Raikao

Then why does it work for Necromancy? You literally tested this. Don't tell me Necro just gets everything (numina, panacea etc procs and easy END management with golgis) while every other set this doesn't work. That just seems like a bug then.

It reduces the bots endurance costs. At least it should since it works for Necromancy. It's the new hot slotting strat. 1-2 Golgis in the second upgrade and maybe one endurance reduction on the pets (easily obtained from just using 2 pieces of Superior Supremacy set on each pet for 3x10% recharge)

While I've come around to looking at the set as a whole and to "not everything needs to be the same in power, if it differes in other aspects". Saying "it's been like this for 18 years" is just braindead. That is absolutely the worst argument I've read here to date.

Well fair enough this is entirely from an MM perspective. Maybe Defense isn't everything. I've also been chasing incarnate caps recently and now wonder if I even need more than softcap. If it's really only releveant in incarnate trials. I haven't even done a single one yet.

Small correction: Only the T3 Bot had -regen, but -500% on two different attacks. Which they moved to attacks, where you can now get -600% if you use all three. Now personally I think that's a bit bullshit, each attack should either give more or the single target damage should be better. I was less against it before but it sure feels kind of..reduandant? Since they never balanced the rest of -regen sources. Like I don't see any kind of baseline -regen that should be available to MMs. Bots + Traps would be -1600%. Necro/FF would be 0 I think. But I also wont hold my breath for any fixes or changes. It took the devs 4 years to even touch MMs at all.

Can you tell me what you put in Equip Mercenary and Tactical Upgrade? It doesn't import those properly. Just shows two empty slots on each. I've learned quite a lot from your choices. At first glance my reaction was also a "wtf, why those invarnates? 59,62% accuracy what is he smoking? I think Stamina could use another EndMod but I'm just addicted to endurance maybe. I will say there a "upgrades" one can make, like Cytoskeletons in Tactics, but those are basically just "invest more inf if you want"

Oh god yes if that makes the arsonist less suicidal I'm all for it.

Well I never said he was required to support his conclusion. I'm going to say that is useless without it.

Well Beasts get 4.5% from the T2. I don't know if those perfectly stack with 100% uptime. Enforcers give 8.466% without any def slotted. Thugs showing again, that they're top tier I guess :P So Thugs/Cold would work then. Bots/Cold as well. I guess that's something. And in this case I was going for 59% defense. Current build gets 58,6% without bending over backwards with slotting.

I firmly believe that if a change would be a net positive for the game it should be implemented. I'm not happy with just shelving my /cold build forever. I can see that this change would be quite involved, but it's also been like this 4+ years.

I'm amazed that this would still show up. "hurr durr it's op but I wont tell you why", when I literally pointed out that with PowerBoost working Cold Domination would still give LESS defense than just using force fields. BUt I guess we can't even have side grade choices or fix obvious bugs or problems with the engine. Just ever. You didn't even say why you've come to this "conclusion". It's just sad.

So I just learned that PowerBoost works on the shields from Force Field, but not on the shields from Cold Domination. The reason seems to be the resistances on the cold domination shields, which block PB from working on them. But the FF shields have toxic resistance. And still work. I've been told they're coded differently. So this is completely nonsensical. Cold Domination is already weaker in terms of giving Defense. So I would have paired it with Thugs or Beasts (slightly more defense from the T2 pets) and really thought I had something going there. Now I don't know the specifics of why. I can only assume some spaghetti code that never got changed. Please consider fixing Cold Manipulation shields to work with PowerBoost. And again, to be clear: This would still make cold shields only AS STRONG as ForceField shields in terms of Defense and only Defense. Cold shields give no fire or cold def and give fire/cold res instead. Both are still distinct in that way and this would only make Cold work similar to ForceFields when it comes to using PowerBoost. Which is 100% how it should be.

well that sucks to be honest. Cold requires more defense just baseline. But if you can't boost it, that leaves only Robots. Thugs and Beasts don't get enough. I mean that just really sucks. It has the same bubbles as a mechanic and you can't power boost. Necro/FF it is then.

Ok you have to explain Enflame to me. I've never used it. Isn't it just a little fire trail your buffed target leaves as it runs? That wouldn't even work most of the time if your target stands still or only runs at the enemy. I'm curious though.

