Redlynne

10.13.6 High Sierra on a 2011 iMac 27 inch.

Feel free to crib tips and tricks from my Ninja/Time/Mace build for use with your rebuild, including (and especially) notions about taking the personal attacks for your Mastermind. Trust me, it makes WAY MORE difference in actual gameplay than you'd think just by looking at things in a build planner. And you're right, that Time is something of a strange powerset in that it will take quite a while to mature into its full strength ... but even early on once you've got Temporal Mending and Time's Juncture as power picks (never mind getting fully slotted up later) you'll start seeing a marked difference in how you play with Time Manipulation at your disposal. Use Time Crawl as a "neutralizer" for Lieutenant/Boss types that you want to reduce the recharge and movement speed of and you'll be sitting pretty, even as early as the mid-teen levels. Should be. They're traded on the auction house.

Ice/Ice/Arctic will always remain a classic. Inhales aggro like a wind tunnel and won't give any of it back. I know. I've tested. Back on Virtue, I ran an ITF on a Tanker Tuesday with my Ice/Ice/Arctic and DENIED aggro to ALL of the other Tankers on the team ... for the entire run. They eventually figured out that they were all "glorified scrappers" dogpiling on my herding TANK action. Fair warning though ... to play an Ice/Ice Tanker most effectively, you're going to need to play with a "Brute-like mentality" where you're just incredibly aggressive (go figure) and always moving from spawn group to spawn group in order to fuel Energy Absorption "just in time" with lots of $Targets ... which has a sort of "Fury-like" sensibility to it, except it's for defense buffing and endurance rather than for damage buffing. You might want to also have a look at Ice/Titan since Energy Absorption will assist you with the endurance management issues that Titan Weapons can produce in some builds, and the slowing that Ice Armor does for you will synergize well with the "slowness" of Titan Weapon's animations when you haven't got Momentum going for you.

I would argue that Concentrated Strike, deliberately used for purposes of insta-recharging Siphon Power, does not make sense on a build with lots of recharge. When you've got lots of recharge modifiers (sets, alpha slotting, etc.) you don't "need" to be using Concentrated Strike as an insta-recharge on Siphon Power since Siphon Power will be recharging "fast enough" already anyway that the insta-recharge if/when it happens is of reduced benefit. The converse case ... where you aren't building for lots of recharge modifiers ... is where you'd want to have Concentrated Strike in the build. You'll want "just enough" recharge in the build in order to "close the loop" on your attack chains and then throw in Concentrated Strike into the mix to try and get Siphon Power recharged instantly, creating a marked increase in uptime for Siphon Power that wouldn't otherwise be the case. Now, whether the low recharge build could "compete" with the performance of the high recharge build in terms of overall damage output over time (like, say ... against a Pylon) would be taking the THEORY and trying to apply it to a (real?) game world application for purposes of cross-comparison of the relative merits for either strategy. But needless to say ... that would be a LOT OF WORK to theorycraft and test out. Not surprising the cross-comparison hasn't been "battle tested" yet. After all, the Conventional Wisdom™ (which is so often wrong, but still relied upon) is that the high recharge build will "win" on every metric you might want to consider ... so why bother checking and testing?

Once you pull the Gamma Ray from Mr. Fission, the Cherenkov Radiation you see is Not Your Friend™ ... ... just like how once you pull the pin from Mr. Grenade, he is no longer your friend ...

Basically ... NC$oft need to faceplant ... and maybe, just maybe, they'll "drop" the IP rights ... once they've been DEFEATED. Short of that, the only thing that's going to liberate the City of Heroes franchise from the evil Battalion NC$oft is going to be the expiration of their rights to the IP, at which point it would enter the public domain. Given that Di$ney keeps pushing the envelope on how long that will take (in order to hold onto the exclusive rights to Mickey Mouse), it's entirely possible that the expiration of IP rights held by NC$oft will require more human lifetime(s) than most of us have left. There's a reason why NC$oft has a lifetime BAN from my wallet. I don't care how "good" a game is that is backed by NC$oft ... I'll never play (let alone pay!) for another game of theirs EVER again. Not after what they did to Tabula Rasa ... and what they did to City of Heroes. They can keep what is left of their ... "face" ... and I'll keep my money away from them (as I've done since late 2012 for ... reasons).

