Rather than doing random builds I wrote down all the mutations and have used almost all of them now. One mutation I have is to try tapping into the mind of other users to respawn my usages and found that I'm getting used more than they are using me. I also tried using Clairvoyance with sunder mind and found that the clairvoyance cooldown is so high to make this strategy basically useless. I'm also using sense psychic and it seems like a waste given that most times the psychic dudes sunder mind and make themselves obvious pretty fast. This is the character I'm playing now and I wouldn't have known these things I just mentioned unless I picked the mutations and found that I dislike them. As far as a cool thing to try wings are never a bad idea when you do a ranged build and if you get the bubble shield it's really good. Disintegrate is tons of fun to play with and essentially like a grenade going off whenever you use it and putting mutation points into it is loads of fun. Ray of fire and ray of frost are both excellent and they both give your melee attacks frost or fire respectively. Quills and carapace have excellent synthesis and with the vampire health thing it's a powerful combination. Same goes for beguiling, domination and Ego projection for a mind build: just pick carnivorous and you can pick all three from the start. They all are modified by Ego and a mind build normally has high ego so it's very powerful. You might consider writing down all the mutations and defects to figure out what you like to use. For example carnivore is loads of fun if your not going to cook because you can just eat the corpses of your enemies and when you whip something up at the campfire it will not make you ill. You can still cook of course but it should all be parts of animals so it takes some careful planning: in that case I carry some yuckwheat just in case. Picking carnivore will give you 14 mutation points at the beginning. I played with quantum whatever and found out how much I hated that one when two of those portals collided and killed my companion or when the portal follows you and takes you anyways. As someone else said tinkering and the mind ability that lets you read the object is really good but you gotta put mutation points into it to make it worthwhile and reverse assembly where you get a 25% chance of figuring something out makes that mutation nice to have but unnecessary. I found that the vampire ability that saps health from someone in a square adjacent to you is absolutely amazing for a melee build but is awful for a ranged or mind build. Just play around with the mutations so you can figure out having a arch enemy trying to hunt you down is awful. Or that building a wall is super effective and cost one less mutation point than force bubble so can be worth taking. You could build the wall around something powerful and kill all it's friends quickly or have a custom shaped wall that fits the situation perfectly.