Unknown Magi

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.

Disclaimer #1: I have not read all 3 pages of this post. Disclaimer #2: I have long had a love of Empathy; back in the original Live days my main was an Emp/Psy defender, and an Emp defender was one of the first two characters I made again when I got to Homecoming. So, I think a lot of people who pick up Empathy "Aren't Playing It Right (tm)", and as a result people have a natural distrust of the skill level of people who they see playing Empaths. To put a little context around that statement...as some people early in the thread said, there is a long history of people making empathy characters and then doing things like going on follow and auto-firing Healing Aura and then afking, or taking nothing but heals and passive powers and standing around waiting to play life bar whack-a-mole. So, when people see Empathy, and have dealt with a lot of those, they subconsciously make the connection of "this is gonna be another afk heal aura spammer who brings little/nothing else to the team" and the reactions you see are visceral. While at first glance Empathy appears to be a healing set, it is in fact a buff set and needs to be played as such IMO. In the era of Time/* defenders and */Time controllers, boosted Fortitude isn't as magical as it used to be, but it is still solid; Adrenaline Boost and Recovery Aura are great for all the people who haven't finished slotting their +recharge and end management yet, as well. But the other side of the "don't play this like a healer" coin is that if the buffs are being kept up and things are going well, you don't have to spend much time using the actual heals so you can end up spending a lot more time focusing on your other set being proactive (in the OP's case, doing Illusion stuff more).

ATOs will generally take a bit for the entire inventory to move, even in the more popular archetypes and especially if you've flooded the market. Give it a couple more days, and even most of the less popular pieces should go.

I'm consistently tossing up 50 packs at a time, some of them just sell quite fast. Pretty good profit, honestly; I'm seeing 10-20% profit after everything sells and counting market fees.

As someone who ran MMs as my mains in Live, and has been playing a lot with them on Homecoming, a few thoughts: MMs are functionally less compatible with IOs than most other archetypes, which reduces our buy-in to the system. This is because most of our damage comes from pets who do not actually get any of our set bonuses, so we have fewer viable build options than other ATs. Also, because our primary form of damage does not get buffed by IOs (excepting the auras), we are unable to actually increase our damage through the system. One fix for this would be to provide more pet-affecting IO options, especially ones which would increase damage. Another potential fix would be to allow pets to inherit IO set bonuses, either partially or in full. This would make slotting more of a thoughtful process for MMs, as we would need to balance our personal set bonus targets with bonuses for the pets as well. It would also provide an avenue for sets with little/no pet survivability boosting a method of doing so. (see below for this) MMs suffer from a lack of clear role in end-game content. The variable pet spawn levels (T1 at -2, T2 at -1) plus the damage reduction caused by relative level difference against purple-con enemies means that our Tier 1 and Tier 2 pets have severely reduced damage. Unfortunately, some sets are balanced with the bulk of their damage being in T1 and T2 pets, having a control-focused pet in the Tier 3 slot; these sets in particular have a harder time achieving damage parity. This would seem to drive us into more of a support role with our secondary, but as our secondaries generally have the lowest numbers in the game between ATs that share support sets, this is counterintuitive. IMHO, Masterminds need a buff on at least one side of this equation: either better support numbers to allow us to perform team support better, or better pet damage to allow us to keep pace with damage-dealing archetyps in end-game content. MM pet survivability varies wildly between sets, but is critical. As many pets have relatively small health bars and end-game content has relatively high damage, increasing pet survivability is a high priority for MMs so that we can continue to actually deal damage. Some primaries are better at this than others (Bots and Demons have shields and pet-to-pet heals baked in; Ninjas fall at the bottom of this spectrum). One possible suggestion for this would be to allow pets to take enhancements for their innate "Resistance" power. For example, being able to add +Def to Ninja Jounin to improve their passive defense. This would at least work toward normalizing the innate survivability of the sets. Inspiration management is painful for MMs. Unlike other sets, when we want to use reds to improve our damage, we have to spend 6 reds (1 for each pet) to get the full effect that anyone else would need to spend 1 red to achieve. And it all has to be done with click and drag, by hand, as there is no macro-ing available for this. MM inspiration effectiveness could stand to be reviewed. Set-specific thoughts: Ninjas These were my old main, so they are where I have a lot of experience. Ninjas are an interesting set which is challenging but can be rewarding for single-target damage. The biggest potential improvements here would be: Giving the Tier 1 and/or Tier 2 pets some sort of AoE. Nothing earth-shattering, but perhaps a cone of shurikens? Smoke Bomb improvement. Smoke Bomb is a fun power, highly interactive and effective when used wisely. Unfortunately, its end cost and recharge are *huge*, which makes it challenging to use this and still budget End for the secondary. Suggest re-evaluating cost/rech formula of this power. As the OP mentioned, buffing the innate Def numbers and/or adding some Res to the ninjas would help a lot with their survivability (and by extension how much micromanagement and resummoning is required in the set). Robots Robots are in a good spot for the most part, often sitting at or near the top of the heap. The nanites upgrade from the OP would be a welcome change. One other thought is that bots need less knockback. Pet slotting is extremely tight already with having to fit in Auras, defense or healing on the T2 bots, set bonuses, and still get enough Acc/Dam. Bots then have to pay a tax of slotting KB-to-KD or forever deal with knockback which the MM cannot directly control. It would be nice if this were changed to knockdown by default, or if there were some other method of alleviating the extra slot tax pressure here. Other sets I am less experienced on, and so defer to the OP, but the changes in general look quite good. +1 from me!