TheSpiritFox

I have a Beast/Kin named Ricky Bobby who's got Cal Naughton Jr, Karen, Death Machine, Walker, Texas Ranger, and because I couldnt resist, Odin's Raven.

Thats not a terrible idea. "The Rock's Biggest Fan" and name your T3 Dwayne Johnson

I would go /dark over /rad. Only one toggle on /dark and otherwise a great set, plus fluffy from Dark can mule pet IOs. /elec is really good. Less offensively powerful than dark or traps, but insanely powerful defensively especially if you invest in an expensive recharge build. /time is actually kinda the new /ff. It goes well with everything and is more fun and does more stuff than Forcefield. Staggering amounts of -recharge to enemies.

Thugs/Traps has one of the highest potential DPS ceilings in the game on hard targets and its one of the tankiest masterminds particularly with some aid pool help.

Have you never colored water blast yellow in the costume creator, just to see?

The chosen roles are just...bad. There are too many ways to break the mold with too many classes, too many ways to step out of your role into another. Make it a bonus that starts at 5 different archetypes within the group, and scales up to 8 different archetypes in the entire group. Good bonus at 5 great bonus at 8. Boom done, and instead of "Hey we need this role" itll be "hey we dont have x y and z classes any of those on wanna join?" which is perfect for creating inclusion within the structure of LFG interactions. The classes you need will always be the classes you dont have yet.

I like the macros and shit, honestly. Just boost the damage a little bit on form attacks and then double Khledian max damage bonus, AT fixed.

Traps is the best secondary far and away. FFgen is the best defensive power in the game by a mile. Tons of defense and a bunch of mez resist? Yes please. Then caltrops for soft control, acid mortar which can stack with more than one out for an absolutely insane amount of -def and -res, poison trap for neutering the regen of everything anywhere nearby, and boom if you wanna be youre done. Take those 4 powers and its 90% of the power of the secondary in your hands. But then you know, web grenade is solid for stacking on AVs that wont stay in place. Trip mine is solid for removing minions from the group and lowering incoming damage, fast. Even detonator is getting a look so it wont be the single worst power masterminds have anymore! We might have to start taking it! Sure, time is sturdy. But itll take 3x longer for x/time to kill things compared to a traps, and frankly, if youre playing smart, youre safter with traps and the mez protection it offers. Primary theyre all good now so its on favorites, but bots and thugs go best with traps. Single best mastermind? If you wanna be more sturdy, Bots/traps. With repair drone and medicine pool you're insanely tanky. If you want to be more deady, especially to hard targets, Thugs/Traps. I dont know why people are underwhelmed by thugs tbh. My bots/traps can kill a pylon in just under 2 minutes no lore pet. My thugs/traps can do it in 1. The only MM that surpasses Thugs/traps for raw single target DPS is Demon/Storm and Demons/storm is not a tenth as survivable. If youre underwhelmed by thugs youre not dropping a pair of damage procs into enforcers along with a LOTG and 3 acc/dam hamis. Seriously. Enforcers have 4 attacks that can proc the -def damage procs, each. Two of those attacks are aoe cones. Throw an explosive strike in the bruiser and alot of his attacks will proc that. Throw a soulbound allegiance in the bruiser as well and suddenly he's sometimes hitting knockout blow for 600 damage plus an extra hundred from the explosive strike proc. Thugs is fucking nuts yall idk how youre underwhelmed.

In case it wasnt clear I think you should absolutely rain purples on a bots traps.

