Col. Kernel

March 25

5 hours ago, tidge said:

Anecdote: In the current game, the only open-world content I see Masterminds regularly having trouble zerging are Giant Monsters like nu-Eochai, Lusca (with Tentacles), and the Arachnos Flier (far less trouble IMO, but there are some subtleties with it relating to its shield, regeneration, and travel times). Every other GM (except for Rikti Dropship) is something I regularly see MM's fighting toe-to-toe.

The first two GMs are problematic because of AoEs... nuEochai's has an auto-hit patch, and Lusca with even just one tentacle can muster multiple AoEs to grief and MM+henchmen. This is not to say those GMs are unbeatable, rather they are in a category where many MMs don't bother with them because of the extra effort required. No-cost auto-upgrades of henches certainly would make life even easier against those two GMs... because now those MMs that can't/won't/don't zerg those GMs would zerg them. Right now my Lusca solo times (all 22 merits) are rate-limited by the 2-minutes between Destiny Barrier modulated by the resummoned henches not having their upgrades. Lusca would become very easy for me if the henches didn't have to be upgraded.

The next lower tier of annoying Giant Monsters is IMO nuJack-in-Irons and (a little bit) Kraken. nuJack because it can chain a bunch of AoE (including some controls) that "get lucky" and mess up an MM trying to zerg. Kraken has the Damage aura which isn't so much of a big deal, but with its AoEs it means that it (currently) it is smart not to resummon a hench too close to it. Most other GMs have some sort of AoE attack(s), but in practice I haven't observed them to be worried about (mostly because of ToHit checks).

There are adjacent points to be made about MM secondaries.... whatever team buffs are in those are the same types of buffs that other ATs have. That is: no "for free for the henches at all times". Any "Aura buffs" from a secondary will still have to wait for the timing of a complete summons before affecting a newly summoned henchmen. FWIW: I'd probably rank /Marine as the best of the MM secondaries because of every tool it brings to a fight, plus a "patch", and then either /Time or /Traps. Traps is very busy (but powerful) while Time should be slightly more laid-back.

Can you solo a Pylon on your MM?

March 20

1 hour ago, tidge said:

I wouldn't advocate for the toggle idea... primarily because toggles for powers which affect others generally have some radius. This feels like the sort of thing that would open a lot of rabbit holes and require lots of work/testing. It may not be best-practice, but I do often position my henchmen outside of the IO Aura pieces areas of effect and Supremacy range. It would stink if I sent a henchmen to go draw an alpha strike and it lost survivability from its first upgrade.

I think what @srmalloy was saying is that if the henchman is in range of the toggle that End would get spent to apply the upgrade to the henchman. The henchman now has the upgrade even if they leave the toggle radius.

March 20

46 minutes ago, tidge said:

Don't be like that. People having a different perspective on the game and game balance does not mean that those people who disagree with you are ignorant or cognitively deficient.

I'm not talking about someone with a different perspective on the game or game balance. I can agree to disagree on those types of issues.

I repeat myself under three circumstances.

1) When someone either deliberately or accidentally misunderstands me (case in point)

2) Someone blatantly lies or misrepresents the issue repeatedly

or

3) When someone fails to acknowledge that what I'm discussing is an issue for me.

It it truly a mystery to me how the in-game community can be so utterly fantastic, but these boards are so pointlessly argumentative. If I ask a question in /help I get a prompt, courteous answer, sometimes with a side order of humor.

On these boards I get 4 pages of fresh cow patties, with 2 good answers (I consider this resolved by the way), and one piece of good information.

March 20

5 hours ago, GM_GooglyMoogly said:

A few points:

1) One can disagree without being disagreeable.

2) There is generally no need to continuously and repeatedly say the same thing.

3) MM balance is a weird thing. A well-built level 50 MM can essentially "walk" through x8 missions solo at even level with some minor management of the pets and an occasional heal or buff. That same MM will struggle at *4 and even more so on incarnate or 4 star content. I think the trick is to buff them at the highest level of difficulty without making lower levels too much of a cake "walk." While the proposal will make MMs easier and less tedious I don't think it really does anything for them at the higher levels. And then we'd have to come up with 2 new powers and animations to replace the upgrades and that can be incredibly difficult and time consuming to design and balance.

