Scrapulous

Unless they changed something near the end of the beta period, their resist gaps are energy, fire, and lethal.

I have a suggestion for people who are giving feedback: the more your feedback relates to the designer's goals, the more helpful it is to the designer, and the more likely it is to see the light of day. Some examples: "I like/don't like/hate this feature." This is interesting information, but it's really only actionable to a designer in large volumes, because otherwise it amounts to an anecdote. Sufficiently large volumes won't be reached on a forum thread, by the way. "I like/don't like this feature because it impacts the way I play; here's exactly how it impacts me." This is better, because at least it conveys a sense of what the design change is doing to the player. This can make your feedback more likely to be implemented ("Oh, I never expected that interaction, we should try to find an implementation that causes less collateral impact") or more likely to be dismissed ("Well, of course you're going to have to change your build after a powers redesign."), but either way the designer is able to act with more information and you have the security of knowing that the change was deliberate. "I like/don't like this feature. Here's how it impacts the game negatively. I see what you're trying to do. Here's an alternate suggestion that might get the same result with less unintended spillover." This is a huge improvement over the previous two types of feedback, because suddenly you're in a design discussion. This doesn't obligate the designer to reply - everybody with an opinion is an amateur designer and feels entitled to comment on the designer's work, so it's impossible to answer every constructive suggestion - but there are many benefits to doing this. The first is that it forces you to grapple with the tradeoffs the designer had to deal with, so that you have a better understanding of the context for the design. The second is that it allows the designer to see at once if you're simply refusing to acknowledge those tradeoffs and therefore are providing low-grade feedback. The third is that you might have a good suggestion that the designer hadn't considered, or what's more likely, a good suggestion that the designer considered but stepped back from out of concern; informed by your testing experience, the designer may feel less concern. The fourth benefit is that the designer has a chance to grapple with your perception of the problem, which honestly is something that every design needs but not every design gets just by the nature of design work; this can shake loose new ideas or different approaches. Often the Goldilocks implementation of a feature comes not as a direct adoption of a tester's suggestion, but as something inspired by that feedback, even if the link is not obvious to anybody but the designer. TL;DR: provide clear details of your test experience, and if you want something changed, try to understand what the original change was intended to achieve and suggest an alternative that meets the same goal.

It did have the base recharge lowered, from 300s to 150s. I quoted the patch notes for the base recharge but used in-game values for the duration - this was a mistake. Icefyer on the discord called my attention to the fact that the patch notes for Oct 12 weren't updated for the Soul Extraction changes. I have edited my post. Sorry about that!

I'm chuckling at the Mender Ramiel Flashforward mission. MC gets so powerful that her pets become immune to her own bullshit. My testing of the latest patch: Soul Extraction: I just did the first room of the first ITF mission at +4/x4 to test the changes to Soul Extraction. I have to say, I was skeptical of this change - I figured that changing the values but keeping the proportions intact would leave me in roughly the same boat but with more work to do. In practice, I think it's a good change, at least for a roided out level 50. The power context: The ghosts are up for 30 seconds in v2.1 Soul Extraction. Power is 300s recharge at base. Correction: power is 150s recharge at base. Oct 12 Patch notes were not updated to the new values. I have 94.6% recharge enhancement in Soul Extraction, and 151.25% global recharge with Hasten up (Hasten has about 13 seconds of downtime). With that amount of global recharge, Soul Extraction takes 43 seconds to recharge, giving it 13 seconds of downtime. It takes me about 40-50 seconds to chew through a +4/x4 spawn of Romans with this build. That's actually about perfect. This enables me to spawn the ghosts right at the beginning of a fight, and they and the zombs do a lot of the work, clearing out the minions and lieutenants. I kill the Surgeons with my own blasts, which is an excuse to summon Specters because hitting the Surgeons with 1, 2, and 3 kills them. By the time the ghosts are gone, it's usually down to a boss and maybe some other straggler, which the zombs can whittle down just fine on their own. By the time they're done with that, I'm readly to tackle a new spawn with a recharged Soul Extraction. It's possible this is just a lucky accident of timing. I don't solo much in this game, so I don't have a sense for how common 40-50 seconds per spawn is. If that's a pretty usual amount of time for people to take when they're pushing challenging solo content, then I'd say this recharge/duration tuning is a good fit for endgame builds. If I'm particularly slow or if most people solo larger spawns that take longer or whatever, it may be that my feedback isn't representing them. I also am still concerned about the leveling experience. It's easy for me to sit on top of a pile of recharge and declare the power perfect, but I can see how grinding through content at level 23, trying to make hay with a 30s duration / 300s recharge power might feel pretty lame. I usually don't have a lot of global recharge until I'm 50, so Soul Extraction would probably be a sometimes power rather than a staple for me at that level. MaxHP buff: This is very nice. Thanks for implementing this. It gave me a lot more buffer to work with on the pets. I still lost a couple of zombies, but things felt more comfortable. It's effectively resist to all and gives the pets room to get their self-heals off. They felt sturdier, although I did once lose a couple zombies to a single AoE from one of the meaty bosses. I guess that's still an MM's lot, to be worried about AoEs. Interestingly, this buff didn't seem to increase their self-heal total. I had expected it to be a double-dip phenomenon, where the amount of the heal was increased by both the heal enhancements in Dark Empowerment and the maxhp buff, since the heal totals are based on maxhp. But this doesn't appear to be the case. The amount of the Knights' self heal is 154.21 with no enhancement, and it's 282.7 with two level 50 heal IOs - that's 84.2% higher, which suggests the maxhp increase isn't coming into play. I don't know if that's the engine doing its thing or a deliberate choice by the powers devs (or the game power reporting inaccurately, maybe?), but I'll admit to a frisson of disappointment 🙂 Grave Knights AoE heal: This is an interesting change. It's arguably a buff to their self-heal (7ft radius, 5 targets max), but the recharge goes up to 30, which means they get it off about once per fight (given my 40-50 second clear time). I noticed this because a Grave Knight took a lot of damage and sat there for a long time, which prompted me to check the recharge on it. The issue I notice is that they will use it when they have full health, which means all the extra healing power of the aoe life drain is wasted and the extra recharge just becomes a drawback. I know pet AI is notoriously derpy, but can they be taught to reserve it for when it's needed? The ninjas at least seem to wait until they're hurt to use their self-heal, but of course theirs isn't also an attack. I'm not sure what the best approach is here - probably mechanically it would be to split this power into an attack and a heal, but I see how that weakens the thematic punch of a lifedrain attack for necromancy. Overall, I think this is an improvement. Giving the player the ability to ask enemies, "But what about Ghosts?" more often is probably an improvement over the previous recharge values no matter where you sit on the leveling curve, but I especially like it for 50s. A lot happens in 30 seconds of a CoX fight, and getting to choose more precisely which 30 seconds are filled with ghosts is valuable. The survivability boost from the MaxHP is noticeable and appreciated, and I think it's fun and thematic for the zombies to be hard to kill, as somebody else noted upthread. The change is especially noticeable against lethal damage. Necro feels more like a peer to Ninjas now based on my testing, which is a good thing.

