TheMoncrief

Devouring Earth are the most egregious micro-stunners I've found. It's mostly the Fungoid enemies, although I think the various ranks of Devoured and also Deathcaps do it sometimes too. So focus down the Fungoids first, and you will probably be able to keep your offensive toggles active for the rest of the fight. Personally, I just avoid the faction when possible, and when not possible I lower difficulty so I can just blast past them. I have yet to find a character that is fun to play when facing Devouring Earth, so I don't care about anything except finishing the mission(s) so I can actually play the game some more. For other factions, learn which enemies tend to mez you and focus them down first. You should be able to send your pets in to kill off one or two mezzers in a spawn and still step in to participate more actively once the spawn will not constantly detoggle you.

What are some recommended power set combinations for a solo-competent Defender? I'm not planning to make the character dedicated to solo play, I plan to team most of the time, but sometimes I think I won't be in a good situation to team up and will just want to knock out a few missions or something, and don't really want to have to shelf the character in that situation. I don't have a specific theme picked out other than a Defender that is useful in teams but not entirely dependent on them.

Sincerely hoping this gets fixed. I'm not playing a /Kinetics Mastermind, and thus don't get the luxury of replacing missing enhancement value with massive buffs like Fulcrum Shift. Granted, the missing enhancement value is not a make or break issue for Beast Mastery, but it is still a problem.

One thing I didn't mention is that normally Beasts, being almost entirely melee based, would have some issues with flying enemies. However, the personal attacks in the set offer -Fly, and thus can be used to pull enemies flying frustrating out of range from your pets down to the earth where their faces can be properly eaten. While I don't recommend Mastermind personal attacks as a major source of damage, Beast Mastery offers better ones than most others, with proc opportunities as Clave Dark 5 mentioned above, and a special effect that is in some situations highly useful to your pets.

Beasts are fine. They aren't the best MM primary, but neither are they the worst. They do excellent single target damage, but their AoE is fairly weak. They have the advantage of being able to use a number of useful procs, and the disadvantage of not having an extra power able to take pet enhancements and so have to mule the defense and resistance auras in their active pets. They are tougher than most other MM pets, but you don't notice it much because, being purely melee focused, they also are exposed to more damage than most other MM pets. I can't speak much about Electrical Affinity, though.

As a Robotics Mastermind, grouping is not even remotely relevant to my Knockback problems. My primary power set depends heavily on grouping up enemies to destroy them with the Assault Bot's AoE attacks. Most of the attacks across all my pets do knockback. For survivability, I pretty much require several aura IO's in my pets, and unlike some other MM primaries, I don't have a power outside of my three main line pets to hold them. The upshot? I either sacrifice more slots than I can really afford for KB -> KD procs, or I get the specific Patron Power Pool that has an AoE immobilize that prevents KB. Which is thematically a poor match for the obviously high-tech robots, given that it is Mu Mastery, an explicitly magical pool. Robotics is by no means a terrible MM primary set, but it is intensely frustrating to see my Assault Bot launch his incendiary swarm missiles, then instantly follow up with an AoE knockback. And it is equally frustrating to see my slot-starved pet powers have to sacrifice space to prevent such occurrences and allow my pets to actually work properly.

It also causes me some serious vertigo because of the crazy spinning around as I get nudged by my other pets. But it's still the only practical way to use Group Fly to travel with my pets. Alternatively use normal Fly and let them catch up with their innate super jump power shortly after I get where I'm going. That usually works.

Well these days (and for a long time before I think) people consider travel powers at all to be less than desirable. So a travel power that requires 2 other power selections in a pool and doesn't even work well for its apparent purpose, yeah, it's a bad time to be Group Fly. It looks cool on a Robotics Mastermind, and is situationally useful for making sure your pets are at the proper level and not lost or stuck in some extremely vertical battle fields, but is generally not worth the power pick. And for AT's that don't rely on their army of pets, I just cannot imagine choosing it at all for anything except a theme.

If it worked to actually let your pets travel with you instead of causing you to hugely outrun them and they fall down and can't get back to you, it would be great. As it stands, it's better than worthless, but not actually good. Just make Group Fly affect your pets regardless of range and I'd love it. Then it wouldn't matter if I could outrun them. Let it keep affecting other players as it does now - players aren't my own powers and it makes sense that it requires effort to keep everybody together. But my pets should be able to follow me when I have a power specifically to enable them to follow me.

Somebody in the Help chat the other day brought up something I'd noticed a while back, but never bothered asking, even though it seems like something that is at least wonky if not actually bugged. Dire Wolves, when slotted with Damage Enhancements, appears to enhance both Damage and Resist Damage. Which is cool and all, beasts need all the protection they can get, but both Damage and Resist Damage seem to be following the Resist Damage Enhancement Diversification threshold. That is, you start to get *MUCH* less effect around 55% enhancement instead of around 95%, which would be normal for Damage Enhancement. What's up with that? Is it a display bug, or does it actually hinder the Dire Wolf's damage potential? And if the latter, is it a bug we might hope to see fixed at some point, or is it working as intended for some bizarre reason?

