ParaBruce

Vaster than empires, and more slow Our knockdown empire shall grow (Source: https://poets.org/poem/his-coy-mistress)

I genuinely don't see badly played masterminds wrecking teams very much. In my experience, both playing MMs and watching others do so, the #1 unproductive thing is having pets die a lot and need a lot of resummoning, which takes the MM out of productive action for a while. Beyond that, really, no, just the usual range of things that can hit any archetype, plus a bit of pets being in the way at inconvenient moments. I have, by the way, become convinced that player perception of pets crowding doorways is an instance of a very common category of perception error. Studies show that in classrooms and business situations, when women talk about 30% of the time during discussions, they're perceived - by many women as well as by most men - as talking an outright majority of the time. Most observers will describe a group that's got 17% female members as being balanced 50/50. That kind of thing. I've watched groups of all sorts of archetype mix get into logjams at small doorways, in narrow caves, and the like, with and without any pets at all (including controller and other non-MM pets). The moment people see MM pets, they blame them for any congestion. But the fact of my experience is that they add little if anything at all to the congestion. It's always there. It's just that people only have a target for fussing at/about that isn't a character when pets are around. Now, the other fact is that a problem arising from skewed perception is still something that needs dealing with. Simply being willing to either be clearly ahead of or behind the rest of the group when in narrow spaces helps lot with the clogging perception, and so on. @SmalltalkJava, I can indeed dig my man, but only when playing blue-side, since he's a righteous man.

Great, thank you!

Hey, @Warlawk, a question about the robots/time build: why both Super Speed and Flight? Fine powers, both, but do I really need them both? 🙂

Thank you! I love having builds to poke at; I find Hero Designer very frustrating to do more than minor tweaks in.

Makes sense! Thanks.

Thanks!

I chose "successful" carefully. 🙂 A bunch of us have dabbled in various combos for beasts/ and maybe taken them into the 20s or 30s but not stuck with them, for various reasons. I'm curious who's gotten beasts MMs up to the level cap and done endgame stuff with them. What was your secondary? What was your build like? (.mxds and build dumps very welcome, as always at times like this.) What advice do you have for anyone considering beasts now, based on your experience? Thanks!

Hjarki, the endgame you're talking about is like mythic raiding in World of Warcraft, from what I can tell. It's very much a real thing and people are out there doing it right now, but...it's not the norm, or anywhere close to it. We need more layers, I think, to distinguish those who who are playing at 50 with individual IOs, those playing with sets but no particular planning (and who are likely to never touch Mid's/Pine/Hero Designer), and a couple strata of increasingly carefully designed and lavishly funded builds. There are a lot of people out there at 50 who are not executing anything much in the way of a plan, and taking part with varying degrees of interest and enthusiasm in stuff with varying degrees of difficulty and prerequisites. Heck, you can fumble through a lot of incarnate development relying on questions to friends and /help. The results are of course very far from efficient, but they're still results - you end up with stuff in slots, a few neat attacks and cool pets, and like that. It's certainly okay not to want to play with people whose idea of endgame is anything like that. And yeah, I'm agreeing there's a lot of potential gameplay beyond that. But I think it makes sense to call it an endgame, because that's that it is, for a lot of players - it's as far as they'll go, base on interest and accumulated clues, and it includes the large majority of the content in the game for anyone to play. (Had the game lived, sure, there'd be much more calling for further planned character development. That's obviously where it was heading. But we didn't get there.) And, to circle back around, Empathy is very solid, strong support for teams heavy on people with characters at that level of development, which means solid support for (as nearly as I can tell) a majority of players' level 50 characters.

Thank you, folks! Good fodder for thought.

I have this problem: I keep telling myself that I'd like to make some characters of other archetypes, and I keep ending up making more masterminds. 🙂 Well, I would like a kineticist, and I've realized that if I want a fighting chance of getting anywhere with it, I should make it as a /kinetics MM. So, do folks have recommendations for/against particular primaries for the purpose?

