TheSpiritFox

Mu is the farmer epic for Bots, and only mu. Electric fences is far, far too good to give up. Slotted out it's a 35+ second immob on a 10 second recharge and that immob has -kb which means your bots cannot remove immobilized mobs from burn patches. Can't. Time is a solid pick, but /traps is better. At 50, especially with ageless to help with recharge, Traps does way way more AOE damage than /time does. Caltrops I have 6 slot with 5 damage procs and 1 slow. Poison trap and acid mortar both have long ass recharges and are prime for proccing out as well, but I prefer the debuffs those provide, slotting hold in poison trap and -def and recharge in acid mortar so that they're both up constantly. /time is safe. It'll do a good job of keeping your bots alive in a farming environment, especially if you're on point with farsight every 2 minutes on the dot. /Traps is safe, but it'll debuff defenses and resistance, letting your bots hit high level enemies more (and pets need it against more than +2). It gives you seekers to take the alpha and draw aggro, as well as debuff enemy tohit in a decent AOE. Caltrops help keep enemies out of melee where they can really have a damage rotation including all their melee and ranged attacks, leaving them just shooting ranged = less incoming damage much the same way that the -rech of /time does. Triage beacon is highly underestimated. It too can proc things like absorb procs on everyone in it's radius, but even if just slotted for regen the cool thing about triage becon is it heals at a percentage rate, using regen. So, your T3 pet gets healed for more per second than your T1s. I'm totally plugging for /traps, and I'll say it's a late blooming set for sure. It doesn't really shine until you get enough recharge to have your traps up pretty regularly, to be able to drop an acid mortar at every troublesome enemy group or drop seekers. If you want to actually farm, and you want to do it on +3 or +4 x8, /traps is the set that will enable your pets to do the most damage without being a /kin who's pets will die in 5 seconds at higher level play/in incarnate material. Put a -res in caltrops and use acid mortar and thats -40% resistance and at least -20% or something defense on an enemy group. Bots do alot more damage when your secondary can stack -resistance like that. And you can drop the resistance proc in caltrops early. With good management a bots/traps can melt enemies almost as fast as a fire farmer can. Burn patches are that good, and your assault bot can fire up to 16 of them every 16 seconds, each with a 5 target max limit per burn patch. Hit the center of a mob group with electric fences, throw fast recharging web grenades at the bosses to immobilize them until fences is ready for a double stack, and nothing leaves your burn patch and mob groups absolutely melt in front of you.

I just rolled a Demons/nature named Nurse Joy with Charmander, Bulbasaur, Squirtle, Lugia, Ho-oh, and Mewtwo along for the ride. Besides giggling constantly at my own character concept, it's ridiculously fun to play. /natures cone heal is a 90% arc, 15m radius cone. Considering most PbAOEs are 15 feet, the sheer area you can douse with hit points with /nature is hilarious. It is not uncommon for the numbers most visible to everyone to be green, outpacing both the damage our team is taking, and at times the damage our team is doing lol. Granted I'm lower level but still, get some bloom going and /nature is absurd.

Like all classes we've got our mehs, our decent sets, and our ludicrious powerhouses. Different people have different opinions on how to get there. Bots are king of AOE damage, that's just true the same way that /fire being the best secondary for brutes is true. Bots for farming? You want to softcap your defenses. /FF will do it slow as fuck. /Traps will do it and give you crazy debuffs, so will /time. Thugs can be built for it but it's hard, they're flimsier. People can and do farm with a number of combinations. My bots/traps can tank +4x8 ITF and solo it with full incarnates. It's a different class. Our power works in different ways. Pets are important, you have to want to manage them. Built right, MMs can be tank, damage, and team support all in one. It feels like an epic class without being one, and no other game has a class remotely like it. Not in the nuances.

The economy isn't going to skyrocket without people essentially using unfair market practices and that is MUCH harder to do now than it used to be. With converters, you would have to corner the market on a whole set, not just one really important recipe, and even then enough converters and you'll get what you want out of something else. I think if it got bad enough, the devs would intervene. This is no longer a for profit game, and there is no incentive for anyone to allow it to be run like one. But also, like, as a farmer we arent listing our stuff super high either. I list all purples for the highest price I see on the history and have done with it. It always gets bought within a few hours. Purple prices are hovering between 10 and 15 million for most, with some rares being 18-20. Thats not terrible and we're never going to see people pay a billion influence for anything here, no one wants to spend that much time playing our free vacation back to the 2000s.