Well yes and no? I did a mission for Calvin Scott, then realized he was last? in his sequence and got confused. But physically walking to where Aaron Walker is worked in that case. I still finished my Praetoria run with all missions done and a couple of NPCs in the end being super randomly placed. I'm not sure leveling slower for some merits is worth doing again. But it was an interesting experience for sure. I have to re-make the char maybe if I can justify using /FF instead of /Nature from a thematic standpoint. If I do I'll probably just powerlevel to 22 this time. I got a little tired of the "praetorian lab" tileset. For anyone doing this: Grab Stealth @lvl 4, put missions on -1/1 and just blast through. You don't care about xp anyway since you have to disable xp gain mutiple times and get far more xp than you need.

How long does it take you to kill AVs? I don't see any -regen which is why I'm considering going cold instead.

I don't know about ST damage or pylon times but they do feel good to play. I like having the T1 and T2 be a bit more useful. Putting Forge/TemporalSelection on the T3 still feels impactful and useful to me, since he does the big dick AoE missiles and burn patches still. Part of me hates taking -regen away from the bot and putting it on the attacks, but I also like it, because you can still skip the attacks if you run a secondary with -regen like traps or cold. And if you don't, you can take 1-3 attacks to get some -regen. I like how this gives a reason to use the attacks or not use the attacks depending on your secondary and how it impacts building the MM. For Beasts, I think having them be all melee is still ok. Every set should have its own flavor. Combining them with -slow, knockdown or Immobilize from your secondary/epic pool to me feels the same as figuring out if you need -regen on Robots. It's a puzzle to solve when making a build. I mostly think Fortify Pack should be changed. The loss of stacks and 60 second lockout just makes me not want to use the power at all and only mule LotG, ShieldWall, etc. on it and never press the button. Making sure I get enough defense and heal elsewhere. My suggestion would be to remove the lockout OR: make the primary attacks give 3 stacks of a new buff. For every stack of this buff you keep one PackMentality stack when using FortifyPack. So if you use all 3 attacks you keep 9 stacks of PackMentality when you use FortifyPack. Adding mez protection for your pets on FortifyPack would also be nice. Make them be relentless pursuers basically, who don't flinch easily. A part of me agrees that sets with an additional pet power are a lot better for slotting, but I'm not keen on just making every set have Gang War. On Robots it's not an issue, mostly because you can't slot procs as much and with the right secondary you get their positional Defense to 45+ and don't need to slot AoE-Defense aura. But that also constricts the options you have for secondary. I think the different primaries can be balanced around having or not having an extra pet aura slot power. I'd prefer that over just making them all the same. Edit: After tinkering with it, I think replacing Fortify Pack with a pet power for mule slots is neccessary. You want Lotg/Def slotted on the Lions and the Dire Wolf take a lot of different procs, with the slow procs (smashing+cold) probably being the best, most of his attacks have -speed. I have a full build ready that I'm happy with, but without a rework so it has the same slotting in the upgrade powers and a mule power I can't justify playing it really. It's just so wonky right now. So I'll wait until it gets a patch. I have enough Robots/Necro/Ninja/Merc stuff to check out in the meantime.

So just to confirm: Power Boost works with ForceField buffs (deflection, insulation, dispersion) but it does not work with ColdManipulation (Ice Shield, Glacial Shield, Arctic Fog)? If so what's the reason for that? Seems unintuitive.

So far the theme seems to be making primary attacks better, each one giving something useful. Now in Robots case they did it by taking something away, namely the -recharge from the Assault Bot, but overall it's a buff, since you don't need to use KB->KD on every tier of pet anymore. Mercs got ranged damage and a better serum, ninja got crit, necro got extra summons (and a way better Soul Extraction). I'm even starting to like the maintenance drone. So the focus seems to be better primary attacks and QoL mostly. I can spitball a bit. Beasts: Not the greatest. SO adjusting skills is a good start, give them slightly more dmg, or better slotting opportunities. Probably just better skill use and/or damage. I could see some QoL in terms of movespeed for Beasts (maybe through Fortify Pack), so you don't feel "forced" to take /Kinetics. The primaries already have a function as well with building stacks for Fortify Pack. One thing that feels a bit bad is loosing the +damage from stacks whenever you do use the Fortify Pack power. The pets already build stacks for you, so maybe the primary attacks could add a different buff stack. Let's call it "Synergy" for now. When you use Fortify Pack you loose your pack tactics stacks but keep a few stacks based on your Synergy stacks. So basically you would use your primary attacks to keep some of your pack tactics stacks whenever you use Fortify Pack. Think that would be nice QoL and very thematic, with you fighting "with your pack". Every type of pet has their own thing they're good at. I think beasts should be good at shrugging of control effects. You need them in melee after all, so good protection against CC effects would be nice (bit like zombies but on crack. Wolves should shred through mobs). Demons/Thugs: I'm at a loss there. But I haven't played either that much and just because they're top tier doesn't mean a bit of QoL would be bad. Just don't know where to start.

