tidge

I agree: Invulnerability (on Homecoming) doesn't have to worry so much about Psi damage, with a caveat. When Psi enemies appear, the biggest issue with them IMO is that there are several groups that are not easily gathered (because they have mostly/exclusively long ranged attacks) and so Invincibility is less likely to be boosting a Tanker's Defenses (when a non-ranged dogpile is defeated). IMO knowing that there are groups that don't "swarm" a Tanker (IDF, Seers, Rularuu for example) is my favorite reason to leverage slotting choices that most Invulnerable Tankers will do anyway, like picking/slotting Positional defense boosts (Weave, Maneuvers, Combat Jumping) Scaling Damage Resistance +Heal/%Absorb ...And of course there are individual pieces that can layer on extra resistances, as well as set bonuses. I do typically add a little bit more Psi Resistance to Invulnerables but only after planning to hit (some/all) of the bullet points above.

I tested with a non-50 defeating (nu)Adamastor the first time: 10 Merits + 6 Merits (no threads, obviously) EDIT: I went back and tested with a level 50, and got 10 Merits, plus 6 Merits plus 5 Threads (plus Monstrous Aethers) . This is a pretty generous drop IMO.

IIRC Auto powers act as if they are being triggered every so many seconds... 10? Those reactivations replace the previous application (with same duration), which is why they will be 'perma' in an auto power. Some enhancements have Global effects that work like an enhancement set bonus that does not need to be triggered.

I decided to try nuLusca with my monster hunter. I did get 22 merits (plus 1 pet recipe, + 2 monster Aether's) but it took me 30+ minutes. I didn't think this was a good use of my (solo) time. Those aren't terrible rewards for time spent, but I could have spent the same time in a less stressful set of SSA1 runs ... Likely 5 of them... In the same amount of time.

50s would get 10 merits + 5 threads IIRC, maybe that is what you saw?

As @Infinitum wrote above: it is really hard to go wrong with most any Tanker. I have also watched Tanks drop in Health and then the Regeneration plus Scaling Resistance cuts in and then the Tank's Health is idling at some value. There are corner cases of content that can cause grief.... Like -MaxHP attacks. The 'tankiest' Tank will have to plan for all the corner cases too.

First time in the 24 hour period was 10 merits (and still is). Subsequent defeats in the same 24 hour (more like 18 IIRC) were 6 merits. As others have written: waiting for the timer to reset for 6 merits is not an efficient way to earn merits.

I'll repeat: Many melee characters have Taunt as part of an aura, and those auras rarely get detoggled. Generally it is a good idea for a Tanker/Brute to get in the habit of casting actual Taunt powers as well, for a variety of reasons. There is no reason to be upset and suggest micro-managing of Tanks/Brutes playstyles, especially when the problem as described here (confused players targeting leaguemates) isn't unique to Tankers/Brutes.

You also don't need to be durable or high-level to run SSA1, and it can be infinitely re-run for 5 merits. Once you know what to do, it should take under 7 minutes for a vast majority of characters.

Hoo boy. I find this to be a pretty clumsy implementation.

I can't tell if it is event related or alignment, I suspect the latter. My level 50 is constantly getting Tip notifications. I have 3 valentines and 5 alignment missions.

With ONLY (non set) IOs, being "well rounded" will probably involve specific power choices to mitigate debuffs, improve Accuracy/ToHit, and self heal. With sets, it is reasonably straightforward to mitigate those sorts of concerns via slotting on just about any tanker. In general terms... At 54x8 settings, plan to be hit and make sure you can hit back.

Part of my motivation for a recent new character was explicitly to use up many many horded enhancement sets. I can remember my initial thinking on WHY I hoarded THOSE, but I hadn't rolled up a character that needed so many in a very long time. That new level 10 is now Ninja Running around Paragon City with pockets full of enhancements it won't be able to use for a long time.

Don't forget the players who have Taunt components to their auras. It is somewhat important for players to monitor their own status so the can physically move away if the fall victim to the Confuse.

I haven't been on a Minds of Mayhem in a while, but it is the AoE Mezz that causes grief. When I see myself Taunted, or the League taking a lot more AOE damage, often that is the sign one or more players have gotten confused.

I also agree that Heather Townshends arc is the best. I believe one of the reward options is a second Empyrean Merit. Those missions can be used as a sort of farm as well. From memory, turning up the spawn sizes to x8 and running that arc twice is just about the right amount of spawns to get a Purple or PVP recipe (assuming all mobiles are cleared). When I was doing this regularly, a blitz run takes about 11 minutes while a full sweep (with an AoE DPS character) took a little over 30 minutes to clear.