(Note: #3 is just my opinion as a player and not an official HC statement.)

Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting that the henchman upgrades should be baked into the henchmen, I am saying that they should continue to be powers the MM needs to take(and optionally slot), but they should be passive powers rather than ones requiring a spot on on the MM's bar to be actively clicked.

Re: Item #1

As for disagreeing without being disagreeable, I couldn't agree more. The only persons I've been disagreeable with are ones I have called out on their BS (either being condescending, or lying/misrepresenting info), and I will continue to do so unapologetically. If that's a problem, I really don't care. Seeing that no one has determined that the people I called out were correct (and objectively they were not), I'm not terribly worried about my manners. Don't urinate on my back then try to tell me it's raining and we'll get along just fine.

Re: Item #2
If someone doesn't hear what I'm saying, and continues to insist that up is down, or that black is white there is, unfortunately, a need to repeat myself until such time as I grow weary of trying to educate the unteachable. At which point they are told they are on Ignore and that part of the conversation is over. Again, consistently lying to me or misrepresenting your position will get you called out. If that's a problem it's YOUR problem, not mine.

March 19

6 minutes ago, Ghost said:

Sigh

What actual good does it do to go back and forth with someone who disagrees with your suggestion?

I went back and forth with Rudra because they were misrepresenting what I said, lying about what they said and did, and they used a logical fallacy.

In short, I called BS on BS, ultimately it had next to nothing to do with him disagreeing with my suggestion.

Almost everyone else in this thread has managed to keep the discussion civil.

Rather than start a new thread, I would ask you (and everyone else) how does this change negatively impact your play style if one of the more buggy ATs in the game is given this small improvement?

March 19

21 minutes ago, Rudra said:

And the response I was about to give would have gotten me banned, so instead I will say that when you use Walk? Of course things take time. The pets need to heal between fights for the lack of support. How much and how long varies, but after every fight there is a pause waiting for pets to recover. You have to make sure you are only facing one group at a time, otherwise the pets need the support to survive, so checking to make sure you only have one group to fight takes time. The whole thing takes time and lots of it. I never said Walking through missions as a MM was fast or expedient. I said it could be done while keeping the MM perfectly safe. And that takes time even if you aren't restricting yourself using Walk. All of this should have been obvious from the very first comment about MM characters being safe even while using Walk. So if your whole point was "no kidding, genius. It takes time to use Walk and get through a mission"? Then you completely missed my point.

(Edit: And for clarification? That point was that out of all the ATs, the MM is the only one outside of maybe Controllers or Dominators that can use Walk and be in an Only Affects Self state while soloing a mission and be safe.)

I didn't answer because it is a non-issue if the people in control of game development have decided it won't be done. If you want my answer to that though? That would be fine. Great even. My MMs would be so much more powerful if it was implemented. Never again would I have to upgrade my pets. If I'm fighting EBs or AVs, or even some bosses that seem to only have high damage AoEs? I can drown them in a sea of pets so much faster. (Which is probably why it won't be done.)

Then you're still here for the sole purpose of being argumentative.

And that's aside from the negative value you add to the rest of the conversation. Welcome to Ignore.

March 19

7 minutes ago, Rudra said:

As has already been stated in this thread, the devs have already said no to this idea because taking the time to upgrade pets is part of the expected game play loop for the AT.

This is called an "Argument from Authority" and is one of the classic Logical Fallacies.

I know what the Devs have said. I'm asking for player opinions. I do not need your permission to ask the community a question.

A question I notice that you didn't answer.

March 19

1 minute ago, Rudra said:

So from 'it's not possible' to 'of course that happens when you walk'? Okay.

