illunic

Good point edited. With AoE stuff, I am not looking for make MMs immortal or anything by any means like I mentioned. I just want an opportunity to react to my pets taking damage that something other than re-summoning them. I think the summoning CD changes were sped up as a result of how fast henchmen were dying in endgame content and I am hoping to steer away from that in favor of a bit more durable henchmen that can survive a hit or two from high level stuff so i can react.

Pet AoE: I am strictly talking PvE stuff. I have absolutely zero experience with the PvP aspect of this game so I am not going to pretend that anything I recommended is for the PvP side of things. Hopefully they could make some change where it either only applies in PvE or some middle ground where they arent immortal in PvP and I dont have to deal with spamming resummons during AV fights as my main method of -gameplay- Pet Levels: This is more on the AoE damage again I suppose, and somewhat on the t1 minion damage. I am not looking to solo clear +4 stuff, I am just looking to want to survive some of the pet one shot stuff that occurs when there is a 6 level difference between my t1 minions whatever I am slapping. Some of the things that come to mind are the Arachnos Psi AoE, Freakshow Self Res and Mobs that have an explosion on death feature. I am not looking to just shrug that off but at the same time I would like to have some kind of counterplay to it and yes I have tried recalling my minions before to avoid the AoE explosions from things like the Crystals in ITF but damn if that recall command feels more like a suggestion because they take their god damn time listening to it, then again that could be contributed to AI problems again. Oni: Only problem I have with Oni is that -knockback on its AoE immobilize. Get rid of that mess, watching it not only negate the knockback from t1 and the 2 knock ups from the t2 as well as any KD I want to throw out is depressing.

The Infection This started off as an idea to rework of the necromancer primary but I figured it would be better just to make a new primary instead of getting replacing a current one. So some of the attacks are going to be blatantly copy-pasta'd from zombies because I cannot think of a skill to replace it with at the moment. Theme is pretty much going to be utilizing "The Infected" enemies as a replacement for zombies. The idea is instead of a standard MM pet tier tree this is going to use a more 'horde' style of play using only t1 pets. The pet cap will start at 2 and increase by 1 every 10 levels and a bonus 1 at level cap leaving you with 8 total mobs at 50. Now how they work will be a little different so ill explain it in the skills below. Not the best idea but I do like the idea of a more horde based gameplay. Infection Dart - Standard T1 Blast, Lethal Damage, will apply the Infection Debuff (30s duration, 10% slow, no damage, does not stack). Animation kinda like the Crossbow that the Vahzilok use. Call Infected - Toggle ability, will summon a maximum of 1/2/3 even con infected at levels 1/12/18 respectively. In addition while this toggle is active any mod that dies with the Infection debuff on them will summon an additional even con infected up to the current pet cap is reached. Infected are Infected and as a result outside healing is only 25% effective. Starting Attacks: Brawl - Standard melee smack Infected Bite - Smash damage with small Energy DoT, applies Infection. Toxic Dart - Generic T3 Blast, Lethal Damage, Moderate Toxic DoT will apply the Infection. Enhance Infection - Autopower, First Henchmen Upgrade, Resistance Enhanceable Grants: Resistances - Smashing Lethal and Energy resists Revolver - Ranged Lethal, The standard infected minion ranged attack Irradiated Vomit - Basically the zombie melee ranged AoE vomit, applies Infection. Splintering Dart - Targeted AoE, Lethal Damage, does NOT infect. Expunge Infected - Detonates a targeted henchmen for considerable damage and a KB to enemies around it. Safety in Numbers - Short range PBAoE around Henchmen that buff other henchmen's Resistance and Regen. Stacks with itself. Idea is that if they are all near each other and this is cast is should provide a massive survival boost for its duration. Long CD, not perma-able. Call from Below - Long Cooldown, summons Infected until the pet cap is reached. Used for times when you need to reach the max number of summons and there are not mobs around to infect, like long duration AV fights. Augment Infection - Autopower, Second Henchment Upgrade, Damage Enhanceable Grants: Infected Strike - Smash / Energy -Def Immunocompromisation - Passive, 20% Damage Increase to Infected Enemies (half enhanceable) Infectious Eruption - PBAoE Toxic/Energy DoT. Long CD So thats it, basically a slight twist on the normal MM idea. Let me know what you think if its a decent idea, or I am an idiot. Thanks for reading