Alright, I have never used the keybinds long term. I can imagine they're great for those who like them, but they require that you move a hand either off movement controls or off the mouse to hit them and it feels very not fluid to me. So, here's how I simplified it. I made macros with my most common commands. I bound macros to keys around my movement keys (habit from WoW days) so /bind Q "petcom_all aggressive$$petcom_all goto" /bind e "petcom_all defensive$$petcom_all goto" /Bind r "petcom_all defensive$$petcom_all follow" /bind mbutton "petcom_all attack" and I left the passive button in my tray and on the rare occasion I need my pets in passive I hit it to keep them quiet. Just these three binds do 90% of what I need my pets to do. For thugs, I bound my bruiser to left alt with an aggressive goto command so he can tank while I keep the rest near me in bodyguard. Bots benefit from being moved in a mob vs individually. If your arsonist is dying constantly, you can bind a specific key for him. Most MM secondaries give you enough to do that you don't want to be like micromanaging your pets positions. I find that the complex pet binds are more useful in costume contests than during gameplay, personally. Especially if you have a more active secondary, like say /nature or /dark, you're going to want to plant your pets somewhere and have easy ways of calling them back. Goto defensive is your perfect macro. Tell pets to go somewhere in a mode that so long as you're in supremacy range of them, you're in bodyguard the whole time. I have a button to make them attack a target, a button to make them go somewhere in aggressive mode when I'm in groups and do not have aggro and thus the bots will sit there in defensive doing nothing while I'm not under attack. Just these few simple binds will let you keep moving your MM around while hitting pet commands, let you keep one hand on your movement and the other on your mouse while playing. It feels much more fluid to me and is definitely way simpler than trying to remember your phone tree of MM pet commands. I can move me and my pets around all I need to. I also don't make MMs that can't softcap my pets, so I'm used to being in melee. If you want to get the keybinds to work, I'd use the type into chat method. And reading the line you posted, I'd have to see the error myself to parse it, what you posted in the thread looks correct and I'm not getting that error. I would say recopy the binds and then use arrow keys to scroll and make sure the whole bind copies? lol I figured it out. Remove the quotes. "bind is not a command. bind is a command. so /bind numpad0 “bind numpad4 petcomall agg$$bind numpad5 petcomall def$$bind numpad6 petcomall pass$$bind numpad7 petcomall att$$bind numpad8 petcomall fol$$bind numpad9 petcomall goto” Does not work. /bind numpad0 bind numpad4 petcomall agg$$bind numpad5 petcomall def$$bind numpad6 petcomall pass$$bind numpad7 petcomall att$$bind numpad8 petcomall fol$$bind numpad9 petcomall goto Does.

can confirm lazy. blew 600m on a brute two days ago, spent 50m on the last purple that had one copy for sale

if you want a petless mm play corr imo

please make assault hybrid echo buffs onto pets when they enter supremacy range and buff all their attacks. thank you

Don't make a rad/bio farmer. Just don't. Make a rad/fire or spines/fire (I much prefer rad/fire and I think it's a blast to play) and make a rad/bio content explorer. Bio exemplars down pretty well and you can build a build made for everything except farming, from soloing to tanking AVs in task forces. But a rad/bio is going to be a slow farmer. I used to have a bots/traps farmer. I do now again. Hes all set up, I love him, but he cannot stack damage on top of +4x8 mobs like a /fire farmer can no matter what I do. He can't blend his way through an entire room of minion to boss level enemies in under 6 minutes. His influence gain is maybe a fifth of what my fire farmer can manage on his best day. This is farming. Efficiency is the name of the game. And as quickly as you really can get a toon to high level, you'd be better off getting a real farmer PLed and using them to not have to worry about money on the rad/bio you make to actually enjoy content with and get badges on and so on and so forth. If you go with a rad/bio, it's really pretty simple. You build for smashing/lethal defense and do a S&L farm, or you build for fire defense just like you would a fire farmer and do a fire map.

