Bonkleberry

Well that seems silly. So, you are saying in-game tooltips are broken? Why would they include Scourge if Controller powers do not include Containment and Scrapper do not include Critical? This is news to me, but I have not been back in the game for that long.

Umm... If you say so. Just using the ingame base numbers: Fire Blast Blaster Corruptor Flares 63.19 71.74 Fire Blast 84.72 98.19 Fire Ball 74.62 87.29 Rain of Fire 125.12 166.83 Fire Breath 109.8 146.39 Blaze 170.49 202.08 Inferno 410.94 357.37 They even have the same target and damage caps. So, either those numbers are wrong, or you somehow think Blaster Secondaries and Defiance some how make Blasters significantly more damaging than Corruptor Secondaries (which frequently include -res and +damage) and Scourge.

I put range in the final pet buff instead of endurance reduction. For some reason it has, like, half the range of the other buff...

I mean, I am not even sure why "role" is a topic of discussion. This game does not have organized team roles. If we are trying to argue which AT has the best pew pew numbers and that AT wins the choice, then neither Blasters nor Sentinels win that category--that win goes to Corruptors. You are not choosing Blaster or Sentinel for ranged damage numbers. You choose Blaster for melee options and Sentinel for better survuvability.

I see some chatter than you can use phrases like "kill all", "speed", and "steamroll" to indicate stuff like that. However, my experience tells me it does not work. I joined a "kill all" ITF last week and people were skipping stuff. Ho hum.

I survive team wipes all the time on squishy characters. It is called running away.

I would vote for Sentinel. On certains teams, a Blaster can go ham, sure. On every team a Sentinel can go ham. I just have no idea where people are getting this notion that Blasters can reach Sentinel level protection for resistances and mez at all times. Maybe if the team composition has a lot of support buffs. You cannot ignore the fact that a Blaster has to be careful not to attract too much aggro against certain enemy groups in certain team comps. A Sentinel has to be less careful and can pretty much pew pew away without fear most of the time. A Sentinel can also boost overall team damage versus single targets with their special ability. Unless the target is an AV or GM, then Blaster Damage versus Sentinel Damage should not matter--everything dies in seconds anyway. Against a GM or AV, though, I would value the Sentinel more over the Blaster because of Opportunity. The entire team dishing out 20% more damage to the target would far outweigh any extra damage a Blaster brings to the table. Sure, the Blaster can be a trash hero with their target caps, but that is just meh for me. Nobody is proud or grateful to have a trash hero, because trash is just that, trash.

To answer your question, you can set your experience at the P2W vendor. They have a section for experience that allows you to "purchase" time on experience boosts. All options are free to buy, but they cut how much influence you earn. You can get to level 50 fairly fast.

I love the Poison Trap from Poison on my Thug/Poison. It is a low cooldown, large area of effect hold. In +X/8 missions I can use it to hold most minions and lieutenants without much effort. It helps when solo to soften the incoming damage, since all I can personally do for pet defense is some resistances and defense soft cap. Just by watching damage to your pets and your party, you can tell the difference between using it and not using iI could proc it out, but I do not bother. I use the purple hold set in it which has the damage proc. The damage is nice when it goes off. As for the differences with Traps Poison Trap, Josh got it right. The Traps one has a long cast time and can be interupted. It also has a -regen debuff. The Poison one feels more instant cast and cannot be interupted. It is supposed to have an endurance debuff, but I have never noticed it working much, even when I solo AVs.

I have more of those I can use at the moment from knocking out the Incarnate story arcs. I can finish an arc by myself with minimal effort. My Incarnate progression is actually being held back by earning threads, because it seems like such a waste to waste merits on thread conversion.

lol I am not trying to argue or control people. Things just seemed wierd to me and I was worried the information I have access to is wrong or incomplete. But thank you.