Firstly great job on the first pass of MM changes, a lot of the original 4 primaries feel much better. There are a few things I would like to see happen unit wise, mechanics wise and power wise. Lets get started with probably one of the biggest ones. Pet IO Auras These need help, with how squishy pets are, especially melee, these are considered by many a requirement which means if you do not have a 'aura mule' power you are going to sacrifice your limited pet slots for them. There are a few suggestions to fix this, one of the more popular ones is make the MM Supremacy passive slot-able so you can use it as the mule power. Another idea I have seen thrown around on the discord is just a removal of these aura IOs and just giving the resist/def bonuses as a default to the Supremacy passive. Personally I would like to see the second one implemented remove the aura buffs from IOs and change the ATO into something more interesting, maybe some global damage or heal on hit proc. Pet AoE Interaction Pet suitability did get a decent boos with the first MM changes, being able slot the upgrades to improve resist/damage is a great idea and it did help a lot for non endgame stuff. Endgame however is still kind of the same story, some EB or AV claps his thunder thighs together and one shots all your minions that are in range and if you are a melee based primary you are in range. I thought a bit on how to do this that wouldn't result in pets being over tuned and virtually immortal. A lot of other pet classes in other MMOs have their pets survive by being immune to non direct targeted attacks, basically AoE immunity. With how CoX is though feel like that might be overdoing it, but instead a hefty resistance to all non targeted attacks (maybe like 90% res). This way things like AV AoE attacks and other pet melting attacks dont just instantly take the MM out of the fight damage-wise but instead give them time to react to their minions taking damage. At the same time they will retain the squishiness in an event they they get targeted by a mob. I know 90% much be high but it is probably going to be more after watching my t1's get OHKO'd by a thunderclap. Which leads me to the next point. Pet Levels Probably tied with or ahead of the Pet IO Aura's in terms of being asked for. Running +4 content and having your t1s be 6 levels below the monsters you are fighting is terrible for damage and pet survival. I don't know if its so far into the spaghetti code that its unchangeable or what but I do not think it would be any game breaking change to bring t1s and t2s up to even con with the MM, hell take the t3 down a pet so its even con'd as well if you feel like that'll help balance out the damage. Pet Collision They have already made the change where MM pets cant body block teammates it is time to go the rest of the way and make it so MM pets cannot body block each other. This will help more so the melee based primaries such as Necro/Ninja/Beast with damage as the henchmen will not be pushing themselves around all the time trying to get an attack in. Individual Henchmen Changes First off this is only going to be about the primaries that got changed with the first pass since I do not know what changes are in store for the rest of the sets. There are only two real changes that stick out at the moment: Medic: The Mercenary primary has probably had the biggest boost from the patch, going from the most under powered primary to actually being kinda not garbage. One unit that seems to have been overlooked is the t1 Medic, he got combat changes but his 'medical' abilities seems to have remained the same. His lackluster heal and the CC stimulant that he seems to cast on cooldown regardless of combat status. Instead how about we give him a small and spam-able henchmen only heal over time, a big emergency heal on a long CD that can target the MM, and maybe a long duration henchmen only +regen / +recovery buff. Oni: Another one that doesn't seem to have changed much. The biggest issue people seem to have with him is his AoE immobilize giving KB protection and removing survival tools that utilize KD/KB like bonfire or attacks from the t1s / t2s. Easiest thing would of course be to remove that KB protection but if that is not possible maybe replace the skill with a different AoE attack like Combustion or Fire Sword Circle Some Secondary Changes Some interaction changes I would like to see is letting you apply the enemy toggle-able AoEs on henchman as well. Things like Snow Storm, Radiation Infection, Darkest Night, it would allow for both a mobile AoE debuff zone but it would also help improve survive ability of melee henchmen by ensuring that the mobs they are engaging are always in the debuff range

Sorry for the late reply I kinda forgot that I had posted this, Ill admit the names aren't that good for me either but I didn't want to use Medic just because I did not want any confusion between the old t1 medic and the new temporary summon. Also I have updated the main post after reading Aspie's reply I decided not to just get rid of spec ops all together but try to make them a more ST focused while providing some decent CC options. I also redid the commando to focus mainly on gun attacks, gave him more AoE to help balance out with the Spec Ops ST stuff.

