Shin Magmus

There's a startling lack of being excellent to each other going on here. Most of you need to take a time-out. Suggest actual improvements to the game like reducing Ground Zero and Meltdown needlessly long animation times, instead of pointlessly bickering.

Yep, Fire Imps need the level penalty removed + damage slightly adjusted to compensate + Containment bonus damage increased to account for the DoT (it is currently too low on Controllers).

While we wait, an AT is relegated to being a useless sack of shit: a half-strength Defender with no attacks. But it's okay because MMs are "strong" on really easy content that presented no challenge, and we can't buff them too much or they might be OP on easy content.

My friend solo'd the final fight on his Brute while I did nothing but give him World of Pain and Painbringer. We are strong players, even with my character neutered and almost completely ineffective, he was more than capable of defeating the multiple Nemesis AVs.

I completed the the new Zoe Langston TF on Advanced Mode, blind, 2-man with my friend as usual. Since MMs have been "buffed" in this patch I decided to do it with my MM. We did finish, but the entire TF is incredibly anti-MM and the last mission in particular has the most forced, unavoidable, autohit, wide-ranging AoE dmg I think I've ever seen in this game; It is overwhelmingly anti-MM. This highlights a significant problem, because while you can theoretically be allowed to play the game while maintaining perfect uptime on 90% Res buffs and supported by tons of Regen buffs and heals, the instant a pet dies once you are no longer allowed to play. There is no safe area, no gap, no time to realistically resummon a pet and be able to apply your Upgrade Powers and any other buffs to the pets before they die again. This is the MM pet deathloop. The MM pet deathloop can occur in other content, but it's never been as prevalent and completely unbeatable as it is in the Zoe Langston TF. I'm not exaggerating for comedic effect, it's "literally unplayable" unless you run away from the encounter and summon somewhere else, far from your team and the actual battle. You can try to teleport back to your team and perfectly time some Barriers + Wild Growth + World of Pain etc. and maybe your pets won't die in less than 2 seconds, maybe... big maybe. So, since this last update started to address MM issues, I would like to make a suggestion for further improvements. Holy Mission: To Defeat the evils of Mastermind Pet Deathloops All MM Henchmen should have a buff on summon that works like a hyper-condensed version of Barrier Destiny, with short-lived depreciating buffs. The purpose of this power is to give any MM player just enough time to cast 3-4 powers on their MM reliably: both Upgrade Powers and then either some shields/buffs in their secondary (Deflection Shield) or Barrier Destiny. The detailed information of this power is below: "TENACITY" Henchmen are the strength of the Mastermind, and cannot be so easily defeated. We get knocked down, we get back up again. +18% Damage Resistance (All) / +9% Defense (All), unresistable, for 3 seconds (90% / 45%) +18% Damage Resistance (All) / +9% Defense (All), unresistable, for 4 seconds (72% / 36%) +18% Damage Resistance (All) / +9% Defense (All), unresistable, for 5 seconds (54% / 27%) +18% Damage Resistance (All) / +9% Defense (All), unresistable, for 6 seconds (36% / 18%) +18% Damage Resistance (All) / +9% Defense (All), unresistable, for 7 seconds (18% / 9%) 🙂 Being allowed to play the game is much more fun than not being allowed to play the game.🙂

If not dev, why dev-shaped?

These are literally the kinds of changes that make a set less annoying to play, and are therefore among the most impactful to the average player. Finally, if you see a boss you want to start Attune on, you can do it without walking up to kiss them on the mouth, saving time and enabling you to stay in the middle of the pack for Deafening Wave placement. Making the startup of the Toggle be as fast as possible reduces both the literal downtime and the tedium of having to repeatedly toggle Attune on multiple enemies in a fight. These are the kinds of things I would've made as fast and friction-less for the player as possible before committing to the concept of Attune at all. We have now successfully accomplished Step 1 of Sonic Melee.

Sai, I know the point you're trying to make, but the casuals here will just see all the other optimization you did and summarize that the set "looks fine to me" or point out how you're still killing enemies so it "feels fine to me", while the HC Devs will see this as even more evidence that Bio needs to be nerfed. To make the point in a way that mattered, you'd have to make a side-by-side video just like this but with Sonic Melee swapped out for Axe or another good set.

