Allods Psionicist Guide

By Hammish; IGN Metis. This is as a guide written for the Allods Online Starter Guide Contest.

Who is this guide for?

This guide is for the newb to this game in particular, but not MMO's or fantasy games in general. I do use some generic fantasy MMO lingo. Now, don't get me wrong, I'd be happy to see people who had never seen an MMO in their life, but largely I've found the people that ask me about Psionicists tend to be people new to the game, but not new to MMO's. A lot of this will make more sense after 10 levels or so, so come back here before you depart from Lightwood/Nezebgrad, and a lot more of this will probably make sense!

In light of that, this guide will be formatted a little differently from most guides. It will be an extended FAQ aimed for the new player. These are the types of questions that I come across all the time by new psis, so hopefully this will be helpful. Feel free to skip the general questions if you're making a psi alt.

Some Allods-specific abbreviations and jargon

• Heroics: The dungeons you do once you've reached the maximum level of 40.
• Perc: Perception. An important stat in spell resist calculation. Explained in detail later.
• Int: Intelligence. Your damage is directly proportional to your int. Explained in detail later.
• Psi: Psionicist.
• Twin: Mental Twin. An important spell for how the psi works. See below.
• Shock: Psychic Shock. Bread and butter attack.
• Stun: Shock Wave. Explained in detail later.
• Hypno: Hypnosis. Explained in detail later.
• Rapid, haste: Rapid Metabolism. Gives everyone in your party +30% walking speed. An important talent to have at level 12.
• Proc: Trigger. I don't know how this terminology came to be.
• Assassin: Spectral Assassin.

General FAQ's about Allods

What is an archetype? What is a class?

An archetype is probably what you're thinking of when you hear "class." The archetypes are Warrior, Paladin, Scout, Healer, Warden, Mage, Summoner, and Psionicist. The Psionicist classes are Seer, Mentalist, and Occultist. In-game, most people conflate classes and archetypes, which is confusing. For example, you'll hear them talk about Warriors and Paladins as classes even though they are archetypes. This is an important distinction mostly when you're trying to find information in a detailed guide such as this one.
The full grid is here. This grid will tell you what archetypes can wear what armor at what level: http://en.allods.gpotato.eu/Overview/Classes/

What's the ruby grid? How do I buy rubies? What do I get for buying rubies?

The grid you see in the beginning of the game only shows 25% of the talents you can get! Once you get to level 10, visit the psi trainer (in the basement Imperial Square on the Empire side, and on the southwest corner of the Gibberling District of League side)

I can't pick up this bag / loot this chest. WTF?

You've lagged out. It's not that common but it comes up enough that it has its own name: "bag lag." If you announce to your party that have bag lag and you're logging, they'll know exactly what you're talking about. Log out and back in to resolve.

Where can I get equipment item of type X? (cloak, ring, etc)

Generally, every five levels, there is a new type of item that you'll start getting in quests. You'll also be able to purchase them from vendors. For your convenience, I've listed the levels at which you should be able to buy types of equipment from vendors.

• Off-hand: Doesn't apply to psis! Don't equip one unless you hate DPS!
• Ring: 15. You probably have at most one ring by level 15. Find the ring merchant to buy some basic rings. You have to drag-drop the second ring into place. To replace your second ring, remove your second ring and then drag-drop the new ring in, otherwise it will replace the first ring instead of the second.
• Head: 15
• Shoulder: 25
• Back (cloak): 15
• Ears: 20
• Neck: 30
• Trinket: Not entirely sure, they start showing up around 25 I think.

What's fatigue? What do I do with this blue XP bar? Why didn't I ding even though it says I have enough fatigue to reach the next level?

Fatigue is explained well here: http://allods.wikia.com/wiki/Fatigue
You can find an innkeeper on Noob Island, in the south part of town for League, and inside the Imperial Square tower. They're also in every zone, though not in every single town.

General questions about psis

Should I use Erase Memory?

No. The spell serves no practical purpose. See below for more detail.

What are the racial abilities? OR I just got this spell but I didn't put any talent points into it. WTF?

They are fairly even, but I'm biased toward the Seer ability.

