biostem

No doubt! While I, too, very much enjoy my Crabbermind, I find the lack of support powers makes me feel like less of a leader for my pets, and instead them being a bit of a distraction for the enemy and some extra DPS. But survivability-wise and in terms of ease of use, that SoA doesn't feel naked without their pets and is much more durable. It's definitely good to have both options, but it does make me wonder if a full AT could somehow skirt the line of individual survivability whilst still having a full entourage with them...

I think this is a big sticking point for any future/hypothetical pet ATs; MMs try to be both the "I have lots of disposable minions" and the "I have a few very powerful enforcers" AT, never fully achieving either. Controllers/Dominators, and SoAs to a certain extent, have a "set it and forget it" style when it comes to their pets, where you tradeoff direct control, (no upgrades or ability to issue commands, to contend with), for simplicity, (just select location and cast, with all powers immediately available and no level penalty). In cases where other ATs can get access to multiple pets, they tend to overshadow MMs, IMHO - such as a "Crabbermind" deploying all their pets + incarnate ones, whilst still benefitting from their own armor toggles, direct attacks, and possibly even stacking leadership powers...

Baby steps - let's implement what is doable first. Let's imagine they did add the swimming animation as an optional flight pose, but left everything else as-is. You could easily rationalize that those "stuck" at the bottom simply don't know how to swim or something. It's a much more feasible option than trying to implement some sort of pseudo-underwater environment. Also, Champions Online has an underwater area, and frankly, I hate how they basically replace all of your travel powers with faster swimming, while there...

There is an animation for swimming on the surface of water. I wonder how difficult it would be to adapt that as a new flight pose...

New sets are absolutely possible! The big question is how to create, what I think would be a new archetype, (per your OP), into the existing game, which would both have its own unique playstyle while also fitting in among the existing ATs. Could you flesh things out a bit more? Cheers!

Hmm... I wonder how difficult it would be to implement an in-game lottery - you buy tickets for some amount of inf, and every week there's a drawing - the winner gets like 90% of that inf, and the rest goes "poof" as a way of removing some inf from the market...

I like some of what this thread proposes. Something similar has been proposed before. What I would do would be to replace the personal attacks from the pet sets with appropriate armor toggles, while the secondary set consisted of melee attacks. The APPs for this AT would include the ranged attacks that were stripped from the pet sets. I would also have the passive ability for this AT be two-fold: 1) Those armor toggles also generate a PBAoE effect that grants some of their benefit to your pets, and 2) Add a single-target taunt effect to the melee effects, like what brutes get. The armor powers would need to be tweaked, and some other adjustments would be necessary for the primary sets, (likely, each pet primary would end up with 2 general armor powers and likely 1 status protection power): Beast would get super reflexes, regeneration, or maybe bio armor Demon Summoning - fire armor Mercenaries - invuln or willpower Necromancy - dark armor Ninjas would get ninjitsu powers Robotics - invuln, elec, or energy aura armors Thugs - invuln or willpower

Animation-wise, it absolutely fits. Damage-per-activation or Damage-per-animation time, though, I can see how one may view it as "slow"...

While flurry may not be a great power, it does fit the theme of the speed pool...

I think you're looking at the wrong thing as the cause of lag, here; It's not the GM itself that causes significant lag, it's all the people congregating around it and activating all sorts of powers, not to mention any passive/toggle effects they may have going on...

Only issue is that those powers existed within the set before unrelenting was added, while flurry's been there all the while... Personally, I think there was this philosophy with the early dev team that if a pool power "steps on the toes' of any AT's role, (in this case, the taunt effects), then those powers must be dramatically reduced in effectiveness.

Oh no doubt, but frankly, without the -range component, they are nearly useless unless you are already in the faces of those enemies...

I feel like the single target and AoE taunts need at least some -range component, even if it was less than what tankers/brutes/scrappers get, (and those powers are autohit vs regular mobs, IIRC, already).

I've had really good results with a dark/sr or dp/nin sentinel!

Well, probably would need to eliminate the phase effect, unless this only applied while within its AoE, which would, IMHO, cause more frustration, especially since it's a toggle...

What would be interesting would be to make it some sort of toggle, (either a PBAoE or anchored on an enemy), that deals some minor NE DoT, whilst simultaneously providing a HoT to allies.

Generally, at least IMO, I feel that a HoT is better when used in conjunction with burst healing, kind of like pain domination's soothing aura. I've been playing a seismic/earth blaster recently, and having only a HoT from mud bath definitely shrinks the margin for error vs having a form of burst healing available; Perhaps once I get their defense up, that periodic healing will be enough, but now, (and with a blaster's smaller HP pool), doesn't give you much breathing room if and when things go south...

I'd also argue that, especially in the heat of combat, the time between the windup as you're casting the power and when the smoky effect travels from the enemy back to you, is quite a bit longer than any of the other sets' healing powers that don't require a target...

I mean, having some twists and turns isn't a bad thing - heroes and villains alike often must work with missing or incomplete information, after all...

The chest and pants are regular pieces, IIRC, and you can select their helmets, but most of the other parts are unique to them...

You need to step away from our current definition of "normal" - In CoH, even the newest hero or villain gains access to the medi-port system, which can bring them to the nearest medical facility and instantly restore them, regardless of how damaging that last attack was. Further, even baseline human characters can withstand multiple point-blank shots from a firearm without being KO'd. Additionally, groups like the Sky Raiders demonstrate that tech like jetpacks are no longer consigned to the realm of fiction. If you were to introduce cars as a travel power, they'd have to be restricted to the ground, and even if they were capable of jumping, that'd have to be limited to outdoor areas and perhaps with some startup distance. I think you'd be better off advocating for something like a hoverbike or maybe a variant of the hoverboard that could be slotted and further customized...

There's this kind of "outlier" radio mission to save/clear-out a pawn shop or something, and it tends to have enemy groups not found in the other ones, (like Malta). Also, and I could be misremembering, but I vaguely recall going to PI just as I dinged 40, and was getting Freakshow radios - so maybe they get cut off above 40 or something?

You'll have better luck herding cats or maybe trying to un-bumble bees.

Truer words were never spoken; It's one thing if the team leader is "Leading from the front" and expecting the team to keep up with them, but it's another thing entirely if someone joins the team later on and behaves like this...

I sure hope your character is so well optimized that they can solo +4/x8, because I feel like you'll be doing a lot of that... I also want to add that, as far as I am concerned, as long as you are contributing, I don't really care what you play. On top of that, MMs are the only way to have whip attacks, or if you want support powers with the various bird attacks from beasts. They're also the only AT that gets dark blasts that summon ghosts.