I don't see the problem, honestly. Corpses are notoriously resistant to fire. Crematoria can get hot enough to melt steel; that's not because corpses are easy to burn.

I did another run, this time with a Necro/Cold with a build specifically tailored to the beta state of Necro. I ran it through the first mission of ITF at +4/x4 to compare with the ninjas/nature I did last night. The ninjas run was fun, while the necro one was mostly a pain in the butt. The zombies suffer from a few problems in comparison: They're just more brittle than the ninjas are (feels weird to be writing that). They have 0% native resistance to lethal, which is not great for the ITF, which has plenty of lethal damage (you could also exchange "ITF" for "CoX", here). I spent a lot more time trying to keep them alive, which was harder given cold's more limited reactive toolset. I relied on inspirations and incarnates for Necro to get through spawns - Ninjas did not need this. The increased offensive punch of Necro 2.0 is bound up almost entirely in Soul Extraction, which is not always up. This is a significant difference from the other three sets that got revamped - even Mercs, which has a similar mechanic in Serum, has attack improvements outside of Serum. What's more, Serum is much easier to make permanent than Soul Extraction. This winds up meaning that 60% of the time, you're Necro 2.0. The other 40% of the time, you're OG Necro. This feels bad. I haven't tested at low levels, but it seems harsh that Necro (and to a lesser extent Mercs) relies heavily on recharge while other sets are just given their entire potential when they acquire their upgrades. Won't that create a situation where some sets are much better at lower levels while others just really want a pile of global recharge? I realize that's not exactly unique in this game, but is it something to build into new mechanics if it could be avoided? The Specters are somewhat better than I originally gave them credit for because they have their single target taunt. They are still not great, or even good, because: 70% chance to summon makes them uneven and requires that the player put a fair amount of attention into monitoring buff icons to see if a specter was summoned, and has to do their own mental accounting to remember which blast failed. The ghosts can't be buffed right away, so ghosts summoned in the middle of a hot melee are sometimes instantly deleted before they are eligible for buffs. They spawn on the player, so you can't use them to open a fight by shooting somebody and having the specter take aggro; instead, you shoot somebody, the specter is summoned, maybe aggros on somebody or maybe just hangs out near you, and maybe aggros on the person you want or maybe doesn't. Even when Soul Extraction is up and you're rolling with all 15 potential minions, you're still slower than ninjas. I don't really know what necro's niche is intended to be. The self-healing pets, I guess. That doesn't work out especially well in practice, because they have no resists to Lethal, Energy, and Fire, which are abundant in the game; relying on self-heals as the sole layer against those damage types when you have a small health pool is not a recipe for success. I still maintain that necro needs something else to shore up its defense, whether it's closing their resist holes or giving them a larger maxhp boost. I think making them the high-hp pets would be thematic and could be interesting. I plan to run this ITF test on Mercs and Bots as well, so I'll have a broader basis for comparison. Edit: here's the build I used for this test: Nuruhuin 10 - TEST mm revamp beta p5 - Mastermind - Necromancy - Cold Domination.mxd

