TheSpiritFox

Mini mode on one character, one of the premium effects on two characters, a smattering of costumes and pets. My main has the 100 PA cataphract costume, all told spent a little over 1k PAs so far. Bought most of them off of people in large numbers, farmed up about 250 during the Scrapyard farm days. Its faster to farm up influence to buy PAs than PAs

Having a massive increase in one side, or a massive increase in only middlemen, would not be a balanced addition. You can't say a massive increase in supply side only wouldnt devastate any economy at least temporarily

No I was citing the other persons build as a "Look at this this is much better slotting choices for this powerset and looks alot like a build I would make" I dont have a build myself to show you, and I dont have time to like detailed go over all the math, too much thinking with divided attention.

You can fit the two ATO uniques into your first level demons. 4 slot command of the mastermind 2 slot mark of supremacy for 2 10% rech bonuses, two pet uniques, and you can still pull 95% damage and more than 60% accuracy out of slotting. You can put 3 hami os Acc/Dam, two +5 resist IOs, and another unique into your Lt pets Then hell on earth 6 slot with your remaining 3 uniques, one +5 acc io for the little hellspawns, and two +5 rech IOs Then the remaining 4 mark of supremacy IOs, OF Kb proc, and a slow damage proc into the prince. Then yeah thermal you could get away with 3 slotting the resist powers, but Id recommend 4 for the melee bonus on Unbreakable guard. You could also consider throwing in a 5th slot into each for the two 3% defense uniques for you personally. And yes I 5 slot both heals with panacea for the recharge bonus. My biggest other recommendation is that I feel like for thermal and cold, Rune of Protection from the sorcery pool is flat out not optional. Thermal has zero protection for the actual mastermind (Its absolute bullshit, imo, that you can place shields on everyone but yourself) and while thats not so bad damage wise because of bodyguard, its absolutely TERMINAL because of crowd control. It doesn't matter how strong your pets are, they WILL die if youre held for a solid minute unable to heal or do anything else while your pets die around you. Rune of protection is your "Fuck you youre not gonna hold me to death, assholes" button.

Unfortunately necro is a little and bots are alot alot now if you dont take some personal attacks. Bots in particular, taking pulse rifle burst and photon grenade are no longer optional, at all. Putting the regen debuffs on those makes them not optional, without them youre missing out on one of the big draws of bots - the ability to neuter some hard target regen and thus increase effective DPS on them. Brings me to another needed MM balance pass. Personal attacks from MM primaries need to have end use cut flatly in half to bring us in line with other ATs, and secondary probably needs end use cut by a flat 25% across the board as well. The entire point of double end use was that our pets do the attacking, if we're going to be required to be attacking alongside for our sets to get the same benefit, we should be on the same endurance scale as other classes.

Yes, heal. Like, I have two /traps characters. My bots/traps which in fact comes with the maintenance drone and protector bot heals. I do not always need the heal, in easier content it doesn't matter. On the other hand, when I go out to solo a GM being able to heal 2/3 to 3/4 of my assault bots health depending on if I press field medic or not can literally save my life because if his big ass goes down, I'm probably next. So yes I vote healing, I tend to either combine primaries and secondaries that go well together, or take something with a heal, or both. Especially any set which both has no real powers to protect the MM himself, and no heal? I know /cold is a great set, but not for my purposes where I wanna go solo +4x8 whenever I want, or solo a GM. Its dogshit for that with all primaries, cold just does not offer enough mitigation to pets and especially to the master to make the kinda MMs I enjoy playing. Sonic is better, but not great. Thermal at least has a self heal in its PBAOE but even so like cold its too vulnerable to crowd control and theres not enough protection on the MM himself for me to actually like those sets. Theyre really strong in teams, maybe even good in 4 star content on teams, but the second you wanna solo something serious you're up shit creek without a paddle, and I dont like that kinda fragility.

