Adeon Hawkwood

You can get the pets permanent for Spiders, you just need perma-hasten levels of recharge. As for it not being powerful, it's incredibly powerful. The Spider pets were balanced with the assumption that they wouldn't be up 100% of the time (except for the spiderlings) and it shows. A perma-hasten Crab Spider with permanent pets is an incredibly powerful character. Now pet-based characters aren't the most popular but that's not because they are weak, a lot of people just don't like pet-based characters (as evidenced by the fact that Masterminds aren't super popular despite being very powerful). The problem here is balancing for SOs versus IOs. A Crab Spider with permanent pets is incredibly powerful but it's also a high end IO build and there are plenty of other ATs that can achieve similar levels of performance with high-end IO builds. However giving a Crab Spider permanent pets with just SOs would make them a lot more powerful than most other characters with that level of slotting. In another thread I described perma-pet Crab-spiders as having the firepower of a Blaster, the toughness of a Scrapper and pets of a Mastermind and I stand by that assertion. It's an incredibly powerful build and I don't think it's unreasonable for it to require a high end IO build to achieve it.

No, they were all going to be released as part of Issue 24 but the game was shutdown before that was released to live. EDIT: Also just realized I should clarify since I don't know which version of Pines you have. The Sorcery pool and the fifth power for most pools that are currently live were going to be added in I24. Some versions of Pines also list a few new power pools (Utility Belt, Gadgetry, a couple of others) that are not currently in game. Those were being worked on by the original devs but weren't finished prior to the shutdown.

I'm actually against this. I like being able to double stack gun drones, if it was a permanent pet then we'd lose that ability.

So if you really want to buy the IOs with merits I can't stop you but I would seriously encourage you to check market prices first. If you've actually got 300-500 merits (which your statement implies) you can probably finance a large chunk of your build by turning them into a fungible commodity (either Enhancement Boosters or Enhancement Converters) and selling those on the market. 100 merits = 300 Enhancement Converters. Converters sell for 90K-100K each so you're looking at 24-27 million inf. Even the more expensive IOs in the posted build (the Winter sets and the Hecatombs) are only about 20 million each.

It's somewhere between the two. They inherit your buffs including any remaining duration.

It's an awesome idea. However it's probably to much work to be practical. You'd have to make custom animations for each item type and based on some comments that the devs made when the game was live programming a power to work with multiple different combat stances (aka weapon types) is incredibly difficult. Apparently Brawl is the most complex power in the game animation-wise specifically because it's coded to use a different animation based on your current stance. I'm sure PK will be along to post the standard code rant soon.

So at a basic level Empathy just isn't a great secondary for Masterminds (which is part of the reason the original devs never ported it over). You'll probably have a better time with Pain if you want a healing secondary since that was designed with Masterminds in mind. Now the other side of it there's a pretty clear hierarchy for Support sets and things like Dark and Time are at the top for basically all support ATs while Empathy is generally a low tier set. So essentially Empathy is a low-tier support set that has poor synergy with Masterminds in general. Is it viable? Sure, you can play it and have fun. Is it the best possible option? Hell no.

You need 122% recharge (remember you always have a base recharge of 100%). It's a good idea to aim a bit beyond that though to give the power time to activate before your bar drains. Note that since Perma-Hasten requires about the same level of global recharge it's generally worth sticking that in your build since that gives you a bunch of extra global recharge.

Right, the Interface is the only one that shows up on their buff par because of how the Alpha Slot works. Since the Alpha slot is a global enhancement is enhances your pet summoning powers rather than the pets themselves. So if (for example) you slot a Musculature Alpha Slot ability the damage enhancement will be applied to the pets when you summon them but the alpha slot ability won't show up in the buff bar. As for the Alpha slot ability feeling weak on pets, that's kind of the nature of the Alpha slot. The alpha slot is strongest when you can use it to buff an aspect of your character which is under-slotted. For example my Time/Electric defender chose an Alpha slot ability that gives Endurance Modification to make his drains more powerful while my AD/Dev Blaster picked one with Range to give him larger cones. Since MM Pets tend to already be ED capped for Damage and Accuracy picking on of the Damage boosting Alpha Slot abilities doesn't have that much impact on their DPS. You're better off either picking something that either enhances a secondary aspect of your pets abilities or something your secondary powers are under-slotted for.

Yeah, it's been that way ever since the invention system was released.

Glad to hear it. Unfortunately that bug has been around for a while. The name of the IO is wrong, but it's been that way ever since the Invention system was released.

