Steampunkette

So the way Pet Powers work is that there's a specific Call tied to the Power to summon an NPC from a specific 'Batch' dedicated to that powerset. The actual -control- over the pet that Masterminds get is baked into the pet itself, it has a deferred AI that the Mastermind gets control of through a UI. It's AI does not function like normal NPC AI. Controller pets, on the other hand, do -mostly- work like normal NPCs only they're set to bungie-follow the person who created them like they're part of a patrol and you're the 'leader' of the patrol. So in order to make new pets you'd have to take the AI Set that exists for the Mastermind Pets and then apply it to a new NPC model that is then added to the batch that the power summons, but also apply all power logic and stuff to it so it uses the same powers as any other member of the batch. But unless you remove all other NPCs from that batch, it's still going to be random whether you get the White Dude Thug with Red Hair or the Black Dude Thug with Black Hair or the White Girl Thug with the Blond Hair. To set up model swapping they'd either need to create an override power and a separate NPC AI/Power Loadout/Etc to a separate NPC Batch with 1 NPC in it -or- create a way to divide all NPCs from the full combination of Model/Powers/AI that they currently are into a floating cloud of individual pieces that can be swapped around. Like right now? The Devs could not Spawn a Crystal Titan that uses the Zeus Titan attacks. Those things are baked into the individual characters and aren't interchangeable. They'd need to decouple all of those things for every NPC in order to just "Swap the Model" Obviously the override method would be less work, but still a LOT of work. Meanwhile creating ANY Mastermind Powerset would, according to the Live Devs, take as much effort as creating 8 regular powersets... Sooo... We can get a new powerset with female minions or we can get 8 other powersets... So I wouldn't hold your breath on any of the above happening any time soon.

So... You're suggesting a double-mitigation archetype. Defensive abilities are a form of Passive Partial Mitigation. You toggle on your abilities and they reduce incoming damage by a percentage. Either a strict percentage, Damage Resistance, or an instance percentage, Defense. Alternatively you have sets that allow you to take damage, and then mitigated it by passive or active partial mitigation in the form of healing and regeneration. Control, on the other hand, is an Active Absolute Mitigation. You attack the enemy with holds/stuns/sleeps/etc and they do not even -make- the attack in the first place. Control also only functions as powerset if it's pumping out at least 2 magnitudes of control because Minions have 0 protection (So 1 mag control affects them) and lieutenants have mag 1 protection (So 2 mags affects them). The Hallmark of a Secondary Powerset is to make it weaker than it would be as a primary powerset. This is why Defenders do less damage than Blasters. Only you can't make Control any weaker without making it ineffectual. You could affect the -durations- but Hasten, recharge enhancements, and control duration enhancements renders that largely irrelevant. And THEN we get into the idea of making the controls more powerful based on targets in your AoE Taunt or Damage Aura.... Jeebus. At least Controllers (Control Primary) have to rely on a critical hit or stacking to hold a boss, and Dominators (Control Primary) need to stack holds or reach domination to do so. This would be a character with control as a -secondary- who could permahold bosses out of the box without stacking just by walking over to a group of enemies. I think the idea needs a lot of workshopping. But by and large I don't see this archetype suggestion as something that could reasonably be implemented in the game. It would solo worse than a Controller ('Cause it's control damage would be lower and it would have no damage buffs or enemy debuffs or end-cost offsetting powers) or a Tanker (because it would lack... basically everything that they need to deal damage). And on Teams it would wind up doing half the functionality of a Tank and the work of 2-3 Dominators who forgot they had Assault Sets as a secondary.

It seems like the main stumbling block is psychological, your deep connection with one character precluding the creation of other characters... So... Could you make an alternate version of the same character? Like... You like Claws/SR, right? So make a Claws/SR Brute with the same costume and a slightly different name (Hyphenate, maybe? Or have it be the Weapon-X to your Wolverine or whatever). Play the same character in concept and even powers, but with a different archetype. You could do the same guy as a Claw/SR Stalker and use that 'version' for a Black Ops/Stealth Mission mindset. Or maybe you can do an alternate universe version of the same character, where instead of getting Claws he became a Fire Blaster. Same person, different powers and playstyle and archetype.

If your position remains "We've got bad stuff in the game, so let's add MORE bad stuff! There's no reason not to!" I dunno what to say, GB. I've said my piece. I don't want it in the game because I don't want to be exposed to what we both know will happen 'cause people are often awful.