Honestly the build up proc seems wasted. I've put it in a few builds and like while it might make some small mathematically definable difference, from a gameplay perspective I have never once noticed a difference putting build up in any pet set vs putting an actual damage proc which I can regularly see come up in floating damage numbers when pets attack

I havent made a Bots/Cold OP, and Im working atm so I cant give you a solid breakdown of your build and all the bad choices in it, but I looked at this and other than 5 slotting health and 6 slotting stamina (I would not do either of those things, ever, on any toon) this is a build very close to what one I would make would look like and is a solid starting point.

I feel this. I've gone back to dual box farming because converter crafting in the currently saturated market has become too low margin for me to participate in, things are moving more slowly because of the massive influx of new sellers and the relatively small growth in buyers. It started in normal enhancements, but in the last idk probably month it feels like its now hit all the markets. Everything is down. Hell, there was a point I was turning all my threads into super team duals and I was the only person with any listed, and I had like 150 listed at 1 mil each, a slow but reliable moneymaker. Now theyre regularly going for 250k as people got told you can liquidate threads that way and I havent sold a single inspiration in over a month out of the ones I still have listed (about 70 or so across 3 alts) I'm hoping the market stabilizes soon but Ive had to pretty much give up on making money except by being super duper patient. Like I used to list and sell about 160 enh a week or so, do a double batch on my crafting character and theyd all be gone in a week. I've listed them all at reasonable prices, and I've sold 20 enh in the last week out of 160. The market is moving slow, reasonable listings undercut constantly by people who are desperate for any money and will happily take a 500k profit on an enhancement instead of being patient and listing for something more reasonable. That whole "making money off the impatience of others" bit isnt working atm because right now its the sellers who are the most impatient, not the buyers.

Please dont. Rares/uncommons are already oversaturated. You explain to people the details of like how flipping works and how to play the long game and exactly how market transactions can be taken advantage of and get 10x the number of people placing lowball bids to how it works now and you will destroy the market. Converter crafting being spread far and wide is bad enough at the moment, the last thing we need is people widespread embracing the idea of getting money out of the market without generating new product to sell on it.

This. This this this this this. I gave up farming for *years* and now I have started dual boxing again because getting things to sell at a decent price is so goddamn hard. I started getting into some flipping and the result is I now have 1 billion more than when I started flipping, but I also have 200 purples stashed in my base to represent my profit, because Im stubborn on selling. Everything is selling slower and more and more shit is just being dropped on the market every day by people desperate to make a buck, its depressed prices in literally every sector I can think of. Every single one of my moneymakers has been hit, nothing left untouched. Its at the point I'm like we need to stop telling newbies how to do this shit and let them find their way to it because we have severely oversaturated the market with people trying to pull money out of it. I feel like we should have maybe had a meeting when the announcement hit and agreed quietly "We dont teach anyone market secrets unless they already have at least 1 level 50 slotted out farmer first" Its a GREAT time to slot out an alt. If you dont have altitis and instead want to amuse yourself making billions its a really, really bad time.

Its 20% and 29% at level 50 with two +5 IOs please get your numbers right. Its also to, as stated, 3/8 damage types. The five remaining continue to be at 0% resistance, psionic is a relatively rare damage type compared to the rest so it applies to much less content. More powerful does not mean "the numbers went up" it means a manifest change in the gameplay. A 60% increase to resistance which does not stop pets from being one shotted because the level shifts increase damage to the drones 50% or more is not actually more powerful. But, again, you refuse to admit that this concept is in the end subjective and that you're the one here screaming into the wind that you agree with my concept but disagree with my goddamn word choice. Do you not remember that this is supposed to stay on topic? I've asked you to stop repeatedly. Please stop autistically sticking to this point like it even matters.