So, what am I missing here? I generally run my missions on the lower end of difficulty settings. I set it to where I know I can clear my missions at a rate that I am happy with while getting good rewards. I am starting to get my level shifts, so I have the potential to change up my difficulty strategy for more rewards without making things more difficult. However, before I did that, I decided that I needed more information. I finally got around to looking up what upping mission difficulty actually does for my benefit and it looks like +1/8 with AVs turned off us the most efficient setting for earning recipes and salvage. Am I missing something? Almost everyone seems to be running at +4/8 and I cannot figure out why. Like, I know you get higher exeprience and influence/infamy earnings, but veteran levels are meh to me and I earn WAY more influence from selling recipes and rare salvage. I feel like there is some mechanic that I am missing here for rewards. From what I am reading online, mission difficulty does not affect mission/story arc rewards. Fighting higher level foes does not increase their chances of dropping stuff or change the pool of potential drops after level 51. AVs can have a higher chance of dropping recipes, but, unless you are sporting a build that can take on AVs well, you might save a substantial amount of time just killing them as an Elite Boss and moving on (AVs and Elite Bosses have the same loot tables as Minions, Lieutenants, and Bosses). I suppose some players may also just want the challange that +4/8 provides. I cannot know for sure, but it seems fishy to me that a culture of "let's try and skip as much of the mission as possible" always wants to play at the hardest difficulty just because it is available.

I am just popping in for an update. I am not giving up on my Mastermind over one gripe with the pets on speed teams. Thinking about it, I do not even like speed runs anyway. They are the whole reason I do not play Illusion Control anymore... Not only that, but I recently learned that Incarnate trials are not even required. Being a returning player, I just had this idea made up in my head that the endgame is nothing but people skipping content and leaving me behind. While it certainly can be, there are still people that are okay with doing this the normal way. I will join their ranks and not encourage skipping. Solo is too fun with my Mastermind. Missions are a cake walk and I do not need to fear Elite Bosses like I would on the Controller, Sentinel, or Arachnos Soldier I tried leveling up before this character. I do not need to fear GMs or AVs either, but I cannot debuff their regen enough on my own to take them down (I tried). My pets and I are pretty much unkillable (if I play smart) and I am not even fully slotted for the defenses I am planning and I am missing all of my incarnate slots except for Alpha. I spent some time thinking of new characters builds that I could put together to assist better with team content, but it always ended the same before I hit that create new button: none of the concepts I was coming up with would be as safe for solo content as I would prefer. I even considered some different Mastermind secondaries, but none of the builds could support enough slotting and power choices as my current one could. So, in conclusion, I have one gripe with Masterminds that I hope gets fixed someday. For now, I feel fine in all other categories, so I can compromise. I am happily soloing the Incarnate Story arcs and whatever other arcs I feel like doing. I have already soloed the Carnival, both Preatorian AV arcs, the Malta, and the Nemesis Rex.

Or maybe some higher up who is paying attention can alter Recall Friend to bring all pets if one is teleported. Or even better, make the pet emhamcement abilities an auto power or sonething that all we need to do is summon the pets and not need to worry about them being bunched up for buffing.

I suppose I should specify that I do not feel completely useless. I just feel left behind because my pets are usually not present when we need to jump around so much and I waste so much time summoning them. I know I am contributing as Poison. I always see team comments about how fast Bosses, AVs, and GMs fall when I am on a team. They think it is just an awesome team, but they do not realize it is because I am stacking more than -75% Res and -70% defense and effects on single targets by myself. Poison is not exactly an obviously-in-your-face-doing-something powerset. It is just the Mastermind pets that are the problem. I love them and their DPS, but if they are not present, I feel like it looks like I am doing nothing during the battle. I am strongly considering swapping to some type of controller instead and maybe I will appear a lot more useful to parties and at least have more options to contribute when my pets are not immediately available.

I am just coming here for the final say on whether I stick with my Mastermind or not. I have a Thugs/Poison that I have been working on. She is at level 50 with the Alpha slot unlocked and I have the four HP/End accolade powers. I have been having fun with her, so far, and things go well for solo play. However, sometimes in group play I am finding that I am often too slow for what seems to be the current accepted rate of play. If I land on a team that wants to skip all the content and head straight for the goals only, I need to dismiss my pets. Then once we get there I spend most of the battle resummoning and buffing and I barely contribute. Of course things are different if I am in a party that has no problem doing things the normal way, but even then I am slightly slower because my pets are slow to travel unless there is a Kinetics user that buffs my pets. I have not attempted incarnate trials yet, but I am afraid to join them. I have seen in general and help chat already that Masterminds are often too slow and they are regulated to a support role in parties. /Poison is not exactly stellar team support. So, I am basically wondering if I should bother investing more time in this Mastermind? I would like to hear from other max level content Masterminds. Do Masterminds, specifically /Poison, have a solid role in good parties? Or is this just going be an ongoing problem and I need to switch to a different AT, like Controller?

