Bonkleberry

I have a Tankermind that I have "led" through a 54/8 before without dying once. To answer your questions: 1. Traps, Force Field, or Sonic are the only three sets that can offer you that. Good luck, though, because what they offer is not strong enough to prevent being mezzed during some alpha strikes, which you should be absorbing if you are being a Tankermind. 2. Force Field and Traps, really. Storm Summoning, Dark Miasma, and Cold Domination to a minor extent providing defense for you. 3. Not happening, but I guess Force Field can be on the cheaper side of things. So, in conclusion, as many have said already, you seem to be looking for Force Field as a secondary. However, I have so insights for you, if you want them. All you need to survive as a Tankermind is the following: 1. Approach the defense soft cap for yourself as much as you can. This is a given for most good builds and can be accomplished with set bonuses and pool powers. 2. A group heal (Radiant Aura, Healing Aura, etc.) or high minion healing (I think only Beasts and Necromancy can do this). Bodyguard mode can do a ton of damage to your pets, and it bypasses pet defenses. Bodyguard mode is also the best defense any Mastermind can hope to put together. No matter how much defense or resistance you give your pets, an alpha strike you absorb can kill all of your pets easily. Group heals or pets self healing make that damage go away. Group heals are particularly potent because, with all six pets summoned, damage is split 7 ways among you and your pets, but your healing is not split, therefore your group heal is like a 7x boosted ST heal. My group heal heals for 223 every 3 seconds, that translates to about 520 healing a second by spamming my heal in high damage situations. 3. As much Mez resistance as you can get. As a Mastermind, you really do not have a reliable source of 24/7 Status Protection for yourself outside of Force Field, Sonic, or Traps, but you do not need it. If you slot at least 5 purple sets with 10% mez resistance, mezzes do not last long on you. You can get more from other sets, enhancements, or powers. Most mezzes on my character only last a second. I find just keeping a handful of Break Frees on me for oh crap moments works fine. Mezzes usually do not phase me at all, and I only ever run into mez issues against Talons of Vengeance, Circle of Thorns, and Malta--those issues are easily solved with some minor tactical planning and understanding how the mob mezzes work. 4. Debuffs and a ton of control. Just taking one look through Mastermind secondaries will show you that buffing ourselves is not something we excel at. We do, however, have a ton of debuffs and, when you consider epic power pools, a ton of control. Masterminds can lock down a group of enemies with the right power selections. Think playing a controller, but with freedom to spam control AoEs since you can survive continued aggro. I have so much control on my Mastermind, that it is a common problem for my pets to stop attacking and doing damage, because I have everything controlled and nobody is taking damage, so Defensive AI kicks in and thinks I am not fighting anymore. All of that said, auto-hit AoEs will always be the bane of your existence as a Tankermind, as they will melt your pets as they both take their own damage, and split damage from you taking damage. This makes tanking some GMs or AVs (particularly Eochai or the Jade Spider) not possible without support. A Mastermind is also incapable of out damaging most other ATs, so, without a taunt, they cannot hold aggro. Tankerminds are not main tanks and only work on self-sufficient teams (as a fight starter) or solo.

I was on a Manticore TF PUG once where the whole team wanted to skip what we could, but the only team members with stealth were me and a Stalker and neither of us had Assemble the Team yet. Several missions were just the Stalker and me duoing final rooms while the rest of the team sat at the door. One of the missions bugged and we all had to disband anyway.

k I never claimed they could not solo. I am merely stating a fact that Necromancy/Dark Miasma is not a very durable build combination. The best route for slotting, i.e. most efficient, is to tackle content more friendly to their build to get resources first.

I do NOT want a taunt on my Bruiser. 1) That would instantly kill any Tankermind build that uses Thugs as a primary, as the idea of a Tankermind is to direct all damage to the Mastermind and split it with bodyguard mode. 2) The Bruiser would interfere with tanking. If a party tank is trying to reposition enemies, then the Bruiser could taunt off the tank and cause team friction. If the tank in your party is good, then having your Bruiser taunt enemies and take unnecessary damage themselves would only lower the Mastermind's contributions to fight as they would possibly need to constantly resummon or heal the Bruiser.

