Re: the lust damage discourse
I've always found lust builds to only be playable when you scale the Lightning Globe, which has good raw damage and scales off both lust and ranged damage (the AoE is handy as well if you want to get enough aura to cast the spells it gives).
Tease scales very poorly, since the base damage is incredibly low at a measly 7 lust, and the fetish-gained teases have even lower base damage (5). A raw lust build needs a lot of crit power in order to gain enough damage to take out enemies in one turn. The fetish-based teases scale with crits better than Tease, but this would mean unlocking a lot of them to respond to the variety of NPCs available, and since you can only have eight combat moves, you'll have to constantly cycle them so you can use more than one iteration per turn.
Arcane Arousal starts with 15 and gets to 30 base lust with a small spell point investment, auto-critting if it's the only move you use that turn. Even with no corruption, you'll be dealing around 60 lust, making most street fights a two-turn win. For casters that don't fall over when at max arousal, subsequent casts will deal ~120 HP damage; very few enemies will survive more than two or three turns. This leads to a glass cannon playstyle, since you can't really use defensive abilities, and you'll have to have enough raw defense to shrug off attacks. However, once maxed out, Arcane Arousal can roll up to 99 raw damage; taking into consideration max crit power, this leads to some very silly numbers:
View attachment 1158035
However, this takes a very significant investment into a multitude of stats to make it work past the early-game; arcane enemies will probably have enough damage to overwhelm you before you can take them down with single casts without a defensive investment as well. It obviously favors the Aristocrat background since you can get a lot of Corruption (and through it, both offense and defense) very quickly.
Really, Lust just seems very hard to balance; a damage type that plays by a completely different ruleset in which enemies always have a set cap means that Lust has to be fairly-weak, or otherwise it will just steamroll enemies. This is fine, but weapons are so powercrept that equipping them makes anyone OP, player and enemy alike (level 2 alleyways enemies should not be able to do upwards of 100 damage per turn at the start of the freaking game
on Human).
TL;DR Lust builds in general sort of have to be bad, but it's made worse since they're outshone by melee. Its only real avenue is a weapon that's gained though a ~level 10 questline. If you pump yourself full of OP gear you can make it work, though.