• Occultist: "Stress Coping." Every spell you cast also has a 4% chance to clear your Mental Overload stack. So no matter what you will never get extremely overloaded, but unfortunately you have no control over when this ability triggers. Not great IMO: I dislike low-proc-rate triggered spells that don't either blow up the universe or do something else extremely cool.
• Seer: "Elevated Insight." All physical damage will be Dodged. This does not stop side effects from happening, so you can't use this to run away from a mob or player without getting tripped, nor can you stop spells, nor physical DOTs that are already on you (which kinda makes sense -- you can dodge a knife but not a knife wound to the gut!)
• Mentalist: "Mentalist's Will". The same as Elevated Insight except that you're Immune, and you can't move at all, whereas with Elevated Insight you get to move around freely.

I set a twin out but the mob attacked me instead and is completely ignoring my twin! WTF?

That's a bug. Cast twin again, and the mob will pull back and you'll go out of combat. Find another mob to attack, then go back to the one that was glitched and it should work this time.

I set a twin out on a mob that can travel across both water and land, but it keeps glitching out. WTF?

That's also a bug. Only attack amphibious creatures such as hydras on land, or pull them out of the water before you

Help! I'm doing No Room For Error and the poisonous glands won't drop!

I told myself that I wasn't going to do a quest FAQ here, but this one really bugged me and a LOT of follow-up quests depend on this one. You can't cast mental link on the Snakes, otherwise they won't drop glands, or if they do it will be a one-in-a-million shot. I don't know why. Just a heads up. Just shock them down to the necessary level of health.

What gear is good for psis?

Respected reputation gear, much like every other class! Every zone has a faction you can grind reputation for, and it is almost always worth doing the grind. Possible exception for Demon Hunters, but I don't know enough about their gear to give a definite answer on that, and you'll be 40 long before you get respected with the Demon Hunters, so it's your call.

Questions about PVP

PVP is not braindead in Allods! You will not find a class that will autopilot for you, and you're going to find a lot of players better than you that have been doing it for awhile. However, a little practice goes a long way!

Is psi a good class for PVP?

Depends on the type of encounter.

• One-on-one: you'll find the psi to be quite handy. Once you have Twin out, the only thing an enemy can really do is run away from you — if they run far enough away they get Mental Immunity and destroy your twin. Don't let them get that far! Stun, knock back, blind! Here's a fun tip: most people in world PVP have no idea how to deal with a Spectral assassin, they'll just run around and let the Assassin hack them to death! You may have a bit of a hard time sealing the deal with a kill since people can always try to run. But the first trick is to get Link up in the first place.
  
• Groups: psis aren't very good assistants and have a hard time holding their own against an assault. They're squishy and you can only really dominate one person at a time, so the other people are free to destroy you. This is simply going to take a lot of practice. And death. To quote Kurt Vonnegut: "so it goes."

Why does it take so long to cast Mental Link?

That's just the cast time. Once you kill an enemy you get a Sensitive Perception buff, which makes it instant-cast for the next 30 seconds.

How does this affect PVP?

It means there's actually a metagame instead of a flashy rock, paper, scissors! Stun the guy!

But stun is only for five seconds?

Well first, put more points into stun. Or link while the player isn't paying attention. Or use the environment to your advantage: kill some weak mob before the player notices you to get Sensitive Perception up, then link and demolish!

Unfortunately Psionicists are not God: there is strategy involved.

But I keep losing!

Practice! There are people that have been online that have had plenty of practice playing the character they're on, and they are ruthless. This is war! And never give the enemy a fair chance because they're certainly not giving you one. Don't say, "hey, I'm going to duel you," or jump out in front of the enemy so he can take the first strike. And attack unflagged players when you have your Banner up (yes, this game allows you to attack unflagged players if you have the right buff). Just battle whether they like it or not! You will win way more often this way, if winning is what you care about.

What's a good PVP build?

A high-end PVP build from 1 to 40 will not get you to 40, which is the focus of this guide. You're going to need to get at least one Water of Death to respec. To be honest, I don't have a good PVP build, but everyone else is specced for PVE until 40 anyway so don't worry about it until you're 40! You should have a feeling about what would work and what wouldn't by then.

Builds, spells, DPS, and stats

What build should I go with?

You should probably focus on grinding, since you will be doing that a lot. Here is the build I used:
Level 7; Level 12; Level 17; Level 20; Level 22
It's important to avoid putting any additional points into Mental Link because one point does everything you need. By the way, this is a general guideline that's based off of my memory. You may need to tweak that build to your personal style. For example, if you find that you're running out of mana at an unmanageable rate, feel free to add in Trance earlier.