Just played through the Atta Caves in the past couple of days (started Level 13 and leveled up to Level 14 while on the map without leaving except to Hospital) and simply due to the sheer quantity of spawn groups on the maps while playing my Peacebringer and Warshade solo through the caves ... and I found it kind of interesting how my Peacebringer and Warshade dealt with the large numbers of Quantum Gunners who spawned throughout the map. On my Warshade (first, I ran my Peacebringer second), I was starting out (with the v2 build, not the v3 build I've now posted) in Human Form with Orbiting Death (and trying to make it work) ... and once I hit a Level 14 Troll Lieutenant while I was Level 13 and got pummeled into a Hospital trip I switched to doing the rest of the Atta Caves in Nova form and never looked back. But the curious thing was that my strategy for dealing with Quantum Gunners was radically different for my Warshade involved use switching back to Human form, retreating to a "safe" distance from the spawn group with Orbiting Death toggled on so as to use Starless Step to teleport foe to the ceiling(!) above my position (so the Quantum Gunner would fall into my Orbiting Death aura radius and delay their attack until they gain their footing). I'd then cue up use of the Nemesis Staff once the Quantum Gunner has "moved" through the teleport (so you don't interrupt the casting) so that part of the draw animation finishes more quickly and that the Nemesis Staff is the first thing to hit the Quantum Gunner so as to inflict Knockback and buy more time in which the Quantum Gunner can't attack. Once the Nemsis Staff attack is done, change to Nova form and just deliver fast attacks to burn down the Quantum Gunner as fast as possible and then get ready in case any other adds are running to also attack (hence why it's a good idea to use Starless Step at a decent remove to delay how quickly those adds, if any, arrive). Once the Quantum Gunner and any adds are mopped up, it's just more Nova form burning down the stock and standard spawn groups that don't have a Quantum Gunner mixed in with them ... until finding the next spawn group with a Quantum Gunner in it. By contrast, my Peacebringer handled the same problem quite differently. On my Peacebringer I would simply revert from Nova form to Human form to prepare to engage the Quantum Gunner. If Essence Boost was recharged, cast it, but if not skip it. However, the real reason for reverting to Human form was to cast Inner Light to boost damage output, so if Inner Light wasn't recharged yet I'd wait for it to finish recharging. After getting buffed with Essence Boost (first, optional) and Inner Light (second, required) I'd then switch back to Nova form and charge the Quantum Gunner (already selected as $Target) with Bright Nova Scatter queued up to cast upon getting within range, immediately followed by Bright Nova Detonation ... and then launch into the usual single target attack chain (Glinting Eye, Bright Nova Bolt, Bright Nova Blast, Bright Nova Bolt, repeat) to mop up the entire spawn group. The curious thing is how the asymmetries between Starless Step+Sunless Mire and Essence Boost+Inner Light empowers Warshades and Peacebringers respectively to deal with the threat of Quantum Gunners, and how the disparate capabilities lead to such radically different engagement strategies for being able to deal with those all too pesky Quantum Gunners. I just find it interesting how when given different tools both Kheldians CAN have strategies for dealing with this particular challenge the methods used wind up being so radically different. Same outcome (defeated Quantum Gunners) ... but completely different means ... which is Very Cool™.