Wow. So beautiful. Thank you, @Rylas!

Something that would help a lot of us, likely, is an info pane within Island Rum itself that could explain basics in an untechnical way, where possible. Like: August 28, 2019 Island Rum version: xxxxxx, updated on July 37, 2019 Current Homecoming 64-bit client version: xxx, updated on May 52, 2019 Current Homecoming beta version: xxx, updated on May 52, 2019 If you have an older version, you'll need to update. Here are the steps for this update: 1. Click on the palm tree icon, and choose Violate Causality. ...and so on. A good back up would be a Twitter account with that info.

@Auroxis's post is really the place to go, but I can supplement a little bit.... You're never too high level to have a run of bad luck with either defense or resistance, and suddenly someone's taken a lot of damage very quickly, and maybe died. At that point, quick healing and rezzing are very helpful. It's true that this is less common as characters power up, but it never goes away altogether, as a matter of design. As @Redlynnepointed out, Empathy's regeneration and recovery auras have specific utility in Hamidon raids, and they both come in handy just about anywhere. In my experience, recovery boosting seems to come into play more often, assuming a reasonably prepared and well-played team. Whether it's Clockwork at low levels or Malta at high levels, various enemies like to chow down on blue bars. Spurts of rapid usage of high-endurance-cost powers can produce a similar effect. Being able to bounce back from that is always in order. Fortitude and Adrenaline Boost are fun to spread around, and can make an immediately visible difference in the performance of a whole team. They make mediocre teams do well, and solid teams do great. And Clear Mind, like healing, fills in at those moments when normal character defenses just weren't enough. My empath is now 45, and I have yet to find a mission or task force where it didn't come in handy to have me there. A solid /sonic secondary just makes it more so.

Works like a charm! It's the z:/ that made the difference, apparently.

Step 1 fails, alas. I'm including a screenshot so you can see that I've got the test file, mmshield1.txt, in the right place. But "/bindloadfile mmshield1.txt" gets me "Unable to read in keybind file", as does "/bindloadfile .\mmshield1.txt", which I tried for good measure. At this point I feel really pretty darned sure I'm doing something wrong without noticing it, but really want to know what, y'know?

I used to have a folder of binds called, cleverly enough, "binds" that I'd park under drive_c inside the Mac client package, and invoke with "/bindloadfile c:/binds/abinding.txt". When the new client arrived, I moved that to /Applications/coh/binds since that seemed sensible. But "/bindloadfile c:/coh/binds/abinding.txt" doesn't work. Nor does "/bindloadfile /Applications/coh/binds/abinding.txt". I'm sure that the answer is simple and I will feel like a yutz when someone tells me what it is. 🙂 Help?

That's astonishingly helpful, Sovera, thank you.

This thread may help you with some good advice. With Sentinels, it's generally a good idea to go ahead with what interests you. 🙂

Gotcha! Thanks.

This is a small thing, but...what's the proper pathing for binds now? With /Applications/coh/binds/ in place, c:/coh/binds/ is apparently not right. But what is?

@oldskool, do you have a recommendation for a non-purple substitute for Apocalypse in your second build's Abyssal Gaze? Decimation, as in build #1, or something else?

Huh. I wonder what's up with that, since I'm using a different name and it's working for me. (I'm used to being the one for whom something doesn't work while others sail on.)

Removing the .wine directory worked for me too. Go to the Finder, and open a window. Select your home directory, as you have probably done many times before. Type Shift-Command-. (that's a period), and all hidden files and folders will be shown. One of them should be a folder called .wine Select that and delete it as usual. Type Shift-Command-. again to re-hide the usually hidden stuff. After that, I re-launched Island Rum, selected Homecoming 64-bit, and clicked Play. As usual for me, it took a while (several minutes, that is), and then a Wine pop-up window said it was updating the wine directory. After a while that went away, and CoH started loading up as usual, and now I'm in again.

Disclaimers taken on board! more info gooooood. 🙂