battlewraith

LOL, no. There's a reason you invest billions of inf in special IOs and grind out incarnate powers. And it's not to be mediocre in comparison to other people's performance. You completely glossed over the point of that post. The secondary approach you're talking about is completely hypothetical. It assumes that those upgraded pets, if summoned over and over, would be sufficient to zerg hard content. Nonsense. Those trash pets would get rolled over without having the backup of the secondaries. The closest anyone has come to supporting this notion was Rudra and his hilariously underwhelming "lazy day"-- walking an IOed build through 0-2/+3 content. And that only worked because after each fight, he'd stop and let the pets rest up.

This doesn't make any sense. You're describing two different scenarios. In the first, you have a build (and presumably a "strategic" playstyle) where you try to keep the pets alive. This is the world that current MM players live in. One that involves a lot of repetitive upgrading because the pets die if you are doing content that actually poses a challenge. They die while you are actively trying to keep them alive and they have been upgraded. In the second scenario, you build for recharge and end reduction and just zerg the enemies. Mmmm okayy.. but if you gimped your build to prioritize recharge and end reduction (and took less pains to keep them alive with the secondary)--there's no reason to expect better success than in scenario #1. It just sounds like an ongoing cascading failure unless your strategy is to constantly run away, respawn the pets and then come back. If that's what floats your boat, but it's not an improvement over the first scenario. A Kitted out MM with incarnates should be able handle something like +4/+8. And I think you're right that the OP won't make these struggles easier because the suggestion is about quality of life, not about making them stronger. And if you're saying that this change and the zerging you imagine won't help in higher difficulty--than that's kind of an admission that that objection is baseless.

I'm curious how people picture the carnival of shadows masks actually working. The descriptions I've read on places like the wiki describe them as porcelain masks. I've always pictured it as, once the mask is put on, it actually becomes the wearer's face. So the effect would be like whiteface and makeup rather than actually wearing a mask. The old comic from the retail days seemed to support this somewhat--when Vanessa becomes pissed her mouth is clearly represented as an actual mouth moving, not the static opening of a mask. This would also make sense in terms of porcelain mask breaking easily, restricting vision, and being a potential weakness if someone could just run up and pull it off of your face. Also, despite the fact that all of the carnies are psychically connected, there is still some sense of individuality as indicated by the various named bosses. Anyways, just curious on people's takes.

Because people change their minds about things? Or maybe they'll find some other solution to address the issue? Why spend so much time arguing with people if you're convinced that it's never going to happen anyway?

Your posts always read like a confession. I think what actually happens is they disagree with me for x reason. I argue with x reason. People dig in and they get offended. I think that's the cost of not living in a silo.

It doesn't even sound like you read the post you quoted entirely. I'm perfectly fine with open discussion, I'm also not the one clamoring for threads to be locked, people being forced to stay on topic, etc. My suggestion was really about disingenuous posters weighing in on everything out of self-interest or habit. I think it would be better if they didn't feel so entitled to derail discussions and then clutch their pearls and demand threads get locked when their feedback isn't appreciated. I certainly don't see how this would make anything worse.

Back in the day I had a dm/inv scrapper and it was badass, I could herd all of the wolves on that one AV map and bring them all over to the corner where the blasters would nuke them. If you were one of the people waiting, you'd see this writhing carpet of wolves approaching. People want fun. They want something epic. And they will always seek out the option that is different, the one that allows them to outperform in a cool way. Under those circumstances, you expect the cool thing to be nerfed. Even things that are just somewhat overperforming get nerfed. When that happens, the fun experience is gone. Nobody gets anything positive out of it--people just don't have a reason to be jealous of other players. But that type of player just thinks perfect balance is wonderful. Unfortunately, I think they are the easiest to please.

I know plenty of people that left the game because it was the same old thing. The people that moved on, for whatever reason, far exceeded those that stayed. But by your logic, making things more or less generically useful is a huge win because there's a population that keeps on playing. It's a myopic assumption. And even if it does point to some factor that is integral to the game's success, it doesn't follow that everything has to be either rock, paper, scissors or blandly generically useful.

