crimson72

I played the original game I believe up until around Issue 7 or 8, so there's a lot of new stuff in this version that I never got to experience. Back then, I had a group of friends and family who also played this, and I had a far easier time playing whatever I wanted, because I could always generally get a team and didn't have to rely on the generosity of strangers. In this version, I started as a thugs/poison mastermind, and felt like this class was extremely weak. Struggled for about 20ish levels with little to no resources for gear. Getting on a decent team was rare, and solo leveling a pleb mastermind was very slow. HOWEVER Then I made a spines/fire brute, and started fire farming to power level myself and get drops and money and found this game to be far more enjoyable than the struggles of a fresh starting account with low-mid level mastermind with little to no resources. Now I at least got enough to keep my enhancements up to date and then some. And I'm able to make steady and consistent progress without requiring myself to be carried by the community's generosity. This is my personal opinion, but based on my experience, I wouldn't recommend a returning player on a fresh account try to play anything other than an AE farming build with their first character, because that's a really steep road, and you'd be relying on getting on solid teams in order to level up, which isn't guaranteed, but you'd probably have better luck than I did if you actually have IRL friends or family who play this.

If your goal is to merely destroy large packs of mobs as quickly and efficiently as possible? I just want to make a brute so I can kill tons of mobs, get tons of inf, and drops, and even power level some people.

Triage beacon with traps is completely useless, I can't notice a difference when it's on or off. It should be healing a certain amount per tick that scales with level or something, or a %HP amount per tick. I recently rolled a thugs/traps mastermind, and I truthfully 100% feel like I just stumbled on the worst possible build in the game currently. It does no damage, has no heals, and a bunch of stuff that takes too much time to place. I think the acid mortar should be placed without a crouching on the ground animation, just summon it like a pet. The other stuff, you should be able to toss it to the ground like caltrops vs crouching down. Traps needs a huge amount of love.

It would be a buff actually, because jacobs ladder sounds better than thugs.

Thugs are pretty well garbage. It's probably the weakest of the mastermind pools, it honestly used to be the strongest one in the original game for awhile, so I don't know what happened between then and now, but I can say with certainty that thugs are trash now.