barrier

My suggestion is to just jump in. Watch for Smol KBs being posted. Respec a toon based on that build philosophy thread. Join the PVP discord. Compare your build against those posted.

Here is mez's tier list: He's a bit more generous than I would have been. Earth and Mind are the only primaries you won't outgrow. Fire is leaps and bounds better than any other secondary unless you're only doing kickballs (team PVP with no blaster limits) and then a secondary with Power Up might do particularly well.

But do you intend to remake this toon on Homecoming?

Do we have an ETA for this patch yet? Hope all is well on the dev-side of this - did something drastically break when fixing mez durations?

Have you ever gotten hit with a KO Blow from a fully incarnd tank? Please dude. Rage, Impale, GPB, Eagle's Claw, etc. Your comparison is so off. I'm not even going into what the fiteclub dudes do. Your snark would be cool if you knew what you were talking about.

You try consistently getting more than 1 pet on a target during a spike window without SB if you think procing out pets works. You literally get four viable PVP attacks that can be properly proc'd out on a mastermind (with solid proc rates, I mean). They are in two patron sets. Mu and Leviathan. That's not ok.

That is exactly what happens. Pet choice is pretty irrelevant when it comes to getting DPS'd through bodyguard. Absorb is the only thing that helps.

Toxic. Someone get a mod here to wipe this dude's blog post.

You are toxic. While full of banter in our posts, which I'm sure you aren't used to seeing, the three of us will likely still interact more than cordially within the next week. And again, wishing that a part of the game that brings joy to A LOT of people (probably a lot more in proper proportion than on live) be deleted makes you toxic. A buff to pets, be it movement speed or damage is still straight on topic (so sorry mono, I'm not going to your thread).

I stand corrected on the BG mode notes. You do agree with the movement buff as being a good thing, and that's good enough for now.

Okay man, I'll take your notes on the dark hold as correct. 1. You haven't addressed a single one of the comments on MM comps that both me and mez have raised. MM's are only ok with kins in the team: Discuss. 2. Part of why I say you need to play a MM in 8v8's is that your comment re: being less opposed to a movement speed increase than a damage increase just shows that you haven't spent much time on a MM in a typical 8v8 scenario. Having pets moving at SS level is more than a 25% damage buff given how pet AI works (probably less for things like bots and maybe even thugs, but definitely more for things like necro and ninja - but mostly to the most underutilized sets). This would be super obvious to anyone who has spent an hour playing in the arena. I'm sorry to put you on the spot here - but you're commenting on an AT you don't play. This is Burrito King-style stuff: "Look at them bad blasters over there" and making some glaring assumptions. 3. MM's don't get to contribute to relevant damage spikes without heavy buffs (kin). Look at my killshot rate against your own team when we brought the MM and played with no kin vs. when we brought a kin. I think I had zero killshots on the first match and was probably active on 75% of the targets but staying far because if you're half competent, you know exactly where your pets are and how much time it will take you to get to BG mode. Meanwhile, bring a kin in and suddenly either me or my pets are in on every spike when SSJ and/or KO Blow are up (both on terribly long recharges) and I make the scoreboard. I know the scoreboard is a terrible source of information when it comes to figuring out who is doing what, but the pattern repeats itself enough to be relevant. 4. 5k hp? Come on man. Do your math. A mastermind with a res shield is at ~23% resists in a diminishing returns pvp map. Half of the damage dealt on a 1.2k HP (assuming a +hp build), half goes to the henchmen. So functional HP is 1.2k * 1.23 * 2 = 2.95k. That is not 5k. Compare that to a standard squishy at 1606 x 1.43 = 2.28k or a mediocre brute at 2,4k x 1.50 = 3.65k, or even a blaster at 1.85 x 1.43 = 2.65k , then add to the fact that that 2.95k is reduced to 1.48k if you dare come off BG and your numbers start looking like hyperbole. So that's even before we start factoring in the fact that being able WASD freely is the biggest survivability buff that any toon in this game has.

He's talking about PVP 😉 Zone means Recluse's Victory.