I called it out in help chat earlier and they felt I should post here about it. I have a level 33 Illusion/Traps Controller and I was doing some missions in Brickstown. I have the "Kill 30 Council" mission from Allison King. Normally, this mission would not be an issue, except my pets are ignoring the Council bad guys and the bad guys are ignoring my pets. I tried Phantom Army, Phantasm, Spectral Terror, and Acid Mortar on the enemies--nothing. I tried attacking some other mobs and my pets react to them just fine and they react to my pets. The problem seems unique to Council. EDIT: I forgot to point out that my pets are not just ignoring them, they do not affect them. Spectral Terror's fear aura did nothing to them. EDIT2: I came across some Council my pets will attack. The difference seems to be the Council groups that have a recruiter with them. If there is a recruiter with the Council before I engage, the problem happens.

I might appear new to this game, but I do have something to say regarding this topic. I play nothing but Controllers and I get annoyed by other Controllers sometimes too. Locking down everything is cool and all, but there was a reason why City of Statues was nerfed a long time ago when the game was live. Completely locking down the enemy is not that useful to the party and it can ruin the fun of the game. If everyone has competent builds they are confident playing safely and incoming damage is easily managed, then locking down the enemy only provides minor benefits to team survival while detracting from how fun the battle actually is for everyone involved. There are already examples in this thread on how Immobilize powers can actually put the party in danger by interfering with a Tank's ability to taunt or extend the length of battle by spreading everything apart. It is also not a recommended long-term plan for entertainment to just stand there and spam attacks on a target that does nothing back. Also, a controller focused on lockdown is not doing damage. You should only focus on control if the party needs it; for example, when the party is nothing but squishy ranged fighters, so a mass Immobilize keeps them free from melee attacks. Spamming control powers in battle when it is not necessary is just performing a pointless action that might interfere with other playstyles or kill the fun and excitement of the game. Control has uses, but if conditions are not met, a lockdown controller is pretty much dead weight to the party and can be annoying to play with.

Who knows. Most attacks in my experience do double damage with Containment, but occasionally I have seen some that do not. Powers that do not double usually have some damage mechanic baked into them (like how Spectral Wounds heals some damage over time). I would not expect Cross Punch to get the Spectral Wounds treatment for Containment when Boxing and Kick don't, but meh. It is what it is.

The link you shared only reinforces what I just posted, but I guess it also confirms the numbers are intentional and not a bug. Thank you for sharing that link to, I did not know that website existed. I typically expect Containment to just double the numbers, but it seems that Cross Punch has a special Containment formula, like Spectral Wounds does. EDIT: I pasted the wrong line.

Hello. I am new and stuff. I recently returned to the game (I played live on the Triumph servers way back when). I tried searching the boards for an answer first, but nobody seems to reference this power much for Controllers. Anyway, is Cross Punch working as intended for Controllers with Containment, or is it bugged? I took it with Boxing and Kick on my Constalker (Illusion Controller with melee attacks) and Containment is not triggering extra damage as expected. Boxing and Kick both trigger two identical damage numbers with Containment. Cross Punch generates one large number, the expected damage outcome, and a second number that is around the same damage as the Boxing numbers. This does not seem right. Combining the two damage numbers, Cross Punch is dealing the same damage for me that Kick does, but with double the recharge, so it is lower DPS than both Kick and Boxing unless it hits another target. All of that said, I had trouble finding numbers on Cross Punch before I took them myself, so I am going to put some damage comparisons here. Boxing does nearly identical damage to Blind, but the fast recharge pushes its DPS well above Blind and Spectral Wounds. Kick and Cross Punch hit for the same damage as Spectral Wounds, before the heal, so both are superior DPS options and Kick is the king with the recharge.