Sadist vitalist and empowered by pain

[Segev]

The sadist archetype grants the ability to make a member of the collective suffer hp damage equal to the total pp cost of a healing power in order to empower it, as per the metapsionic feat. You do need to spend psi focus, but do not need to spend any extra pp.

Is there any healing power other than Body Adjustment that Empower actually does anything for?

It also strikes me that the damage is almost the primary feature of this, since requiring the focus expenditure means that all its saving you is 2 pp, which is two more targets or one more d12 of healing, but still kind-of slim. So the damage to enemies forced into the collective seems more like the real “purpose” of this effect.



Side note, I remain disappointed that Life Leeches can’t use Drain Health on low-HD targets. I get not wanting to make them cheap hp batteries, but the style points for sucking a chicken dry for a free power point over having to slaughter it manually are sadly lost.

[Fouredged Sword]

The sadist archetype grants the ability to make a member of the collective suffer hp damage equal to the total pp cost of a healing power in order to empower it, as per the metapsionic feat. You do need to spend psi focus, but do not need to spend any extra pp.

Is there any healing power other than Body Adjustment that Empower actually does anything for?

It also strikes me that the damage is almost the primary feature of this, since requiring the focus expenditure means that all its saving you is 2 pp, which is two more targets or one more d12 of healing, but still kind-of slim. So the damage to enemies forced into the collective seems more like the real “purpose” of this effect.



Side note, I remain disappointed that Life Leeches can’t use Drain Health on low-HD targets. I get not wanting to make them cheap hp batteries, but the style points for sucking a chicken dry for a free power point over having to slaughter it manually are sadly lost.
Mend body, but it an even worse trade. Mend body allows you to expend your focus to turn base cost 5 3d8 (av 12)+1d8 (av 4) per 2 pp spent into base cost 5 6d6 (Av 18)+2d6 (av 6) per 2 points spent, so it essentially self empowers for free.

And why you would take this over body adjustment anyway is questionable. 2d12 is better than 3d8 for the same PP cost. 3d12 is much better than 4d8
for the same cost.

Though as a Sadist Lifeleech I never bothered to use ether of those powers. Vigor is a much better cost to PP conversion when you can turn damage to temporary HP into real healing. Rather than getting an average of 6 points of healing per 2 PP you get 10 temp HP to turn into real HP through draining. And if action economy is what you are worried about the temp HP last plenty long enough just to leave in place.

Vigor is also one of those rare powers that is exponentially effective the more points you plow into it. In a party of 4 spending 9 points gives you 4 piles of 25 temp HP to turn into real HP. That's 100 points of healing for 9 power points. This is a great move after a battle when you have temp PP from the enemy member of your collective's death.

[Segev]

Mend body, but it an even worse trade. Mend body allows you to expend your focus to turn base cost 5 3d8 (av 12)+1d8 (av 4) per 2 pp spent into base cost 5 6d6 (Av 18)+2d6 (av 6) per 2 points spent, so it essentially self empowers for free.

And why you would take this over body adjustment anyway is questionable. 2d12 is better than 3d8 for the same PP cost. 3d12 is much better than 4d8
for the same cost.Actually, 2d12 is worse than 3d8. 2-24 rather than 3-24, and an average of 13 rather than 13.5. It's close, but 3d8 is better. 3-36 with an average of 18.5 is better than 4-32 with an average of 18, though, so 3d12 is better than 4d8. Looking at your averages, you're underestimating the average result on a die by .5. The average result on a dX is (x/2 + .5). That's why 2d6 averages to 7, not 6.

Other than that, though, yeah, I agree with your analysis.


Though as a Sadist Lifeleech I never bothered to use ether of those powers. Vigor is a much better cost to PP conversion when you can turn damage to temporary HP into real healing. Rather than getting an average of 6 points of healing per 2 PP you get 10 temp HP to turn into real HP through draining. And if action economy is what you are worried about the temp HP last plenty long enough just to leave in place.

Vigor is also one of those rare powers that is exponentially effective the more points you plow into it. In a party of 4 spending 9 points gives you 4 piles of 25 temp HP to turn into real HP. That's 100 points of healing for 9 power points. This is a great move after a battle when you have temp PP from the enemy member of your collective's death.That's my thought, too. Sadist really only seems to be there as a way to get rid of the cost for letting an enemy die while connected to your collective. The other features sound decent, until you actually try to examine how to use them.