I find that to be worse than what he posted.

I think that kind of sums up the problem though. "Every AT with any combination of powersets will have a place at the table" in practical terms means a bland sameness to the game. There will still be favorites, but the end goal is to make characters broadly interchangeable. And the things that might make a specific set or build stand out get nerfed into mediocrity so that nobody else feels insecure that their character 's performance in general. An example of this mindset, for me is impale. Back in the early days, impale had a long range like a sniper. It was a cool little feature that I liked about the set. Then at some point the devs nerfed the range "to bring it in line with other ranged attacks blah blah blah," Why? It's not like impale was a super damaging power that was upsetting game balance. It just fell prey to this impulse to put everything into neat little predictable boxes. I has hoped early on that the different sets would be given different zones or TFs or somewhere that they would shine, Instead they went with the assumption that the entire game is one table(except for pvp) where anything should perform at the same level in any context.

If you're at the bottom of a dogpile, it's going to take some tenacity to crawl out from beneath it. That was the point of the statement you quoted. One engenders the other. If you make a suggestion and the usual suspects show up with the usual complaints, which they make repeatedly--there's your dead horse in tiny pieces. There's an implicit bias in that direction.

As I said before, I don't have a problem with your moderation. It's a mostly thankless job with limited tools to work with. If I can offer a suggestion, it would be to manage expectations maybe slightly differently. At least with respect to this subforum. In my experience, there are a group of players that view themselves as helpers. And quite frequently the "help" is about explaining why an idea is bad in their opinion. This is wholly unnecessary. Ideas sink off the page fairly quickly. If you don't like something, don't engage. All these individuals are doing is making the thread tedious and contentious for people who may actually be interested in the topic. Furthermore they tend to bring the same litany of objections to every discussion and then complain about repetition. I'm not against people objecting to an idea. I'm against people treating these threads as a "cleanup in aisle 5." If you have no interest in an idea and think it's horrible, by all means say so. But then move on. If you look at the "phantasm sucks" thread, it went on for a while with people making the same repetitive assertion that changing phantasm would be a buff to the set and therefore they were against it. At one point someone said "this thread is done, gms put a fork in it." That's the mentality I'm referencing. "I made my good arguments against this, now stop the discussion." The thing is, the thread did not get locked and people kept discussing it. And I noticed in the recent beta patch notes: Known issue: Phantasm is stupid. That's the point. The hope is to get a message across to the developers, not convince a subset of forum regulars. Someone taking the initiative to articulate a suggestion shouldn't be condemned to playing whack-a-mole with people who are simply not interested in the idea.

I think we, as a community, should probably be more empathetic to the deep trauma associated with being a second-class Kheldian. And maybe this trauma could explain some of the personality disorders that we see crop up in other places. At the very least, tell your doctor.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the OP, I thought the idea was just to make the upgrades passives, not inherents. Like quickness in SR. You would still have to select that power while leveling in order to get the benefit. It's just that the upgrade would be automatically applied upon summons.

I didn't say anything about the role of the MM. I was talking about the secondaries, which were clearly not designed with pets in mind. First of all many of them existed before masterminds were a thing. Secondly, all of them appear across multiple ATs. Some of which feature no pets in their primaries or secondaries. Game design is an art, not a science. Yes, math is an important tool--but the entire point is to provide an enjoyable experience for the players. Somebody's fun hinges on a lot of subjective factors. And if it's not fun, people don't give a damn if the rationale behind it is mathematically balanced.