So I just did some testing with a Ninjas/Nature build that I designed specifically for beta. It's quite good. It was trashing the +4/x4 DA dailies that I had been using as a baseline for comparison, so I took it to Cimerora and ran the first mission of ITF at +4/x4. It was a little rocky at first - I'm not a pro at either Ninjas or Nature, but I figured it out and had pretty smooth and consistent progress until the nictus ambushes. I just smashed my three big clickies, which together give resist, regen, heal over time, absorb, damage, and tohit. They're all on about a 1m10s recharge, which is roughly as long as it took me to work through each spawn. Sometimes a Genin would die, but once I figured my business out that became rare unless I pulled an additional spawn or I was in one of those weird spots where there are multiple spawns and a couple of captive sybils. In those places I wound up using barrier to cover for the ~10 second downtime in my Nature buffs. Then when I got to the nictus ambushes, I died four times. I took the naive path up the hill, up the stairs, and to the minotaur, so I was getting sandwiched between Cimerorans and Nictus, and the Nictus really loved targeting me. If I focused the pets on one nova, the rest of the novas would kill me pretty easily without bodyguard, so it took me a while to puzzle my stuff out. I think Nature is a very strong set generally and I picked it here because I think it's great for Ninjas, who have high defense but are brittle on their own - getting resists, heals over time, and absorb is a very strong supplement to high defense. It felt absolutely great to be doing this kind of damage with a mastermind. I love having the ability in Smoke Bomb to focus the ninjas to take down hard targets with crits - it was great for dealing with Cimeroran bosses, dwarf nictus, and the minotaur. I should mention also that I forgot about nature's mushroom toggle until I saw the minotaur, so I definitely wasn't playing optimally. I think it's impressive that a defense set can stand up in an environment with so many defense debuffs like this, but that probably says more about nature than about ninjas. I think I'm going to make +4/x4 ITF my new benchmark. There's too much going on in the Dark Astoria missions with villain groups I don't understand well for it to be a consistent environment. ITF is nice and predictable. I would like to try to retool my ninjas/storm from scratch to see how it performs, but I owe bots and mercs a visit, and I also want to try a few different necro combos to see if I can make them work as well as I see ninjas and mercs working.

Here's the before-and-after of defenses for Ninjas: Live: Genin: Defense: +6% to Melee, Ranged, and AoE Confuse Resistance: 33% Confuse Protection: 2 Run Speed: +7.16mph Jounin: Defense: +13% to Melee, Ranged, and AoE Confuse Resistance: 33% Confuse Protection: 4 Run Speed: +7.16mph Oni: Defense: +6% to Melee, Ranged, and AoE Resistance: Smashing & Lethal: 25%, Fire: 50% Confuse Resistance: 33% Confuse Protection: 4 Run Speed: +7.16mph This is all inherent on Live. Beta: Genin: Inherent: Confuse Resistance: 33% Confuse Protection: 2 Run Speed: +9.45mph Stealth Radius: +54ft (Note: this does not appear on combat attributes, and is either a typo or is bugged) Train Ninjas Upgrade: Defense: +11.25% to Melee and Ranged; +15% to AoE Debuff Resist: +12.97% defense Kuji-in Zen Upgrade: Kuji-in Sha: 25% heal, 45s recharge Jounin: Inherent: Confuse Resistance: 33% Confuse Protection: 4 Run Speed: +9.45mph Train Ninjas Upgrade: Defense: +15% to Melee and Ranged; +20% to AoE; +10% to AoE (no typo) Debuff Resist: none Kuji-in Zen Upgrade: Kuji-in Sha: 25% heal, 45s recharge Oni: Inherent: Resistance: Smashing & Lethal: 26%; Fire: 52% Confuse Resistance: 33% Confuse Protection: 4 Run Speed: +7.16mph Train Ninjas Upgrade: Defense: +18.75% to Melee and Ranged; +25% to AoE Debuff Resist: +21.63% defense Kuji-in Zen Upgrade: Kuji-in Sha: 25% heal, 45s recharge Anecdotally, if ninjas die during a hard fight and you try to bring them back, it can be murderously difficult to get them summoned and buffed before they get killed, because the animation time on the summon is so long that they can easily drop if they have no defenses. It's a little weird that the humans got runspeed buffs but the demon didn't. Demons bad at running I guess. I don't like that the pets have differing speeds. Stealth radius on Genin is a nice thought, except it doesn't actually happen. And it would be a little weird if they were always stealthy and the Jounin not stealthy until the first upgrade... although it's a difference of the first five levels, so not very meaningful in actual play.

I'm not a ninjas expert, but I copied my 42 ninjas/storm over and then boosted it to 50+3. I kept the leveling build and just bought attacks and smoke bomb with the final available power picks and stuffed some basic stuff in the new slots. Then I took them into +4/x4 Dark Astoria dailies for parity with how I've tested necro and mercs. First maybe a bug or an oversight: Genin and Oni have Defense Debuff Resistance; Jounin do not. Jounin have two AOE defense buffs from Hide. I assumed that the second one (10%) was intended to be DDR, but maybe Dispari is right and it's intended to be suppressed when attacking? In any case, my Jounin have more than 70% def to AoE, so I guess they're safe as houses when it comes to fireballs. They're pretty durable. Their heals are on a 45 second recharge timer, which feels very long when they're on low health. But my Oni is at the positional def softcaps with just two Def IOs in the first upgrade, Maneuvers, Steamy mist, and the MM aura IOs. Most teams will casually push the Genin to softcap (mine are at 36%). This janky leveling build performed about the same as my finished, price-is-no-object endgame proc offense necro build did. I think there's a lot of room for improvement - I have no procs in Jounin, for instance. I plan to return to this tomorrow, plan an actual ground-up build with beta changes in mind, and do a respec and retest. Right now I think Ninjas look like serious threats for a top-3 spot in MM rankings, (though I haven't tested Bots yet and hear some impressive things). They do quite good damage and depending on your secondary they're very sturdy. My guess is that Elec, Nature, and maybe Thermal will be the big winners for Ninja secondaries as things stand now. Edited to add: I think 3 seconds might not be enough on Smoke Flash. I get that you don't want them grinding out a bunch of crits all at once, but as it stands sometimes you use the power and none of them are in position and it's mostly wasted, which feels pretty bad.

