GunnyBarney

Ninja and Beast need to be converted to just an animation aesthetic for those people who want them -- opening the door for new versions for different character postures/styles when/if the ability is added to the game, like an undead shuffle! The run speed and jump boosts they both currently have should be migrated to its own stand-alone power.

With a cone that narrow, there's almost no reason for it to be an AOE (with all the penalties that come with being one). 30 should be the minimum, and only for the strongest, longest range aoes. 45 should be the norm for most ranged cone attacks, with 60-90 degrees for mid- to close-range (like Buckshot).

Agreed. Actually, I'd like beast/ninja to not provide ANY enhancements at all, but instead, be restricted to just the animation changes. Then add the travel-boosting effects to a new prestige travel power instead. The people who want the visuals can still have the visual, and the people who want the travel enhancements can get those enhancements. Everyone goes home happy. Bonus points -- ninja/beast will then be usable with Super Jump and Combat Jumping.

See, now, that, right there, sure SEEMS like a 'simple fix' answer -- change brawl to a near-infinite effective-cooldown duration. Like, 24 hours. Ranged minions would attempt to brawl ONCE, and never try again for the remainder of your play session, since its cooldown would never finish up. The spill-over effects to melee minions is that they would stop using the near-worthless brawl power as well.

That almost makes sense, but only superficially, because there are plenty of AI routines used in the game that are fully functional for purely ranged entities. They will stay at range and never leave it. There are also fully functional AI routines for purely melee entities, who will promptly rush in to use their melee abilities (and any ranged abilities only when that fails). So what exactly is the cause of this inconsistent behavior with minions? It can't be that all minions share the same AI routines, because, again, some ranged minions work just fine. If the cause was shared AI, then all ranged minions would be equally messed up, and they're not. Because of this, there aren't a lot of possible causes: the AI specific to 'stupid' minions isn't being used properly (somebody copy-pasta'd a melee-specific AI routine for ranged pets?) or the abilities unique to each minion are confusing the AI positioning and ability queuing...or a combination of both. Maybe some ability-specific flag isn't getting set right. Maybe it's some part of the AI routine being initialized incorrectly because of its abilities. It's something along those lines. Clearly the existing system supports doing both melee and ranged quite competently.

I'll be honest -- until now, whenever that text appeared, I had no idea what it even meant. So I'm loathe to offer suggestions, but all this talk of active abilities and the like doesn't really feel inherent, ie something that just 'happens.' My first thought would be to build opportunity a little faster, then automatically trigger it on next attack, alternating between the two effects, applying a nice group buff within a reasonable range. Or have some buffs to your allies and some debuffs to your enemies, depending on opportunity type. For example, it might apply a nice restore/resist bonus to nearby allies while applying a reasonable-magnitude stun or disorient or -recharge/-speed debuff to your target and all enemies near your target (or targets, if the triggering ability is an aoe).

I'm pretty new to the game (which is to say, still exploring the starting elements and...making/remaking many characters to find something I the most), but even I've noticed how quickly minion/henchmen durability falls off as I level a mastermind. At first glance, I would think that having incoming damage capped to some reasonable percentage of their max health would at least solve some of the rapid-death problems. But as I've dug into the way many skills deal damage (often multiple bursts of smaller damage packets in rapid succession), it would be more appropriate to cap incoming damage over time to a percentage of max health (like 10-15% per second, for example). Also, obviously this functionality would not exist in PvP. Anyways...my $0.02 on the matter, for whatever it's worth.