I noted injury in this case would mean having something taken away... Did you miss that part of the first paragraph? Thankfully I haven't seen any "Body Fluid Blasters" so far. But while that's gross it's not also tied up in a culture of violence against women and power over women. It's gross and stuff but it's not tied up in a cultural expectation of female subservience. It's gross and all but it's not part of a continuing travesty of hatred and mistreatment of women that gets wrapped up in internet memes and laughed off as 'boys being boys'. You keep trying to set up straw men, Galaxy Brain, but the issue is the social context in which female mastermind pets would exist. Not exclusively this puritanical "Oh no! Something related to sexuality!" you're trying to put forward.

It isn't "Punishing" anyone. Punishment implies injury inflicted because of wrongdoing or whatever. Injury would be having female MM pets taken -away- from you because someone did something deplorable. This is more like "We're not getting a hottub because your pervert siblings would do unspeakable things to it and in it. And while we could repair the damage after the fact, it's -still- going to traumatize any member of the neighborhood who sees them doing it." 'Cause while we do have the ability to moderate, someone STILL gets exposed to the nasty shit before it can be reported since they have to see it in order to know it's happening. You obviously don't mind. I do.

Slippery slope was "A leads to B, therefore A leads to Q!" with no established connection between A and Q. Like "If we let gay people get married, we'll have to make having sex with ducks legal, too!" an actual argument provided by Pat Robertson! This is "We should have Female Mastermind Pets" goes directly to "We live in a society with rampant sexism and general grossness/cruelty so some people would use Female Pets to do gross stuff" There's no presumption of C through P of sliding slope we're skipping over and jumping to the end at Q. That's one step. A to B. If we do this, people will use it to be gross. Because people are -already- gross with all the stuff that isn't this, already.

People have the ability to be really gross, it's true. This would make it worse. Why would we want to make it -worse- than it already is?

Nothing. Or male thugs masterminds. But that's also a false equivalence. Thanks to the different ways society treats men and women they both have RIDICULOUSLY different social connotations and levels of expectation. A different impact as well. It's disingenuous to present them as equal concepts.

Temp pets that you cannot control, rename, speak through, or emote with animated emotes. Apples to Oranges. Harris's arc IS nasty.

The devs had reasonably considered it. The fact that you can do something Terrible in one part of the game that was designed to be as customizable as possible to allow players to generate content doesn't mean they should open it up EVERYWHERE ELSE. Also somehow someone's nasty rape fetish made it through the game's design team and became a Rogue > Hero Morality mish so... yeah... Also: The AE is a contained place where someone's perversions are at least -somewhat- hidden. McPimpin' the Hoe Mastermind gets to be offensive pretty much everywhere.

The live devs had a good reason to keep female MM pets out of player hands... I feel like they were right. Not the "Violence Against Women" thing. But the knowledge that time to penis is measured in milliseconds.

Not particularly, no. In fact it would be Underpowered. Blaster sets have a muuuuuch higher target cap and a longer range than Sentinel sets. The baseline damage values are a -touch- different, but overall it would be a Blaster who blasts poorly compared to others. Unless the Devs took the time to create a separate "Blaster-Specific" Sentinel Set version of every Sentinel set... which would be a lotta work for not much benefit, really.

Would be similar to making entirely new powersets from a numbers standpoint. The animations and art would be there, but each set would have to be complete before it was provided to the players. You wouldn't be able to drag and drop powers, yourself, as a player, up and down the powerset. It would be Kinetic Melee1, Kinetic Melee2, Kinetic Melee3 for each variation of power order.

Sounds great to me! We take the KB Resistance out of Bio and Radiation, slap -some- but not a -ton- of KB Resistance to the Acrobatics Power... And it gives people a variety of ways to play! 😄

I kind of feel like not having the Knockback Resistance is a thematic part of playing those sets. Like... If I'm playing a character who is Invulnerable, standing tall when someone hits me with the force of a tank-blast fits the theme of -being- the invulnerable brick who weathers whatever comes at her. Like Captain Marvel getting head-butted by Thanos and no-selling it. Meanwhile "My power is being on fire!" doesn't scream "You can't knock me through a building". It screams "I'm on fire!". Same thing with Electricity and Shadow Manipulation. I'm of the opinion that Radiation probably needs it's KB Resistance taken away. At least Shields/Willpower/SR have other reasonable things going for them (Like deflecting/absorbing the blow with a shield, overcoming the force with telekinesis/tenacity, or using super-agility to redirect the force and not go anywhere) Radiation's just... weird. Honestly, Bio Armor is, too, kind of? Yank it out of there, as well. (I say that as a Bio Armor Main)

It really hasn't been handled, Everstryke. You've not apologized. That's, like, the bare minimum level of courtesy that your generation -demanded- of my generation. Drove through our heads all day every day. And acting like it was handled, or that this has been a civil conversation since that post, is a form of Gaslighting. Gaslighting is a type of mental and emotional abuse where the party who commits an offense acts as though there was no offense. That it just didn't happen. OR that it's over and done with without any action on their part to attempt to make amends. And on top of that you're trying to put the burden on others to engage you in civil discourse in PMs? Man what a backhanded insult from the person who was uncivil. Like... I get that you're a proud guy. But you're not helping yourself by trying to deflect, endlessly. Apologize. Don't apologize. This'll be our last interaction. Happy trails, Cowboy.

