Well, we were escaping up a narrow spiral staircase, a crowded party of 5, with teleporting blink dogs *bamph*ing every which where on all sides, dividing us, flanking, etc. we were making a slow and tactical retreat with five foot steps and withdraw actions. Unfortunately, an AC of 16 with relatively squishy HD made me fairly easy to bring into negatives. I will add that Autohypnosis is amazing in place of the standard fortitude roll to stabilize.
I had started with Matter Agitation on the first blink dog (before we became aware there were at least another 4 or 5) with the idea of just keeping meat shields between it and myself whilst providing sustained damage. If I had played more sensibly, I probably would have manifest Vigor on myself and ran away faster.
Observations from earlier combat scenarios is that Astral Construct is invaluable at low levels, especially shouting "I-MANIFEST-ASTRAL-CONSTRUCT" just before the DM gets to say "Roll Initiative" - he'd often allow that to count so that it appeared at the very start of my first turn
. It was useful as a meat-shield, especially with Improved Trip as the selected quality, in combo with Grease it was very useful for debilitating enemies and allowing the melee party members to finish them off.
Energy Ray at low levels was so-so, often with the poor BAB etc. it would miss more often than it hit, although that may be due to unlucky dice rolls. Also, the damage at this levels was relatively unimpressive, and sucked a lot of PP. A Crossbow was generally a more effective option at this level. No doubt at higher levels it would be much more useful.
So I probably found Grease, Astral Construt and Vigor the most useful powers in terms of keeping myself alive and making opponents less of a threat. Energy Ray was not very useful as we had the melee members for damage, and Matter Agitation would probably be more appropriate once there was more BFC in place and I was not being attacked.
Erudites are awesome. I had a Level 21 StP Erudite in the last campaign with Persist Power metapsionics, funny stuff. I look forward to the handbook.