Thanks for the reply, I'll try my best to answer your questions but some of them just boiled down to personal taste or trying to prevent as much weapon redraw as possible. 1&4) I really dislike how the current spec ops are built, techincally t1 soldiers have a wider variety of damaging attacks, and some actual AoE damage compared to their t2 friends. Any why do they have stealth, yeah I get it fits the theme but theres nothing really good about it. They had some AoE grenade abilities but they were mostly debuffs so I just went with that and expanded on it. You could have em keep the guns without much issue tbh. Give them slug, burst, heavy burst and then a variety of AoE debuff grenades to use (just make them come out of the gun instead of hand tossing). Ooh and if they keep their stealth at least make the first attack they do coming out of stealth do a critical hit. 2&3) I only picked pummel because it was an attack that used a gun. I have noticed some occasions where when my t1s were in melee they would put the gun away, punch, then bring the gun back out resulting in more redraw time wasting. TBH I want to keep the amount of melee they have down to a minimum, but I could see the t2 and or t3 having bayonettee as a melee attack instead of rifle butt / pummel. The idea of having them whip out a combat knife did cross my mind but again I wanted to avoid as much weapon redraw as possible. 5&6) The idea of removing serum and making temp summons is two-fold. First is the obvious Aura IO sink, while Merc's have a bit more survivability because theyr'e ranged those aura IO's still feel like a requirement and having to sacrifice henchmen slots for them feels bad. Second, I wanted to keep the medic around in some form as well as the Serum idea of a short burst of increased efficiency just instead of offense like serum it was defense/healing. At first I did fiddle with the idea of just changing serum around but I ended up going with the temp pet idea because aura IOs are silly things. One idea I did have was kind of merge it with Experimental injection and make it an AoE. Reduce the damage and resistance buffs, slap in some +regen to go with the +rec and CC resists. Increase the duration to maybe 90s (or longer if youre feeling frisky) and reduce the cooldown by half. Maybe remove the -end part of the drain when it ends but keep the -rec, that way they bleed themselves dry instead of just the sudden cold turkey stop. Post-Post Edit: I realized I never posted my Supremacy idea in here before so Ill drop that bad idea down at the bottom of this. Ill start off by saying that every MM primary should have a few personal attacks, namely 2 single target attacks and an AoE of some sort (currently Necro is the only set that doesn't follow this). First remove the whole supremacy aura idea (and maybe IO auras too) and make it a no endurance toggle (so people can turn it off if they need to). When toggled on any attack the MM uses from its primary pool apply a debuff called "Marked by the Master" to the target for a duration. Marked enemies are easier for henchman to hit and take significantly increased damage from the henchman (and only the henchman). I feel like this would help make the MM primary attacks feel a bit more useful and maybe promote more active MM game play. May find a way to have pets auto attack marked targets as a type of 'assist me' feature. If this change was done, id like to see that stupid 25% end cost increase that MMs have to be removed.

I played live back when CoV released and I fell in love with the MM class, particularly the mercenary primary and back then It wasn't in the best spot. Sadly (or maybe luckily) I quit live before IO's became a thing so I didn't see if they really helped the set. After a few weeks on this server it looks like the general consensus was it helped them a little but they're still worse than pretty much every other primary. Me loving my mercs tried to come up with ways to improve them without just making them broken/OP. I browsed the suggestion forums before posting to make sure my Idea's weren't already out there and I came across Monos and Galaxy Brain's post about Mercs and damn if they weren't super damn close to what I was thinking (even the serum name change was almost identical to what I had in mind). After reading though their post and a few others I feel like the idea's I had differ enough from the other posts to warrant me posting my ideas here. Hopefully nothing is too nuts / broken and all the numbers I use are just to give you idea's on what I want the power or change to do. Before we get to Mercs though: General MM Change Suggestion: The two henchmen upgrade powers should come with a level increase depending on the pet. using mercs as an example: Equip Mercenary: +1 level to t1 Tactical Upgrade: +1 level to t1 and t2 Overall would be a great change for all MM's, having t1's be at +6 when running 54 stuff is never fun. Would help both with damage and I am hoping with survivability because of the health increase that would come with the level increase. Secondly as has been mentioned before henchmen with weapons would benefit from either no redraw or simply keeping the weapon out at all times. Now onto Mercs Maybe replace the primary attack M-30 Grenade with the Conical Heavy Burst just to differentiate it from the primary attacks in robots. Soldiers As many have recommended before, will now summon 3 soldiers instead of 2 + Medic. All attacks will have an 80' range to promote the unit staying together. Not a whole lot of major changes to be made. Base Powers Pummel - Melee / Minor Damage Burst - Moderate DoT / -DEF Equip Mercenary Slug - High Damage / - DEF Heavy Cone Burst - Cone AoE / Heavy DoT / -DEF Tactical Upgrade Suppressing Fire - Targeted AoE / Minor DoT / -DMG / -DEF High Velocity Rounds - Auto Power +To-Hit / +DMG Spec Ops After reading some replies and giving it some thought, I wont completely just remove Spec Ops but instead rework them into a pair of units that focus mainly on single target damage and AoE CC grenades. Same deal still applies with ranges, everything is 80' unless otherwise stated. Base Powers Rifle Butt - Melee / Moderate Damage / Small Chance for Disorient SCAR Burst - Moderate DoT / -DEF Sticky Grenade - Targeted AoE / ST Immobilize / AoE -Speed -Fly Equip Mercenary SCAR Heavy Burst - High DoT / -RES SCAR Incendiary Burst - Moderate Lethal & Fire DoT / Chance to Burn Flashbang Grenade - Targeted AoE / ST Disorient / AoE -ToHit Tactical Upgrade SCAR Snipe - Extreme Damage / Chance to Knockdown / 120' Range SCAR Cryonic Round - Moderate Lethal & Cold Damage / -Recharge -Speed Stealth - Auto Power: +Stealth / First Damaging Attack in stealth will critically strike Commando Changed his skillset to focus mainly on gun based attacks (less missile and flamethrower) and could possibly change out his Legacy Assault Rifle for one of the Longbow/Council chainguns. Base Powers Brawl - Melee Burst - Moderate Damage / -DEF Heavy Cone Burst - Cone AoE / Heavy DoT / -DEF Equip Mercenary Long Burst - Single Target / High DoT / -DEF Full Auto - Cone AoE / Extreme DoT / -DEF Tactical Upgrade Full Burst - Single Target / Extreme DoT / -DEF Mow Down - Wide Cone AoE / Extreme DoT / -DEF Lucky Shot - Auto Power / 20% Chance for bonus Lethal Damage on all attacks. That's the general idea of the Henchman changes and now onto the Serum change. Field Support 60s Duration 240s Cooldown Not affected by +Recharge Will summon two support temporary pets, both will have minimal combat abilities having Slug, Burst and Brawl but provide buffs to both the MM and his other henchman. If either of these units are killed they will cast a short (60s) vengeance on the other henchman. The two units it will summon are: Medical Support Unit Med-Kit - ST Heal / Low CD Tissue Restoration - 2min Duration / +Regen / Low CD Equipment Support Unit Well Maintained Equipment - 2min Duration / + RES (All but Psi) Tactical Auto-shielding - 1min Duration / Small Regenerating Absorb Shield That's it for my version of the changes, hopefully my bias towards the set didn't make anything too overpowered. Id be interested to hear what other people think of these ideas or any changes you think would be good.