And no, the results were not the same. First fight was a boss fight, and the pets handled that just fine. Second fight was a regular fight and one of my pets was left near dead at the end. Results like that are typical, but that does not make walking through missions impossible unless the mobs are all grey as was previously cited. And in the video, I even upgraded my T3 while he was still untargetable. Something else that was claimed could not be done on this thread.

So the net presentation of your post is "lah lah lah I can't hear you".

I did NOT say it's possible when you walk. You said you have to stop and rest.

To which my response is "No kidding, genius".

Please understand that my next question is not sarcasm, it's based on the lack of understanding that seems to be taking place between us. Is English your first language?

March 19

There seems to be a lot of consternation about this request, while at the same time some posters don't seem to understand how the AT works at a very basic level.

So let me ask you this: "How does this change negatively impact your play style if one of the more buggy ATs in the game is given this small improvement?"

March 19

23 hours ago, Rudra said:

MMs never leave their HP anywhere unless it is from taking damage. Pets aren't more HP. They are extra damage mitigation, but only while in Bodyguard Mode with the pets in Supremacy range. You aren't losing any HP when you set pets to Aggressive or Passive, just changing what you are having those pets do.

Tell me you don't understand how Bodyguard works without using those words.

No one else has argued my statement that my HP get scattered across a zone, or within a mission, if I'm using a travel power - any travel power with the possible exception of Group Teleport which I have not tested.

March 19

18 hours ago, Rudra said:

Here, have a demorecording.

I kept it short because waiting for henchmen to heal up for the next fight makes for a very long video.

neko.cohdemo 1.14 MB · 2 downloads

Not even bothering to watch this waste of time.

You said you put on walk and walk through the mission. If that's not slow enough to keep your henchmen from dying...

So Sapphire was correct, and you have contributed less than nothing to this conversation.

@kwsapphire so you can see that he gets the exact same results you presented.

March 18

2 hours ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

There are other options that allow you to keep your pets alive while also not using just the more defensive secondaries. Of those options my favorite is to team up with a Tank or a Brute and let them draw aggro before ordering my NPC minions to attack.

I'm discussing the utility and QoL of playing an MM, not the benefits of teaming.

My general preference is to team with others, but that's not what we are discussing here.

March 18

2 hours ago, Doc_Scorpion said:

There are multiple ways to mitigate damage and death/destruction among your pets. You can buff them, or you can heal them. Or you can debuff the mobs. Or you can take a more offensive stance and assist them in destroying the mobs before your pets can become casualties. There are no secondaries that don't have valid playstyles.

Your personal preferences among those playstyles or inability to master them is not a reason to change the fundamental gameplay loop of the archetype.

Oh, now it's my inability to master playstyles with buffing and debuffing is it?

I'm a member of the Repeat Offenders, and have been since Live. The Devs have heard of us, even if you haven't.

I assure you that a fully IO'd Barrier Reef combined with a fully IO'd Soothing Wave is insufficient to keep my Zombies alive, even when combined with the rest of the buffs from Marine Affinity.

I don't recall my henchmen dying right and left on my Bots/Traps MM, but then again that character has FFG combined with the ProBots shielding, backed up with the Maintenance bot.

I could continue but you get the general idea.

I have not played every MM primary with every MM secondary, I'm sure there are some (e.g. Bots/Traps) where there is a good synergy that results in minimal dead henchmen. Unfortunately, playing MMs is less fun that playing most of my other characters due to QoL issues like the one in this thread, so it will probably be quite some time before I get to even play every secondary on MMs.

In closing, if you can't keep your speech civil (and I assure you that your little "lrn2play n00b" dig was not civil), it would be best if you bowed out of the conversation gracefully.

March 18

13 hours ago, srmalloy said:

And I just finished going through all of my Mastermind bind files to preface the binds for the upgrades with '+targetcustomnear alive mypet$$' to make the bind target the nearest pet, eliminating the need to double-tap the first use to target a pet. I can corroborate from testing with my Necromancy/Marine Mastermind that I can run through the Skeleton/Grave Knight/Lich summons, then slap the first empowerment on a Skeleton while the Lich is still untargetable, and the Lich gets the empowerment.

