Kizabum

As a voice, someone who hasn't maxed out their mastermind yet (and has started playing recently), I give a couple of opinions. First, tie pets bonuses to set bonuses leads to complexity and likely problems, rather than outright boosting and adjusting the base numbers of the pets overall or individually, depending on the pets given. Give them either a baseline upgrade or upgrades that get unlocked based on pet level (or enchantment given, probably easier if the highest enchantment also gives them an additional boost in survivability). Problems emerge if you plan to introduce any new enchantment sets, as you need then take into account because of single AT what set bonuses are. Another aspect is also besides enchanting pets for ability, not just summoning them (replace the dead ones), but the ability to transport them from location A to B, and more so, engage enemies faster. As if you keep pets summoned, and move in an instance, pets usually use flat movement paths rather than use their innate jumping abilities and aggro, and cause problems to the entire team, not to mention that by the time pets arrive to fight, enemies may have been killed by all other AT's. So my own suggestion is that you can 'store' pets into a separate transport dimension and summon them from it (it has cooldown but not long one), idea is more life luxury solution to be able to summon a pet horde instantly (but you need to have summoned all of them first, normally, and then place them into a pocket dimension). As an alternative, you can dismiss the pet and then summon all of them + enchant them (which occupies MM doing nothing else in the fight, which may get over by the time they get their horde ready). Another is that when big AoE's are done, pets die fast as well, the mastermind himself as well, cause the bodyguard featured shared HP with the mastermind is not mitigated anyway and MM may suffer the same AoE dmg equal to the number of pets caught in the AoE. Sure, keeping pets alive and position them is MM's responsibility and part of the fantasy, but need just better tools to do so or adjust the numbers so it's not so punishing.

Yeh, true, we have the same engine as back then. But some bugs and problems have been fixed over the years. So whip powers could be one possibility. Maybe instead of trying to do it *same* way as before, try tinkering and see can whip powers implemented in a different way. Ofc there can be hard engine limitations to introduce new powers; like can only use pre-excisting power as a base for a new one, which just changes visual pixels and data/latch some effect and adjust numbers. But considering people who run the servers run on a limited budget/time-wise, progress of even tinkering with code and testing stuff takes a very long time. Besides bug fixes. Not against the idea, but likely Whips/Chain powers would differ between dominators vs those used by Scrapper/Brute/Tanker ones.

Well, it's not meant as a huge reach but longer than other melee attacks. It could have attacks that snare/pull enemies to you as well. But true, not all would jump to try it on nor fit their preferred style. But overall, tankers, brutes, and scrappers share the same melee power sets (at least what I saw in a glance).

Ah, I see it has been suggested a lot. My main guess is that the issue is perhaps with the animation and rigging of the models in the game files. Would need full dedication to work on making a workable rig, followed by animation itself to be consistent and trigger the impact effects in the right timing.

It's overall more for fantasy of using a whip in combat with cool animations is main reason suggesting it. Just as an advanced note, I am new to the game and so may not know all the dynamics between all power sets or whether there is a niche which whip could fill, or what debuffs, if anything, it could provide. But I myself lean towards it just sake of theme/logic, that whip user would have a wide range/longer reaching melee attacks. The only whip I have experienced is from a mastermind with demon summoning, but this is more of a normal whip than a magical power-granted one. Also, it could have several quick attacks, not necessarily high dmg, but could have 'bleed' dot dmg on foes struck and maybe some 'stuns' created by shock/pain of whip strike or such? Overall, fast, low dmg (but dot dmg), reach, quite a bit of melee control is what I am thinking, but not sure is there power set like that already. But as said, more fantasy in mind, I suggest it cause I feel not experienced enough to suggest any solid mechanics besides what surface glance seen from other powers.

I agree that it should be an optional feature, default wise off, but can be turned on if desired additional indicator when your low HP. Or even adjust when it's triggered (10%, 20%, 50%).