1) Musculature Alpha 2) Look at set bonuses, build for +recharge and +S/L defense. You can stick 4 kinetic combats in a ST power to get a good bit of that. Even in, say, brawl. 3) Global recharge keeps your bio powers up and gets the cooldown on atom smasher down. 4) T2 punch over T1 because of higher contaminate chance. 5) this isn't a great set to proc out, but irradiated ground is probably your best bet for proccing. Your basic goal here is to get parasitic aura and ablative shell permanent. Always have absorb up and always have your regen/recovery bonuses up so you can spam your primary powers with impunity. Rad/ is a no redraw set, meaning you can throw any patron/epic powers into your rotation you want. Soul is really powerful and brutes are soon getting a buff to their ranged modifier so its equal to the melee buffing ranged damage, and there are a number of other powers that fit the bill for more solid AOE damage for a brute. /bio is clicky but it's powerful, especially up against groups. It is when solo tanking an AV that you'll start to have issues and you might want to tweak your build around that. But rad is a very solid ST and AOE primary especially with a little late game help and when you hit incarnates the natural choice for destiny is barrier, as you've got endurance and mez handled with /bio and simultaneously softcapping and hardcapping all your defense and resistances for 10-20 seconds is hilarious, you're literally unkillable, nothing in the game does enough damage to dent you through your constant regen.

The two top tier pairings for farming are spines/fire and rad/fire. Rad fire is a tiny bit faster, but you can't really afk it very well, it's farming power comes from an AOE+st rotation that procs contamination and fires off aoe blasts, but if you use a map that funnels enemies to you you can look up and have evaporated half a farm. Both can pretty easily be built to survive indefinitely in fire farms. /bio comes with high out the box fire defense that's easy to softcap. With the right build you'll have respectable fire resistance too and wayyyyy more regeneration to recover lost HP, and you can still sit in offensive stance and make your primary even more golden. Any solid aoe set can farm with /bio and be safe, but spines, rad, and titan weapons stand out as the best overall. You could farm with other sets. But no brute secondary can compete with burn for additional AOE damage. That's why it's fire farms, it's not because fire is easy to cap on /fire characters, there are lots of other things you can cap on lots of other sets. But /fire has burn and a taunt aura to help keep enemies in it. Burn is a farmers dream power, and it stacks up with high AOE damage primaries to let us actually efficiently blender our way through farm maps.

This would break the leveling out of arcs system currently set up. There's already X2 xp, doing more would mean you outlevel arcs half way through them if you actually wanted to try to take on story content. You'd have to go and fuck with whatever limits exist on arc levels just to accommodate a loud minority of players who are jealous of PLing gains while decrying the method. And unless you want to crash server populations it's not a good idea to take away min max stuff because you don't want to engage with it. I get wanting things to be social. You can't artificially force people to engage in social things they don't want to. The farmer who is alone in his farm probably would just be playing something else if they were forced to team to do everything. You're starting to get into social engineering to have the game experience you specifically want territory. Why people think this is ok to do to other players I have no idea. Maybe because companies have shamelessly done it to us for years to meet their profit goals. This is a free game we play for fun, largely to relive the nostalgia and enjoy an MMO that's more open to let us play how we want, while you play how you want. 4

I feel like the complaining about people not knowing how to play their toons... they wouldn't have known how to play at the low levels. Is it just the subversion of your expectation that people know what they're doing that upsets you? Why is that worthy of changing anything? I feel like the real issue is you don't want to be the one someone learns on or who teaches someone how to use their character. You don't want someone else's inexperience to affect you, you want it to be learned solo or on someone else's time. Yeah I can't support nerfing the AH because you resent being a learning experience. This game has replay value in part because of how well I can fund alts with a solidly built purpled out farmer. My rad/fire is there. I'm sitting on a little over a billion influence across all my characters and haven't farmed in days because I haven't got anything leveled up enough to kit out, but you can bet I will. I do this in large part because my goal is to perfect my build before I start adding incarnates. So I'm working up my TW/bio brute and I'm figuring out how I want to build him at 50 and when the time comes I'll have him fully kitted out so that when I step foot in your BAF I'm useful out the box before I even get my alpha level shift. I'm working my way through the trader badges on two characters doing this, all of that is stuff other people get to buy and use. Purples aren't seeded on the market. If we want sets, we've got to put them up ourselves. Farmers power that economy and generally sell more purples than they keep. All of that is market activity that people are trying to nerf. All you're gonna do is force us to get creative again, invalidate a ton of builds people have already spent time and energy on, and piss off the population of the server that keeps everyone in recipes.

Alright. I made a TW/Bio. And I am having trouble really wrapping my head around the strengths and weaknesses of /bio so far as what to really build it towards with sets end game. I really, really enjoy the smashy feel of titan weapons and I like /bio as a set, but I feel like I'm squishier than I should be and it's in part because I haven't really figured out how to really use /bio for tanking. I would like to build this brute for tanking over damage. Not that I want to specifically be responsible for being the main tank, but I want to be able to handle what incarnate can throw at me over maximizing pylon times. Can anyone run me down the /bio powers and tell me how they slot them and why, what they're trying to achieve with the build? I found a scrapper build I could use, but I more need to understand my secondary better and what holes /bio has and how best to plug them. General guidance, specific power breakdowns, etc, anything welcome.