Now that (bolded above) is the second useful piece of information I've gotten from this three page thread. And that's my bad, I don't use "targetcustom near" enough.

Honorable Mention to @Snarky for stating an obvious truth.

March 18

12 hours ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

There are a lot of ways you can make your minions more durable, and prevent from having to constantly resummon and upgrade them, other than just asking the devs to buff them.

1) I expect high casualties on the T1s

2) I expect casualties on the T2s

Now, from a gameplay standpoint, what is the difference between preventing those casualties and recovering from those casualties?

If preventing the casualties is the only option I'm limited to Thermal, Cold, FF, and Sonic secondaries, or Robotics primary. That means that, for the sake of keeping myself sane, I don't get to play all the other wonderful secondaries the devs have created.

Whereas, if the change I requested is made, now the secondaries all have valid, but different gameloops.

March 18

On 3/16/2025 at 12:35 PM, Rudra said:

And yet yesterday, I spent a good portion of the day on my Ninja/Dark MM doing the Organ Grinders Flashback doing exactly that at +0/x3. I entered the missions, turned on Walk, and walked through the missions. Only on 1 mission did I have to turn off Walk and support my pets because I got jumped by 3 groups of Rikti on a sewer map.

If your team stays together in the crates/containers part of the mission? You most definitely can keep your pets alive. If they scatter? Then let them. Do what you can or just go prepare for Marauder's arrival.

I'll believe you when I see the video of that run.

March 18

On 3/14/2025 at 12:55 PM, Rudra said:

Also, as a heads up in case anyone is unaware, if you are having problems targeting one of your pets for anything? Whether an upgrade or a heal or any other reason? Simply click them in the pet window and it selects them.

Ahh yes. Because that is so ridiculously easy to do in the middle of combat.

I'm micromanaging the pets because if I don't they'll run off and aggro another spawn.

March 18

On 3/14/2025 at 11:41 AM, PeregrineFalcon said:

It's part of the challenge of playing a Mastermind. It's also why my two favorite MMs are /FF, so that I'm not having to constantly resummon my minions.

So you take FF specifically to avoid that challenge. Because MMs don't have enough challenges already, like leaving half their HP scattered across the zone behind them when they travel. And if you have the audacity to mention Group Fly I'll laugh in your face.

On 3/14/2025 at 11:41 AM, PeregrineFalcon said:

Personally I think it's a good thing that the various ATs are so different, there's an AT out there for everyone.

You say you're glad the ATs are so different (as am I) but you also state that your favorite MM secondary prevents the problem I'm wanting solved.

I like the buff/debuff secondaries, they are all wildly different. But to have one secondary (or 2 if you count Sonic) that fixes a flaw in the AT design while snubbing the others seems unjust.

March 18

On 3/14/2025 at 10:54 AM, PeregrineFalcon said:

Well, I got lucky. I expected to spend nearly an hour searching for it, especially since I couldn't remember who said it or when.

Here's a weird coincidence. When I posted yesterday that the devs had already said that, it was four years to the day after he'd said it.

In case I didn't already say it, thanks for digging that up.

March 17

On 3/14/2025 at 4:06 PM, Rudra said:

Holy hells. Way to misinterpret what is being said. The point is that I can very much with any of my MMs regardless of primary-secondary combination just turn on Walk on the character and be perfectly safe as my henchmen annihilate everything on the map trying to threaten me. What I am not saying is that I don't use my secondaries, because when I'm on teams or running through +4/x8 on my MMs, I do. Damn, how can you misread my post that badly?!

That's what I got from it as well.

On 3/14/2025 at 4:06 PM, Rudra said:

You can select any pet in the pet window and that pet will be selected. If you are trying to upgrade a pet you just summoned and you have other pets? Select one of the other pets and apply the upgrade through them. It's that simple. Or are you intentionally misreading my posts?

That is incorrect info.

Click on summon T1, and T2. Once the T1 is complete click T3 and immediately try to click the T3 in the Pet window. You can't. If you upgrade another henchman instead the T3 won't get the upgrade.