You called people who hovertank Pussies. That's why the GM popped in. That's not an "Oversensitive" issue. It's not a "Thick Skin" issue. You insulted people. I popped up to try and defuse things with a joke about the strength of pussies... but yeah. And your "Safe Space" comment is just another deflecting insult on top of the younger people old man shakes a stick at millennials guffaw guffaw. Young people these days aren't "Overly Sensitive". We just have the pussies to stand up to insults and rude behavior. I would say we have the 'balls', but balls are soft, exposed, weak, and fragile things. 😉

Good thing a pussy can take a pounding, then!

CONTROVERSIAL OPINION TIME I generally do not play characters under level 22 outside of a PLing farm or the DFB. I don't consider my characters to be 'fully formed' until that point, largely because at that point you get your attack chains going, some decent AoE, and the ability to slot SOs. I have 30 characters on Everlasting. Almost all of them are in the level 25-36 range. I have one who is 50 and two in the high 40s. I've been playing for months. I love pretty much all of them, mechanically (Except Supernaturelle, my Petless Demon MM 'cause shit I did not realize just how little damage MMs do). They're all fun to play and I run around Paragon with them at different times 'cause I loves me some Variety. (Brutes and EATs are where my focus is, recently, but outside of Tanker/Scrapper/Defender I have characters of every AT) I'm 900% certain I'm not the only person who plays like this. Mainly because I have friends who do the same thing. Not everyone slams their "Main" to 50 and continues relentlessly playing that character. Not everyone PLs a stable of characters to 50 so they can cover whatever role a given party needs. Not everyone faffs about in Pocket D at level 15 or less forever 'cause they only leveled far enough to get a couple of RP-Centric powers. But a lot do. And we should consider them all in these decisions.

Apparently Incandescent Strike causes an animation glitch in the "Combat Idle while Hovering" animation. In the glitch, the character model's arms jerk outward at specific intervals and yank back to normal position. Like a good player, I made a video to make it easier to verify the glitch. No idea why there's a black box L around the game playspace... it didn't show up in OBS.

I'm saying that if you're on a team and need heal self so badly that you cannot take a break from tanking to run around the corner and heal yourself, and need to do so, then you have a very bad team both in composition and play style. Which is such a narrow field that explicitly only affects tanks, that no change to heal self is really going to help. And if you're not on such a crap team you either have support to keep you from dying so you don't need heal self or you can run around the corner to survive by using heal self. The problem being presented is so incredibly niche and small that it shouldn't really be considered a problem.

Seriously, if your team isn't watching your health and helping you out it's their fault you're dropping. Tell them IN ADVANCE to use some mitigation effects if you think you're gonna get in trouble. Though for the record? Even the buff-debuff sets TYPICALLY have at least SOME healing. So unless you've flatly refused to have Corruptors, Defenders, Masterminds, or Controllers on your team you shouldn't need much, if any, self healing. And if you've got a Controller or Dominator on the team you shouldn't have a problem using your self heal. Also your OWN KB/Immob/Etc. Or maybe since everything is aggroed on you, and no one is providing Controls or Knockback, just run and heal. Barring ridiculously OP Blasters or Scrappers/Brutes trying to steal the aggro (And hey, they're tough enough to endure some) you can still just run and heal. Like... how explicitly -specific- are you building your teams where you eschew anyone who has any kind of control or healing abilities that this is a serious issue for you?

If you've got a team: Tell THEM to Knockback the enemies. Or Control them. OR throw heals. Unless your entire team is Fire/Fire Sentinels you're going to have -someone- on the team who can delay the enemy, or debuff them, long enough to get the heal off.

Honestly I don't understand the Wizardry involved in making them desummon and resummon when you walk onto a different map. It didn't -used- to work that way. You used to have to resummon your pets any time you swapped maps! Maybe that would work? But it could also be abused... like in Stealthing missions. Desummon pets, Stalker gets to the boss, Recall Friend, Resummon. So maybe it would need a decently large recharge? I dunno...