vynestra

First time donator - Glad I could do a small part.

I haven't finished reading the patch notes fully - but the VEAT changes. Thank you so much. I've been wanting them for so long, I even said like earlier today in soldier chat "why cant they make the crab attacks just at least the same cast time as the soldier ones?" and you not only did that but more. I literally am on my knees praising the ground the devs walk on. I have tried so hard to make bane spiders work and its just not great atm. These changes though are a literal gamechanger. It's huge, I'm extremely happy. This is literally everything I've been hoping for in a VEAT update. Thank you so much.

I thought they made a change to confusion and xp but I didn't see anything, however considering I've farmed a lot on my plant/fire/fire dom, it hasn't been an issue for me, especially since I aoe with roots and fireball right after theyre confused.

My plant/fire/fire has perma dom and also uses ageless core, and still if i'm doing a LOT i'll get close to running out of end. But yeah doms use a lot of end lol. I'd use incarnate abilities to fill in those gaps.

All the more reason mind control should be buffed imo.

Same as my reply above - those arguments are pointless against plant, who already does that. Trying to sell mind control as the "but you get enemy pets because of confuse!" is a bad selling point since another power set, plant, gets that, AND a pet, plus plants confuse is much better.

Well the 16 pets all at once argument is kinda silly considering plant does that without it being a long cooldown - lol. However I do find the pets to be rather lackluster. They die in relevant content, or do so little damage its not even worth summoning them.

Part of the reason I don't like this change is because it punishes players with low amounts of inf (or new players) while increasing the wealth of the players who have been farming for a long time and have billions and billions. It effectively makes it so new (or poorer) players have a harder time to get sets and progress, which is overly punishing. Basically the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, because they now need to farm 2x as much to get what other people used to get with the same time/effort. Maybe there is a more elegant solution - I don't know, I just know the change makes it a lot harder on some people than others.

This makes a lot of sense to me. After all, these pets are supposed to be "reinforcements" not leading the charge. You are meant to be leading this squadron of spiderlings and bots into battle, not the other way around. I still think though giving spiderlings +2 and arachnobots +1 in itrials should be a high priority (since thats what mms get now for thier pets, at least in the magisterium from what I saw)

I would disagree that crabbers dmg is worse or equal to a defenders - Maybe the crab itself, sure, but when you include the pets they do massive damage. The problem of course boils down to the pets living or not, which usually isn't an issue in task forces or in teams, even i trials aren't too bad depending the trial, since they get a ton of team buffs and usually can survive + healing spam. It's hit or miss though. The problem with crab itself is that if you don't go the crabbermind route your damage is extremely underwhelming, and if you do you have the pet tanky-ness issue. Definitely not perfect - But the good news is that the debuffs and team buffs are very useful, and so even if your pets die and your damage isn't amazing, you still provide value to your team.

My crabbermind is by far my favorite character, and like others said, in a vacuum our damage is amazing, but in itrials my pets definitely die sometimes, I wish there were more pet IO set options especially for defenses, or a power pool or something that helps with pets specifically, I'm sure a lot of masterminds would like it too. Tankyness on crabs is great, you have decent res (50-60%) on most res, and high defense. Perma serum is awesome. I'd love to have more trade off options in damage vs. tankyness for pets though. However they have strong aoe and decent -res debuffs. And even if they don't neccesarily match a brute/scrappers dmg in itrials - they do provide strong support, their tactical trianings are just spectacular. Also - it looks like mastermind henchmen that are 2 lvls down gain an extra 2 lvl shifts and ones that are 1 down gain an extra level shift in itrials - can that be applied to crabbermind pets too please?

Are you reducing people's criticisms to "gut feelings" just because they didn't play on the beta branch? Don't you find that a bit ridiculous? 1. You don't need to play on the beta branch to know that ToHit (namely from tactics) is going back to being a useless endgame stat. 2. You don't need to play on the beta branch to know that people will have to re-work their builds and that new builds (on sets with snipe) will not work for other servers anymore. Didn't most people used to run tactics for chance for BU anyway before the i24 snipe changes?

Kind of replying to what one of the above players said - some of the TF's/SF's, especially SF's, rarely get run, any chance you could nudge those rewards a bit higher? A lot of 50s try to do the 50 only content to maximize reward merits, which makes sense, and I even support changing the fathiim kind TF to 45 instead of 44 for that reason since its -so- long. But some of the 10-40 ones genuinely are more of a slog because no one runs them except for a badge, but I personally would love more variety in what 50s run by buffing those TF's reward merits and making them somewhat viable in comparison to the 45+ ones in terms of time spent to reward merit efficiency. Thanks for all you do!