TheSpiritFox

Here's my thing. You have a preference against re-summoning. I have a preference against being mezzed. And everything I get to 50 gets a "finalized" build with purples and the whole 9 yards. But when you build for tankerminding, it is not possible to build for personal softcap, resistance, recharge, and recovery all at once. You are trying to turn your mastermind into a tanker when what they truly are is a pet wielding corruptor. Building your mm around personal defense sacrifices support for your secondary. It means that your /nature won't be in position to use cone healing and that buffs that could be perma, won't be. It means your offensive toggles will get dropped regularly. It means that you have to pick different powers which benefit your tanking only and not other things about your class. It means picking your epic around personal surviability rather than utility, damage, or CC. And yes it means sacrificing proc damage for slotting out your personal defenses. Tankerminding sacrifices the things your class is designed to do to allow it to do something it is not designed for. It sacrifices building around your secondary for max effect to avoid resummoning. I get the personal preference, but you are a corruptor with a pocket team here and that pocket team has to be actively supported. Bodyguard was originally put into the game for PVP. It was specifically created to allow you to avoid being one shot through your pets and came when masterminds in PVP complained that they were literally helpless. It certainly has benefits to like not letting AVs do it either, but tankerminding forgets that your primary roles are DPS and support, not DPS and aggro management. When you build around being a support who is not intended to tank your IO priorities change radically. Recharge and Recovery > all. Building your MM around these concepts mitigates the actual shortcomings of the class. You recover from resummons faster, your buffs start to all be permanent, you can heal as fast as you can cast with healing. You're a benefit to your pets in solo, and much more of a benefit to the team in groups. Building around provoke and an attack chain neglects your secondary far more than you might think at first glance. And your secondary is where your personal power really comes in. With a solid secondary and a build made to support your pets as "your personal team/tanks" it is far easier to adapt to changing situations. Without taking personal aggro, retreat becomes a realistic option in battles. No tankermind can solo the ITF. It just won't work, the last boss if nothing else will be a hard stop. End game content where mez is highly prevalent will be a hard stop. Removing your mastermind from the thick of battle by removing them from most of the aggro lists allows you freedom to engage your secondary, disengage from battle, resummon if something goes down, and build your mastermind with IOs to do all of those things very, very effectively. And most MM builds still have the room to take personal attacks, so you can still attack stuff, still have bodyguard, but your focus is purely on damage, sniping bosses or eliminating healers, not on keeping your pets alive by holding aggro. Final point: Bonfire How do you keep pets alive in challenging content? Stuff that is difficult to straight up tank even for the best of sets? You need crowd control. Bots do best with Mu. Mu is not what you will take if you are tankerminding. Every set that is not bots with their massive knockback and burn patch missiles sending people running benefits by FAR the most from pyre and bonfire. With just it's default slot everything from bosses on down flops and your minions take shitloads less damage, and building around recharge means bonfire can be procced out and still be up permanently without sacrificing proc rate. That's not just extra damage but a ton of incoming damage that just no longer exists. Both my thugs/time and my demons/nature took bonfire and built enough recharge into their builds that it is up before the last bonfire expires. If you're soloing, it's up every group. In teams it's up every other group in a hard steamroll, and if you're not steamrolling bonfire can be the difference between being able to carry the group and just being a solid part of it. There is no epic choice which provides the absolutely ABSURD benefit to masterminds that bonfire provides. Damage and damage mitigation in one power that needs one slot, that you can choose to three slot with two +5 recharge IOs and build for recharge and drop it's cooldown to 20 something seconds, enough that it is up every group EVEN in a steamroll. Or you can do like me and 6 slot it with procs and an endurance IO and just spam that shit when it's up helping make mincemeat of your foes. It's too good not to take for a class which needs to keep more than just your own person alive at all times team or solo. It provides too much mitigation to not be worth the power pick. Tankerminding makes taking bonfire a bad idea when you genuinely need either defense or resistance, and no other epic CC stacks up on bosses like bonfire does. All the immobs have to be double stacked on bosses. All the holds have to be double stacked on bosses unless you get a lucky hold proc. Bonfire is one power, fire and forget, and even bosses are rendered fucking helpless lol. And lets not forget that you can proc the shit out of pyre attacks to do heavy single target damage if you so desire.