Bots traps is pretty simple to build tbh. 5 slot the second and third attacks in the primary, 6 slot pets, 5-6 slot repair bot, 3-4 slot FFgen, five slot trip mine, throw LOTG everywhere you can fit including in the protector bots, frankenslot superior pet sets to get 3 10% global recharge bonuses, slot two purple sets into epic powers for the final 2 10% recharge bonuses, perma hasten, and its good to go. The real keys are just maximize defense, fit the two pet defense uniques in the build somewhere, and pound recharge and endurance recovery to the exclusion of literally anything else in set bonuses so your traps recharge in like 25 seconds. Because of the summonable nature of FFgen (seriously its the single best defensive power in the entire game) and the fact that caltrops, web grenade, even acid mortar can all completely do their jobs on one or two slots if you need gives you insane slotting flexibility. You can focus your build where you want. Proc out caltrops and bonfire from heat mastery, or take mu and electric fences your way through later content. Or slot out trip mine and just drop mines everywhere you can all the time for extra aoe damage and fun watching minions get launched away from you. The only must take pool is speed for Hasten, other than that you can do whatever you want. You can go fighting and presence pool for cross punch, tough and hasten, and taunt and face tank your way through shit. You can pick utility powers and have extra random buffs and heals. You can take medicine pool up to field medic for the instant cast single target heal, five slot that, and realize hey medicine pool can like barely keep the tank alive when the healer already bit the dust and top off bots every few seconds. You can take multiple travel powers for style and not compromise anything about your core build and ability to melt level 54 avs. The worlds your oyster. Your laser blasted poisoned acid doused stunned flamethrowered regen-less oyster.

Unfortunately everything mids related I had was from 2020 and two computers ago. It amounts to stacking as much recharge as I could fit into the build. Just with the pets I get 3 10% recharge bonuses from franken slotting the two superior pet sets while still hitting solid acc/dam numbers with enhancement and boosting leadership defense and even dropping a proc into enforcers for extra damage. I fit 4 LOT into the build without taking fighting pool, threw all the uniques I could fit otherwise into the build while proccing out caltrops and bonfire from fire mastery. The premise of the build is with sufficient recharge you can get up to 3 acid mortars out at the same time, 4 with properly timed burnout and gang war. You can perma poison trap to completely destroy the regen of anything it touches. And you can stack up proc damage and once the bruiser gets his rage up he seriously hits fucking hard like I've seen him knockout blow things for 400+ with just once acid mortar up. Get the acid mortars up asap, burnout gangwar, dump everything on a pylons head, and it will fold fast with severely debuffed resistance and flatlined regen. It also matters alot for teaming, traps with 45 second recharges at 50 feels useless, traps with 22 second recharged, you can lead groups and just poison trap -> acid mortar -> pets every single spawn and watch things melt noticeably faster than they would otherwise. Acid mortar does work.

The stay command fixes this. As long as you can heal them through whatever damage is done theyll sit in damage patches attacking if you just put them on stay.

Demons/Elec can survive in fire farms solo. You just need perma hasten for recharge to do it.

This. Defensive stance and Stay, Goto, or Follow = Bodyguard. If they are in defensive stance (the switch is instant) and in supremacy range you are in bodyguard, period. You can literally switch as a boss is winding up an attack and have the damage reduction kick in before the attack finishes and actually hits you and it works. As long as you havent ordered them to attack a target specifically and they're in defensive mode Bodyguard is on so long as youre in range.

You havent played MMs enough. Even with the level shifts between pets a number of our powersets can top DPS charts. My thugs/traps has a top pylon time of 0:55. There are not many powerset combos in the game that can kill a rikti pylon in under a damn minute. Depending on how you build your MM we can be powerhouses down to like level 10. My bots traps? Pops ffgen at 11 when exemplared, which means at that level and above I have protector bot shield and ffgen bubble and like 35% defense on my damn pets. I can take hits better than anything but a slotted exemplared tank and still put out more damage than anything except a blaster or stalker, while providing team support at the same time. MMs are OP. I'm grateful they have not been nerfed. I dont have many other AT combos that can kill 54 AVs solo, but several of my MMs can do it.

If Warshades and PB get to be across multiple roles then Masterminds need to cross ranged damage, tank, and support.