Most people don't PVP and I've never seen groups asking anyone anything about their build. People ask about incarnates for Itrials and if you've got +3 no one looks at you more than that. You're creating problems that don't exist with that one. If you wanna compete in PVP you have to compete with Min Maxers. Trying to nerf that you might as well limit everyone to 10 million influence max in their wallet at any one time.

I really do not like /ff. People describe it as mellow, I describe it as a snoozefest of "I buff, bots chew things down, I move" and thats it. That said, i feel like it's a weak set in general. One trick ponies fall off in performance with incarnates. With barrier, support core, and generic IOs you can make a setless MM pretty close to immortal in end game content. the leveling curve with /FF is slow. Steady, but slowwwwww. It just takes longer to chew things down without some form of buffs/debuffs and the harder content gets the more true that is. The soloing curve with /ff levels out early and then starts to get steeper. You're at your most relatively powerful at level 32, maybe 41 when you get an immob to keep people in burn patches, and it's downhill from there into incarnate material. By comparison, a bots/storm which gets barrier and suddenly stops losing bots randomly, can let the drones be in melee because they can take it, and has gotten their sets in order to blast storm powers left and right at 50 is going to top out way higher and much later. The /ff power graph flattens out before you hit 50 to pretty close to nothing and gets a slight bump from incarnates compared to most other pairings turning into demigods. I should also note that compared to demons and thugs bots has no proc mule power to help damage and /ff kinda hurts bots in also not being a strong powerset to proc out compared to the other two most popular MM sets and benefits more from some kinda set that has a power you can proc the hell out of.

Ha ok. City of Heroes is a very grindy game. Grind serves the specific purpose of extending the time investment required to achieve things, which serves the specific purpose of keeping you paying your subscription to City of Heroes. A concept which no longer exists. This is now a free game that we play for fun. Some people find efficiency fun. Slower content is available. Story arcs are always there to run, and plenty of us do run them. At the same time, different classes have very different solo and team leveling curves. Brutes are easy to solo, MMs evenmoreso, blasters can be a nightmare, tanks are slow and pretty boring, controllers can be a nightmare, etc. The efficiency smooths the leveling curve out for more onerous ATs. And lets face it, people will always PL. People will run level 54 PI radio missions and doorsit bank robberies if they have to, thats the kinda stuff we resorted to we used to do before the AE. Saving missions and not completing them and resetting them endlessly because it was a big map with an enemy group you were built to farm. Some people like experimenting with different ATs or powerset combinations. If you've played this game enough, you want to try out lots of stuff at some point, see how it feels. To really get a feel for a class, you've got to get it past 25 and get at least some basic ios in it, to learn it you've got to get it into the 30s or above. Thats a significant time investment. PLing a toon to the thirties and then figuring it out, much less time investment. As this is a free game, there's no justifiable reason for taking that away from people. Some people find engaging with the AH and in game economy fun. These are the people that make it possible in many ways for you to get all kinds of stuff. Materials used to be prohibitively expensive. Recipes were often the same. Farmers are often the ones who buy it now at a high price, handing over 20 million for a purple drop like it's nothing because it's not, it's literally like 10-12 minutes of our time on a good day. At the same time, we farm drops, not just influence. Those drops are why anyone can cheaply go and find yellow and orange sets to fill out a decent build at any level. They add to the count of boosters, converters, and catalysts for sale and keep the supply up and the price down. Farmers are the supply side of the in game economy. Nerfing farming is a direct nerf to the supply side economics of every server. Some people find learning the game in and out engaging. This is what farmers do. Efficiency requires knowledge. Farming keeps a steady supply of people with a ton of in-game knowledge in your gaming environment and help channel. It keeps those of us who can afford alt after alt making alt after alt to run those DFBs and lower task forces and endless bafs to get incarnates up that other people need. Most farmers do not just farm. We use farming as a means to any number of ends, pretty much all of which benefit other players. The ones that don't, well the devs have already seeded things like materials on the AH so that in the end no one can like corner the market for ritki alloys and run the price up to half a billion each. But farmers are the ones who can afford to buy super pack after super pack and drop rare ios on the market for you to buy, and get the rapid drops to do the same from their personal stashes. Farmers are the ones who can afford to throw out a hundred million on a costume contest every Thursday like it's not a big deal because again, if the guild has 10 farmers doing it it's like less than ten minutes of their time each. That small time investment for a farmer is some completely random person's purple set. People are happy every single time I run a free farm and throw ten levels at their characters in an hour. Every time. Farming is a service to our little community dude. Sure, it benefits me most. It's my time playing a game, it should. But granting us efficiency in some areas lets us be generous in alot of others. Dude was on his first character the other day at P2W trying to buy some basic stuff to help him out and I can afford to just quietly hand him 10 million just to help out. That's like several reasonable arguments.

