Unknown Magi

A difference in pet survivability is a difference in clear times and effective DPS, though. Even if pets are dying just 10% more often (a napkin math number, not a specific value from extensive testing, mind you), the potential impact to DPS is much larger than 10% because not only are you losing that much more pet DPS more frequently, the MM's ability to support or deal their own pittance of damage stops while they're moving to a safe place to do resummons, then resummoning and rebuffing. Even in ideal test circumstances where you're already IO'd to the gills to say "I can match prior clear times on a pylon that doesn't fight back, with set bonuses" (which doesn't at all account for the portion of the MM's career that is pre set bonuses), that is still spreadsheet performance, not practical performance.

The irony being that because GMs are even level, that edge case seems to be one of the biggest negative impacts of this change. Feels like "Hold on, MMs are still good at something, better nerf that."

It's not that this "isn't going far enough", it's that this feels like an unwanted trade. There's some improvement in some categories in some cases. But at least as many drawbacks in the same and other categories. Overall, this feels like a nerf, even if not absolute. And I don't really buy "we have to nerf it first so we can buff it later" based on the history of how other ATs have been handled (buff first, fix later).

Just going to echo something Sai said. Instead of releasing "half of the changes" now and the other "half" at some unspecified future date, leaving us in the lurch in the meantime, finish the work and then push it. While lots of MM players are clamoring for even level pets, I don't think anyone is particularly clamoring for this particular set of changes, and it's creating a negative perception pushing it with promises of future buffs. Can we just get the whole package all at once, even if that's later? There's clearly some issues with the changeset as it stands now, and if there's no time to fix it properly, better to hold off than rush it to production.

Another member of our group who tested tanking it saw the 95% hit chance you're describing, but I was encountering very low hit chances (I'm not at home to check my combat logs, but I recall seeing at least some attacks coming in at ~9% final hit chance). The build I was running on Beta was overtuned for defense, clocking around 70% to all positional defenses before outside buff Widow Mind LInk, which IIRC clocks in at around 15%.

I will say the one time I did get to test fighting the minotaur, I was able to hold my own against it for a minute or two with my only outside buff being a widow using link, and without popping purple or orange insps (including no draught or ultimate); zone level shift was +2 or +3 at the time, IIRC, and minotaur was only at +5. The only reason I actually went down was Streak-breaker triggering on Plague Howl and crushing me under a mountain of toxic damage and debuff. I'm curious to go back and retest that tanking fight with a draught on to protect from disease.

Thanks a bunch, looking forward to the change and will DM you if needed! 🙂

Went in last night to test, and was able to solo most every mob other than the minotaur (who we didn't get to test against very much, see previous post). As CelestialDragon said, it wasn't particularly fast, but I felt comfortably survivable. For reference, I'm playing SR/Savage tank with full incarnate kitting.

@Cobalt Arachne Feature request, would it be possible to reduce the Minotaur's respawn time in the Beta server, or otherwise give another way of speeding up its respawn, or creating private shards, or something? Ran with a group last night wanting to try out ideas for the minotaur fight, but it seemed to get gacked very quickly (unsure if using beta auto-execute power, or what), even by solos, and then we got to sit around for an hour waiting for a new minotaur and hoping that didn't happen again. The zone itself is interesting, although I don't feel like I"ve played it enough to have an educated opinion yet. Just wanted to voice this particular frustration which was shared by our whole group and see if there's anything to be done about it.

Not sure if this is where this goes, but it didn't seem to fit anywhere else. Why the massive nerf to the P2W amplifiers? Personally, I really liked that they were cheaper at lower levels, it made them more accessible to smooth out the early levels for characters who weren't cheesed to the gills by level 10. I frequently used them for leveling myself. With the cost change, they're now *much* less accessible and attractive to the players who would potentially get the most value out of them (those who aren't swimming in inf and are at the lower levels), and the people who can afford to drop that many millions on a buff are probably running challenge modes which turn them off anyway. Seems like an odd choice of a random thing to nerf in a second build.

Will the placate change be applied to Ninja masterminds' Jounin also?

