Blinding pulse
 | This article relates to content added by Royalty (DLC). Please note that it will not be present without the DLC enabled. |
Blinding pulse
Induce noise in the visual centers of the brain, obscuring vision of everyone near the target point.
Base Stats
- Type
- Psycast
Ability
Blinding pulse is a level 2 psycast that reduces the sight capacity of pawns in its area of effect.
Acquisition
There are two ways to acquire the blinding pulse psycast:
- Upon reaching psylink level 2, a random psycast of level 2 is granted regardless of how this level up is achieved. This won't apply if the psycaster already knew one or more level 2 psycast.
- Blinding pulse can also be acquired from a psytrainer naming it. See the psytrainer page for further details.
Summary
Upon casting, Blinding pulse inflicts the Psychic blindness hediff for 1,800 ticks (30 secs) on all psychically sensitive pawns within a 3 tile radius from the target tile, which can be any location within 25 tiles, respecting line of sight. The Psychic blindness hediff multiplies the affected pawn's Sight by a percentage scaling with their Psychic sensitivity: ×50% at 100% Psychic sensitivity, capping at ×0% for 200%, and a minimum of ×95% at 10%.
Analysis
Blinding pulse is the first of several area-of-effect crowd control psycasts available to the player, and it performs its role well. The debuff inflicted to Sight, while not effective against all threats, can be devastating against others, and the reasonably large area of effect makes it highly useful in chokepoints or against large clusters of enemies.
Against the average humanoid raider, Blinding pulse is moderately effective in stifling their efforts to harm your pawns. A 50% reduction to Sight is equivalent to losing 6 levels of both Shooting and Melee skill. Given a target with a melee skill of 10 or lower, this reduces their Melee Hit Chance by roughly 20%, depending on their skill. This, in turn, results in an average reduction to DPS by anywhere from 22% at skill 10 to 48% for a pawn with 0 skill, assuming no other impact on hit chance. Melee Dodge Chance is also impacted by Sight, but the typical raider is unlikely to have a high enough value for Blinding pulse to meaningfully reduce it. For ranged pawns, due to the exponential decay of Shooting Accuracy over distance, Blinding pulse will be significantly more effective at longer range engagements than in close-quarters combat. For example, an affected shooting skill 10 pawn firing from the 25 tile maximum range of Blinding pulse will have their typical Shooting Accuracy of 46.7% cut in more than half to only 21.3%, whereas the same pawn firing from 15 tiles would only see a reduction from 63.3% to 39.5%. As with melee pawns, Blinding pulse is significantly more impactful against pawns with low skills or capacities to begin with. For more information on the calculations provided here, please visit the associated pages for the formulas used to calculate their derived statistics. Note that pawns such as animals and mechanoids have a default Melee skill of 4 and a Shooting skill of 8 (where applicable) for the purposes of these calculations.
However, the effectiveness of Blinding pulse can vary wildly depending on the target. Blinding pulse is significantly less effective against mechanoids and yttakin
, due to their reduced Psychic sensitivity. For example, Blinding pulse only reduces the hit chance of a scyther by a measly 9%, rendering it hardly better than nothing. However, Blinding pulse can have some minor benefit against lancers and centipedes due to their tendency to engage at maximum range. However, this range is higher than that of Blinding pulse, requiring the caster to approach them in order to cast it. On the flip side, a few entities
have massively increased Psychic sensitivity, rendering Blinding pulse absolutely debilitating against them. The two most vulnerable targets among them are the sightstealer and the gorehulk. Not only does the area of effect nature of Blinding pulse counter their large numbers, but their 200% Psychic sensitivity allows Blinding pulse to almost entirely cripple their damage output - Sightstealers will have their accuracy reduced to less than a third, and Gorehulks will be rendered almost incapable of damaging your pawns, assuming medium cover. Additionally, gorehulks tend to cluster together while attacking and do not move unless approached, making them easy targets for Blinding pulse.
Lastly, it should be noted that Blinding pulse may be considered preferable to Vertigo pulse in a scenario where groups of enemies are directly on top of your pawns, whether they have broken your ranks, or in a group of melee blockers. While Vertigo pulse is largely superior for negating the threat of enemy pawns, the risk of losing control of own pawns and having them stumble out of cover or towards a thrown grenade is a significant threat. In these situations, Blinding pulse can be a more palatable alternative, especially in regards to a group of melee blockers, as they don't necessarily need to be able to kill enemies to do their job. However, other psycasts such as Stun or Skip are likely to prove far more useful in such situations.
Version history
- Royalty DLC Release - Added.
- 1.1.2571 - Radius reduced from 5 to 4, range reduced from 25 to 20.