Making Psychosomatic Predation be worth a slot

[haze1103]

As someone who started a Spear/TC build on the new patch, I was interested when I found Psychosomatic Predation. The theme seemed to work well with exactly my kind of build. Except, thinking it through, I'm not sure it's ever going to be worth putting in one of my innervation slots.

1. The damage bonus is not too incredible, which makes me think it's really meant to be used for melee builds with sources of fear.
2. Apparently, Yell doesn't count for the "frightened enemy" bonus (hard to verify). Sources of fear are then going to be mostly Frighten, which costs another innervation slot, and molotovs, which aren't terribly reliable at creating fear. Frighten might have been fine if I was using Locus of Control.
3. 15 AP is a bit much when paired with the low bonus. If I had more than 15 AP to spare, I'd just use an extra attack instead. If I had just 15 AP to spare, grenades would give much more damage, or a flashbang could buy time.
4. Even if it was worth casting, the cooldown is a bit long for what it does.
5. It's a pretty high psi investment, though normally you'd get back half of it.

Any of these items on their own are not really an issue on their own, it's really all these things combined that make me reluctant to keep it prepared.

Suggestions:
1. The cooldown could be refreshed when the target is killed. I'm still not sure using up 15 AP each time would still be worth it, though.
2. When the target is killed, apply the effect on a random nearby (maybe afraid only?) enemy for a refreshed duration. This avoids both the cooldown and the AP investment issue. You're left with a high psi investment but rewarding spells that can make killing a chain of enemies just a bit easier.

[Niko]

Spear would be extremely cool, if we had a kind of ghost strike with it, scaling with TC. My idea for it is to have a chain-lightning type of ability scaling with TC and TM, so that the combined values would not make the build ridiculously overpowered. Like the first target you hit would take -50%, anyone near goes full, and anything beyond 1 range would take +50%. Limiting maximum targets could be a way to scale it down. Spears still suck, Styg!

[Niko]

Thing with Psycho Predation is that you need caltrops to make it work. It kinda forcingly introduces sure step in a build that you never take. But TC/PSYCHO is a valid thing. And yeah. That ability is super op, when stacked. Like seriously fucking op.

[Barry]

I don't like how specific the power is, you can tell it was made for TC knife or whatever melee builds also use TC, but that makes it so niche that it's almost never worth using at any point unless you're a melee TC build that makes use of Fear, especially when most of the fights are in groups and you should deal damage to multiple people instead of just one.