I don't know, dude. A lot of the Mastermind PVP issues are not purely mechanical and are pretty qualitative in nature (Pet AI quirks - super subtle -, responses to near optimal spike patterns, tactics to deal with prolonged spikes, etc). Limited pet mobility is something that hasn't been a problem since i13 but is now. Back then in i12, limited mobility and blaster damage basically meant that you'd never see a MM in a kickball or a mixed hero/vill team because getting nuked in the face wasn't nice. Procs and Judgement have brought us way closer to i12 - but I like where damage is right now. I just don't like where MM's are right now. Most issues aren't really super apparent in casual zone play (ex Judgement), but they are extremely easy to spot if you play a MM in 8v8. This is exactly the time to try to address the mobility of MM pets in 8v8's. You didn't take time to respond to my 8v8 comp notes. Playing a MM without a kin in 8v8 is impossible. For context, people love to say masterminds are overpowered. Watch M3z's stream. There are two great instances of both us reacting the same way on our MM's. I pick his kin MM on my bots/nature before I pick any blaster, and he picks me on kin (a kin has literally no use outside of a MM team and other very specific comps that are rarely ever present in a kickball) on his poison MM. The fact you literally have to intertwine two comp picks to make the MM's work (or play a kin mm) should be a huge red flag for developers re: game balance. Find me another AT that requires the same pairing? I'm going to take this with a grain of salt. You advocated in the past for NOT fixing the dark hold's mez duration and makes me wary of what you see as a proper direction for the game. I am asking for an iterating fix that is 100% pet-related and therefore part of the subject to this thread. I'm pretty sure you're referring to the VORI turtle responding to TBD's all-damage team. Turtling as perfectly legit tactic against a disorganized damage team. But if anything, you're not lending much credence to "masterminds are fine" here. I strongly disagree. Simply making the MM pets inherit travel powers from the MM would go a long way in solving most of the issues. MM damage output is intrinsically linked to pet travel speed (This is why I say that you need to play MM's in 8v8's to really understand how the pet AI works). MM survivability is intrinsically linked to pet travel speed (very obvious if you 8v8 on a MM). Right now the balance issue is pretty glaring: When do you pick the non-kin MM in an 8v8 comp assuming all other ATs in the comp are blind picks: the answer is literally never. That's a red flag right there.

Epsi, I love you dude, but you need to try playing a MM in 8v8 before going on these. I am probs one of the 3 people in the game with the gall to show up to kickball on a mastermind. Being kin-less is an exercise in total frustration. At the risk of airing dirty laundry: there have been a solid 5 times where I have basically refused to play MM on my team because a comp that doesn't have a kin. Even VORI have had to make due with running a kin MM because its the only one secondary that can function in a high movement environment without requiring that you sacrifice a corr or defender spot to a kin. Movement in the PVP game is huge. It becomes exponentially more important as you go up the rungs in competitive PVP. You can run a crunchy brute, tank or scrapper without a kin and they get to take advantage of the WASD keys. Masterminds do not. What is the trade on that? All of those ATs still do a bunch of damage so.. You'll say the force multiplier effect of MM buffs? I say no. The kin requirement. Remember that. You are taking a full set of otherwise better buffs, be it a poison, nature or whatever, turning it into a kin and bringing crappier versions of them. MM travel powers should be inheritable by pets just like alpha slot is.

Yeah... That wouldn't fly on Indom...

the time has come...

meatloaf23 Because Meat Loaf and meatloaf1 through 22 were already taken...

No but for reals... Do our wonderful developers have an ETA on this? For context, our scrim group has actually resorted to bilateral bans on the corruptor stun. The result has been the widespread exclusion of a lot of people's characters from scrims. I don't want to be fighting other people's least preferred line-up when all sides would be more than glad to take a fix on stun duration for lancer shot. Is this part of the patch something that could be expedited so that whatever delays regarding the PVE changes are happening to tanks aren't hurting the PVP community?

Maybe get really good on an on-meta character and then show up on your off-meta toon? Like, there are a good dozen people out there that I would pick on totally random toons just because I'd be curious to know what they know that I don't. There is no use in seeing an off-meta character in play with 5 other random off-metas that were all on the black team, either. Or a bunch of people that cant lock. There is a reason I don't bring weird disruption toons to KB's anymore... (I also want to thank Rens for breaking me off the habit, too many realistic toons we want to try in our scrims, many stupid ideas smashed in the bud). Also, there is a huge difference trying off meta toons and bring a 1300hp grav/sonic with no accos when you get fatkidded. A captain shouldn't have to carry that. Yup. Personal.

Because that starting point was PVE in mags, then acro got the nerfbat and PVPers reacted by making build sacrifices and running kins (we were already doing that anyways) in 8v8s so the game just went on. Castle was too lazy to understand the inner workings of an 8v8 to balance around those sorts of encounters, so i13 happened and here we are now. He now works on the Goosebumps mobile app. A game renowned for... Definitely not its PVP game mechanics. Good summary?

2v2 champs yo. I stand corrected.

Bizarre's Cthulu was the original KB sent. Everyone just pushed her to roll a blaster.

Oh yeah, every blast set on sents is kinda shitty except for ice and to a limited extent beam (8v8).

I am a fan of fire these days. The snipe changes were extremely helpful. There are situations where having an instant-snipe is extremely useful. I was playing a fire/poison last night in kickball, and I got a sizeable number of killshots with the snipe after the standard blaze to dominate chain. The only other set where I've been able to reliably do that is beam with lancer to dominate to penetrating, but with the animations being so much longer, you do sacrifice a certain degree of survivability. I have also been playing both a fire/ta and a fire/plant blaster in zone and both are great. They are both great if you play to fire's strengths (high dps, medium-high burst). Fire ain't dead.

September note: Lib was probs the first fire/plant blaster to play in kickballs (on Prestige), MJB was also one of the first on his fire/em ("do NOT total focus" -Vinnie). Meanwhile, we were all busy trying to reinvent the wheel, playing nostalgia toons, or sticking to ice/plants (that early on).