I would say that that Dull Pain is one of the least important powers to have perma. I have put it on auto, but only for very limited circumstances (hard modes). YMMV. I usually see Defensive clicks as being more important to perma... Although if those powers affect teammates (e.g. Mind Link) it could be important to not have them on auto because teams may be too scattered to get the boosts. Obligatory reminder that a temporary global +Recharge buff can be crafted at a SG base workstation.

For a newish player, I think my recommendation would be Invulnerability.... mostly because of the early access to Dull Pain. It is also crazy easy to build a strong defensive build with just a as few as one extra slot in the primary powers and IOs. (Endurance Reduction, plus one for the Def/Res attribute) Personally, I find the low level Tanker powers to be mostly unnecessary for most of the content... this includes Dull Pain... but if a player is trying to get an old-school feel for playing, just having the self heal/+HP available as a "click" (it won't recharge very quickly without slotting and bonuses) is probably the sort of assurance that a newish player should have available as they observe how damage gets directed at them. I have nothing against the SR recommendation, except that I think this is one of those sets that needs more thinking about slotting and would be slightly harder than some other armors while leveling and/or lacking slots. This is just me: but of Defense-based builds I find myself constantly monitoring the defense values (mostly positional, depends on character)... and it will be hard to get to the "soft-cap" without access to globals and set bonuses.

+1! For me it is less about getting upset and more about smirking about logical disconnects among players who say they want one thing but then fall on "No, not like that!" I often ignore PUGs advertised as "Kill Most" because I've played on sooo many of them where the team leader freaks out because we are engaging spawns "that we don't need to fight". I'd say less than a quarter of these sorts of advertised groups even come close to "kill most". I am not a mind reader, so how am I supposed to know that the leader doesn't want to fight as many of the Freaks/Council in the Penny Yin TF, or sweep through Crey on Manticore, or pull as many ITF Cimerorans/Council as possible?

This is my experience with Dominators: With Domination up they can usually pop into a large spawn and fire off enough controls (hard and soft) that they don't face any meaningful retaliation... and with perma-Domination, this sort of mad cycling happens really fast... but a few things happen to Dominators that don't quite happen to Blasters: A Dominator that gets slowed, or allows perma-Dom to slip gets clobbered fast Endurance burns faster with uber Recharge, so Dominators have to make sure they don't exhaust the blue bar before the Domination refill When a Dominator misses controlling certain boss-level enemies with mezzes, watch out! This is a little different than with Blasters... yes Blasters can be hit with an enemy Mezzes and debuffs, but generally I find it easier to buff Blaster defenses AND have a couple of AoEs to wipe out spawns... so a Blaster that misses a nasty boss/LT has probably wiped the rest of the spawn (or set them up to be wiped with another AoE)... My Dominators don't tend to try to sweep out a spawn until after the first round of controls was applied. Scrappers typically don't get ALL the aggro from a spawn like Dominators, Controllers or Blasters... and Scrappers have their secondaries. When Scrappers fail, usually they are just getting whittled down in a dogpile. My Dominators constantly feel like they are on playing on the edge of a knife... I can play my Blasters in a kamikaze way but usually for me a full-kit Blaster gets into trouble when messing up an attack chain... Dominators fail in a wonderful variety of ways.

I can totally get behind this. Writing only for myself, about myself: 1) I used to always reach for Hasten, and then I tried NOT using it, and I found very little actual difference in when powers were available for use... and when I wanted to use them. If the character has a 90 second heavy-hitting power... Hasten might (on my typical builds) have it ready as much as a couple seconds sooner. Mileage varies, but those 2 seconds could be used for something like chatting with teammates (or whatever). I found that once I was relying on Hasten, I'd then start down the path of chasing Slow resistance and/or perma-Hasten, neither of which are really teaching me what I can do with my primary/secondary powers! I am not anti-Hasten! Every once in a while I find a build with a much longer (5 min+) recharge timer on a power I want, and Hasten helps for sure. I try to delay the choice of Hasten until just before I pick up such powers. 2) I use leveling up to challenge my own notions of how powers "should" work... sometimes I am disappointed, sometimes I am surprised. Sometimes I keep powers by change my slotting instincts. One type of power that I sometimes find great and other times disappointing are Stuns. I never know until I play with them which category they will fall into! One power that I struggle to make work is the Poison Controller's Venomous Gas. On paper, it looks to be good... but as near as I can tell it requires some very specific build/play choices that I have not mastered... I'm on my second Poison Controller just to try to unlock its secrets! My first character that tried it gave it up and never looked back, but I want to see if I can make it work... and for that I feel I need play time with it across all levels. One character that was a nightmare to level was a War Mace Scrapper. With level 50 slotting, it plays perfectly fine across all content.... but if I had stopped using it before 50, I would have a completely different opinion of that set. If I had PLed it to 50, I would have a much narrower opinion of how to make that set work during play... I might even recommend Hasten for it while leveling!