Oh! Good catch, thanks for the correction. It's weird, though. I have a single, unboosted level 50 heal IO in Dark Empowerment. Here's what I get for my upgrade figures: I would have expected a single percentage, resulting in an increase that scales with pet maxhp, similar to how maxhp set bonuses work. But this isn't that at all. In fact, it's neither a flat hp increase nor a percentage, but ... something else? It's weird. I'm guessing you have more heal enhancement in your Dark Empowerment, and that's why you're seeing 150 hp where I'm seeing ~72.

Thanks, I didn't realize things had changed until I saw your post. Is there a list of the changes, or did you find this just by noticing an update and then logging on and checking? I like the new specter look! The damage aura on the Grave Knights is interesting, too. It may serve as a kind of passive taunt, or at least a collection of stray aggro, to redirect damage from the slightly more fragile zombies. I also notice that the maxhp buffs in the pets' self-heal powers are gone now.

These are exciting changes. I'm glad MMs are getting attention and I think the changes you're making are fun, thematic, and interesting. I was excited to test. Some initial thoughts: The Blasts: The specters have very minimalist graphics, just a sickly-green floating tennis ball trailing a bunch of streamers below it. Energy Font and the Dominator version look much better. I'm more able to notice the specters by the leadership and IO aura buff icons rotating around them than by their actual physical appearance. It feels pretty underwhelming. "These Specters cannot be healed or regenerate, but have decent resistance to all damage and defense against AoE attacks". What this means: 4 mag protection to Terrorize and Sleep 1 mag protection to Stun 50% resistance to Terrorize and Sleep 100% resistance to: healing, run speed, and recharge 38.04% resistance to smashing, lethal, fire, cold, energy, negative energy, psi, and tox damage 19.99% defense to AoE I don't think this is really going to change my thinking on my necromancers. I already take Gloom and Siphon Life because they deliver procs at a decent rate. I don't take Dark Blast, because it does not. Summoning the specters is a neat trick, and may be a real help while leveling (especially if they can take aggro), but I don't see getting all three as anything especially important. The Pets: "Powers have been adjusted for area and duration" - what they're saying here is that the zombie AoEs are bigger and will try to do more damage. Details: Projectile Vomit Wider arc. Live: 40ft, 20deg cone; Brainstorm: cone arc increased to 30deg Longer DOT. Live: has a DOT component that is 6 ticks of 90% chance for 1.25 over 5.10 seconds after a 1s delay Brainstorm: 16 ticks of 80% chance for 1.17 over 15.10 seconds after a 1s delay This may sound sexier than it is. My understanding is that when that DOT tick chance fails, it cancels the rest of the DOT. 8.5 potential damage (if the target lives for 6 seconds) becomes 18.72 potential damage (if the target lives for 16 seconds). Compared to what I heard they did to mercs, this sounds like peanuts. Zombie Vomit Larger AoE. Live: 8ft range, 5ft radius Targeted AoE. Brainstorm: radius increased to 7ft. Longer DOT. Identical parameters before and after to Projectile Vomit's dot. The Lich cones all looked unchanged to me, but the tedious nature of comparing the two code states means I was relying on my memory of cone dimensions from playing my dark defender. I may easily have missed something. It would be pretty cool if more detail were available here. It's fussy to compare pet powers across the two states. I know it's a pain in the butt to keep notes on the changes you make, but not as much of a pain in the butt as it is to compare the two code states as a player. I was hoping to test two MMs tonight, but I spent a lot of time decoding the patch notes, so... less feedback, I guess. Enchant Undead: "Henchmen passive resistances have been moved to this upgrade." There is a lot hidden in this patch note. Here's a quick before and after of the Necro resistance scene: Zombie Resistances: Live: Mez Protection: mag 4 Sleep & Terrorize, Mag 1 Stun Mez Resistance: 33% Sleep & Terrorize Damage Resistance: 25% Smashing, Cold, NE, Psi, Tox Brainstorm (additions underlined ) Mez Protection: mag 4 Sleep & Terrorize, Mag 1 Stun; Mag 1 Hold and Immobilize Mez Resistance: 50% Sleep & Terrorize; 50% Stun, Hold, and Immobilize Damage Resistance: 20.25% Smashing, Cold, NE, Psi, Tox (this is lower at base, but can be enhanced - on Live it can't be enhanced) with a single level 50 resistance IO slotted, the resistance becomes 25.41% Knight Resistances: Live: Mez Protection: mag 4 Sleep & Terrorize, Mag 1 Stun Mez Resistance: 33% Sleep & Terrorize Damage Resistance: 26% Cold, NE, Psi, Tox (no Smashing; value is 1% higher than Zombies) Brainstorm (additions underlined ) Mez Protection: mag 4 Sleep & Terrorize, Mag 1 Stun; Mag 1 Hold and Immobilize Mez Resistance: 50% Sleep & Terrorize; 50% Stun, Hold, and Immobilize Damage Resistance: 27% to Smashing, Cold, NE, Psi, Tox with a single level 50 resistance IO slotted, the resistance becomes 33.89% Lich Resistances: Live: Mez Protection: mag 4 Sleep & Terrorize, Mag 1 Stun Mez Resistance: 33% Sleep & Terrorize Damage Resistance: 26% NE, Psi, Tox (no Smashing or Cold; value is 1% higher than Zombies) Brainstorm (additions underlined ) Mez Protection: mag 4 Sleep & Terrorize, Mag 1 Stun; Mag 1 Hold and Immobilize Mez Resistance: 50% Sleep & Terrorize; 50% Stun, Hold, and Immobilize Damage Resistance: 33.75% to Smashing, Cold, NE, Psi, Tox with a single level 50 resistance IO slotted, the resistance becomes 42.36% "Lich's Petrifying Gaze has been moved to this upgrade" I like this change. Getting both hard controls at 32 is a big step and I prefer the idea that you gradually earn your hard controls for the Lich rather than getting them all at 32 (or 26 or w/e the t9 power comes). Dark Empowerment: Now gives the life stealing attack upgrades to all three pets (before it was just Zombies and Knights; Lich got theirs from Enchant Undead) The life stealing attacks have a stealth buff: each of them gives a maxhp buff worth ~25% of their heal effect. This can't be enhanced or buffed. This does not exist on Live. Soul Extraction: The Soul Extraction ghosts are noticeably slower than the zombies. Masterminds already suffer hugely from most of their power being unable to keep up with even a moderately fast team; this problem is made worse when half their power arrives well before the other half; worse yet when you consider that you want Gang War-style chaff generators in times of extreme need. Please match the pet speeds. The ghosts all have: Resists: 50.35% to Smashing, Lethal, Cold, NE, Tox Defense: 13.07% to Melee, Ranged, AoE The changes to this power are where the set's offensive buff sits. My proc offense build, which sits at 155% global recharge with Hasten running and has a single +5 acc/dmg/rch enhancement in Soul Extraction, has a 1:46 recharge time on this, meaning 60 seconds of Ghost Time, and 46 seconds of Sad Time. That's a massive increase in offense over live, and it shows. Ideal play is to get the recharge nice and low and mash the Soul Extraction button with your paw whenever it's up. Then I did some tests. All my tests were DA dailies from Maharaj, on my 50+3 Necro/Dark who has all pet auras slotted (which gives +35% res to all and +10% def to all to pets within range). The Cakewalk: +0/x0, which, given my level shift, meant that minions were grey. This was mainly to get some initial power impressions that you see above. As on Live, this was a total stomping of the enemy. The Moderate missions: +4/x4 (but remember I'm +3, so this is effectively +1), and my only use of my secondary was sometimes opening with Fearsome Stare because letting the pets open was risky. Oh, and Shadow Fall, except on one escort mission. No use of active incarnates. Otherwise it was just Necro blasts (Gloom and Siphon) and providing Supremacy/Leadership/IO auras. These were okay, but not comfortable. The pets occasionally died. One of the missions was the one where you have to escort some CoT mage to an altar, so I had to have Shadow Fall off. At the altar you get ambushed. I got aggro from an enemy spawn at the same time the ambush showed up, and those two spawns