Black Zot

Or just do what many missions do already and have the objective complete immediately when the hostage is initially freed, no escort necessary. Can't use the coding as an excuse when the code's already there to make it happen.

This is why, way back when Counter-Strike: Source was the go-to FPS for the local gaming community, my handle was "The Other Guy".

That'd probably be about as close as you could get with CoH's combat engine. Pets would still get instagibbed, just not nearly as often. Personally, I'd really like it if pets had the same "last chance hit point" protection that players got, so they couldn't be erased from full.

In orange sauce. It's great on MSRs, but using it on teams doing regular missions is usually either redundant or counterproductive.

They do indeed. Last I checked, it was 80% damage reduction versus all AoE attacks, applied after the pet's native mitigation versus the damage type. So if the pet was 20% resistant to physical damage and got hit with a dragon's cleave attack, 100 damage would become 80, then that 80 would be reduced to 16. This was deemed necessary as there are several classes in WoW that rely heavily on pets to be effective, and raid bosses in particular were just wiping them out pretty much by accident and gimping those characters.

Nothing quite like going through the trouble to summon and buff up the full squad only watch them all get deleted by one Foot Stomp.

I'm fine with caves until we hit the layer cake room. THAT needs to disappear permanently.

LOL. So I've been fiddling with potential Dual Pistols characters in MIDS, and I remembered DP has a PBAOE nuke. That got me thinking "well, if I'm going to be that close anyway, what ATs can get mileage out of the Fighting pool?" I suppose you could just as easily call this topic "Blapping on ATs that aren't Blasters", but I couldn't pass up the chance to spew out that many rhyming acronyms at once. So. The Fighting pool. 3 attacks that do diddly unless you take all 3, at which point the synergy bonus brings them ALMOST up to the level of melee attacks from primary/secondary sets. But where does that leave them with regards to ATs that don't get melee powersets? Do Sentinels, Defenders, or Corrupters get half-decent melee damage or no?

Dark/Time Controller Bots/FF Mastermind 2 Fortunatas Huntsman Spider Dark/Atomic Blaster Warshade Necro/Dark Mastermind The MMs and spiders all have at least 4 buff auras each. All are intentionally overbuilt on acc/tohit to account for debuffs, and everyone but the Necro and Warshade have softcapped defenses before outside buffs. You would not be hitting. They would not be missing.

Where you and the last enemy in a spawn trade mez effects and you both stand around looking like idiots for a bit.

It might be a priority - bug fixes and code stabilization in general tend to be the team's biggest focus. I suspect it's more a case of pets being the biggest tangle in CoH's pile of spaghetti code. They have to FIND the bug before they can fix it.

Malta is mostly Tech, whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

As much as I tend to pooh-pooh the Sentinel AT for being flatly underpowered, it does make a pretty good fit in this case. Just grab whatever primary she thinks looks cool and roll.

Hardly. Name any established MMO with a conventional equipment menu. I guarantee you SOMEONE has made spreadsheets (updated after every significant patch) to tell the people who don't get the combat math (which is most people) what stats they should be chasing to get the most from their character. Weighing up the performance of stat X vs stats Y, Z, and Q is beyond the average player of any game.

I would laugh my head off if I saw someone grab that humongous statue behind Positron in Steel Canyon and clock some Outcasts with it. Talk about overkill.

See, this is the point where the Warriors lore falls apart. In a city where everyone and his dog has access to something over and above what a normal human can do, these guys have access to a means to match them and ... just don't use it. Even the thickest of people has to acknowledge that there's a hard limit to what you can achieve through training and effort alone, and that limit just doesn't cut it when you're up against folks with training, effort, AND the ability to knock you through the wall with a belch (or whatever). I can't take the Warriors seriously as a threat, other than the odd guy who actually breaks out the magic toys. They're just one more street gang for heroes to curbstomp when you're not dealing with REAL enemies.

Illusion with its pet shenanigans is WAAAAAY different than any other control set. Rather than staying safe by reducing chaos, you're keeping safe by increasing it. Masterminds play quite a bit differently depending on whether you're running a buffing or debuffing secondary.

Given that less than 1 in 10 Crey mobs is a PP, odds are you'll trip over 200 Crey defeats anyway on the way to Infiltrator.

Wait, does that absorb proc actually work on Triage Beacon/Spirit Tree?

If you want ranged damage with survivability, roll a VEAT. You'll get better range, better target caps, at least as much damage/durability, and contribute more to the team than a sentinel could ever hope to. The only reason to roll a Sent over a Crab, Huntsman, or Fort is you want to play a concept that isn't covered by those three.

Dunno about the procs, but the guy who told you Acid Mortar is bad ... is a complete idiot. Acid Mortar is one of the most powerful debuffs available to a Mastermind.

Definitely disagree. Incarnates can smooth out some issues, but ultimately they're more of a force-multiplier for your existing stuff than a build in and of themselves. Hybrid, Judgement, and Lore all have far more downtime than uptime. Destiny's full power is brief. Alpha and Interface add oomph to your existing powers, and their effectiveness is directly tied to the power in question. Also, if you exemp below 45 for any reason, your Incarnate powers outright shut down.

95% to hit against even level targets, which only the assault bot can claim. The others are all -1 or -2 to your level, which comes with a significant to-hit penalty even before any enemy buffs or debuffs come into play. Settling for 95% is a good way to get a lot of whiffs right when you really need to be hitting. End consumption is less of an issue with the battle bots, but the assault bot will eventually run himself dry without an endredux and the protectors chug through their blue bars REALLY fast with both upgrades. End-reduction also makes resummoning easier on your own end bar; you may not be resummoning often, but when you start taking losses and need your bots back in play, you need them NOW, not after your blue bar has had time to recharge naturally. (I also recommend +recharge in any extra slots for this reason - especially the assault bot, as his summon takes forever to come back up). The most common cause of defeat for a mastermind is a cascade failure - losing a pet or two, then having the remainder get overwhelmed by the extra damage that isn't being split as many ways anymore.

Conventional wisdom is to put 5 or 6 slots in your most important powers, regardless of AT. And NOTHING is more important to a MM than the pets. Your pets are your main offense and defense, and need all the boosts they can get. Even 1-2 +Acc and 2-3 +Dam SOs make a world of difference over the baseline strength of your bots.

50, as Greycat said, is a number. Nothing more, nothing less. How much I play the character has more to do with how much I enjoy it and what mood I'm in than with a number. The number just determines how many options I have for what I'm going to do today.