Do you even play an MM, ever?

March 14

On 10/18/2024 at 10:02 AM, Greycat said:

I'm generally a big advocate of knockback. I think people need to quit having a kneejerk reaction to it and learn to use it. It can be very helpful when people are using it correctly.

You'll note, I hope, the word *people* in there, though. The game's NPC routines are not "people," and won't learn how to be helpful with it - whether that's pets or allied NPCs like Sefu or Imperious. (I'm all for keeping it when it's an NPC the player has to fight.) I'm all FOR changing friendly-NPC use into Knockdown or something.

Imperious, as I recall, has the same "template" granted to him by the Well that Statesman did - roughly that of Zeus. In that sense, the handclap that knocks everything back makes sense, but has always had the exact issue mentioned by the OP - the NPC doesn't know (or just plain can't) use it well, so players either try to lose him or try to get him killed. I would either replace it with Tyrant's lightning strike - probably toned down to not have the "going to lag some people out" issue - or the Mighty judgement PBAOE "knock everyone straight up into the air" bit, which has the bonus of being thematically very similar but less disruptive to the team.

Both powers have the benefit of not needing to be created - they already exist (and are actually used by NPCs - while I don't *think* any NPCs use the punch-the-ground animation, Jane Temblor uses essentially this power. Poorly, granted, but she uses it.

(I'm not, for what it's worth, for removing Imperious completely. Thinking "in world," he'd have to be seen fighting alongside the players to defend the people he's leading or it would undermine his authority to some extent.)

The operative phrase here being "...when used correctly."

I'm a guy who had a Storm/Energy Def as my main for the longest time, and I agree that attitudes to KB and Repel need to change.

But I'm also the guy who slots KB>KD in every power that has radial KB, because that stuff is just disruptive to the rest of the team. I use KB for positioning the mobs where I want them. One ran away from the Tank? BAM, back to Daddy you go. Someone escaped a debuff/damage patch (e.g. Freezing Rain or Rain of Fire)? Ok buster, back into the pool.

I'll say right up front that Imperious (aka Clappulus Maximus) is a real PitA, so when I'm running an ITF I try to be the first one in the door so I can dump him on a wall somewhere and get the Romans to murder him.

March 14

9 hours ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Unfortunately, the Homecoming developers have already said that they will not make the upgrades passive. I think that summoning and resumming and upgrading is part of the intended gameplay loop.

I suppose I could go find the post if you really need me to.

I would appreciate it. Every post I've found someone says the devs won't implement this idea, but I haven't found a post with a dev comment yet.

March 14

On 2/8/2025 at 12:52 PM, macskull said:

OP probably did not play back when your pets needed to be resummoned every time you zoned (and the recharge times of the pet summon powers were 60/90/120 seconds instead of 5/10/15 seconds) and the upgrades needed to be applied to each pet individually.

I did.

And I still agree with the OP.

March 14

3 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

I think a better comparison would be if a buffer cast a buff on someone and then it just randomly blinked off and then had to be recast.

There are keybinds for targetting teammates. How do I make a keybind to target a specific one of my T1 or T2 henchmen? I'm not making custom keybinds to tag my T1s and T2s by name for every MM I have.

March 14

On 3/13/2025 at 12:22 AM, UltraAlt said:

Being in Defense mode doesn't stop your pets from attacking.

If you are attacked, your henchmen attack whomever attacked you.

If one of your pets are attacked, they attack whomever attacked them.

They don't stop attacking when you switch to defensive mode if they are already in combat.

Everytime my characters don't have enough endurance to continue attacking and that includes when I think I will be taking them too low on END to keep toggles running.

Not my first rodeo, chief. I use Sandolphan's MM keybinds to direct them.

As for running out of End if you're over level 20 and running out of End you're not well slotted, or you're facing foes that drain your End. Those are problems you can fix. In nearly 20 years of playing I've only had ONE toon that burned End so fast that even a billion Inf build couldn't fix him. I haven't recreated him on HC yet because I just don't have that kind of Inf to burn.

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