nzer

The arguments here about Farsight's defense when paired with Power Boost ring really hollow given Force Field gets just as much defense from Deflection Shield, Insulation Shield, and Power Boost, then gets 15% more and mez protection on top of it from Dispersion Bubble. No one seems to have a problem with Force Field being able to nearly incarnate soft cap and mez protect an entire team without incarnates, but Time reaching the non-incarnate soft cap with Clarion Radial is apparently too much. And yeah, Time has benefits outside of that, but people have been complaining for years that Force Field needs offensive bonuses in order to be competitive with the rest of the support power sets. If it gets them, are people gonna suddenly start having problems with the defense it provides? I sure hope so, based on this thread. To say nothing of the fact that almost every properly built end-game team has enough def buffs to softcap everyone anyway. My thugs/storm MM only sits around 28% defense to positionals with all her toggles going, but I can't remember the last team I was on where I didn't have 50+% after buffs. Time is, frankly, not much of a standout once the team no longer wants for survivability, and that's a fairly low bar. I'd like to see the interaction between Clarion Radial and Power Boost fixed, and I could see toning down Farsight a bit for defenders specifically, but I don't personally have a problem with Time defenders being able to provide 35-40% defense with Power Boost and Clarion Radial, and I definitely don't have a problem with /Time Corruptors and MMs being able to provide ~25%.

Ah, yeah I don't slot it for procs, as I've been told it doesn't take them well. That probably makes the difference.

This hasn't been the case for me, personally. TJ attracts aggro for the alpha for sure, but as soon as a pet hits something it takes aggro in my experience.

I want to be clear that I'm not suggesting we lower the price of ATO recipes to 30 merits, or whatever, then call it a day, I'm just suggesting there's an imbalance that ought to be corrected.

Something isn't not a trap because you can discover it and avoid it. The argument you're making is dangerously close to "ATO recipe prices are a trap deliberately, and that's okay because traps incentivize people to seek out knowledge," and I don't think you realize that.

What's the choice? To spend three times as much to get the ATO now rather than half an hour from now? Do you think most of the people buying ATOs with merits understand that's what they're doing? Because I'd bet they actually just don't know any better, in which case it's not a choice at all, they're inadvertently wasting merits because they don't know any better. That's a trap, by definition.

But that's not what it's based on... I really don't mean to be rude, but I just explained that; I'm saying we shouldn't be tackling the problem of varying efficiency by adding or removing merit sinks, we should be tackling it by equalizing the existing merit sinks so that players aren't punished for picking the less efficient ones. To put it more directly, it shouldn't be significantly more efficient to convert merits to boosters, sell them on the AH, then buy the ATO on the AH than it is to buy the ATO outright. A bit more efficient perhaps, because buying them outright is faster, but not three times as efficient. The problem isn't that players are "doing it wrong," it's that a reasonable looking way to spend merits is actually a trap.

You were, and that's my fault for reading too quickly; I edited my comment to better respond to yours, but not in time apparently. I too will be marginally less respectful: I don't find "people should be allowed to waste merits if they want to" to be a compelling argument in the slightest, and I don't think the people you're arguing on behalf of would appreciate such an argument if they knew you were making it for them. The idea that someone would argue against "people should be able to spend merits however they want without inadvertently throwing them away" is, to me, completely absurd.

I'm not really interested in having this kind of philosophical debate. I'm suggesting players should be able to take advantage of all the merit sinks available to them without inadvertently throwing merits away in the process. Allow me to quote them again: The problem isn't that there are many different ways for people to spend their merits, it's that they all vary wildly in terms of efficiency. The solution to that isn't to remove or add merit sinks, it's to equalize the efficiency of the available sinks so that, for example, buying an ATO outright doesn't cost three times as many merits as buying boosters, selling them on the AH, then buying the ATO off the AH with the profits.

Please read more than the first sentence before responding. Railroading people into playing the way I think they should play is literally the exact opposite of what I'm suggesting.

The problem is that the proper way to use reward merits isn't something players will naturally discover or intuitively grasp, so many players end up spending them inefficiently and flushing lots of potential inf down the drain. The proposed solution is to allow merits to be sold for inf, which is both easy to direct players toward and simple for them to do. It's really fairly straightforward, but IMO it would be better to adjust the costs of existing merit sinks so they're all roughly equal. If the problem is newbies falling into traps, the solution should be removing the traps.

You have to check your buff bar, I don't think there's any kind of visual effect when it happens.

They are, but the reason they are is that the AI doesn't handle recharge buffs properly. OP is wondering whether pets could reasonably be affected by recharge now that brawl isn't something ranged pets do anymore. The answer is probably no. For starters, non-ranged pets are still a thing, so if brawl presented a problem before it would still present a problem now for those pets. But personally, I'd be shocked if brawl was the only thing preventing this; I think it's far more likely that the AI's problem with recharge extends to all pet abilities, not just brawl. And, of course, this would represent an absolutely massive buff to MM DPS, which I think is unwarranted. MMs are already incredibly tanky with the right powersets, to the point of being able to easily solo +4x8. They shouldn't get 500+ passive DPS on top of that. I'll also add that I don't think this is the biggest problem with Kin on MMs, in that almost everything Kin has doesn't work well with MMs. Transfusion is basically useless for ranged pets. With a proper build pets don't suffer for endurance, so Transference is worthless. The MM doesn't have any need for recharge, so Siphon Speed is worthless. Pets have a rather low damage cap, so Fulcrum Shift and Siphon Power are significantly less useful than they should be, and FS is made even less useful by the fact that it's most powerful in melee range. Keeping pets alive is generally the biggest stumbling block for MMs in high level content, and Kin provides very little defensive benefit. So... basically everything it does isn't very useful, and it doesn't do the one thing MM secondaries are expected to do. It's just not a very good secondary pick.