I think the best route for slotting for you is to exemplar down and run low level content until you get enough money for slotting set enhancements and you get enough threads for incarnate powers and level shifts. Your primary/secondary combination of Necromancy/Dark Miasma is not a very durable combination for solo play or +4/8 play.

I just wanted to answer your first question. Pretty much all Mastermind primaries except Thugs and Ninjas can heal themselves. The best primary for self healing pets, in my opinion, is Necromancy, because all of the pets get a Life Drain/Siphon Life power with the final pet upgrade that they spam as a part of their normal DPS rotation. I suppose that does not fit with your Robotic theme, though. Ho hum.

I took the time to grind over 200 candy canes tonight and I have at least 10 Prismatic Aether, yet the Elf Vendor in Pocket D will not let me create the Snow Beast Costume. I have tried everything I can think of. I deleted my Temp powers. I turned off all toggles. I logged out and logged back in a couple times. I even went and bought the Costume Accolade for 50 Prismatic Aether and a Rikti costume just to make sure costumes work on this character, and you can see in the screen shot I attached that I do not already have the costume. Even though influence is not listed as necessary, I have millions of influence. I tried asking help chat, and nobody knew. I could not get in touch with a GM. I did a web and forums search and found nothing. I am at a complete loss as to why I cannot create this Prestige Power. UPDATE: I logged out for a bit to make this post, and logged back in to give things another try. Now the Snow Beast costume does not show up in the list to buy anymore. *GAH*

I already read that, thanks. It makes no mention of what happened with the macro and, of course, does not take into account what the new norm is in the community. I just says what changed.

Yeah, that is what changed. You used to be able to use the macro without standing near a portal. Ho hum. It is what it is.

I am playing on Excelsior. Cosmic Transport was the Macro I used before. It was not working when I tried it. Did they change how it works?

Hello, it has been almost a year since I last played. I can usually pick up on new stuff quite fast, but I am slightly confused on the changes to travel and zone teleportation. When I last played, there was this macro that everyone used that teleported you to a special base, filled with portals and other useful stuff, from anywhere in the world. Between that macro and Ouroboros, you could get anywhere in the game pretty fast. It seems, though, this macro no longer works. When I click it, it says I need to be near a Super Group portal. I tried reading patch notes and stuff and even checked for guides on how people get around now, but all I could find was this thing on Long Range Teleport being an accolade now. So, I am asking anybody on the forums, how do people get around these days? Does everyone just use that long range teleport option? Do people still use the macro, but now I just need to travel to a Super Group Portal? Was there some sort of functionality added to the UI I have not noticed yet? I am leveling a new Controller and I would like to know this information before I attempt a Task Force. Nobody wants to be that person who takes forever to travel to the next mission. Thank you,

I am not sure if this has been covered yet, but only the ally heal, rez, healing buff are really of any use in the medicine pool powerset. Since you already have access to O2 Boost, the Heal Other is a pointless pick. I have never seen anybody pick the Injection for self use and fhe debuff is meh. The heal self is NOT useful during combat. It has something like a 4 second cast time and can be interrupted. In the heat of the moment, if you spam the power to get it to go off, you will just interupt yourself several times and waste endurance (the endurance cost goes off when you hit the power, whether it healed or not). I suppose some teams will be happy for the rez ability, but rezes are often skipped powers in general. In the end, you would need essentially two pointless power picks to get the small endurance from the last power.

As others have pointed out, your screen shot is not much help. For all we know, you were missing some type of buff when the hit happened, but you had the buff on in your screen shot.

You pretty much picked the FOTM builds from when the game was still live before IOs.

Yay for necro threads! But yeah, the game was not challanging at all back then or boring. Sure, compared to the games we have now, it seems like it would have been a pain, but the only MMO competitors back then were like WoW, Lineage, and Everquest--Guildwars came a bit later. Those games sucked at early levels as well. I mean, in Lineage you had to rest after every battle and WoW mounts were impossible to buy until max level without a friend's help, so running everywhere was half the game. All of the games sucked together, though, so the slog seemed normal. It was just a matter of fact for MMOs back then that characters at low levels were AWFUL until you reached a certain turning point were they became bearable. If you stuck with a character that long, that was a sign you enjoyed playing it enough that maybe you should take it to max level. There was also no option to just go play another game, because the other games were the same.