SR is a great tank set! My experience is with SR/Savage, which has been a blast. The main weakness I see to SR before it's fully "kitted out" with IOs is that it's a little end-heavy having three toggles so early in the game and no in-set end steroid; Savage helps solve for this very nicely with the end reduction built into the stacks, and also synergizes well with the 20% passive recharge reduction in SR. Fully kitted out, my SR/Sav tank farms anything (except psi) +4/x8 with zero issues at a good pace, and I haven't come across any issues in other content that couldn't be solved with a few inspirations at worst. The big thing to remember, as others have said, is that slotting SR is very different from slotting other sets. In most cases you're trying to scrape together defense bonuses to soft-cap while your set innately provides other layers of mitigation; with SR, soft-capping is trivial and you're trying to build up resistance, regen, and healing procs to provide those other layers, so it's a completely different slotting experience. It's definitely a fun challenge if that sort of thing appeals to you.

So, just to weigh in here with my own 2c... Bots is fun, but it starts slow. You may feel like your damage is a bit low till you hit level 26 or 32. On the upside, the bots are quite survivable, especially once you have your protector bots bubbling and healing your other bots for you. So, if the early levels feel a bit rough in terms of speed, I really suggest sticking with it until those levels to get a fair appraisal of the set, and just work on joining teams to get leveled to those points faster. Empathy is a much maligned set, and while I do like the set itself I don't like it on masterminds. The biggest thing it has going for it is several powerful single-target buffs; unfortunately, as a mastermind, you are going to be buffing 6 pets and potentially up to 7 teammates, which makes it hard to get the most mileage out of your empathy powers. I highly suggest seeing if your concept could fit a set with more multi-target oriented buffs and healing. As has been suggested above, /Time is quite good for this; /Nature is also a good pick for a buffing and healing in a multi-target manner. Overall, without considering concept, I would say there's a pretty strong consensus that /Time and /Dark are top picks for secondary in terms of raw power, variety, and ease of use. Nature, while less popular, I would still consider to be high tier. Also, a couple of important things to note that might not immediately apparent: 1. +Recharge buffs don't help your pets. So something like Adrenaline Boost from empathy isn't going to do as much for you when cast on a pet. 2. Defense gets more valuable the more of it you have, up to the soft cap of 45%. Because your protector bots already put +defense shields on all your bots (and you, and each other), that means a secondary which can offer some defense and/or tohit debuffs is going to work very nicely with bots. There are quite a few sets that offer this. 3. Because your protector bots can do some healing for you, and if you really need it you have access to Repair in your primary, sets which are heavy on heals are likely to give you less mileage overall than something with a bigger variety of tricks. I would suggest avoiding empathy and pain for this reason, since they spend several power picks entirely on heals. 4. Until later in the game with things like level shifts, pet accuracy and damage is likely to be a bit of a sore spot for you, so sets that can give extra to-hit or accuracy to your pets, boost damage, and/or reduce enemy defense/resistance are going to help you have more impact. If you want some help sorting out IOs, builds, or general questions and need a faster response than the forum I'm on the discord under this name, and my ingame global is also @Unknown Magi and I'm happy to help out whenever I have time, feel free to hit me up.

Personally, when I'm MM farming, I rely on the runners to bring new friends to me so I have to move as little possible. As long as you can increase survivability sufficiently, it ends up speeding up your farm runs.

Bit of a thread rez here sorry, was out for a bit so I'm late to the party. I actually played around with the idea of MM farming a fair bit in early 2020. Of the various builds I tried, the best I came up with was bots/storm/heat running Comiccon fire farm. Storm providing AoE defense and fire resist buff synergizes nicely with the IO auras, protbot bubbles, and leadership to get your pets to a very respectable level of survivability, with hurricane as an emergency measure. Tornado and bonfire with kb-to-kd help keep things stuck in place and cuts down on incoming damage, and dovetail with assbot's burn patches for clumping things up and AoEing them. Also, Storm is very nice in that it can mule some of the auras for you, which helps take some of the slotting pressure off the bots overall. Back when I did the testing on this, the total inf/min was able to keep up with posted numbers for mid-range brute farmers, although it was much more hectic to manage; I'm not sure how this might have changed with the AI updates and such, if at all. One interesting thought IMO, masterminds have a unique benefit to farming, if we can find a way to take advantage of it. One of the biggest limitations for all other farmers is the aggro cap, which puts a ceiling on how many mobs they can keep aggroed and in AoE range at the same time. Masterminds, on the other hand, are 7 (or more) distinct entities which all have their own aggro cap. So, assuming you can both survive it and take advantage of it, in a densely populated map like Comiccon you can potentially have a lot more mobs engaged and clumped up at the same time.