Your overall point is correct, but I feel the need to point out that combined def/res totals isn't a proper point of comparison for overall sustain; 40% defense and 50% resist provides exactly the same overall damage reduction as 45% defense and no resists, but doesn't protect anywhere near as well from debuffs and mezzes.

To elaborate, if you summon your pets while hybrid assault is active they'll get the buff. If you summon them while it's not active then activate it, they won't get the buff. So if you can live with only ever summoning pets while hybrid is up (which should be fine with thugs/time, since your pets will be very durable), hybrid assault is great. Can, but note that clarion radial only provides mez protection for 90 seconds out of every 120, while clarion core provides perma mez protection. As thugs/time neither you nor your pets should need the extra defense, so you'll want to go with core. For interface, degenerative is better than reactive, though not by much. -maxhp is numerically equivalent to -res before regen is considered, but it stacks with -res multiplicatively and indirectly reduces regen as well, which thugs/time gets a lot of benefit from since it doesn't have a strong source of -regen.

Musculature does work with pets, and is generally recommended. For Interface I'd go with Degenerative, though I'm not entirely sure. -maxhp is better than -res point for point (and will stack multiplicatively with your pets' -res, while more -res would stack additively), but I don't know how the DoTs compare. Destiny I would definitely go with Clarion. The increased secondary effects is exactly the same as power boost, except I believe it also affects power boost, so Clarion->Power Boost->Farsight provides like 30% defense. That should softcap your demons, but it means you'll have to cast Farsight every two minutes exactly, so it could potentially be down for a few seconds in combat, and it means you don't get permanent mez protection, only 90 seconds out of every two minutes. Core has permanent Mez protection, which plugs the only major defensive hole /Time has. For Hybrid you basically have to go Support as the other ones don't affect the pets. I mean, SpiritFox explicitly advocated for going in first to eat the alpha. And honestly, despite the power creep an MM's biggest concern is generally still keeping the pets alive through burst, so personally, I'd say jumping in to eat the alpha then letting the pets grab aggro naturally is almost always the best approach with sets like /Time or /Traps when you can actually do that.

You can activate more than one pet command in a single macro, right? If it was passed in as an argument to /petcom you could have a single follow or goto macro with different ranges for each pet so there's not even any micromanagement to it. You could have several different macros for each command with different sets of ranges.

Yeah, that's what I was saying before. If you're still seeing KB, I imagine that would have to be why.

It was noticed here literally the same day as the patch... I'm sorry, are we suggesting it was proccing on both the pets and the players now? Is that even possible?

Of what, Overwhelming Force? Yes, the description is "Provides a 20% chance to cause Knockdown to your targets, enhances the damage of a power by 26.5%, and converts any Knockback this power deals into Knockdown. Some powers may have their chance to Knockdown reduced when this enhancement is slotted. This enhancement also has a penchant for the dramatic..." That says it does three things: Provides a 20% chance to cause knockdown to your targets Enhances the damage of the power by 26.5% Converts any Knockback the power deals into Knockdown The chance only applies to the KD, not to the KB to KD.

Neither Overwhelming Force nor Sudden Acceleration have RNG on their KB to KD, they both apply a blanket KB reduction to the power. What might be happening with Overwhelming Force is that if the power's KB magnitude is just under 1 after the reduction, the KD proc triggering might push it back over 1, turning the KD back into KB. The two of you seeing different behaviors on the same power is odd, but if one of you has other KD enhancements in the power or has KD set bonuses (are those even a thing?), that might do it.

Salvage almost always sells for less than the seeded price, meaning the market is almost always running on player generated salvage, and I don't know whether converters are seeded or what they're seeded at, but the way the price fluctuates makes me think we aren't in danger of running out of those either. And let's be clear, the market is slanted towards crafters and farmers, and every player can easily be both if they know how to. The economy isn't held together by duct tape and prayers, it's more than self-sufficient with the number of players we have currently. If we have more of the former than the latter, this suggestion isn't necessary to begin with.

It would be nice for this kind of stuff to be configurable on the player's end, e.g. a /Time mastermind could set follow and goto to have a shorter leash range if they wanted while a /Storm mastermind could set it to be wider. Maybe even allow leash range to be passed as an argument to the pet commands so we could make macros for follows/gotos with various ranges. I imagine that would take quite a bit more work though, if it's even feasible.

Their description of the problem is perfectly accurate: goto used to mean "go to this area," and now it means "go to this spot and don't move," which renders melee pets useless unless something is standing directly next to them. You can argue all you want about whether the current goto behavior is useful, but at the end of the day the previous behavior was useful too, and is no longer possible. I also found your response arrogant and unnecessarily combative, and doubling down isn't helping. Bodyguard mode works with defensive goto, it does not work with defensive attack my target. Also, if you do this with a melee pet I'm pretty sure they'll revert to follow after they kill the target, meaning a significant amount of micromanagement is required if what you want them to do is stay near a point and kill nearby things.

Can you point to someone from the team confirming that? I know it was stated that proc enhancements from pet sets aren't currently affecting the pets like they're supposed to, but Gaussian's isn't a pet set, and per Captain Powerhouse non-pet sets are supposed to proc only when summoning pets and buff the player. Note that Gaussian's Chance For Build Up doesn't specifically say it affects pets like, for example, Soulbound Allegiance's Chance For Build Up does.