so even if all it does is triple your chances, that takes you from single standard deviation territory into the narrow far margins. For a single play-through, rather than considering raw mathematical probabilities, that does in fact mean higher quality gear is unlocked.