It kinda makes sense within the structure of the game. Minion, lts, bosses are all level shifted from each other even at the same level, and they were copying their own structure for how bad guys work, because MMs originally were bad guys. It makes no sense from any perspective other than a lore/concept point of view, which comes from the stupid ass "hide the numbers, numbers aren't that important" design philosophy CoH had a long time ago before things like combat attributes were implemented. I agree that making MM pets the same level as the master (so as to remove the massive damage increase from 4+ level shifts) and then nerfing the damage down a few rounds until MMs produce similar DPS on 54 purple mobs is the best overall solution. It would not be that hard to do, but I feel like buffing base resistance is more likely to actually happen.

Lord. Did you really just throw out percentages. 60% improvement to resists that aren't noticeable is still not noticeable. If you google the definition of "buff" it says to make something more powerful. Since you want to keep arguing semantics (and keep pretending that more powerful and improved and better are not subjective concepts open to interpretation) The actual definition of a buff is to make something more powerful. More powerful means a definable improvement in performance. There has been no increased performance of pet survivability compared to before the change, therefore its not a buff. The world agrees with me more than you. And since the definition is also listed as "informal" you lose out to colloquial/common use, which is to denote an actual change to the gameplay experience, since the definition disagrees with you and states that a buff must actually make something more powerful, you lose this absolutely pointless, mostly subjective argument you started that derailed from the original point which you agree with. Please just shut up about it. I'm genuinely asking.

Lets say the devs decided that blasters are too fragile. So they buff base blaster HP 5 hit points, exactly, and buff the HP cap for the blaster AT 10 hitpoints. You would call that a buff, despite the fact that it improves literally nothing about the class. But you also said buffs are an improvement. And since you wanted to do semantics, an improvement is "a thing that makes something better or is better than something else" The changes to masterminds are not an improvement. They did not make the class *better* at surviving. So by your definition where a buff is an improvement, there was no improvement, and thus it is not a buff. That's the contradiction. Its not better than it was before, pets are not surviving more because of the change, it just adjusted the math in a way thats visible in combat attributes. By comparison, the incarnate level shift (which I did call a buff myself) seriously improved pets performance in Incarnate content, it greatly changed the gameplay experience of Masterminds in incarnate content. However, thats one buff across the entire history of masterminds directly to mastermind primary set survivability without respect to secondary powersets. They dont more or less survive better. There's been no noticeable change to the damage pets take as a result. Some enemies that already werent a huge threat now do slightly less damage. Nothing that one shots a pet no longer one shots it because of the change, and in high level content anything that one shot your pets before still does. Now lets compare it to a powerset specific buff. Protector bots used to have to individually shield allies every 2 minutes, the shields added up to about the same defense that you get with the aoe single shield now, and protector bots no longer waste tons of combat time casting shields everywhere. This was a huge buff. It increased DPS AND survivability by 1) Making protectors able to shield the entire pet team in one go from one protector enabling more shooting AND healing and 2) ensuring you get full protection from protectors with even one alive, rather than requiring both alive and 3) Shortening the time between bots being summoned and bots being buffed, lessening the likely hood that they'll get immediately one shot upon summon. This was a MASSIVE change to the gameplay experience of playing bots, for the better. Same way, Serum got an incredible buff that makes Mercs much less made of paper. The buffs to their resistance did not do much of anything for them, but serum letting them take alphas and shrug it off for 15 or so seconds makes a massive difference in their survivability and the fact that it can be close to permaed makes it a very reliable "stop killing me" button. Those are buffs. They improve and better the actual game experience, improve and better the performance of the powersets. Something that does not make a noticeable difference in performance on any level isnt something Im going to call a buff. If the game experience itself is not changed, if it is not bettered (or worsened in the case of nerfs) then Im not going to call it either. If they lowered pet base HP by 5 points, Im not going to call that a nerf. Its just a pointless change. Or if you really want to go full semantics. Improvement is itself defined with a subjective word "better" which is open to its own interpretation so we're both technically right, you could use the word buff either way and its not incorrect. And there wasnt a need to argue about it.