Unknown Magi

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!

I'm actually not experienced with recording such things, but I can try to figure it out when I get home this evening. Any recommendations on something easy for recording that on a Windows machine?

The "gotcha" to this is that you sometimes have to do the later conversion step several times to arrive at a set that will sell. Also, need to take into account the not-insignificant consignment house fees when factoring in total profit. It's still generally profitable to do the thing you're describing, but not at the level of "doubling your money" consistently.

Started happening again this morning. One difference I noted that I'm going to test more: -The first batch I bought after the server restart, I claimed everything at once. -Usually, like this morning,I try to collect all the salvage then grab the enhancements roughly 10 at a time. It's when I go back for another batch of 10 enhancements that I run into the error. As of this morning, running into the error again quite heavily. Hit it once, waited a bit for it to clear up, and after one more batch it hit again. Have now spent a total of 20-30 minutes just trying to pull my enhancements out of the claim menu, and not even half done.

Have not had the issue yet since yesterday's server restart, but haven't opened enough packs to have a proper sample size either. I'll see about doing more in the next day or two so I can test.

Just a quick follow up, had this happen on the very next batch of packs I bought after draining those insps out of my unclaimed items, so it's unlikely this was the culprit. Testing early morning US time, so server load should be relatively low. While it is stuck, I've been doing some testing and I'm still able to mail myself items and claim those items, but not able to claim Character Items. Going to start testing this every time I get "the freeze" to see how often this is true. I'm more confused now than when I started testing theories.

I only tend to do this a lot with a couple of characters, and have seen it in both cases. In order to test my theory of "maybe I have too many unclaimed items?" I added some extra insp storage to my base and cleared out several hundred insps this morning. Will keep an eye on things to see if this makes any difference.

In general, I'm rarely opening emails and more often attempting to claim super pack items, so it's difficult to return it to myself. Server pop is most often yellow when I'm doing things, occasionally green.

Playing on Excelsior, so definitely the most populated server. As for lag, it's unlikely that it's from my end, as this has happened on my home machine (on gigabit fiber) as well as on my laptop from other locations. One thing I've pondered is whether it may be related to having a large number of unclaimed items (for example, lots of inspirations and temp powers and such from previous super pack sitting unclaimed).

Have tried zoning, relogging, restarting client, etc. on multiple occasions, and it never seems to work. I suspect you're right about the volume issue, but it would be hard to say for certain due to confirmation bias (most of the time when people are claiming, it's because they just got a batch of super packs or something, so there's going to be a certain amount of volume to it).

When attempting to claim items from super packs or emailed from other characters, sometimes claims work properly (click button, get item). Many times, clicking the button results in nothing happening, and attempting to click it again results in the error message "Character or Account item claim failed, another request is pending". Once this starts happening, no items are claimable from the list. Logging out, client restarts, etc. do not correct the issue. Once this has started, happening, one of several outcomes will occur: -Nothing happens. Later, the item can be claimed normally when attempted. -After 3-15 minutes, the system "catches up" and suddenly all clicked items are added to the characters inventory and deducted from the "Character Items" list. -Nothing happens, but the items disappear from the list. The first two outcomes I've been seeing for 1-2 weeks now with frustrating regularity, but the third outcome just started happening today.

That makes a lot more sense, thanks for the elaboration! As it stands right now, the only -tohit or -damage I'm aware of in tank epics is entirely in Soul Mastery, and there is no +resistance buffing (for self or others) anywhere in the current epics. So, while this is a neat idea, it isn't actually doing much (yet?). Would it be possible to consider also modifying recharge debuffs in tank epics, as those also play into survivability equations and would mean this is a more impactful change now? In particular it seems like this would improve several sets that aren't top picks right now, and I"m always down for increasing diversity of good choices!

So then if Melt Armor was not intended to be modified, can you please elaborate on the vision/goal for "Tanker modifiers to debuff enemy ToHit and Damage and Resistance with support abilities in epic pools have been increased" from the patch notes? As it stands, there are only 3 powers being modified (and potentially one that should be but isn't?) so I'm confused as to what was intended when the patch notes talk about buffing epic pool debuffs if Melt Armor wasn't intended for buffing. Was this *just* intended to be a buff to Darkest Night? I like the idea of "make tank epic/patron pools debuff more" in general that you seem to be aiming for, it just seems like it's not actually applying to most EPP/APP debuffs due to the scope.

Just to clarify this thing: there is no such thing as "resistance debuff resistance", because resistance *is* resistance debuff resistance. If you have 50% resistance and get hit with a 20% debuff, you will in fact only lose 10% (because you resisted 50% of the debuff). AVs have inherent defense that scales with level (IIRC, it goes from 60% up to 87% at the top end). Therefore, in terms of raw numbers, AVs do have resist debuff resistance. However, if you look at it from a *relative* perspective, this is working as intended. In our example before, where you had 50% resist and got hit with that 20% debuff (and thus lost 10% resist), you now have 20% less mitigation than you had before, and thus are taking 20% more damage than you were before.

Not to interrupt on the various back and forth here, but here's some numbers and observations. Numbers first; this is just for anyone else who had been hunting numbers and couldn't find them, like me. Buff Leadership Changes Maneuvers: Old base tank defense buff: 2.28% New base tank defense buff: 3.5% Assault: Old base tank damage buff: 10.5% New base tank damage buff: 18.75% Tactics: Old base tank tohit buff: 7% New base tank tohit buff: 10% Epic Pool Changes Melt Armor: Resist Debuff: 9.75% > 15%. Defense debuff unchanged Darkest Night: Tohit Debuff: 10.5% > 15%. Damage debuff: 21% > 30% Gloom and Dark Obliteration: Tohit Debuff: 5.25% > 7.5% Leviathan Mastery - Arctic Breath: Defense debuff unchanged. Resist debuff...unchanged? This seems like a bug Observations The fact that this is only to tohit, -dam, and -resist is somewhat annoying given that those only pop up in a total of 3 epic pools, and one of those appears to have been excluded. I would like to see -recharge and -defense included just for even-handedness, personally. While the patch notes talk like tanks have had buffing in general improved, and Leadership benefits from that, it seems more accurate to say that tanks just had their leadership numbers buffed. Grant Cover from Shield Defense, for example, is still at the same values that it was before. The patch notes in this regard are either inaccurate, or some things have been missed. Questions @Captain Powerhouse can you confirm whether things are "Working as Intended" in regard to Leviathan Mastery Arctic Breath, Shield Defense Grant Cover, etc. or whether these were intended to receive the benefit from the patch notes and were just missed?

Herostats can still work, if you utilize chat log file parsing rather than direct memory scanning. Just make sure you're chat logging in CoH, and adjust your settings in HeroStats to use that method and point it to he correct folder for the logs.