thoroughly and quickly crushed us. I think I would have died even if I had been using all my powers and playing well. I ran one and a half missions just setting the pets to aggressive and letting them start engagements. That went mostly okay - their health would drop from the enemy alpha strike, but then they'd heal themselves up. Occasionally one would miss the heal and die. I did all this without using Soul Extraction because I wanted to get a handle on the corporeal pets on their own, because they have survivability problems. When pets miss a heal, they're very vulnerable to dying from the next attack wave. The Hard mission: +4/x8. I used my secondary plenty. Only passive incarnate use. This one was rough. It was against the Talons of Vengeance, and there was a T intersection with one spawn right inside each branch of the T, within about 20 feet of each other. That intersection killed me many times. I tried plenty of things to make it work: opening with Darkest Night on one pack and Fearsome Stare on the other while Darkest Night took effect; trying to pull one group with Darkest Night; letting the pets open; using bodyguard mode and taking the first alpha myself. Bodyguard was especially rough on the pets - they dropped hard when I used it. I always got mezzed and it wasn't a good approach. More on this below. I even switched to my Scorpion Shield tanky build with softcapped SLE defenses, in the hopes that my higher defense would mean bodyguard mode hit the pets less hard and allowed them to survive longer than 15 seconds or so. It didn't work. It may not need saying, but the blasts and their little pets were meaningless in this encounter. I had much more important things to do with my animation time and two more bodies that don't interact with Bodyguard would not have made a difference even if they were summoned passively at the start of the fight. My Thoughts: An aside before we dig in: did pet attack mechanics get changed? On live they're kind of derpy and sometimes stand still doing nothing even when they should have recharged attacks available, or they get stuck standing 9 feet away from their target and so can't use any of their 8 foot melee attacks, or whatever. I didn't see any of that on Brainstorm. Attacks flowed smoothly and quickly and the zombs were moving through their attacks like they had purpose. Could be purely a perception thing. On to the set feedback. The increased offense from new-look Soul Extraction is really nice. The tuning of the power now is such that it will be very tempting just to wait for it to recharge if you're soloing x8 missions at or near your capacity to handle. I don't know if that's something you want or not. The changes to the blasts are thematic and fun, and maybe valuable while leveling up, but I can't see them making the blasts good at 50. Why not? Because... The zombies are super brittle. They're admittedly tougher than p4 zombies, sure. But only very marginally tougher. Yes, Knights got Smashing res and Lich got Smashing and Cold res. That's nice, and it was a bizarre omission in the first place. But going from 0% Smashing res to 34% is not a huge deal when you have a small health pool to begin with; and most especially when you still have 0% Lethal res. Which is the big problem, in my opinion. Zombies have 0% resistance to Lethal, Fire, and Energy. These are not exactly uncommon damage types. You could have buffed the SCNPT resistances to 80% across the board and I don't think it would have changed my experiences much; with 0% LFE resistances, they are always going to be a short step away from death. This is even worse because your tankiest minions, the ghosts, are incredibly vulnerable because they die when their corporeal counterpart does, and that happens a lot. Bodyguard mode makes this even more obvious. As the MM takes damage and the undead are hit with splash damage, you can watch the pets' health drop. Once the first pet drops, each other pet starts taking more damage via bodyguard, and another follows, and suddenly there's a cascade and it all goes bad very quickly. My guess is that the maxhp buff was meant to counter this. But let's face it, a 5% maxhp buff is not a meaningful layer. If the goal is to give them more room to float while they wait for their heals to land... I mean, Grave Knight will only see a difference there if the difference between life and death is less than 38.55 hp at level 50. Plenty of attacks will push right through that without having realized it was there. But they're tougher than in p4, so why is this an issue? Well, part of it is that they're not great in p4, either. But I think it becomes more obvious in this situation because of the higher offense they have via the bigger aoes and the Soul Extraction ghosts. Necro hits harder in p5, so you want to take them against tougher enemies, but they're glass cannons. They can't really hang in there against enemies they want to be fighting because they have three enormous holes in their defensive scheme. And they don't have the blaster-style approach of just melting everything before they can counterattack, so bad luck or the wrong enemy group (fire-based or energy-based or lethal-based AOE, I guess) can just trash them. Right now, I think you should consider giving pets total resistance coverage. The idea of defense holes is interesting and thematic when you're a scrapper trying to plan your build or when you're choosing your IO sets. I don't think it's fun and thematic when it's something you have no control over and no way to plug the gap. I have never heard an MM say anything like, "Well, you know zombies are weaker to lethal damage, so we'd better avoid enemy groups that have it." And the IO system gives us no way to plug these holes. Right now it's just a thing that makes pets brittle and that we can do nothing about, so sometimes your pets just die real easily and there's not a meaningful player choice that can be made to prevent or avoid it. If there was some way a skilled MM could direct specific damage types to herself in order to spare her pets, this setup might be interesting and fun, but there is no such thing in this game, so it just feels arbitrary. "Oh, pet 1 died instantly and pet 2 just got scraped. I guess one of them took the wrong damage type / got a bad roll / was in an aoe / got the wrong aggro"... in a CoX battle, there are so many possibilities it doesn't bear thinking about in the middle of a fight, it just winds up feeling like the pets are fragile... because really, they are only as strong as their biggest defensive hole. I guess another thing you could try would be letting the Specters be part of the bodyguard economy. This might make me reconsider the value of the blasts. Because their health decays, you can't really bank them as bodyguard health for long periods. It also would make repeated blasting a more tactical decision than just summoning the little things at the beginning of the fight and then moving on to your real work; if your pets are taking a beating, getting a couple more Specters out would become a priority. That would require some indicator of which blast power has a specter out and which doesn't, but I think it would be worth the work, because players would have tactical decisions to make based on your new mechanic, which I think would be a mark of a successful feature. I think these changes are cool. I like the ways you're thinking. I like that you want to make Necro the swarm set. I like that you're trying to make the blasts meaningful and I like the ways you're thinking about doing it (even if I think you need to go bigger with the blast effects across the board if you want to succeed). I love that you're finding interesting and thematic ways for the vintage sets to do more damage. Caveats: I have only tested with /Dark Miasma. It may be that the res buffs sit better on a /Sonic or a /Cold MM. If I have testing time, I'll give a necro/cold MM some time on Brainstorm. I realize testing using incarnate dailies is not a conventional way to test. If folks have better ideas about how to test this, I'm open to ideas. I'd also love to hear from other experienced necro players what their impressions are on Brainstorm. I don't do a whole lot of solo x8 play on MMs because it's super tedious, even on the ones (bots/cold) who can handle it fine, so maybe there are some big brain strategies I'm missing.