Just played through the Atta Caves in the past couple of days (started Level 13 and leveled up to Level 14 while on the map without leaving except to Hospital) and simply due to the sheer quantity of spawn groups on the maps while playing my Peacebringer and Warshade solo through the caves ... and I found it kind of interesting how my Peacebringer and Warshade dealt with the large numbers of Quantum Gunners who spawned throughout the map. On my Warshade (first, I ran my Peacebringer second), I was starting out (with the v2 build, not the v3 build I've now posted) in Human Form with Orbiting Death (and trying to make it work) ... and once I hit a Level 14 Troll Lieutenant while I was Level 13 and got pummeled into a Hospital trip I switched to doing the rest of the Atta Caves in Nova form and never looked back. But the curious thing was that my strategy for dealing with Quantum Gunners was radically different for my Warshade involved use switching back to Human form, retreating to a "safe" distance from the spawn group with Orbiting Death toggled on so as to use Starless Step to teleport foe to the ceiling(!) above my position (so the Quantum Gunner would fall into my Orbiting Death aura radius and delay their attack until they gain their footing). I'd then cue up use of the Nemesis Staff once the Quantum Gunner has "moved" through the teleport (so you don't interrupt the casting) so that part of the draw animation finishes more quickly and that the Nemesis Staff is the first thing to hit the Quantum Gunner so as to inflict Knockback and buy more time in which the Quantum Gunner can't attack. Once the Nemsis Staff attack is done, change to Nova form and just deliver fast attacks to burn down the Quantum Gunner as fast as possible and then get ready in case any other adds are running to also attack (hence why it's a good idea to use Starless Step at a decent remove to delay how quickly those adds, if any, arrive). Once the Quantum Gunner and any adds are mopped up, it's just more Nova form burning down the stock and standard spawn groups that don't have a Quantum Gunner mixed in with them ... until finding the next spawn group with a Quantum Gunner in it. By contrast, my Peacebringer handled the same problem quite differently. On my Peacebringer I would simply revert from Nova form to Human form to prepare to engage the Quantum Gunner. If Essence Boost was recharged, cast it, but if not skip it. However, the real reason for reverting to Human form was to cast Inner Light to boost damage output, so if Inner Light wasn't recharged yet I'd wait for it to finish recharging. After getting buffed with Essence Boost (first, optional) and Inner Light (second, required) I'd then switch back to Nova form and charge the Quantum Gunner (already selected as $Target) with Bright Nova Scatter queued up to cast upon getting within range, immediately followed by Bright Nova Detonation ... and then launch into the usual single target attack chain (Glinting Eye, Bright Nova Bolt, Bright Nova Blast, Bright Nova Bolt, repeat) to mop up the entire spawn group. The curious thing is how the asymmetries between Starless Step+Sunless Mire and Essence Boost+Inner Light empowers Warshades and Peacebringers respectively to deal with the threat of Quantum Gunners, and how the disparate capabilities lead to such radically different engagement strategies for being able to deal with those all too pesky Quantum Gunners. I just find it interesting how when given different tools both Kheldians CAN have strategies for dealing with this particular challenge the methods used wind up being so radically different. Same outcome (defeated Quantum Gunners) ... but completely different means ... which is Very Cool™.

You mean the Safe Mode that has already been removed from Island Rum ...?

Frost is a Cone attack, not a PBAoE. Switching the set type it accepts to PBAoE would be invalid on the criteria you describe, because all Cones use Target AoE sets. The solution for Frost is to allow Range enhancements to be slotted into the power (and have them affect the power). Range not being accepted by the power for Stalkers is probably a copy/paste error when the powerset was proliferated to Stalkers ... an oversight rather than a deliberate decision/balancing point.

Pay attention to the Allowed Enhancements in the tooltip. Conspicuous by its absence is Range enhancements. What it does list as enhancements are: Slow Endurance reduction Recharge reduction Damage Accuracy What this means is that although you can get multi-mod enhancements (HOs and set IOs) with Range as a component ... but even with that component in the enhancement(s) the Range will NOT be increased by enhancement. The power is coded to NOT be modified by Range enhancements.

IF you take Time Crawl as a Defender, it's useful as a single target "neutralizer" power in its own right. For slotting, I'd personally recommend adding 0, 1 or 2 slots. With 0 added slots, you just put a single Accuracy IO into the power and have done with it as a One Slot Wonder. If adding any additional slots (1 or 2) I would recommend adding ONLY the procs from Slow sets ... Impeded Swiftness which does Smashing damage and/or Pacing of the Turtle which adds recharge debuffing. The key point here is that with no recharge slotted into Time Crawl (and none from Alpha slotting) these procs have a 90% chance to proc upon use of Time Crawl. Just putting the Impeded Swiftness proc into Time Crawl makes it feel like using the power isn't a waste of animation time. Of the two added procs, Impeded Swiftness is more useful against Minions through Bosses, while Pacing of the Turtle is more useful against Elite Bosses, Archvillains and Giant Monsters. And while adding both might be "ideal" for the power, in many builds there just aren't the additional slots to spare for supporting Time Crawl above and beyond the Delayed synergy enumerated in the powers themselves.

