For a while now I've wanted to put together a proper study to test how base skill points in mind blast affect shadow masters mind blast use. The common conception for the last few years has been that the more base mind blast you have, the more your shadow will spam mind blast, but this was basically based on a single/sloppy experiment done by tailschao (no offense Alex), and veteran player's "gut" feelings. Keep in mind this is all PvP oriented. (Like it isn't obvious already.)
What I have done today proves that increasing base mind blast levels has a huge effect on shadow mind blasts, as well as maxing mind blast is by far the optimal way to skill your assassin.
To start, the statistics of my test:
At the bottom you can see my general observations and how I actually performed my tests. Here is a short video show how I did each individual trial, though it is a pretty boring one. (Especially since that trial the shadow casted 0 MB's)
Graphing the relationship of the stats:
From what you can see from this, and even the data, (Pretty obviously relationship) the amount the shadow mind blasts is strongly affected by your base mind blast, increasing the rate by over 25 times in 20 levels.
It is clear that maxing mind blast has the biggest and best effect on your shadow's mind blast rate.
I included the variance of the shadows mind blast rate. (Although the relationship isn't quite a perfect polynomial)
However, after level 15 it illustrates how the variance decreases, or on more layman's terms, the shadow will more consistently spam a higher amount of mind blasts. How could you not want that???
Also, after noticing that mean and variance in these test are approximately equal, (I realize this assumption isn't at all perfect, however it believe it makes a very clear illustration of how likely a shadow is to cast x amounts of mind blasts over a minute) this can be represented by Poisson Distributions of lambda ~ average of (average of mb/m and variance of mb/m).
For those that aren't familiar with statistics, basically each function (line on the graph, lols) represents the probability that the shadow will cast x mind blasts in 1 minute. For example, for a 20 point base mind blast shadow the probability to cast 0-8 MB's over one minute is nonexistent or ~0, and for a one point mind blast the probability to cast 0 MB's in one minute is higher than 15%.
By interpreting this graph, again we see maxing mind blast shifts the normal distribution way over, showing a way higher chance for your shadow to spam much higher amount of mind blasts over that minute.
In conclusion, I have shown our preemptive gut feelings about mind blast have been true, but to a much higher degree than expected. The difference between base level mind blast 1, 5, 10, 15, and 20 is highly linear verses the amount your shadow master uses mind blast. In addition, add in the bonuses of your mind blasts stun length, damage, shadows stun length, damage, knock back, and ability to double spam at the same time as your shadow to completely stun lock your opponent and it becomes very clear that no assassin should ever not max mind blast.
Credit to jeebus666, who discussed shadow master mechanics like 6 months ago, as well as reminded me I wanted to do a real study on this recently.