It’s the oldest rule on Wikipedia, and it does work: ASSUME GOOD WILL. What that means is that when someone makes a suggestion, assume that they do play the game, they enjoy it for the most part, and they want to help make it a better experience for everyone. Keep those things in mind when you write a reply, or ask clarifying questions if a suggestion or parts of it are unclear to you. So that's on you. I think OP just wants to make a mage and hasn't found a way yet to make that happen. Personally I think it should be doable with what we have. I made a DnD Druid recently, with Necro/Nature MM. Someone else made a Circle of Spores Druid with that, which probably fits even better. I could have gone with Demons as well. In any case, I've seen people use water attacks and turn them into oil attacks so what we need is more information. @The Mighty Paladin What ruleset is your mage based on? Dungeons & Dragons 5e? Some series or movie universe? That would help with narrowing down options. You certainly have various blast attacks, telekinesis (Animate Object spell in DnD) and other powers that should work for a mage.

No I don't and I explained my intent. Can we not argue semantics now? You misunderstood then. And yes, by doing things you make the game easier or harder for yourself. Lots of different things. Including difficulty settings, how much you pull, using terain. That still leaves us with no baseline to argue about. Which is why we have this divide in understanding. What I consider hard or easy is not the same as yours. Add to that the fact that some people think the game is easy but having mobs with more HP isn't actually difficult either and now no one knows what this "difficulty" we're talking about even is.

Select a mob from far away and use your power to pre-draw the weapon. Press Esc to de-target and stop queueing the power. Run up and use Combat Teleport. It shouldn't redraw the weapon. As long as you don't remain idle for too long you should never redraw the weapon. At least it works like this on my MM like this I'm very sure. And I do use Pulse Rifle attacks and combat teleport.

I don't. Now what? It annoys me from a thematic standpoint, it's an unfun design to me. And again: I don't care about tough/weave at all. I want to have SuperSpeed, Combat Teleport and Group Fly. That's what I truly care about. After reading through replies I can see how just adding more slots (by adding more overall or by giving slots to Health&Stamine autmatically) would be powercreep. So I got convinced there by those who engaged in faithful conversation. But "you have to have punch/kick for tough/weave" doesn't make any sense, when restrictions exactly liek this have been lifted or changed everywhere else. I can skip a T1 in my secondary, I can get travel powers earlier. But I can't get GroupFly without TWO pre-requisits. It's not even an optimal pick. I just want to give my robots some rocketbots like once every 2 hours of playtime, because I want to avoid pulling something or have to fight in a giant room and don't want them to fall and jump all over the place. I would be picking this over Assault. I'm nerfing myself. But I have to take shit from some people here because they think it'll ruin the game. Because how they play is the only way anyone plays. Yes, you could swap out Kick for something else and make your char stronger. But you can already to that in 50 different ways. We don't even have a baseline difficulty for our arguments, one guy plays on 0/1 and thinks it'll ruin the game, someone else does +2/4 and the next person does +4/8 and challenge modes solo. But a few are so sure of their opinions they resort to insults, smug statement and just all around being complete forum tyrants and assholes. This isn't aimed at you, but reading through the replies here is just... Disagree, explain why. But NO ONE HERE is deciding anything. So stop pretending you do. Put forward your arguments and your position and let the devs sort it out, Jesus Christ.

I'd like a change to these as well. Thematically I'd like to use panther on one of my chars. A lot. But these really seems like just worse Ninja/Beast/Athletic Run powers.