Thought Lash creates a crackling whip of psychic energy that strikes the target for damage and leaves a residue energy that increases subsequent critical damage on the target. This effectively gives the target negative critical padding. The residual energy will last for a duration of 30 seconds.

The initial damage from a successful cast will result in a grapple critical. These criticals will often result in injuring, knocking down and stunning the target.

Training in Mental Lore, Manipulation increases the critical damage of subsequent attacks. This is a mental warding spell.

Would it be possible to get more information on how thought lash works?

In the ELR review there is a lot of information on how the lore interacts with the spell...seeds used for increased performance, etc. Could someone give whatever information they can on how much Manipulation lore contributes to the spell?

Is there a seed base for the manipulation improvement?

By critical damage, I assume that means crit weighing...does it happen before crit randomization or after (I assume before)?

Does the critical increase allow UAC attacks to exceed the maximum for the current tier? Meaning if I have enough manipulation lore could I get a rank 6 hit on a decent attack...etc?

I guess right now, the crux of my question is...is there enough benefit to this spell for it to make up for whatever you lose from training manipulation instead of transformation?

For exactly this reason

> it tends to knock things over, and they go into an offensive stance in order to stand back up, making them easier to hit.

I used force projection over lash (almost) every time. Stancing critters is extremely important for UAC effectiveness and if you can force them to use an action setting themselves up rather than taking you down its a great tactic.

I did find lash useful for a few critter types: 1207 immune with poor warding defense, and these are relatively common at cap, so I did actually use lash a lot on Plane 4 (for stunning crawlers) but hardly at all on the way there.

It also has nice flavor for when helping lower level characters. It may not actually be doing much good, but the messaging is encouraging and its extremely unlikely to kill.