ScarySai

Yeah. Fine as a temporary thing, but I think everyone who understands the AT would rather get a straight buff to MMs than this as a budgeting factor. Realistically, it is impossible to optimize this in a meaningful. way.

Stealth nerfs? Really? I had some suspicions after comparing how the thugs were doing relative to the demon mm. Disappointing, but hardly surprising at this point.

@Dispari They should delay it and release it when it's fully finished, and not a half baked solution then. They got the feedback from this iteration, and it's largely negative. That can be fixed. I don't think powerhouse set out to nerf mms here, but that's ultimately what they did, so it's a problem to be addressed. Can it be fixed before the 20th? Easily. Will it be fixed? That's the question.

Yeah, and I actually play masterminds, having tested demons, thugs and necro. In their current state, these changes are an embarrassing joke. A nerf to one of the weakest archetypes in practice. If they dial down the offset nerfs, there's potential. Current tuning is horrible.

Problem is that it isn't that much of a marked improvement even in those situations, and for incarnate content they already get extra level shifts. So it's just a sidegrade at best, it's weird.

Genuine question, not having a go, actually curious. What is the purpose of level bumping the MM pets if you're going to artificially insert the downsides of said level differences into the base kit of each impacted pet?

The offsets to compensate for the level diff change are too heavy handed, and essentially nullify the gains this should be giving mastermind players. Dial them back, a lot. Having an even con arsonist feel weak is just tragic.

Covered this on disc, so just reposting here. will post again later once I test how the pets perform in the +4 thunderdome. EDIT: After testing, I think you should revert the gang war/pet attack changes. I'm not happy with the pet overhaul in general, but the overhaul to gang war is unnecessary busywork for a character that doesn't need it. This is a case where simplicity would do a lot more. You might read that and go "but you just said people don't want to be afk watching instead of doing things" that doesn't mean firing a pea-shooter that would tickle a minion ten levels low than you, that means firing off a shot that feels like it actually contributes to the damage of a given encounter. Not this weird gimmick that makes you dance to get a slightly better (sometimes) Gang war, a power nobody had a problem with before.

Can we just make the power good without these gimmicks?

Exo blast is missing a gimmicky mechanic nobody wants, please fix.

Every single one of these looks great. I need me some exo blast.

People willingly take beanbag, if they wanna scuff their character in spite of advice, that's not my problem.

You really want to have it + cloak of fear. Pretty much anything below a boss is going to have trouble even initiating an attack once you min/max it out.

Eh, I guess? But then again, forts hypnosis is in a similar boat. AA could be fixed to proc when the stun wears off. Forts hypnosis could be changed to a root or something, actually beneficial to a set like mind.

Well you see, you're powerful in the superhero game in a way I think is incorrect, as someone that had nothing to do with Paragon Studios, therefore, the sets I arbitrarily decide are incorrect must be turned into garbage.

It really depends what era we're talking. Jack era? Pre-jack when it was a total wild west? After jack but before inventions? What part of the game after inventions got added? And hopefully HC doesn't botch anymore sets to the degree that people may want to come back to it being un-nerfed in a classic server, lol.

I don't personally agree with it. My stance was always that mass confusion should have a shorter cd to be on par with seeds, rather than seeds itself being too strong. But that applies to all of the mass ccs. Adaptive recharge is good as a middle point, but wasn't the silver bullet I would have wanted at the time. At the very least, it's pretty game-able. The argument is kind of moot now, eh?

That's not really how power balance works. Also, most control sets don't have a t9 control power, weirdly. Anyway, If you look at the set as a whole, plant lacks a lot of what makes other sets good in exchange for clear speed. Or rather, it did. If another set can clear on par with plant now, I don't see a compelling reason to go with plant.

I'd argue seeds was weaker than mass confusion. What made it strong was how often it was up. That + carrion made for some strong killing power, but the set itself had kinda poor lockdown to make up for it. The set also didn't work that well if the mobs you were after couldn't get confused. Now? The set basically has just as bad lockdown as before and a fraction of its former killing power. Potentially salvageable if coercive wasn't also weirdly hit. Though I do hear it's performing better for controllers than doms atm. Deep Sleep is nice, but spore burst is slow and carrion makes it hard to get value out of it. Mind control, meanwhile, has much more in terms of fallback options when your opening cc doesn't work.

Ultimately, if HC has one major issue in dire need of resolving, it's the process in which power changes are done. This is the most important aspect of the entire game, and is also the most mishandled. Rad armor and psi armor were handled horribly, and - if we ignore how proccable it is, pyro control is very bad as a control set. Continued bad changes to legacy sets will be the thing that drives people away the most. Just look at Veracor.

They also actively punish the wrong people, lol. As for the topic at hand, I genuinely don't see the need to overbalance this game. What's the end goal, exactly? Going back to the game as Emmert had it simply isn't going to get you anything short of a dead server. Buffs to underperformers and making the game fun for everyone, as Synapse said, is simply the only viable path forward. Blasters were buffed because they were the worst AT in the game. Snipes were buffed because they sucked, and nukes were made weaker and crashless because the crash made them essentially suicidal to use. Yet, some people if they had their way would revert all of the QoL because they have a skewed view of how balance actually works. Incarnates are incredibly strong - as intended, the only really flaw with them was that the bulk of the content that was made with them in mind never actually launched before sunset. But we have quite a few things that would be difficult for the average forum poster in the game now, so I don't really see the problem. If you want to stop one person from carrying the group, that's simply something you can't fix, incarns or no incarns.

Jesus christ. It's a dead game that HC was lucky enough to be first in line to grab the source code for due to SCORE. Let's not actively try to ruin it with bad ideas that don't actually make the game better, thanks.

Procs are the band-aid to make bad powers good barring a massive balance pass that HC simply doesn't have the release cadence or awareness to manage in a timely manner. Would I like it if proc bombs naturally hit hard without them? Maybe. Would I love dual pistols to be buffed to not rely on them? Yep. Will that happen in the next two years? Probably not at this rate.

Avoiding the obvious fire/ice/ar answers, Rad/elec and Psi/ninja perform very, very well at shredding packs and hard targets alike.

Need someone else to verify if envenomed blades causes tk to break sleep early. It is the martial assault build up.