Steampunkette

The reason I say is simple: Rogue Entertainment exists. And has always existed. Back on CoH they started up their literal "Porn Studio" Supergroup. I think it was in CoV? And it lasted the entire life of CoH. And had a Branch on Champions Online. When CoH died, they focused all their efforts on the CO Branch. And now? They're on Everlasting. To be clear: I've got no problem with the group (I've had characters in the group on Virtue -and- Champions Online!). I'm just using them as a prime example of why I think the character being 'Sexually Active' probably wasn't the reason.

The Coming Storm Storyline. Or other story arcs. A New Zone. Or Kallisti Wharf -fully- Realized. New Powersets. New ARCHETYPES which create new ways to save our city... or Damn it, depending on the character. Villain Arcs in Paragon City. Hero Arcs in the Rogue Isles. Give Vigilantes a reason to go to the Isles and -stay- Vigilantes. Give Rogues reasons to go to Paragon and -stay- Rogues.

... I -think- Boxing, Kick, and Cross Punch -might- be useful for Controllers... Getting boxing increases the damage of Kick and Crosspunch by 15%. Getting Kick increases the damage of Boxing and Crosspunch by 15%. Getting Crosspunch increases the damage of Boxing and Kick by 15%. So that's a 30% across the board increase to all three powers if you -have- all three powers. Combine that with Set Bonuses Controllers can't typically get and Containment and while it might not be Scrapper/Blaster level damage it's certainly better than nothing!

I doubt anyone on Everlasting gives a hot damn if a character is sexually active... Unless that character is a Minor. I'm curious, @iynx, would you mind posting perhaps a picture of your character and their Bio? Maybe give an example of how the character is 'Sacreligious'?

I have a Science character with Magic Boots and stuff. She's an Archer-Scientist who studies magic the same way she studies physics. I had a Magic Brute. She was a Mutant exposed to Cage Chemical Runoff on Sharkhead when her cop-partner tried to murder her but ultimately it was the Red Coral that saved her life and empowered her split personality into a true hero. They're fuzzy as hell, for me. 😄

Dopplegangers are a tricky beast. Instead of using an NPC Model (That is, a one-piece model, like the Warriors or Thugs pets) it uses a Player Model. With that in place it can use a pre-selected set of variables, in the case of Doppelgangers: Your character's clothes/appearance. As to powersets they're pre-loaded in a model array of all the possible combos (Which is slightly smaller than possible combos based on Archetypes!). They don't have a "Primary" and a "Secondary" powerset, just a pool of selected powers, so a Tanker's Doppleganger is no different from a Scrapper's Doppleganger (So long as powers and such are the same sets).And the power options are entirely based on the AE's design selections. So let's say you have a Huge Bio/SS Tanker. Your doppleganger mission uses the $Gender tag to find out you're 'Huge' gender, a Powerset Query, and reference the mission's parameters. It puck the huge doppleganger that has SS and Bio powers, applies your costume to the player model, and voila! Suddenly there's a second you running around. Though it gets the name as defined by the mission's parameters (Which could be "You?" "Your Doppleganger" or just "$Name" Doppleganger tech couldn't be used, as is, for a pet mastermind 'cause your pet's powers would be your powers so it would summon more of you. Though the devs could make a "Doppleganger Batch" for a Mastermind Powerset that calls your appearance for the pets. They'd just need to have their own powersets defined separately from that to avoid recursion.

*sob* It was never meant to be! At least among the 20 something people who vote for these things.

Allow me to quote Siljin. That cannot be done without changing the entire character database and system. This is something so big -Paragon- never tried it 'cause of the quantity of work... but trust me: People requested it ALL THE TIME.

Oh no no no! Even better! Clawdude the Scrapper, Klawdude the Brute, and Clawdude Noir the Stalker!

There are 4 non-alphanumerical characters allowed in a PC name: . ' - ? (period, apostrophe, hyphen, and question mark respectively). But you're only allowed to use one of the four types of non-alphanumerical characters in a name, and only one of that type of character. So you could name someone Cherry-Bomb or you could play on the song title to name her Ch-Cherry Bomb, but you couldn't call her Ch-Cherry-Bomb or Ch-Ch-Cherry Bomb because you only get to use one special character (In this case the Hyphen). And you also couldn't do Cherry-Bomb? because there's two special characters of two types in that one. Just remember: No matter what the -name- is. The character is the same, and it should help you out!

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! 😄