If it were easy, I imagine they'd already have done it. It's only mildly infuriating in its current state because the power choice *IS* so marginal, and would be so even if it were fixed. I'm sure there is a solution, such as just setting the Group Fly to set flight speed cap and flight speed to equal the user's for all recipients, but I'm also sure that there are lots of other problems our team of volunteers can be working on. I'd like it solved, but I'm not going to hold my breath or get particularly outraged if it's one of those issues that just stays there indefinitely. Really, I mostly count myself fortunate to get to play this game at all.

I'd be satisfied if Group Fly would at least let my Mastermind pets keep up with me. Even as a travel power, it just doesn't work well. If it's not being buffed to work well in combat, at least let it do what it is currently supposed to do properly.

1. You and your pets gain stacks of a buff called Pack Mentality as they attack (and as you attack with attacks from your Primary set. This buff increases the damage they deal, and allows them to deal critical hits when you have Fortify Pack taken. When you activate Fortify Pack, the buff no longer increases their damage dealt and they cannot deal critical hits, but they gain a defense and regeneration buff. The more stacks of the buff they have, the higher these buffs become. 2. Yes, pet damage suffers quite a bit while this is active. As per answer 1, your pets no longer gain the benefits of the Pack Mentality buff, which are increased damage and the ability to deal critical hits. 3. You can make it perma I believe, but I have always used it as a panic button. I use it less as I gain enough powers in my Secondary set to keep my pets alive. Eventually I only have the power at all because it allows my pets to deal critical hits. 4. No. If you go into your enhancement management screen, you can mouse over a power to see what kinds of sets any of your powers can take.

I think the obvious answer to the thread title is "Why not?" Blasters have melee attacks. They do a ton of damage. They are better equipped than ever before to survive using them - and even in the past they could survive using them easily enough in teams with the right buffs flying around. So why not melee?

Note that Emperor Cole was correct in that Primal Earth is an existential threat to Praetoria. Primal Earth has the Hamidon contained and has plans in the works that we know are effective to defeat it - we defeat it pretty much every time it respawns. That leaves two possibilities. First, that Primal Hamidon is just as powerful as Praetorian Hamidon, and Primal Earth's heroes will eventually come and defeat Praetorian Hamidon because it's horribly dangerous even if it isn't actually unstoppable, which will remove Emperor Cole's whole justification for seizing absolute power. Second, that Praetorian Hamidon is significantly stronger than Primal Hamidon, in which case Primal Earth's heroes will eventually come and attack Praetorian Hamidon, fail, and irrevocably break the agreement Emperor Cole has in place that allows Praetoria to continue to exist. Either way, Emperor Cole loses, unless he can subdue Primal Earth before it happens.

It was fun back when perma-Elude was possible. Broken, but so were many things back then. Super Reflexes has changed a great deal since then. The defense cap was much higher than 45%, it had no scaling resistances, and there were no set bonuses to allow it to bolster its pure defense focus. It was hit pretty hard by the global defense nerf and ED. Not as hard as Regen, perhaps, but there's a reason "Nerf Regen" is a meme. Unlike Regen, Super Reflexes was actually fixed by subsequent changes to the power set and the game as a whole. It's not my favorite armor set any more, but at least I can enjoy it if my whimsy decides that today I'm playing something with Super Reflexes.

Spider-Man, like almost any hero in published comic books, is "strong enough to carry the plot." If he needs to be strong enough to throw cars around, he can. If he needs to find just lifting a car a little tough, then he'll be straining hard to lift it, even if it's the exact same car he was chucking across the street last issue. Telling the story has always been more important in comic books than maintaining perfectly consistent power levels for the heroes. No matter how much that infuriates a lot of comic book readers.

I had an on-screen message telling me a new contact had been added while I was in my enhancement management screen. It covered the Exit button to return to the main screen. It also had every interactable element, including the button to close it, off-screen. This is legitimately game breaking. OK, not quite, but any "glitch" that forces you to Alt-F4 to get out of it is a serious issue IMHO

But that can't be true - Spider Man is effective. In all seriousness, if Street Justice didn't suck, I wouldn't mind Super Strength being kept away from Scrappers nearly as much. Also, if the Hulk is the base for qualifying for Super Strength, then almost nobody has Super Strength. Not even the Thing, or Colossus. The Hulk is pretty much the strongest being in all of comic books, unless there's a cross-over with Superman.

I started a Beasts/Nature MM. If you don't mind the very limited offensive support, /Nature seems really nice. Lots of defensive options to keep your furry buddies biting and clawing the bad guys. Might not be the best secondary for Beasts, given that Fortify Pack can already make them pretty tough, but as long as they're up and fighting, I figure I'll eventually get the bad guys dead. Not like MM is a low damage AT - even without offensive support, I figure I'll kill stuff fast enough.

My Robots are named after poets. It was good enough for the main antagonist in A Miracle of Science (excellent web comic) so it's good enough for me. Chaucer, Dryden, Coleridge, Byron, Tennyson, and Spencer. I like to think my victims have a moment as they die to appreciate the sheer mechanical poetry of their clanking feet and whining capacitors as they unleash a torrent of high-energy death. My robots are no mere cannon fodder, each is an individual piece of advanced technological art, and I name them as such.