Yeah I have tried both manually right click dismissing all of them in the pet window and using the /release_pets command as well and still only summon 2 most of the time. Last night, I the problem seemed to be out for me, I only summoned 2 the first time and the following few recasts only resulted in the 2 I had being replaced by the fresh 2 I had just summoned. Took several times before I finally got the legendary third imp to appear. Some lazy digging shows that dom's only have a 60% chance to summon the third imp, not sure how accurate old tomax numbers are but certainly feels like it is still there: http://web.archive.org/web/20140821055810/http://tomax.cohtitan.com/data/powers/power.php?id=Dominator_Control.Fire_Control.Fire_Imps No mention of the chance to only get 2 in the skill description or in the detailed info. I don't suppose it would be open to change, It would be nice to not have RNG when dealing with pet summons.

I've noticed that my fire imps skill will sometimes only summon 2 imps instead of the 3 it says. It does not happen all the time. Im not sure what the cause of it is, but I do notice when it summons 3 the third imp will take a little longer to pop up then the first two. Edit: After asking around this seems to be an old known issue and apparently its a Dom only thing, where they don't always get the third imp because reasons. Honestly it would not be that bad if i could just recast and get the third one but that's now how it works, if you summon two and then get unlock and summon two again it just resummons the 2 you had out instead of giving you the third one.

Closest summon it seems to relate to is the Gun Drone from a /dev blaster which is in a similar spot, though i think you can get 2 of them summoned with enough recharge, could be wrong. Hell you could stray away from it being a summon completely because and make it a toggle ability that makes it orbit you and take pot shots at things (think like /dev targeting drone).

Yeah I did a quick browse on the subreddit, the homecoming discord and here. The opinion on the little thing seems to be overwhelmingly bad, which sucks because I really like the concept of it. While id like to see a damage increase and behavior change I honestly think just removing the duration and letting it stay spawned until it or its caster dies would be a huge step forward.

I'm sure anyone who has used this ability can attest to how useless the ability feel, which is sad because it feels like one of the unique abilities of the electric blast / assault pools. It's damage is laughable, even when slotted, you can only have one up at a time, and for some reason it seems to like to move into melee range. I really like the concept of this ability so I've got some idea's that might i improve the skill and make the little sparky ball useful. - Make it last until it gets killed. - Put it on a leash so it doesn't stray too far from the player. - Do something about it's damage. Currently according to the in-game info at 50 the sentinel hits for ~44 every ~3.5s (1s / 2.5s) unslotted. Honestly I bringing it up to the beginning bolts damage (~62) or maybe a bit above would help this skill immensely.