Empowered healing is nice! But it still costs psi focus and thus is only saving 2 pp. And psionic healing never does better than Natural Healing, which can't be Empowered. (And yes, with a Life Leech, Vigor is a much better healing power.)

Gaining temp power points for dead things is cool, but the diminishing returns as the targets go up levels is annoying, and the way to "abuse" it by slaughtering chickens for 1 pp boosts, while perfectly doable, loses cool points since you can't use your life drain power from life leech to do it. No, you have to kill them the old fashioned way, which feels more "shaman" than "psionic," to me.

[icefractal]

It doesn't benefit from Empower, but for non-temporary healing I always found Natural Healing a better healing option than Body Adjustment or Mend Body. It's slightly less healing (3/pp vs average 3.25/pp for Body Adjustment or 3.5/pp for focus-expending Mend Body), but the fact that it's non-random makes it more efficient in practice.

(And if you have Wild Surge or other sources of free augmentation, Natural Healing becomes very efficient out of combat).

The big one (Heal Injuries) is also non-random. I think this feature giving free augmentation like Wild Surge instead of free Empower would have been a better fit.

Incidentally, why the hell does Mend Body even exist? Body Adjustment is valid because a larger group of classes get access to it, but Mend Body is even more exclusive than Natural Healing and strictly worse unless you spend focus. Maybe if it cured a bit of ability damage or some conditions as well?

[Segev]

It doesn't benefit from Empower, but for non-temporary healing I always found Natural Healing a better healing option than Body Adjustment or Mend Body. It's slightly less healing (3/pp vs average 3.25/pp for Body Adjustment or 3.5/pp for focus-expending Mend Body), but the fact that it's non-random makes it more efficient in practice.

(And if you have Wild Surge or other sources of free augmentation, Natural Healing becomes very efficient out of combat).When a Vitalist uses Natural Healing, he can combine the automatic Network tag and the ability to redirect healing to make it geometric in power points, as long as he has more people in his Collective to expand it to. You want to roughly divide the pp spent in half, half going to augment it for more hp and half going to augment it by spreading it to another person.

In theory, this also works out with Body Adjustment, but I recall the return still being slightly worse.


The big one (Heal Injuries) is also non-random. I think this feature giving free augmentation like Wild Surge instead of free Empower would have been a better fit.

Incidentally, why the hell does Mend Body even exist? Body Adjustment is valid because a larger group of classes get access to it, but Mend Body is even more exclusive than Natural Healing and strictly worse unless you spend focus. Maybe if it cured a bit of ability damage or some conditions as well?

Heal Injuries is just heal as a psionic power, right?

Mend Body is...yeah, I don't know what they were thinking with that one.

If it were an Empower for any power, not just healing, or if it were a 1.5x without needing to be "Empower" (but didn't stack with Empower), it'd be better. Heck, replacing it with Overchannel and the feat that lets a Sadist Vitalist force the Overchannel damage onto others in his collective would probably be a significant improvement.

[Kris Moonhand]

I always prefer Mend Body over Body Adjustment because of the psifocus augment. By that level you're gonna have Psionic Meditation and possibly a second focus as well, so why not use it? By the way, Body Adjustment and the d8 version of Mend Body is pretty much always worse than Natural Healing if you're a Vitalist. When you get access to it at level 3, you can spend 2 PP on NH + augment plus 1 on Spirit of Many for 12 total, which is the max roll of BA. At level 5 when you get MB you can get 27 out of NH (3 PP on power for 9 + 2 on SoM) whereas the max roll for either BA or d8 MB at that level is 24 (2d6 MB has max 36). At 7th, max is 48 for NH, while max for BA is 36 and d8 MB is 32 (2d6 MB is max 48). I could go on, but I won't. But I could.

Now, obviously these are for a SoM'd NH vs a single target manifesting of the other powers. You could potentially get more out of BA and MB by dropping an augment or two and using SoM as well. And the numbers can improve for BA and MB by using Empower from Sadist. That said, it is highly unlikely you will get the max roll of any of these. Having a greater quantity of lower denomination is obviously preferable (2d6 is better than 1d12 simply by dint of having 2 dice for the same max), but having a number you always know is best, even if it is a bit lower than the max roll of something else.