Just to clarify (because there was an entire page of speculation), I tested on Brainstorm. Case 1: Super Speed and Cloak of Darkness (from Dark Armor) On Excelsior: each power gives 35ft of PvE Stealth Radius, and they stack to give a total of 70ft On Brainstorm: each power gives 35ft of PvE Stealth Radius, and they do not stack; running them together gives a total of 35ft Case 2: Stealth IO with stealth toggle: Celerity +Stealth IO in Sprint + Super Speed: on both Excel and Brainstorm, they stack to give 65 ft total Celerity +Stealth IO in Sprint + Cloak of Darkness: on both servers, they stack to give 65 ft total Case 2 is just confirming what Booper wrote, I'm just being pedantic because I found it a little hard yesterday to wade through all the claims about behavior and which applied to which code state. So basically, yes, Super Speed is getting nerfed: it no longer (on Brainstorm) stacks with stealth powers to give "invisibility." And yes, +Stealth IOs can still be relied on to provide that effect.

Update: robobl4de in Discord showed me how to address this using the OS settings on the executable file. In the folder where you installed mids, right click on MidsReborn.exe and select Properties, then: All thanks to robobl4de here, they're the hero I needed.

I had no problem running 3.4.6.8 on my Win 10 desktop. But my Win 10 laptop has problems. It's one of those devices with a physically small screen but high pixel count, so Win 10 scales the display (resolution 3840x2160, 300% scaling size). This is what new Mids does with those settings: The previous public version of Mids didn't have this problem on this machine.