And THIS ... THIS is why I go to all of the effort of writing my WALL OF TEXT CRITS YOU!!! posts for my builds. Even if you don't want to play the exact build that I specify, if my build post(s) INSPIRE YOU to take my discoveries and then cross-pollinate them into your own build(s) ... I consider myself well rewarded for all the agonizing and effort I put into writing up my build(s) and posting them in the forums. THIS is why I post my builds and explain what I'm doing in them to the extent that I do. And the best part is ... sometimes other people go on to make even more discoveries ... and by doing so (and sharing those discoveries), we ALL become "richer" in both knowledge and understanding of the possibilities within the game, and "how" people want to play and engage within it. Thank you.

/jranger

/jranger

Personally, I consider the Fighting pool to be largely wasted on a Mastermind ... but to each their own.

I've never played invulnerability, so I'm not well versed in its foibles, quirks and limitations. For Martial Arts I like everything (even the Taunt!) except Crane Kick (unless Crane Kick is slotted with KB>KD). However, given that Cobra Strike and Crane Kick are functionally interchangeable in damage output terms for an attack chain (one stuns reliably and the other does RNGesus knockback), on balance I'd say that Cobra Strike "wins" and Crane Kick becomes redundant. You can check my math on the attack chains in order to see why I make that assertion.

How so? Do tell ...

Once a slot is added to a power, that slot is ALWAYS with that power. The only thing that turns a slot "off" is being Exemplared more than 5 Levels below when the Power the slot is in is taken. So if you have a power you take at Level 6 and put the last slot into it at Level 50 ... even when Exemplared down to Level 1 that last slot from Level 50 is "still there" and working for that power.