Specific info on pet changes so far Staying at range - Basically they modified the AI so that pets which are primarily ranged damage do not ever try to run into melee anymore. As someone said, they will brawl if nothing else is up to use and things are in range. This makes bots and mercs particularly flag planters. Put them somewhere and they tend to stay there. Goto command - I'm pretty proud of this one, it was my direct suggestion to the devs and they did it. The old goto command would move pets towards a location, but very unreliably. They modified the goto command to basically plant a pin where you set it. Pets will stay within about 30 feet of this pin with the sole exception of running out of damage patches. They will prioritize targets closest to the pin location first, and will attack as normal in aggressive mode firing at anything in range of their weapons or meleeing anything that is within their leash range for the pin. Pet management with this change is now 10x easier as even melee pets can be parked at a certain location and be expected (again except for fleeing damage patches) to stay where you put them. A well controlled mastermind aggroing extra groups with pets running wildly around is a thing of the past. Pets will now switch targets if something runs too far away instead of chasing it across the level. Trick arrow - What used to be the worst secondary bar none is now actually pretty solid from a debuff and control standpoint. Pet summon times - T1s now have a 5 second recharge, T2s a 10 second recharge, and T3s a 15 second recharge and summon costs have all been lowered significantly. They cannot be changed with recharge enhancement or global set bonuses, but the recharges are all shorter than you could formerly get with an expensive perma hasten build and with the reduced endurance costs, you can spam lost pets back pretty reliably and it's harder to kill an MM by chewing through all it's pets than it used to be. Minor merc changes - They lowered the cast time on full auto for AR ranged sets and the merc commando so while its still got a stupid long recharge, it no longer locks your commando up for 6 seconds, down to 2.5 There are more changes in the pipe but we have no idea what they are at present. But the devs have mentioned repeatedly over about the last 6 months that they are looking seriously at the MM class for changes and buffs, particularly geared towards buffing the weaker primaries and going through the class itself to figure out what issues can be solved without changing the fundamental aspects of the class. So at some point we have more to look forward to.

I giggled at your misfortune ngl, but glad it had a happy ending =D

Step 1: Make merits by running TFs Step 2: Turn merits into enhancement converters Step 3: Bid on cheap yellow recipes lvl 30+ Step 4: Turn 80 recipes into 80 enhancements, buying salvage off the AH Step 5: Pray to the RNG gods and use converters to turn yellows into oranges by converting in type to get a rare then converting in rare to get a valuable enhancement Step 6: Sell enhancements, profit

lol My niche is something no one can intrude on. I just have stacks upon stacks of recipes and absolutely shit merits into converters to seek out enhancements which are lower in stock and valuable. I blow as much as 1000 converters to get 80 enhancements, but every enhancement I sell is worth a minimum of 3 million and I've got a good sense of which enhancements on the market regularly need restock. As long as I keep pumping enough merits to keep me in converters, I can find listings that need to be filled and make money. And I PL all my alts to 50 now then play them slotted out, so just playing my 50s also slowly stacks up money.

I was gonna say yes but then I saw your definition and I guess no I'm primarily a craft converter, 99% of my income comes from running TFs and using merits entirely to buy converters and converting until I get shit that's worth money.

I only have about 3 billion influence total sitting around on all my characters (with about 200 IOs worth 4m+ each for sale on two characters) but does it count if I have 23 50s and every single one of them is purpled out to the tune of a minimum of 800m including catalysts and boosters?

Upgrade powers hit your henchman and any henchman who is within 30 feet of that henchmen, though it only gives the animation towards the one you target. Make sure your minions are clustered up and you only have to cast each upgrade once for all pets to get them. You do not have to individually upgrade each minion, learn the visual signs of upgrades so that you can tell by looking if a hench is fully upgraded, you can also see the upgrades in the buff bar on the side of the pet window (arrow makes it expand or retract) The upgrade abilities are, in general, non negotiable. Most every mastermind build is designed to take the pets and upgrade powers the second they are available, they make a massive difference in pet power overall, though some sets are more affected by it than others. Like, thugs do pretty well without their T2 upgrade, but the T2 increases their overall damage and their aoe damage significantly. By comparison, Bots are kinda anemic until the 32 upgrade which gives the assault bot an attack that spawns burn patches under up to 16 mobs in a 20 foot aoe, which is capable of burning down entire groups in seconds. You should take the equips as soon as you get them. They make a ton of difference. Maneuvers is something that is often fit in post 35 or in gaps where no new primary/secondary power opens up that level.