Teamwork > Fortunata Teamwork > Fortunata Mind Link is incorrectly flagged in the database as having Recharge Enhancement disabled. This is incorrect. It is correctly flagged as not accepting the slotting of Recharge enhancements. But in 2.6.0.4 right now, Mind Link shows no benefit from local or global recharge values, which is not how the power behaves in the game, and not how previous Mids versions displayed the power. So, despite having 62.5% global recharge and 73.78% local recharge from a full 50 set of Reactive Defenses, Mind Link is showing a recharge of 300 seconds, off a default value of 300 seconds. If this seems confusing, the power does not accept recharge enhancements, like recharge SOs or generic recharge IOs. It does accept defense sets (and HOs), and any recharge enhancement that comes from that set or HO will apply to the recharge of the power. Scrap

Doms don't get Energy Font - that's a controller ATO. They get Fiery Orb in one of their ATO sets. Do you know if that also stuns, Coyote? Scrap

Could this be added to the patch notes, please? It's a rather large change.

That's right, hide suppresses the effects of AAO. Shield Charge and the other telenukes don't break hide (but do generate aggro), so you can lead with that and then quickly follow up with a non-as attack for a second crit. This is probably the chief reason Shield Defense is well-regarded, which, by the way, I meant specifically in the context of stalkers. It is a great stalker secondary, because it provides a lot of offense without giving up much in the conversion to the stalker AT. You get all the benefit of positionals with a lot of extra offense and plenty of versatility when it comes to choosing how to open from hide. Scrap

I have never seen a tier list that offered data or context, but maybe we're looking at or thinking of different things. For instance, what task is the list evaluating the sets for? Hjarki above cited SD as a problematic set for stalkers, but it's well regarded because it cranks AoE damage and interacts well when facing groups, which is useful in arguably more contexts than AV fights, especially solo AV fights. So what you're building for matters. If you're planning to solo AVs exclusively, yes, SD isn't an ideal set. But if you run 8-man teams or solo x8 content a lot, SD is a fantastic stalker set. Shield also offers AoE damage which can supplement the anemic AoE that certain stalker primaries get as a result of losing aoe attacks to pick up Assassin's Strike. So pairing matters, too. Haijinx' point above is spot on, imo. I have not seen a tier list that included anything like this kind of nuance. Again, it may be a limit of my experience with these lists, but choosing a set because "somebody said it was good" or "I saw it was S-tier" is going to lead to some bad experiences. When Homecoming first opened its doors to the general public there was a spreadsheet floating around that ranked all the ATs and powersets. It at least presented its data and assumptions, so it was a good-faith effort to rank things. But its assumptions were bad (like that everybody is always at the global recharge cap), and it wound up showing that Masterminds do more than twice the DPS of the next best archetype, which is not the case. I mention it as an example of how attempts to reduce complex problems to simple equations result in misleading conclusions. Tier lists are a far more simplistic approach to the same thing, and so I think the possibility for bogus conclusions is potentially even greater with them. Scrap

Why? What will the value of this list be? I find lists like this to be reductive, simplistic, and often gateways to weak conclusions. One of the strengths of the game is that there are few clear-cut answers to "what is the best?" Context and playstyle variables, of which there are many, shift the answers here. One of the problems on the AT build channels in the discord is that people show up and ask "what is the best?" Often we see the same people later saying things like "I made a spines fire brute and leveled it to 50. When does it get fun?" The answer is: yikes, probably never for that player. It sounds like a bad match. The only reason they tolerated the grind is because somebody told them spines fire was the best at something so they swallowed their misery and plowed through with a character they don't like playing. I see that you asked this in many (all?) of the AT forums. Please consider the value of what you're asking for. Thanks, Scrap