/em chuckle Of course they do ... Demons/Dark is VERY ... boy ... 🤣 However, for Beast Mastery, I would honestly recommend picking Nature Affinity as the secondary, and not because "girls have to be healers" or some other nonsense, but simply because the combination is POWERFUL and has some pretty serious synergies attached to it. I'll refer you to THIS THREAD started by @SmalltalkJava on the subject to give you not only a sense of possibilities but also synergies and things to think about (along with an evolution of builds that ought to help you tremendously). I even took what @SmalltalkJava was doing with Beast/Nature and applied it to my Mind/Nature/Primal ... Mind Over Vegetable(s) build simply because the work that @SmalltalkJava had been doing in his thread was simply THAT GOOD, so you might want to look at that build too for ideas on how to leverage Nature Affinity most effectively/powerfully. I personally recommend taking all three of the Mastermind personal attacks, for reasons to be found in my Ninja/Time/Mace ... "It's A BOW Time" build posted in these forums because of the serious synergies I found (and, let's be honest, enjoyment of playing the character amplification/magnification/multiplication by having attacks of my own instead of just letting my Ninjas "do all the work" while I could only just watch them). It's okay. Not everyone has played (or likes to play) a Mastermind. What makes Masterminds tick/sing/awesome is the sense of "directing traffic" and it can be an empowering feeling. The closest analogy I can think of is playing the supporting role on a Team ... except that you "always bring your own team" even when you're playing solo. There's a perception and "mode of thinking" you need to have in order to play a Mastermind to the fullest possible extent. Now, the BIGGEST difference between hating (or even just not understanding) how to play a Mastermind ... and LOVING to play a Mastermind ... is going to be the CONTROL SCHEME you use to command and "direct traffic" with such that you're playing on multiple levels at the same time. You're not just thinking tactically, from moment to moment, you're also needing to think strategically, BEYOND what's happening at any particular instant in time. You need to have a heightened sense of situational awareness of your surroundings (because Mastermind play CAN get somewhat chaotic at times so it's easy to get overwhelmed if you're not accustomed to it) AND you need to have easy/quick/reliable ways to issue commands to your Pets so that they respond to your wishes and orders. Without a control scheme for commanding your Pets, you're essentially a spectator to all of the action happening around you, which is rarely satisfying as a Player. So you need to work out a way to be able to corral/command/direct your Pets in a way that becomes intuitive ... and that control scheme is something that doesn't come "pre-built" for you with the Archetype. This is where keybinds come in ... or more to the point, a whole slew of bindloadfiles that contain the necessary command and control scheme that enables the necessary UI inputs to control/wrangle your Pets and make the experience of playing a Mastermind something that is enjoyable (and challenging!) rather than just drudgery or near impossible to manipulate in a timely fashion like you can with other Archetypes. However, since the creation of the overwriting/overriding Control Scheme for Pets is something that is SO DESPERATELY NEEDED for the Archetype to be playable (and fun to play!) there have been a few methods developed over the years for "standardizing" how to formulate the necessary bindloadfiles. Spoiler alert ... I myself use a collection of TEN bindloadfiles to organize the necessary "threads of possibilities" needed to issue commands to my Ninja Pets either in total, by selective groups, or even individually. If you want to use those as a starting point for the bindloadfiles you'll need to develop for your boy and girl, they can be found HERE. Yes ... it's "a project" to work up a set of bindloadfiles (and then proof them in actual gameplay because typos will wreck things for you) so as to "perfect" them for use. It took me a few DAYS (and multiple rewrites) to get my set of bindloadfiles into the shape you see them in, and one of the considerations I had to allow for was the simple ergonomics of my keyboard and mouse setup so that I didn't wind up with a control scheme that "conflicted" with any of the other characters and archetypes I'd play as alts. In the end, I'm happier with the result (once I trained myself to it, and yes there is a period of adaptation and memorization involved) than if I'd been using the more "standard" method of setting up keybinds for the NUMPAD to the right of the keyboard (mainly because my game client doesn't recognize the NUMPAD keys as being legitimate keybinds, so I had to work around that handicap). But this is the thing you NEED to know, especially as a newbie to playing (or just leveling) Masterminds. You NEED a well defined CONTROL SCHEME for managing/commanding the Mastermind's Pets in a way that doesn't frustrate you and which is responsive to Player inputs. That basically means you need keybinds and/or macros to achieve that. If you want those keybinds to be "flexible enough" to shift depending on context (all Pets instead of selected Pets or an individual Pet) then you're going to essentially have to resort to a bindloadfile scheme of some sort in order to achieve that outcome. Yes it's annoying to have to do all that setup/testing in order to get it to work ... but the results you get from doing that is Night vs Day. It's the difference between having fun playing a Mastermind ... and being annoyed/bored/unsatisfied at playing a Mastermind. So ... are there must have binds/macros they need? YES! You'll almost certainly need to do some amount of customization of whatever control scheme you settle upon, if only to "address" the different primary powersets correctly, but once you've got a control scheme built for one Mastermind you can adapt that scheme to another (and another and another). Getting the STRUCTURE of the control scheme right is the