The build after level 22 becomes less critical than your ruby grid because you have level 3 Psychic Shock, Shock Wave, Mental Twin, and Choke, which are your bread and butter. The stuns are useful, and do get Hypnosis fairly soon, but more or less at this point you should just put points into whatever you end up using the most, as long as you end up with at least one point in every talent before you ding 40!

Level 31 and 32 should be Spectral Assassin and Will Suppression, respectively. That gives you a significant boost in your ability to deal with tough mobs, and also lets you solo some Elite mobs! Note that putting 2 and 3 points into Spectral Assassin gives you 20 and 40 seconds less cooldown, respectively (as opposed to what Allodsbase tells you; the Allodsbase app is bugged on that tooltip).

Level 33; Level 40 Tweak to your heart's content, or find a guide that will do what you want more specifically. I used one bonus ruby for the 40 build; you should have at least one by 40. That is a build that will work well for heroics (assuming you have Historians and Free Traders rep gear). Note that you can get bonus rubies by solving world mysteries. I'm not going to venture out onto that branch quite yet, since I haven't finished them all myself, but by this point you should know where you want to put the extra points.

What is that skull around the enemy's picture frame? Is that a boss?

Different frames mean different things. The thing I put in quotes is how they're referred to in game.

• Mob: Same frame as you. Any type of NPC enemy that's not one of the below types.
• Named: Fancy, solid green frame. Almost certainly related to a quest.
• Rare: Fancy, yellow-green frame with a crown. Unrelated to quests. Guaranteed equipment drop.
• Elite: Yellow-brown border and a crown. Needs a party of 4-5 to kill. Once in a while you can get away with duoing or even soloing these (Bolbru comes to mind)
  . Seers can solo elites that other classes can't, just play Assassin, Twin, and your stuns right.
• Boss: Red and black border. Generally requires a 10+ party raid to attempt. Do not bother attempting to solo. You will die unless you are at the very least 10 levels over the enemy, and even then it can be questionable.

The reason that I bring this up is because Bosses and only Bosses are immune to stuns, DOTs, and Spectral Assassin. So don't bother casting those, go straight into support spells and damage.

Important spells and mechanics:

• Mental Link. Allows you to cast Mental Twin, Hypnosis. Triggers Astral Echo.
  
• Astral Echo. Displays most prominantly after you cast Mental Link, but there are other ways to trigger it and you do NOT have to cast it on the linked mob. Once you establish a mental link you have the option to cast three spells:
  
  • Astral Desiccation. 5 second DOT, damages every 1 second. Does a decent amount of damage.
  • Destroy Consciousness. Does as much damage as Astral Desiccation, but all at once.
  • Mind Lock. Paralyze a mob for two seconds. As useless as it sounds.
  • Mind Lock is not worth discussing, but the other two are. In particular: why would you ever want to cast a DOT when you can get the same damage up front? The answer is damage stability. Later in the game it becomes hard to keep a very high Perception, so your damage generally varies.
• Mental Twin. This is the core mechanic of how Psionicists work. Drop a twin, and it's a dummy that your enemy has to kill before he can kill you. Enemy AOE can still affect you so stay clear of the enemies themselves!
  
• Mental Resistance. Enemy is immune to Hypnosis, Mental Twin, and Spectral Assassin for 30 seconds. Fortunately, if there is already a Mental Twin out then it will not die. Here are the ways that an enemy can gain Mental Resistance:
  
  • The enemy kills your Mental Twin or Spectral Assassin.
  • You cast Mental Twin while you have a Mental Twin out.
  • Your Spectral Assassin is killed.
  • It may very well be technically possible to cancel out your assassin with another assassin, but in practice if your assassin has been out for the necessary 80 second cooldown, the enemy is already dead.
• My pattern on hard enemies generally goes like this: Mental Twin, Mind Fire, Spectral Assassin, Astral Desiccation, Mental Twin, Choke, Shock.
• Mental Overload. Some spells cause Mental Overload. Most importantly, Mental Shield causes Mental Overload. This means that it is unfeasible to use Shield and Shock as your main grinding strategy. Astral Echo spells also cause Overload, so if you start the battle off with those then your stats will take a slight hit as you start.
• Will Suppression: A second mental link. In fact, in your special ability icon (the one that shows what mob you're linked to), you'll notice a slot that implies that you can link two mobs at once. That's Will Suppression.
  • Does not proc Astral Echo.
  • Can be resisted. In practice it rarely happens, but be prepared, or just have your Conviction high enough if you're doing heroics.
    
