[February 2024 Donations & Finances]

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

[[OPEN BETA] Patch Notes for January 19th, 2024 - Issue 27, Page 7 - Build 1]

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.

[Seeds and teaming...]

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. 

[Couple thoughts for Doms]

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. 

[Mind Control: No Pet?]

1 minute ago, Mezmera said:

 

And to be fair Mind Control is a legacy power set so Mass Confusion got its rebalancing ages before Seeds of Confusion even became a thing.  Since it was still a newer powerset people comparing Mass Confusion would be asking for them to make it like Seeds which I'd see them making Seeds more like Mass Confusion.  

 

Seeds is OP, yes we know, plant is good.  

All the more reason mind control should be buffed imo. 

[Mind Control: No Pet?]

9 hours ago, MTeague said:

I very much like Mind Control not having permanent summonable pets. ;

Confuse means all enemies are my potential pets.  That's plenty good enough for me. 

 

Confuse already IS my "take control of enemy mob for X time and need to refresh or it can break free". 

No, I can't order it around. No, it won't zone with me.  But those are concessions to game balance that I'm okay with. 

 

Singy is a pretty beastly pet for gravity control.  But it can't heal me like Tsoo Sorcerors.  

Fly Trap has some good immobs and damage. But it can't match a Zeus Titan. 

Animated Stone tanks like a champ.  But it's not going to rip things faces off like a Cimeron Boss. 

And I can confuse several enemy mobs at once and maintain them without much effort. 

 

I really don't feel Mind is lacking here. 

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.

[Mind Control: No Pet?]

10 hours ago, Mezmera said:

 

It's the whole reason to go with Mind Control.  If you want a pet there's a plethora of other power sets to choose.  Mass Confusion gives you 16 pets all at once and you have the regular ST confuse where you can keep enemy bosses as your pet as long as you wish. 

 

Who needs a pet that'll just get killed running across the map when you can make many pets with every group?  The most appealing thing about Mind Control is the amount of control within the set and how seamless it is to use each and every power.  It has no use for a summon pet and I give a very big No to losing Mass Confusion.  

 

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. 

[Discussion: Disabling XP No Longer Increases Influence]

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.

[Weekly Discussion 44: Arachnos Soldiers]

4 hours ago, Redlynne said:

We'd obviously need playtesting to determine the validity of this opinion (of course), but a simple default stance change for all Crab pets would make some sense if controls are not available.  Putting the pets on Defensive+Follow as their default stance, rather than Aggressive+Follow, would be an improvement ... even if Soldiers of Arachnos do not get Bodyguard mode.  Having the pets WAIT to attack until the Soldier gets attacked first would improve their survival potential, rather than having them simply charge blindly forwards upon entering aggro range on a suicidal kamikaze towards $Target(s) and then forcing the Soldier to try and keep up (to keep them alive) as the pets just go on a suicidal rampage would be ... better.

 

Part of the reason why I say that is because (conceptually speaking) you want the PC to be leading the pets, not following them into battle.  Switching from Aggressive+Follow default stance to a Defensive+Follow default stance would accomplish this, just from a behavioral standpoint.

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)

[Weekly Discussion 44: Arachnos Soldiers]

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.

[Weekly Discussion 44: Arachnos Soldiers]

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?

[Sniper Beta Patch Notes, June 2nd 2019]

A lot of the loudest complaints yesterday came from accounts that didn't log in to Justin at all; gut feelings are nowhere near as valuable as playtesting feedback.

 

 

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?

 

[The Future - An Open Letter from the Homecoming Team]

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!