hard part ... after that it's just details and "gravy" (so to speak). In fact, I would even go so far as to say that having a Control Scheme for a Mastermind is just as important (if not more important!) than having a build plan that you can load up into a build planner to decide what powers you're going to take and what slots you're going to pick and what enhancements you want to fill those slots with. The Control Scheme is the difference between a well played Mastermind and a Mastermind who can't "do" anything in a timely fashion while chaos erupts around them (at the slightest provocation). If you can't "control" your Pets then you can't control MOST of what your Mastermind "does" ... and that's bad. If you'd like to look at other Mastermind keybinds for alternative Control Schemes aside from the one that I use (which is not as common as some other schemes) you can find more information here ... LINK ... if you want to really dive head first into the deep end of this. It might start out being "all greek to me" when you first look at it, but there are ... patterns ... involved in the bindloadfiles and once you recognize those patterns you'll be well on your way to figuring out how to write the necessary bindloadfiles for your boy's and girl's Masterminds (and they might even thank you for it!!!). Mastermind play is QUITE different from playing any other Archetype. A lot of what you're "doing" as a Player when playing a Mastermind is ... indirect. It's not that YOU attack your $Target, it's that you command your Pets to attack your $Target ... and then they keep doing that until they're told to do otherwise (or the $Target is defeated). It's very much a style of play that involves "directing traffic" as I mentioned above, but there's a kind of synergistic bond between Mastermind and Pets. They fight for you, but you also need to be smart enough/aware enough to tell them what and where to fight in order to be most successful, and that requires a LOT of mental calculus and planning ahead and just simply "knowing" what's going on (and where things are headed) if you want to play in a skillful rather than just merely chaotic manner. Best thing I can recommend is that as a Mastermind you don't want to get TOO overly ambitious in trying to take down dogpiles of mobs. As a Mastermind, your best play is done when there are "many of you" fighting "few of them" in the battlefield. Usually the Player is outnumbered by the $Targets you have to fight ... but with a Mastermind you can reverse that and outnumber them! Just be mindful of the fact that your Pets are NOT indestructible and they will take damage (which will need to be healed if you aren't going to be resummoning them all the time) ... because dead Pets deal no damage to whatever you're fighting. Your Pets WILL have limitations ... there will be things they Can and CAN'T do on their own. It's your responsibility, as the Mastermind Player, to either work around or otherwise mitigate those gaps in what your Pets can and can't do in order to set them up for success ... rather than failure. In other words, don't get TOO overconfident and too far out over your skis (so to speak) because it's embarrassing when you faceplant (especially if it's your fault for making bad decisions). Your build can help you ... but it's really up to YOU, as the Player, to make it shine and chime with your decisions and skills while playing. Masterminds, and their Pets, take a lot of "care and feeding" to get right ... but once you bring it all together ... not only is it glorious but there is simply nothing else like playing a Mastermind. Masterminds are difficult to learn AND difficult to master ... but once you do ... 😎 One other thing I'd recommend to every new Mastermind Player ... TAKE the LEADERSHIP pool! This ought to be obvious, but some people overlook it. Maneuvers, Assault and Tactics are THE most useful powers you can add to ANY Mastermind, since they affect yourself and ALL of your Mastermind Pets. Maneuvers makes your Pets take less damage (by sometimes not being hit), Assault makes your Pets do more damage (always useful) and Tactics helps ensure your Pets actually hit their $Targets more often (since misses waste time and give more opportunity for incoming damage to harm you and your Pets). I recommend Assault and Tactics for EVERY Mastermind, and Maneuvers if you've got the available slots for it in your build. You won't need to be taking the Leadership pool at Level 4 or something crazy like that, when you're still getting your initial powers, but the Leadership pool should be one of the first power pools you reach for when you've got a power pick at a Level where you don't have something to take in your primary or secondary at that time. Maneuvers is better with slots and enhancements. Assault is a One Slot Wonder power. Put a single endurance reduction enhancement into and never spend another slot on it ever again. Tactics is either a One Slot Wonder or something you'll want to 6-slot (with Gaussian's Synchronized Fire-Control if you're taking personal attacks on your Mastermind). As I mentioned above, I recommend Beast Mastery/Nature Affinity. You can even add Mace Mastery as the epic/patron pool to get Power Boost for even more incredible yields out of Nature Affinity (if you've got the power picks left for it). I'd even argue that Beast/Nature will wind up being "stronger" than Demons/Dark in terms of possible build strategies, but that also largely depends on "how" your boy and girl are going to play their Masterminds, because Player Skill is extremely important in determining how much fun a particular Mastermind combination will be to play. Dark will make stuff MISS so it can't hurt you (as much). Nature will make stuff NOT HURT when it hits due to Absorb and Regeneration and Resistances and Healing. Good luck @Rooster Gold ... you've got your work cut out for you. 😉 Enjoy the learning curve though!

Females get Tights with a Metallic option ...

Makes me wonder if anyone has created a Psimon Says character yet ... or any of the homonym variants that immediately suggest themselves.

Nice ... sure. Fair to the other powersets ... not so much ...