Assault Rifle / Thought Control hybrid

[GunWizard]

Short answers:

1) You can drop Neural Overload and the associated feats, AR damage is more than enough.

2) Psi crit does nothing for non damaging spells.

3) Must have psi abilities are Pseudo Spatial Projection, NO (if you for it), Mental Breakdown, Psycho-temporal Contraction and Stasis.

Now I'll just elaborate a little on how and why I used NO, but once again: dropping it for lower psi costs and more utility feats is perfectly reasonable.

NO is an extremely high damage spell in late game, as shown in my original post. But to be good it has to crit, and it is not possible to get crit chance high enough in that hybrid build. That's why I picked Psionic Mania, and only ever use NO after Mania. Psychosis is taken as a prerequisite for Mania, the feat in itself is indeed a net loss.

My experience is that the extra cost is okay, because the fights are short anyway. As I progressed through the game I used less and less CCs, it was faster and more reliable to just kill everything. Typically the first turn would be:
Premeditation -> LoC -> Mania -> NO -> Burst -> Burst -> Burst
Not many groups of enemies can survive that.

That sounds right up my alley, thank you very much for the strategy! right now I always started stealthed, approached an enemy, initiated combat, got a first burst, stunned the one I got close to with the tazer and threw a grenade or used adrenaline for the extra bursts.

Also, any good strategy for fighting crawlers? So far I could out-stealth them and initiate combat or throw pre-emptive molotov cocktails but I just wanted to know if this build had an anti-crawler strat.

[Koveras]

This build does have tools to deal with crawlers:

- Locus of Control makes you stun immune; it can even be used when stunned to break it.
- Pseudo Spatial Projection can be cast in advance, when entering an area with crawlers, causing them to miss their opening attack (most of the time).
- I played without Temporal Manipulation, but since you got it: Stasis is amazing against crawlers. Just run in the middle of the area and Stasis yourself to bait the crawlers. When Stasis end you'll have a pack of crawlers around you, and you can burst them or nuke them with Neural Overload.