Maybe you are the only one, maybe you aren't! What follows are some of generalities based on my own head-space... Hear are a few of the things that make me question any belief in a level 50's player's deep understanding of the game. Every build contains Hasten, and sometimes it is taken as early as level 4. With enhancement bonuses, and slotting for /Recharge... few builds need Hasten, and taking it as the first power pool pick is probably not a good idea for a lot of content. If the character is only being played at 50+, of course it doesn't matter... it's just that mandatory Hasten is one of things (like 6-slotting Stamina) that feels to me (points at self) like a leftover mode of thinking from a completely different era of game. LFG PUG posts with requesting specific ATs (or "DPS"). This is always feels to me as if the person making the request doesn't understand the game (from any era). Even back in the antediluvian times, debuffing enemies and buffing allies got short shrift. We now are in an era of the game when Controllers can help as much to clear times through damage as other ATs. "Solos" that repeatedly faceplant during low level PUG content (and don't self-rez). I admit I like to push the limits of my characters, especially in low-level content, but I feel like I know how my character plays across all levels because I've often played it through those levels. It also helps to build empathy for players who aren't exemplared. "Pass me the star, I'm level 50 (to a level 47 teammate)" Ok... maybe this is the sign of something other than not having "played the character up", but this always feels to me like someone who doesn't appreciate the difference between a level 47 build and a level 50 build.

The one change I'd like to see for Merit Vendors: to be able to buy recipes for sets that a character has out-leveled (at the highest level).

The second henchmen (not pets) upgrade is the equivalent of the T9 "nukes", which is why it makes sense to me to keep that as an actual upgrade for the henchmen that are already part of the MM's suite of powers. It takes ~255K XP after level 22 (third and final henchman summons at level 22) to unlock the level 26 second upgrade. It's the first henchmen upgrade, available after earning only ~3100 XP (level 6), and will almost always be chosen before the second henchman summons (~18K XP later, at level 12) that strikes me as weirdly wasteful in terms of primary set design space. Baking the offensive powers from the first upgrade into all of the henchmen pretty much only gives the MMs a relative boost during that first 3K XP of their career. I don't think this is game-breaking or over-powering. ...If that first henchman enhancement isn't necessary to give those particular attacks/powers to the henchmen, then it appeals to me to reconfigure that first power into something that can still provide the defenses/resistances but could also be used to mule those "pet globals". As it is right now, some primaries (e.g. Demons, Thugs) have a primary power that isn't one of their henchmen to slot those global pieces, while other primaries do not (e.g. Ninja, Robots)... so if those MM also don't have a secondary power that offers a place to put those pieces, the MM has to sacrifice slots that would otherwise go to Accuracy, Damage, Endurance for the henchmen... which we all agree is where the actual offense of the Mastermind comes from. Despite the side-eye that this is me asking to make MM's over-powered, I'm actually just asking to (1) level the slotting potential across ALL MM primaries by (2) re-evaluating a power that (pretty much) all MMs will have in their build after just 3K XP and has another set of MM specific oddities; e.g. it may be cast as few times as once per gaming session, every primary summons after that first 3K XP will require a cast of the power, etc. I rather like the page 5-ish reworking of the MM primaries, such that I don't think there is much of a reason to revisit them for a while. However: when they are revisited, I think the level 6 power is common to all MM primaries and is worth examining. As an aside: the recent influx of new players has me observing that in terms of percentages: I see a LOT more MM players than I would have expected, given how the AT can be "clumsy" to play in some content. MMs are rather unique to CoX, and the Homecoming team's choices (both for the MM AT and for Quality-of-Life changes) have improved things such that I'm happy for all the new MM players. I've gotten more PMs about Masterminds since January 2024 than for any other AT. I expect we'll see many questions/suggestions about the AT... ultimately thi Level 6 power oddity is pretty much the only area I see as needing a tweak.

I didn't see "Vengeance Bait" listed as an answer on the poll. More seriously: When a Dominator is rolling (with Domination) they can be a whirlwind of insanity. I personally think the controls are what to lead with, but it would be a waste to not lean into their damage and debuffs. There are plenty of different directions to go in, but perma-Domination should be a goal.