I recently transed Telepathy, and while I love it, I'm struggling. I have three main problems, and would appreciate any and all feedback on how to fix them.

1) Setting up for a Mindburst.

Seems easy enough. Drain ego to 50%. I've been doing it wrong, I'm sure. I'm starting to realize the importance of not using Psychicvampirism exclusively, but working in mindblasts. I'm going to start trying to use lightningbreath/addiction/reckless/mindblast to get a little more non-ego damage. Anywho, this isn't even the problem I'm most concerned with.

2) Hindering.

How the heck is it done. Need pro tips! I've been using lots of lightningbreath(epilepsy)/paralyse/stupidity. I've also been trying to weave in hallucinations/epilepsy. I'm still quite new to combat, so I'm not sure how to get things to stick long enough to matter. For example, epilepsy and hallucinations are normally cured before they get a chance to tick.

3) Dominate.

I'm sure there are more creative ways to use it then what I'm doing now. I pretty much just dominate sit/paralyse/boom. I've also tried to strip insomnia/stupidity/boom followed by dominate sleep/paralyse/boom. I'm sure there are ways to trip up every class out there. I've got a few aliases like dominate ally kio/stupidity, and dominate order entourage kill /stupidity.

Any tips, tricks, or pro telepaths are more than welcome!

Don't know a lot about it, but for classes with ents, you can try ORDER ENTOURAGE KILL ME. For warriors, maybe SIP CROTAMINE.

You may wabt to dominate warrios/monks to RELAX GRIP, though I'm not sure if that works off-balance. You could also try debating them as you use TP to get them under 50%.

EDIT: You might want to make sure that the other person can't shatter you, otherwise you'll get burnout, but Psionics should give you an edge.

Hmm, I was contemplatng telepathy for Dominate alone, because then I'd really - really wreck some havoc with that. heartstops, force an enemy to see if evolution could happen faster with jumping out of the skies to fly, making an enemy be the bait in astral to lure 30 steel goats out of the next room, have them behead an enemy unit, i mean seriously, who would expect seeing your best friend next to you behead you in combat? or to make matters really, really fun, remove waterbreathe when fighting underwater. Or if outside of mag, have them set off the gravediggers so you can pass unharmed, or get taken down by rocs. Or if it is a mag, spam them with illusions (you have that, right) so they can't see that you dominate them, and then have them attack the ur'dead. Or or or, use your imagination. so many fun things you can do with telepathy, let the inner kid inside of you go out on the expense of your enemies. Heh, or if it's a bard, make them change all their allies to their enemies and their enemies to their allies. especially if you can dominate a killer like Ixion, sure, when he's out of your grasp your dead, but you can wreak so much havoc with him taking down his allies that it would be interesting just to sit on the side and watch...

but I'm telekinesis because of a weak constitution and high charisma... meh

A lot of what you just listed is impossible or against the rules, FYI.

then it's good i'm not in telepathy, otherwise i'd be a fine shrubbery in hallifax about now heh

You can't relax grip off bal. You can dominate them to debate you if you do a sneak attack or something to catch them on balance. Dominate to sip a potion after you give them addiction. Peace/paralyze used to be a good hindering combo but most generally people, or I do anyway, use checks when they are hit with tp afflictions to get rid of those. Still could be good on a lot of people though! Keep up claws to drain mana, phantom has an entangle affliction so it is good to keep up as well. Don't take advice from me though, I've never been a tp.

Force Debate against a strong mindset, use PsyVamp. If you're an Aeromancer (which I think you are), it should be relatively simple for you to stack herb affs since that's all Telepathy and your meld hits people with them as well. You should eventually be able to outpace the herb balances on people.

Edit: Use illusions too to trick system's into thinking that they can't focus/eat another herb. Illusion's are a Mage's best friend.

heartstop - not possible to dominate.
flying - not quite sure what you mean by this.
astral bait - theoretically possible, but quite difficult to get them to move, easier just to use gust.
behead - decapitate (the 10s instakill) will almost undoubtedly be interrupted by the person doing it, assuming they're even on-balance with the five power.
remove waterbreathe - not possible with dominate. Once the defense is raised, removing the enchanted item doesn't break it. You could, however, alteraura it away.
gravediggers - could be considered avenger avoidance if they died to it.
ur'dead - same. Plus, dominating to attack will actually make the attacked creature hit the dominator these days.
bard - quite difficult, as it would need two dominates (minimum balance between then is 5s) during which the bard did not repair their lists.
Ixion - seems you don't quite understand how dominate works - you get to give ONE command. Dreamweaving possession, the only 'extended' dominate, lasts ten seconds, takes ten power, and requires the target to be asleep and yourself in dreamform, and every action knocks you offeq for a bit (half a second, a second?).

damn, there goes all my dreams

Just stick to dominating forced debate and sipping poisons. Order Entourage kill person doesn't really work since you have no form of aeon to stick it with. Just stack herb affs as an Aero Telepath and you'll be dandy.

It has been 2 and half years since I've been a telepath, so I might be incredibly wrong.

I never started with psivamp. Start with mindblast and throw in some bleeding from claws to force them to drink health or mana, then switch to psyvamp and afflictions that need you to focus mind, to make them drink mana instead of bromides.

As for illusions, if you don't want to take apart a curing system to find its vulnerabilities, go for focus mind afflictions, to make them drink mana.

As for as hindering goes, stupidity+paralysis and stupidity+epilepsy. Just spam them.

Oh, and freeze ground.

There a few more tricks I would use, but that depends on what system they are using.

EDIT: Telepathy used to be all about mashing two or three macros when I was a telepath (mostly because of the faulty curing system). I am hoping that has changed.

Protip: You can illusion while off psionic balance.

Mindblast is terrible.

Go with PsyVamp, use illusions like Sham and I said.

Every time I try to do this, I get told "Systems are too smart for that."

So, how do you outsmart them properly?

There will always be at least a handful of illusions that can bypass even the best anti-illusion measures. Some people will hack together kludges here and there, such as ignoring ectoplasm from a particular person all the time when it's usually known to be an illusion, but that's easy enough to avoid by randomly using different names.

The sorts of things that you generally can't get past a decent system are things like 'You eat .' or any other action that they're probably tracking internally with all sorts of failsafes. You need one-off lines that are hard to anticipate and therefore have little in the way of anti-illusion protection.

I suppose, then, that these will come in time.

For example, burstvessel illusion

It's impossible to make a system totally immune to illusions. You can protect yourself against the most dangerous illusions, or limit the damage they do, but no system will ever be 100% safe from illusions.

I like Vathael's illusion. I could tell you how to protect yourself from that illusion, but then I would have to kill you.

EDIT: can anyone please give more examples of illusions? I am curious how my system would handle them.

It is not that hard to block most illusions if you break your triggers into groups based on skill - you can just disable all of them except the ones for the mage you're fighting, eg. Aeromancy / Phantasms / Telepathy, so for example burst vessel illusions wouldn't work. However most people, including me, don't bother doing this because it is a lot of work for not very much gain (how often do you duel mages, really?).

Telepathy in particular is very limited as to what illusions it can use against this a system set up this way, since all the lines are pretty much the same.