Here's my build plan. The character is only 37 right now and I'm assembling the components of the build, but I'm excited about the potential. One nice thing about it is endurance for days. Both sets love your blue bar and want it to be full and happy. My build doesn't quite have perma hasten even with the Agility Alpha, but the force feedback proc and the savagery stacks may create effective perma-hasten. I haven't tested on Justin because I don't much care about a little hasten downtime, but if you do it might be worth checking out to see if you want to try to squeeze more recharge in. My S/L resists are only 81%, but SLENFC are all softcapped for non-Incarnate content. I'm pretty happy with how it looks right now; we'll see what comes of it in practice. Villain Plan by Mids' Reborn : Hero Designer 2.6.0.3 https://github.com/ImaginaryDevelopment/imaginary-hero-designer Click this DataLink to open the build! Level 50 Magic Brute Primary Power Set: Savage Melee Secondary Power Set: Willpower Power Pool: Leaping Power Pool: Fighting Power Pool: Leadership Power Pool: Speed Ancillary Pool: Soul Mastery Villain Profile: Level 1: Maiming Slash -- SprBlsCol-Acc/Dmg(A), SprBlsCol-Dmg/EndRdx(3), SprBlsCol-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(3), SprBlsCol-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(5), SprBlsCol-Dmg/EndRdx/Acc/Rchg(5), SprBlsCol-Rchg/HoldProc(17) Level 1: High Pain Tolerance -- Prv-Heal/EndRdx(A), Prv-Heal(7), Prv-Heal/Rchg(7), GldArm-3defTpProc(9), StdPrt-ResDam/Def+(9), UnbGrd-Max HP%(11) Level 2: Shred -- Obl-Dmg(A), Obl-Acc/Rchg(11), Obl-Dmg/Rchg(13), Obl-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(13), Obl-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(15), Obl-%Dam(48) Level 4: Fast Healing -- RgnTss-Regen+(A), Pnc-Heal/+End(15) Level 6: Blood Thirst -- GssSynFr--Build%(A) Level 8: Vicious Slash -- SprBrtFur-Acc/Dmg(A), SprBrtFur-Dmg/Rchg(19), SprBrtFur-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(21), CrsImp-Dmg/EndRdx(21), CrsImp-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(23), FrcFdb-Rechg%(48) Level 10: Combat Jumping -- LucoftheG-Def/Rchg+(A), Rct-ResDam%(23), ShlWal-ResDam/Re TP(25) Level 12: Mind Over Body -- RctArm-ResDam/EndRdx(A), RctArm-ResDam/Rchg(25), RctArm-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(27), RctArm-ResDam(27) Level 14: Indomitable Will -- LucoftheG-Def/Rchg+(A) Level 16: Rise to the Challenge -- Prv-Heal(A), Prv-Heal/EndRdx(17), Prv-EndRdx/Rchg(19), Prv-Heal/Rchg(29), Prv-Heal/Rchg/EndRdx(29), Prv-Absorb%(33) Level 18: Rending Flurry -- SprAvl-Acc/Dmg(A), SprAvl-Dmg/EndRdx(31), SprAvl-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(31), SprAvl-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(31), SprAvl-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(33), SprAvl-Rchg/KDProc(50) Level 20: Quick Recovery -- PrfShf-End%(A) Level 22: Boxing -- Empty(A) Level 24: Tough -- RctArm-ResDam/EndRdx(A), RctArm-ResDam/Rchg(33), RctArm-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(34), RctArm-ResDam(34) Level 26: Hemorrhage -- SprUnrFur-Acc/Dmg(A), SprUnrFur-Dmg/Rchg(34), SprUnrFur-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(36), SprUnrFur-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(36), SprUnrFur-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(36), SprUnrFur-Rchg/+Regen/+End(50) Level 28: Weave -- LucoftheG-Def/Rchg+(A), RedFrt-Def(37), RedFrt-Def/EndRdx(37) Level 30: Heightened Senses -- LucoftheG-Def/Rchg+(A), RedFrt-Def(37), RedFrt-Def/EndRdx(39) Level 32: Savage Leap -- Erd-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(A), SprBrtFur-Rech/Fury(39), SprBrtFur-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(39), SprBrtFur-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(40), Erd-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(40), Erd-%Dam(40) Level 35: Maneuvers -- LucoftheG-Def/Rchg+(A), RedFrt-Def(42), RedFrt-Def/EndRdx(42) Level 38: Strength of Will -- Ags-ResDam/EndRdx(A), Ags-ResDam/Rchg(42), Ags-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(43), Ags-ResDam(43) Level 41: Gloom -- SprWntBit-Dmg/Rchg(A), SprWntBit-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(43), SprWntBit-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(45), SprWntBit-Dmg/EndRdx/Acc/Rchg(45), SprWntBit-Rchg/SlowProc(45) Level 44: Dark Obliteration -- Rgn-Dmg/Rchg(A), Rgn-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(46), Rgn-Acc/Rchg(46), Rgn-Dmg/EndRdx(46), Rgn-Knock%(48) Level 47: Darkest Night -- EndRdx-I(A) Level 49: Hasten -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(50) Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Dash -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Slide -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Quick -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Rush -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Surge -- Empty(A) Level 1: Fury Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A) Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A) Level 4: Ninja Run Level 2: Swift -- Empty(A) Level 2: Health -- NmnCnv-Regen/Rcvry+(A) Level 2: Hurdle -- Empty(A) Level 2: Stamina -- PrfShf-End%(A) Level 1: Blood Frenzy Level 50: Agility Radial Paragon ------------ Scrap

TL;DR: Cross Punch from the Fighting pool appears to have a 100% chance to crit from hide. I usually avoid using pool attacks on Stalkers because I prefer using attacks that can build Assassin's Focus. But I took Cross Punch instead of Jacob's Ladder on my sub-50 Elec/Shield stalker, and I use it routinely now because it's my best aoe opener from hide at the moment. Chain Induction crits only on the first target hit, and Thunder Strike is slower than I want from an opener. But Cross Punch offers good buffs, does damage competitive with other melee cones, and most importantly, appears to have a guaranteed crit on every target hit when used from hide. Since I take Tough and Weave routinely, it's an easy pick up in my builds that don't have enough aoe for my purposes. I may not keep it in the end state, but it's fantastic while leveling in teams. Scrap

I even don't know if Shadow Maul can crit for scrappers, because I loathe Shadow Maul and never take it. I also haven't paid attention to whether Cross Punch can crit for scrappers. It does for my stalkers, though. Scrap

Yeah, when GB and I discussed it (mostly GB's analysis and design work bounced off of my reactions, tbh), the fundamental constraint was the wretched MM damage scalar. Every idea we discussed for the attacks had a fundamental obstacle, which is that it is nearly always worth less than any other thing you could be doing with that animation time or endurance (whichever your constaint is) from your primary or secondary or pools. .55 is a crippling scalar, and means that any attack you give to a MM will basically be a pea shooter that isn't worth its opportunity cost and is only considerable when you have nothing else to do with your resources. The fact that they gave attacks to MMs anyway mostly represents a noob trap with the exceptions of proc shenanigans and the beasts and demons cases. That beasts and demons have attacks that are useful besides their damage is strong evidence that the Paragon design folks understood that MM damage was useless by the time they designed those sets. I think the petless mastermind concept is just one possible use for this idea and debating whether it's viable or not is a side discussion that isn't particularly valuable to the question of whether MMs should be allowed to do more damage. Even if we get an agreement from every current and future person on earth never to make a petless MM, that still leaves unsettled the question the OP raised, which is whether MMs should get to do more damage than currently. Scrap