  • You cannot cast Twin on the second
    
  • You CAN cast hypnosis on a Will Suppression. So now you can handle two mobs at once with no trouble at all.
    • For grinding: Link/twin the first one, then suppress/shock/hypno the other. Once the first mob is dead Link the second mob and cast Twin. Note that you do NOT get Astral Echo when you go Will Suppression -> Mental Link like that. You have to have both clear in order to proc Astral Echo.
      
    • For CC: Will Suppression the second CC mob.
      
• Empathic Gift: Absolutely critical for heroics, which you will probably want to do for the gear. One point.
• Spectral Assassin: Deals a lot of damage and keeps doing so until it's killed. You can solo bosses and hard mobs with this. This guy's especially fun for PVP! Most players don't know how to handle an Assassin so they run around trying to avoid it. This will not work and they will die fairly quickly.
• Temporal Acceleration: Does what the tooltip says, with four important exceptions: you move probably 50% faster (the tooltip isn't accurate), the effect lasts for six seconds (this detail isn't in the tooltip), you will NOT pull any mobs you run across while this is in effect (very useful for running toward or away from things), and you'll get this weird blur effect on your screen while the spell is in effect (slightly annoying, but you just have to know to expect it). Worth getting for PVP, even in a PVE build, but very late in the build when there aren't a whole lot of other useful rubies to invest in.
• Fear of Death: An effect that starts out at level 15. Quickly becomes very annoying, but is fairly cheap to clear out until your late 30's. No need to burn through your incense right away -- they generally go for 20g each (400g for a pack), and you going to wish you had saved your perfume when you're in the last 38-40 stretch and you actually ARE spending 20g in a bad dying streak! Hoard your incense until you're doing something that really needs them, and also do the daily incense quest in the meantime. You'll thank yourself later.

Spells to ignore:

• Regular attack and Wand ranged attack. Why do they even give you this option in the beginning of the game? WTF? Get rid of it, don't even bother with it.
• Erase memory. Doesn't serve any good at all. Forget it exists.
• Doppleganger Curse and Positive Momentum. To this day I still have no idea what Positive Momentum does, but I do know that Doppleganger Curse is actually harmful! The first thing you want to do to a mob or player that's broken your twin is probably to stun them! But Curse is a dot that will counter your efforts. Doppleganger shock only lasts three seconds, but the dot lasts six, so they can't be used in tandem. Avoid Curse!

Talent Tree items on which I have no strong opinion

• Mental Shield. OK for running away or taking one hit. One point is fine.
• Trance: Does what it says. One point is fine.
• Pain Transfer. Eek out that extra bit of burst DPS, I guess. 0 points is fine for me, but you may like it.
• Hypnosis: Does what it says. One point is enough for most purposes, but three points for Heroics and after you get Will Suppression, where you'll want to Hypno that mob while a third is charging you.
• Mental Pulse: One more stun. One point.
• Mental Cleansing: Kind of annoying the heal is entirely random and often zero. Bandages + food should be cheap enough that you won't have to deal with using this for heals. One point for decurse ability.
• Telekentic Pull: More stuns. More the merrier. 1 point.
• Cloud Vision: This isn't a full blind, just reduces sight radius. They can still see and kill you, so I'm not sure what the point is. Pass. (Someone feel free to correct me on this)
• Wall of Blades: AOE, but you have no real protection against stuns and you have to be near the enemy who could have AOE stuns. Still, it's your only AOE damage, so it's worth a point.

How do I do a lot of DPS?

Unfortunately I don't have all the theoretical graphs for this, but I can at least show you how Intelligence and Magic Power are used to calculate damage. Hopefully this will be an important starting point for you.

Intelligence and Magic Power

If you want to understand this section a single sentence, here it is: Magic Power is the stat that they don't tell you about as being important, but it's actually just as important as intelligence!

For those who want to know why, this is where it gets just a little complicated, but the aritmetic isn't that bad! I'll explain it in aritmatic terms first, and then try to explain the implications in subjective terms for those of you who are not math-minded. The Spell Damage formula is as follows:

BP: Base Power (explained in a little bit)
Int: Intelligence
MP: Magic Power of your wand.

Spell Damage = BP * Int * MP * 0.0016
Total Damage is later modified by Perception and Luck, but I have no idea what those formulas look like. More on that later.