I just have a simple request for the benefit of the MM class. Currently assault hybrid slots don't work unless you resummon pets while the buff is active. If possible, could the buff be modified so that it applies a pet only aura like maneuvers or supremacy that the pets pick up the moment they're in range? Something that would let us just fire off hybrid mid battle like any other class and immediately benefit from it.

My Rad/fire brute is irritated that his farming is being nerfed. I don't see this as a brute nerf. I see this as an influence making nerf. And as such, I disagree wholeheartedly and think it should stop. The nerf "Won't affect most people" You're right. It affects farmers specifically, lowering our inspiration macro farm pace. With good inspiration drops I stay damage capped for several minutes at a time. This is basically just a nerf to farm clear time, and to that I say I have kids man come on let me fucking farm fast I don't have all day to sit around on this old ass broken unoptimized grindfest that I can't seem to let go of.

Ok, mobility is part of it, definitely. /time is more group friendly IF THE GROUP REALLY DOESN'T NEED YOU. That's my thing. Sure, if you're steamrollering, a /time will feel marginally more useful not leaving an acid mortar behind. Ever been on a speed ITF? You'll feel half useless as a mastermind anyway, no one wants to wait for your pets. If you are solo and can pull into traps, traps is straight up safer. Your defenses are out the box stronger with /traps (and you don't have to wait as long for FF gen vs farsight) leveling. Farsight is around 9% defense, ffgen is 12% unenhanced, requiring a power boost rotation. /Traps is often set it and forget it. I took the aid pool 1 because I don't even begin to need tough or weave to survive and 2 once my traps are set up, what do I do? Do I waste slots on shitty MM primary attacks and be the worst blaster ever? No I drop minor heals on people and keep my bots topped off and cycle my traps as fast as I can in battle. When people are steamrollering, who cares if you just use seekers and acid mortar? If the team isn't in danger, you don't need your toolkit. If the team is in danger, I've told people "fall back into my base" and saved a team when the tank went down. Give me enough time on my bots traps I could solo itf +4x8. Sure, I'll die alot. But I could fucking finish it, guaranteed. Oh and I cannot overstate the difference between just slowing people with /time and dropping caltrops in a doorway so that enemies stack up on the door without even getting to you to die in burn patches. /time is about being safe. /traps is about being a controller and a mastermind at the same time. The AOE hold power is a small chance on /time. Poison trap will often choke out every non boss mob in a group you drop it on. Traps is stronger buff/debuff/control in exchange for the stationary, it's not just a playstyle difference. I forgot, biggest and best reason for /traps over /time. I do not need power boost. Not at all, not in the slightest. It's a core power of many /time builds at 50, too good not to take. I take mu. I get some decent resistance out of it, but more importantly I get possibly the best aoe immob for bots in the game, electric fences. One electric fence and one web grenade stops a boss. With 5 slots my fences last 37 seconds and recharge in 10, I can stack fences on bosses immobilizing them in burn patches and cutting the time it takes to chew them down by a ton. Bots benefit so much from /mu that I can't justify a build that doesn't take them, which is why my /time is a thugs lol. That's the cap to the trollermind.

Gang war is probably the best overall proc mule masterminds have access to in a primary power lol. 6 slot with purple procs, watch the world go insane for a few minues.

Its decent with not bots. With bots you will launch shit through walls constantly. Thugs, alot less of that issue but they still do some knockback. But what was said about slotting into T1 is true, the proc goes off on any attack at all, and your T1s factually throw out more attacks.

Bots/traps is the best healbot setup you can possibly choose. You can take aid pool and zero personal attack powers, let your bots do all the attacking, and spend all of your time dropping traps and using the aid pool. It feels like a healbot to you, to your team it feels like you are a tank, controller, defender, and sentinel all at the same time.

Jesus I feel old now. I'm 34 and scorpion is still amusing to me.

Remaking this cause I thought superior vs regular were two sets, ugh