The smaller number of ticks but for higher damage will not only be less laggy, but make the set feel more impactful. And now that every power contributes to Attune, the option to skip more attacks is back on the menu. This should improve the set's performance, but its issues in terms of playing it will be about the same as before.

I did re-read the most current patch notes, the issue is that they are still wrong. One position the HC staff clearly needs is an Editor, because they leave in blatantly wrong text and/or typos in patch notes or in-game extremely often. Remember how we all thought Sonic Thrust did a Repel cus they forgot to proofread their text and change that? So next time, they need to fix the patch notes to say Attune is boosted by all Sonic Melee attacks if that's how it works.

This was brought up, but quickly refuted by the fact that level 1 lasts approximately 30s and you have Brawl + Origin Power + Vet Powers + Temp Powers, so it's a non-issue.

Sonic Assault's -Res effect scalars and durations are incorrect and do not match the values Doms should have relative to all other ATs, specifically after the Sonic Attack recent changes. I already made the thread on the Suggestions forum. As for buffing the melee attacks... well maybe, but only if they still have parity with Sonic Melee in whatever form it takes.

Well Earsplitter is a shared attack from some other sets so it's just using the same animation as those. If they made an alternate animation for it, I'd like to see that backported to Sonic Manipulation and Sonic Assault as well. Ultimately, I don't think the animations are ever going to please most people because you are in fact just yelling at people with this set. The animation doesn't bother me as much as the more pressing mechanical issues.

Good job compiling that Wravis. I think it's fine to actually just call this out right now: specific ideas become set in stone very early in Homecoming testing/feedback cycles and then all feedback requesting changes to those ideas functionally gets ignored. They don't want us to bring up previous powersets or patches but this is a pattern of behavior. This has happened before, multiple times, and we are justified in bringing it up. Don't let Sonic Melee end up like Cone Devour Psyche on Psy Armor Scrappers. Psy Armor players universally hate dealing with it as a cone AND it has mechanical anti-synergy with the rest of the armorset: you need to hit the enemies in melee range first to utilize the bonus effect of Mask Presence, then jump back out of melee range to try and line up the cone Devour Psyche... that's genuinely bad design and it's because 2 ideas are clashing with each other. It's okay to admit you were wrong.

I'm excited to try it on Live by providing the specific numerical edge needed to swing things back into our favor with my Poison/Fire Defender. Defender scalars on debuffs are going to matter a lot when they get further reduced by the increased effects of The Purple Patch.

Gentle reminder that the game before lv21 is tutorial baby-mode, and worrying too much about specific progression in this artificially ultra-easy "Beginner's Luck" phase of the game (that many people skip) is not important. I'm more interested how people feel about the set from lv22-50.

Just so you know, I did make a Ninja MM to test the changes and I was immediately disappointed but partially because I didn't read thoroughly, and partially because the changes are a nothingburger. I don't want to slot MM ATOs into Smoke Flash, not at all. ATO sets offer superior set bonuses and strong stats, so I don't mind slotting the sets into pet powers and giving up 1 slot in my pets to also drop the ATO Pet Aura IO, which provides another strong set bonus. What I want to do is save the other 4 slots from the other 4 Pet Aura IOs and drop those into Smoke Flash, the same way Necromancy can drop them into their T7. That is the change that would actually benefit the players and truly equalize and standardize MM primaries. It would've been incredible if I could've put things like Edict of the Master and Expedient Reinforcement for example, but I can't. So after testing the changes and finding that they don't actually benefit me in any way, I won't be changing my slotting in any way.

I won't be playing the set in any serious capacity either in further beta testing or on Live, because constantly toggling Attune onto enemies isn't fun to me.

That definitely works too.

What if you try implementing it as another new mechanism? Toggle Attune was very clunky to use, so maybe click Attune can summon an invisible pet or psuedopet that just attacks the last enemy you hit with any of your single target Sonic Melee attacks. That pet could persist and keep switching targets and attacking them, with its damage checking the same flags set by your other attacks that it currently uses: except make it be all single target Sonic Melee attacks and not just the T1/T2. I don't think you'll ever really get the playerbase to like being forced to use their T1.