So, some takeaways:

• Ignore that tooltip that says "Increases the power of magical spells by X.XX%". What it means to say is that full damage would be 100%, and you are dealing X.XX% of that amount. And that percentage is simply 4% for every 25 int. And that's where the 0.0016 comes from: 0.04 / 25 = 0.0016.
• If your int is 25, you can double your damage by making your int 50, triple it at 75, quadruple it at 100, and so on. And the same is true of MP. If your new wand has 200MP and your previous one had 100MP, you will be doing double damage. This may sound great but mobs are built to handle this power structure.
• This is why you don't have to level very long before you can wipe the floor on mobs from the previous zone.

I could have saved myself a lot of grief if I had known that last fact, because I was throwing away very good MP wands for 1 or 2 points in int or perc but with crap MP. Don't make the same mistake! MP is a stat to be treated like Int, Luck, and Perc!

Now you also know exactly why those magic power potions are useful: it increases your Magic Power.

What can we say about Luck and Perc?

Since I haven't been diligent about tracking damage, I can only give you my gut feeling. Generally, if the tooltip for Perc is above 40% resist then damage gets very erratic. Below 20% is very stable and a good target, and 10% and below is excellent. In the 20-40% range is a judgement call, where you can justify having erratic damage if you have a ton of points everywhere else. As for luck, if you have the glance rate at 5% you're doing excellent once again, and hopefully you aren't sacrificing other points for that kind of crit rate. If you have a listed crit rate less than 25% you need more luck. I consider crits normal damage, and normal damage to be punishingly small damage, but then again I like things to die quickly.

The crit/glancing/resist percentages are only general guidelines and not a guaranteed rate, which is hopefully obvious. This is the reason I can't just make a bunch of graphs without a lot of studying into the mechanics of the system: there are more variables involved than the assumptions they're using to give you those percentages.

What else can we say about damage?

Try to avoid enemies higher level than you. You are severely gimped against higher level enemies and they get a bonus against you. Avoid if you're having trouble.

What profession should I choose? Leatherworking?

The craftable armor and weapons are never as good as quest and rep items, and alchemy costs a lot of money and doesn't have a lot of good potions, so forget about using crafting to get good items. And since craftables are useless, this also means that gathering is also not a great money maker! Generally speaking, the way each profession makes money is from endgame daily quests from the Free Traders, Historians, and Demon Hunters.

They may fix this in a future patch. I really hope they do. I'd love to see a viable crafting system. But for now, I write about what's relevant in the current patch.

With that said, here are some examples of what makes money in each profession.

• Disassembling: Buttons can be made early on (level 18) and currently sell for 10g/stack, and can fund your disassembling for awhile. Takes a bit of gold to be able to get to the point where you can disassemble level 18+ gear for buttons, but once you're there you're golden. You can disassemble vendor greens and blues, but not whites.
  
• Tailoring: Slippers of Pristine Blessed Cloth for The Frilly Buy (Historians).
  
• Mining: Once you get 340 mining, you can start farming Refined Mithril Chunks in Avilon and Dragon Ring. Those auction for well over 100g/stack because they are tied to a free traders daily quest. Still, don't expect to get rich overnight because it's one specific type of Mithril, and the random number generator can be a cruel mistress.
  
• Alchemy: Greater Armour Potion: Sitting Ducks for Demon Hunters.
  

There are probably other repeatables that I'm forgetting. But do some research, there's probably something you can make money at.

What about heroics?

Heroics are great fun, and a 40 psi is very quickly recruited! One or two psis are an essential and member to any heroic team. You can CC two mobs at once, and Empathic Gift turns otherwise very difficult bosses into a straightforward tank-and-spank. You can churn out DPS as fast as the tank can keep up, so no matter what you are never going to be dead weight. Since my build guide is based on PVE, it makes a very smooth transition into Heroics without any respec necessary.

Find a guild! You're much more likely to find a party within a clique than with a PUG.

Miscellaneous comments:

This guide will give you a general idea of what will get you to 40, but I will give you one piece of advice that will do a freshly minted 40 a lot of good: find a good guild if you haven't done so yet. They'll basically fall over themselves to recruit you once you're 40, since it shows you at least have the dedication to make it there and are willing to practice with them, so take your pick!

I hope you enjoyed reading my guide as much as I enjoyed writing it! Formatting it was less enjoyable but hey, it has to be in a format that's actually usable somehow, right?