Pretty much exactly yeah

This would be incredible though. Thugs, set your bruiser and arsonist to like 40 and 20 foot leash ranges with everyone else being stationary. Demons, set your demon prince to have a leash range and everything else stationary. Bots let the assault bot and drones have a bit of leash so that they take aggro off the protectors due to proximity.

1) Changing their orders to follow after using goto causes a lag in their target acquisition, and if you are counting on the alpha to pull them out of defensive mode they often just sit there and don't attack, if you switch them to offensive mode your bodyguard count goes down one and they still can sit there well into the engagement, in team settings possibly not attacking at all before the group is dead. 2) Goto is useful for pet positioning and as you can build a number of pets to tank instead of the mastermind and take the alpha (desirable for any MM secondary without mez protection which is most of them) and having to set up extra macros to control melee pets only when goto used to work fine for all of them for basic positioning is a step backwards in pet control 3) Scroll down to the dev response. They agree with me, not you, and this thread is a reminder that this needs to be looked at. 4) You're kinda an arrogant dick to turn this into "you don't know how to play your class"

Yeah they do. Alot of Demon prince and about all of bruiser's dps comes from melee range abilities. The old goto let them run into range to use those abilities, the new goto locks them stationary causing a severe lag or a complete absence of melee ability DPS. It affects thugs worse than demons because a ton of your DPS comes from a melee T3 and that melee T3 is now effectively useless with that command, but the demon prince loses his ability to use his ice sword, PBAOE attack, and stomp. The only way to use the bruiser at this point is to create an individual targeting macro for him, or to put him in aggressive follow while the rest of the pets are in goto mode so that he actually picks and attacks targets. Locking a pet with melee abilities to one single location with a command universal among all masterminds is a serious design flaw in the new changes. It;s just WORSE for ninjas, necro, and beasts, because those are more melee centered than the other sets. I actually forgot to put beasts on there.

Maybe necro, ninjas, and mercs get one shotted. Bots rarely do, especially with the assault bot holding most of the aggro, and thugs and demons are more durable than bots with the space to slot the pet uniques. The one exception is the arsonist, who can pull enough alpha aggro to get two or three shotted pretty easily. But overall softcapped pets plus resistance uniques plus a good secondary makes pet tanking way better than MM tanking on the whole. My three main masterminds are built around pet tanking and they all do it really well, though admittedly the bots/traps is a bit more slot starved than the other two because repair is garbage and bots do not have a mule power for pet uniques.

I keep saying this but tankerminding is actually pretty sub par mm play. It is very overall difficult to actually keep aggro on yourslf vs your pets with the amount of damage they can do, even spamming provoke, you can usually not hold all the aggro and attempting to do so hurts your ability to have a secondary rotation. Traps is probably the overall best for it because it's one of the few secondaries with baked in mez protection, but it's lack of a solid heal means that you need aid pool and would be better off using aid other than aid self (aid other can be made uninterruptable, aid self cannot) Let your pets tank. If you are using bots, thugs, demons, or necro? Let the pets tank for you and build around that. Use bodyguard to take the alpha. Or to let you tank through pulling a boss's aggro or something using personal attacks. But overall? Especially with like a /time build that can softcap your pets? Let the pets take the damage and keep them alive through it, throw out buffs and debuffs. It's a much more fun and effective playstyle than trying to tank everything yourself.

The previous goto commands were preferable to what we have now. Locking melee pets into one location with goto commands so they can't move makes the goto command functionally useless for all pets with melee abilities. Follow is sub optimal pet behavior, it allows no real control over minions which is antithesis to the class. Goto is how we keep pets in an area for supremacy, how we move pets to solid cone positioning, how we keep them out of the way of teammates. But locking the goto commands to a single location scerews up any set with melee pets. Demons, thugs, ninjas, and necro all suffer from these changes.

Come on now lighting oil slick is an ancillary benefit you take bonfire for the mitigation.

Agree. It's like making a blaster where you only take one attack from the primary and then fill out your power choices with every power pool you can fit into the build.