This basically needs to be a PSA to the playerbase so they know which IOs need to be swapped around. This is a buff of course, since it allows more direct dmg enhancement or procs into Enforcers by freeing up a slot in them, but people who are unaware will get blindsided by the next update and find some of their slotted IOs stop working.

We "let them cook" increasingly convoluted gimmick sets every fucking update. Think about the context in which Sonic Melee is getting this feedback, it comes after 3 or 4 failed gimmick sets that people do not like. Seismic Blast's gimmicks still don't even work correctly.

It's even worse than that. The 12% dmg bonus is added on top of enhancements in the power AND Supremacy's dmg buff AND Assault's dmg buff: any serious MM will have Leadership so you have to count all of this. If you're using Musculature Alpha as most (but not all) MMs are, your frankenslotted proc-slotted pets will probably be somewhere between 90% and 130% dmg. Let's use the high end for this math... 130% (enhancements) + 25% (Supremacy) + 11.25% (Assault) = 166.25% Your set bonus damage (if you chased it) is +12%. So 166.25% + 12% = 178.25% 178.25 / 166.25 = 1.072 So all that effort boosts your pet damage by an effective whopping 7.2% maximum, even less depending on how much comes from procs and how much your secondary set contributes. That's the thing about Shin Math: I lay out all the cards and try to account for (and explain) the full environment. I'm not saying anyone else here leaves details out, I'm just saying that I don't. Damage bonus is a pretty awful set bonus on players for the reasons above, but it's especially terrible on MMs (as of the current beta patch). Also remember that teammates providing you with extra damage buffs will completely erase your efforts (especially Kinetics). One Corruptor or Controller running Assault is +15%, which is more than all of your sets.

Emphasis mine, 50% is not that much stronger than 40% but it's 100% easier for many people to quickly calculate in their head. I know the HC shtick is making things needlessly convoluted, but how about a nice "divide by 2" here. I promise MMs won't be overpowered.

I agree with the tweaks to the patches regarding HP. I have 2 fairly optimized MMs, but I don't play them much and have no desire to make more because MMs face a laundry list of issues that no other AT has to. The various AI shenanigans, clunky movement, slow speed, and inability to understand terrain/pathing means that MMs are categorically slower at moving through a map, and especially at STEALTHILY moving QUICKLY through a map to hit certain objectives while bypassing others, than *every other AT in the game.* This immediately relegates MMs to F-tier below human-only Khelds and Sentinels on something as simple as mission 1 of a MLTF: where the MM is incapable of getting their pets to the web parts quickly and uh... alive. The AT has so many weaknesses: that alone makes it okay (maybe even expected) for them to be strong in direct stationary combat. But MMs have never been generally strong outside of extreme niche situations, and one of the biggest issues has always been how quickly T1 and T2 pets could die (no one-shot protection.) I strongly advise looking at further tweaks to the formulas to not hurt new MM players running +0 content, because that HP change was a gutpunch to these players and I'm glad it was reverted. Their baseline performance really has no justification for being nerfed, please keep this in mind. I was already working on respecs with tons of Max HP set bonuses just to keep my MMs playable. I think the wider community in this game really still doesn't understand just how slow and frustrating MM gameplay actually is. Most people don't play them well, or don't have experience actually moving well and speedrunning content. Human control + combat mobility (Combat Jumping, Hover + EM, or Combat Teleport) allows a non-MM AT to move between targets easily at a speed on average 300% to 400% faster than the MM pets. Even with all the keybinds set up, when you use a "PetCom_All GoTo" keybind and command your army to move onto the spot near that boss, they genuinely sit there and think about it for a bit. Then they try to run over, get stuck on terrain, get stuck on themselves, randomly doubleback on their path intermittently like drunkards, and eventually 4-5 of them get there but 1 is still stuck because who the fuck knows why. Now you issue your attack command via another keybind but your pets are still partially staggered, and the stuck pets are using their weaker ranged attacks instead of their stronger melee attacks. This is just the performance on mostly flat ground: add stairs to the equation and cut your DPS in half at least. MM issues pervade every facet of actually playing the AT in a real mission, and these Pylon tests do not tell the whole story.