The secondaries are not designed to keep pets alive. They are meant to assist teams. And if I'm not mistaken, they are weaker versions of what defenders, corruptors, etc. bring to the table. So while defenders, corruptors etc. are helping teammates and blasting away at mobs, masterminds are apparently supposed to manage their pets activities, keep them alive, and be of some use to their teammates. If the team is performing well, the MM already losing damage because of the lag of their pets arriving at where they need to be in order to do dmg. For a lot of content, they are going to be left in the dust by other ATs. If the team is having issues, then the MM may have to keep a teammate alive instead of their pets. Then they have to pay a tax on their dps while the rest of the team can keep fighting. Then there's the late game content, things like the Battle Maiden fight where there are animated swords all over the place ands she's dropping large, hard hitting aoes that may be hard to handle without pets to worry about. People seem to be viewing this as a math problem. Which I guess would be compelling if I didn't actually play the game and see reasons why these complaints don't make sense and are punitive to MMs.

What was the point exactly? I thought the idea was to show that this proposal wasn't needed because it's so easy to keep the pets alive. You demonstrated this by having "lazy time" in a relatively low level mission, where you waited between engagements for the pets to heal back up. Going slowly on easy mode doesn't really support any kind of point as far as I can tell. How much faster? How does this make any sense? If you're able to keep your pets alive--then you'll have the maximum number of pets available throughout the fight. This proposal doesn't give you more pets. If all the tips for targeting, upgrading, healing your pets that have been mentioned here are legitimate, then this proposal is basically about QOL, not performance. If the fight is going poorly, and your upgraded pets are getting wiped--then having them upgraded automatically on resummon is not going to let you drown the AV in pets unless the recharge on the summons is nil.

So the key to success is not dark servant. It's an even more powerful entity...Father Time.

I played a //ff controller back at release. I had to refresh bubbles on people periodically, or just decide I wasn't going to be bothered. This was not a difficult thing to "master." It was just irritating. And eventually they changed it so that it hit everything at once--thus changing the game loop of the set. As far as I can tell, those controllers and defenders affected did not suddenly become significantly more powerful or valued on team. They just became funner to play. People keep saying "well if you know what you're doing, the pets shouldn't be getting killed." Okay, well if it's the norm that the pets stay alive--if that's the standard expectation--then objecting to this proposal makes no sense because you're not going to see a big increase in dps if the upgrades became passive. The primary source of damage, the pets, are assumed to be a constant in either case. So if it's that trivial to keep them alive, this doesn't constitute a major change in gameloop. If on the other hand, it is actually normal for the pets to die in the course of something approaching a meaningfully challenging mission, then this proposal is a dps increase. But that increase is only to the floor of what people here seem to be expecting as standard dps. It does not constitute an increase to the ceiling to what the AT is already accomplishing.

I'm curious as to whether dark servant was part of the equation. The ninjas + a powerful pet from the only secondary I think that offers a pet. Yeah I could see that rolling through low difficulty settings.

There's a very simple solution for a number of these complaints. One that is referenced in places like the sticky for the suggestions forum. If you don't like a thread, stop replying. Let it drop off the page. In my experience, the people that complain the most about divisiveness are the ones you can expect to engage with it. They can't simply walk away. And it looks like, from some of these comments, they want the moderators to step in and lock things down so that they don't have to.

You're supposed to assume good will. What you're advocating is the opposite. Edit: You're basically calling him out as a liar because you can't relate to someone just wanting to have a conversation. Believe it or not, sometimes people do just want to talk about ideas. If it turns into a suggestion, you can disparage them then (why do players always want realism in a way that benefits them sounds like a diss anyway).

I'm not a mind reader. He said this: So I don't know why I'm supposed to assume this is a request.

Where is the request? I thought he was just wondering how it would work.

I haven't had a problem with the moderation. I think it's been reasonable for as long as I've been around, though I don't spend as much time here as other people. I guess my feedback is this: there is a community here in the sense that there is an aggregate of people who post on the forums. Within that group are an assortment of people with different interests, personalities, experiences with the game and so on. A lot of the people who are heavily invested in the game seem to crave social cohesion. They want a community in the sense of wanting a group of like-minded individuals. This is not a surprise for a game this old. But it's not good imo, either for the forums or the game. Be impartial. Don't gatekeep, Be tolerant, and resist the calls to police the crap out of this place. It would only make things worse.