I love my bots/traps and thugs traps, very sedate playstyle and a roomy build. But demons/nature and thugs/time are my overall favorites. Thugs/time is just ridiculous. Gang war on a like 3 minute timer, burnout on a 7 minute timer, softcapped pets with room for all the resistance uniques, making them pretty solidly tough. Demons/nature is like "Do you want to play a support that can tank and kill an AV? Do you like blocking doors and annoying yourself and others and have that be the only real downside of your set? Play Demons/nature"

It's generally some weird roleplay thing. I don't get roleplayers either soooooo...

If you want one that isn't bottom of the bunch power wise but is an absolute NIGHTMARE to play, Beast/Kin. Kin is a very active set, Beast is a set that you need an attack rotation on. Pet management plus kin rotations plus beast attack rotations is a match made in hell. It's worse than scrapperlock. There are always two things you should be doing every second of every encounter.

Rad is better solo overall. Much easier to manage toggles in a solo situation and you can completely neuter spawns. Time brings less overall debuff to the set but has a bit more buff for your bang than rad does, allowing you to very easily defense cap your pets while still having solid debuff and heals. In groups it's no contest, time is far better because of the cast time of toggle debuffs and trying to manage debuff anchors in a moving group. Rad will only shine in groups on the toughest targets.

Not to bug, but any word on the changes? I honestly haven't been playing much cause I'm waiting on this, just an update on if it's coming any time soon would be appreciated.

Yeah but there's literally no advantage to doing this. To the OP, I think part of the point of the pet upgrades is to balance out resummoning in combat. If I could just endlessly shit out fully upgraded pets forever I'd be functionally immortal in all content.

How would you attack anything?

No aggro caps would kill fire farming. No build in the game can handle a fire farm on them all at once.

Attack defensive removes bodyguard until the target dies. Pets do not provide bodyguard unless in follow, stay, or goto stance and defensive.

Alright so first, yeah hell on earth has a long recharge, but it also has like a 2 minute duration. And with a high recharge IO build, like my hell on earth lasts 2 minutes and recharges in a little over 4 I think, which is not bad. It's a genuinely solid power. Hell on earth, in addition to buffing a minion decently and having a cool animation, summons little fire imp things that do like 50 damage each per hit. Over the duration if none of them get killed you can have 4-6 of them following you around, which is a large amount of extra random damage and chaos to introduce to a fight. Now, pet defense IOs. The pet +defense and +resist auras are considered set bonuses. This means that once you slot them in the power they are always on. Hell on earth is a useful mule for some of those procs, you can 6 slot it with 3 recharge and 3 procs and easily fit the last 3 def/resistance procs into your pets and have pretty solidly tanky pets because of it. With damage procs, the way it works is that pets can fire damage procs that can be slotted into them. Procs fire on attacks that affect the individual attack being used. So like, enforcers have 4 attacks that lower defense. Every one of these attacks can proc a defense debuff set damage proc, and better, EVERY ATTACK HAS IT'S OWN PROC PER MINUTE COUNT. What that last bit means is that you proc that damage quite alot. Figuring out how many attacks your pets have that can proc a specific proc isn't something I can direct you to, I dont know where that data is, but I'm sure someone does.

Voting in solidarity with my controller buddies, Make Wormhole Great(er) (again? For the first time?)

Not a chance. /FF is a below average mastermind set. It brings more defense to the table than you need without really any heals, other buffs, or debuffs to the set. Lots of MM sets are tanky as fuck. My demons/nature soloed +0x1 Master of ITF. The ONLY thing /FF really offers is being tanky as fuck compared to alot of other sets, and even then /traps and /time are tankier than /ff is with the healing they bring to the table and the debuffs. /FF really hurts from it's lack of ability to enhance bot damage in any significant way. My bots/traps is way tankier than any /ff build. Caltrops and seekers make a ton of difference, and even the anemic healing of triage beacon is better than nothing. Esp with aid pool helping.

Literally the thing that made me quit city of heroes for like 5 years. Fuck Emmert and his stupid ass "LET'S PATTERN OURSELVES OFF WOW!" ideas.

Yeah but that would be still just as pointless to take overall. Aid other lets you heal more than your bots and you can make it uninterruptable if you want. An AOE heal/buff would be actually useful. I change my vote give me a power that turns all my bots into a Chronos Titan for 2 mins please devs.

That's literally what aid other is.