I'm honestly not sure what your problem is with MMs and Incarnate abilities? Alpha Slot: Enhancements bonuses and level shifts apply to pets Interface Slot: Procs apply to pet attacks Judgement Slot: Same damage as every other AT Lore Slot: MOAR PETS! and Incarnate Shift applies to Pets Destiny Slot: Both the Buff and the Incarnate Shift apply to pets Hybrid: Ok, yeah this one is a bit pants for MMs but you've still got Support Core getting doubled for Pets and Melee Radial is decent for Tankerminds IMHO the biggest issue with MMs in Incarnate trials was the fact that higher level enemies and AoE attacks hurt MMs worse than other ATs, but the devs largely fixed that by giving the lower tier pets extra Level Shifts in incarnate trials and changing it so that a lot of really nasty AoEs (i.e. Obliteration Beam) deal drastically reduced damage to pets. Some of the trials aren't great for Masterminds (eg phase 3 of Lambda) but every AT has some part of an iTrial that they hate so it's not like that's specific to MMs.

I can personally confirm that fast snipe works at 97.37% To Hit. The yellow ring requires a higher level to of To Hit before it shows up but the actual fast snipe animation happens with 97.37% To Hit. As far as I know the fast snipe animation does kick in at 97% but I haven't explicitly tested it quite that low. Now there is defintiely a bug regarding what level of To Hit is required for the yellow ring to show up but that's a separate topic. This is objectively wrong, the Kismet proc gives +6% To Hit, this is well documented and observable in game using the combat attributes screen.

As a side note, if you have Null the Gull change your alignment to a different one and then switch back it will automatically start the timer fo rthe alignment power without needing to run tip missions.

Have you tried doing the fast cast or are you just going by the fact that the snipe doesn't have a yellow ring around it? There's a known bug where if you're only just over the 97% To Hit barrier then the fast cast will still work but you don't get the yellow ring indicating it. To test it try and cast the snipe, it should be pretty obvious if you're fast casting or not but to be absolutely sure start casting and immediately move, if it doesn't interrupt the cast then you're getting fast-snipe.

So 1.5billion to insta-level a character? That would make a nice inf sink. Please add an option to buy merits in bulk though, I think clicking the buy merits button 1500 times would take longer than just leveling them. If it was an influence sink along the level of 1.5 billion influence per token, I’d be +1 with this. It still requires effort and keeps people in the game, and it wouldn’t be a “gimme” for most players Well you can buy merits for 1million inf each so setting it to 1500 merits would be equivalent to 1.5billion if you bought the merits. Now if they level boost item was tradeable the market price would probably be lower but that's harder to predict since it would affect the general merit market price.

So 1.5billion to insta-level a character? That would make a nice inf sink. Please add an option to buy merits in bulk though, I think clicking the buy merits button 1500 times would take longer than just leveling them.

I just put them in as enhancements at the max level for their set. Since the only difference is exemplaring that works fine for doing builds.

You can check the wiki: https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Super_Pack The homecoming devs removed the costume pieces and other account-wide unlocks and I think they may have tweaked some of the numbers but the basic list is unchanged.

What AT are you on? According to Pine's Spring Attack is a 1.5 damage scale attack. So assuming that you're on something like a Tanker or a Corruptor with moderate melee damage scales then I would expect to see about 120 damage. Example: A tanker has a melee damage scale of 0.8, Obliteration gives 96.3% damage enhancement. 1.5 * 0.8 * 55.61 * 1.963 = 131 total damage. So yeah 120 damage sounds about right. As for it being labeled "Superior" damage, personally I would have labeled it as "High" rather thna "Superior" but the game as a whole isn't super consistent with those terms.

Keep in mind with mez resistance it functions a lot like recharge. So 100% mez resistance will halve the duration of mezzes. It's definitely useful but it's somewhat subject to diminishing returns.

I mean to be fair a sidekicked character generally isn't as powerful as one in the actual level range (fewer powers/slots). If you're cranking up the difficulty a bit then asking for somewhat higher level characters isn't completely unreasonable. On the other hand so long as they are level 22+ (i.e. they have SOs) the difference isn't that big of a deal.

The WST gives about half a level of XP. If you have double XP on this is then doubled to give you about 1 level worth of XP.

So the new economy is based almost entirely around Enhancement Converters. Basically people like myself buy up cheap uncommon recipes, convert them into rare enhancements and sell those. This means that unlike live crafted enhancements are often cheaper than buying recipes and crafting them. If you have merits that you want to convert into Inf buying either Enhancement Converters or Enhancement Boosters tends to be the most profitable option, earning you about 250K-300K per merit (before market fees). Other than that things are a lot cheaper than on live. Most good rare enhancements cost about 5-8million inf each. Purple IOs tend to go for ~20million. Finally note that the market uses a bracketing system so all levels of an IO along with the attuned version share a set of buy/sell offers and thus cost the same price.

So there are several IOs that give knockback protection. For incarnates Clarion gives mez protection. You cna also take Acrobatics for a little bit of hold protection if you want.