I think it's fair if you do that to all of your builds and are also rating how well they exemplar. I don't consider rating things based on how they level to be fair, I think that until a build is slotted out you haven't really seen what it can do and because some sets get their major powers way early while others get their best powers very late makes leveling a very bad place to look to determine how good a given set is. I don't include incarnates for the most part in my analysis, but I do include slotting and set bonuses, as much of those can be kept down into deep exemplar levels and that genuinely matters for a sets overall performance. Not purpling out a build is anyone's choice, it is a mistake in my opinion not to utilize the tools you have and 600m is beyond easy to come by in this game if you have even 1 level 50 character. I have a few billion floating around rn and I haven't farmed in IDK how long except to power level new alts to 50. Masterminds in general need to have money put into them to really see them shine in more difficult content. I don't think it's fair to judge the potential of any build before you've gotten all the powers you can put into the character, all the slots, and done something with them. And even with a generic IO build, if you stack recharge traps works tons better. It's just, global recharge is so easy to come by and benefits MMs so much that for this class specifically, IO builds should be considered pretty standard. Like, I get that not everyone is going to purple out a build, but if you want to talk about what a spec can do, there's no rational reason to base it on leveling which varies wildly not just AT to AT but powerset to powerset within ATs.

A comment on Traps. Traps is slow because of cooldowns, but a massive recharge build mitigates this quite alot. Its not all that difficult if you spend the money to purple out a traps build to get caltrops down to a 15 second recharge with no recharge slotted. It's pretty easy to get poison trap and acid mortar down to like 25 second recharges and seeker drones down to like 20 seconds. Triage beacon down to about a minute which lets them double stack. Traps on teams is actually solid in all but the most ridiculous steamrollery teams. You know, if you're doing Mis Lib at +0 where a team of 4-5 could down all the AVs until the final mission in a matter of seconds, yeah youre going to feel less like you're useful. You know, just like the controllers and defenders on the team. On any team where you're not speeding through ridiculously fast, you can get your recharges down with traps low enough to have most of your traps up every group. Besides recharge what does traps need? Honestly, Super Speed with a celerity IO. You want to lead the pack. You want to be jumping into mobs first with your pets right behind to dump a poison trap to open or using seekers to take alphas. More, yes you do set up kill zones. Between seekers, potentially a personal attack or two, or just using your pets to pull things, one of your goals as a /traps on a team that's not sprinting past the majority of enemies in an area is to yank more groups into your killball. Don't follow the group. Lead it. Send seekers into an unaggroed group and train them into the fight already going on. Jump ahead and start dropping traps in a new group while your team finishes off the old one. Being one of the stronger solo sets in the game means you do not have to sit there and wait for people. You can almost kinda do your own thing. Built right, traps is a solid addition to any team. It CAN be made to be fast enough that played right, you are legit useful. You alone can handle a group all by yourself, so use that to your advantage by aggroing more shit into the group and laughing as they're like oh shit 2 more groups aggroed and then 10 seconds later everything's dead and they're like "well that went better than expected" And I really cannot overstate the usefulness of having a permanent -1000% regen debuff. Nothing else in the game does as much damage to AV regen in one go as dropping a poison trap and it's aoe so like, during During the 4 av fight in the LRSF you can have ALL the avs debuffed. Acid mortars stack. Two out, that's like -45% defense and -40% resistance in an aoe being reapplied every few seconds. Its nuts.