Black Zot

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.

I doubt "too much damage" is ever going to be an issue on a set that relies on the most-resisted damage type in the game.

Should all archetypes be able to solo? - Hard yes. There is no excuse for some characters to be arbitrarily prohibited from playing if there's no assistance handy. Should all archetypes be able to solo at +4/8? Is there a difference in performance expectations for content below level 50 versus level 50+? Should players be using Invention Origin enhancements by a specific level or range? - There is no "should" or "shouldn't" here, other than "If you don't like how so-and-so plays, you should sod off." Do players who can solo +4/8 at level 50 have an outsized impact on teams or other players? Maybe this is as intended? - Outsized as compared to what, exactly? No matter what you do, there's no such thing as a team where all members contribute equally, in any game. Someone is always getting "carried" compared to the others, and someone will always be MVP.

All very handy. Also gratifying that my intended character concept (X/Earth/Ice, not sure on primary yet) can make good use of the proc without "needing" it, which is what I was hoping for.

Or perma-anything really, but I'm fiddling around with Dominator builds right now. How reliable is the Force Feedback proc, and where are good places to slot it (in general)? Trying to parse Mids to figure out what impact a temporary +rech buff has is a recipe for headaches - at least for me.

Traps is also good for munching through hardened targets thanks to its big debuffs to Res and Regen.

Against that much damage, bodyguard mode is suicide.

Nope, I was doing a blueside taskforce.

That's not what I've seen; I just got Oro-kicked from a team yesterday.

Add LRSF to lists 1 and 3.

Technically he's trying to eliminate the concept of death; it's just that those pesky heroes keep taking exception to his (frankly ludicrous and counterproductive) methods.

Is it just me or are Red Caps also a lot sturdier, level for level, than other groups? My Fortunata's nuke will delete the entirety of a -1 spawn other than bosses for basically any faction, but when I dropped the same ability on a pack of -15 Reds for lulz they tanked it. Blowing up a spawn that far below your level should not involve mopup.

1. -Rech makes some sense, but -Dam is ludicrous. It's a goddamn ROCK. If it can move at all, it's going to hit like a fucking truck. I'm not big on lateral changes, especially to something that's all but useless in its present state, but -ToHit makes a million times more sense than -Dam. 2. The loss of mobility makes it unplayable for me. You should be able to at least SOMEWHAT move with Granite/Rooted running together, considering one's all but useless without the other. Needing teleport or outside buffs just to make a simple sidestep didn't make sense when the set was created, and it sure as hell didn't gain any sense since then.

Guarantee you there's Hami porn on the web somewhere. Along with people who, ahem, "make use" of it.

Degenerative is a yellowish cloud. Lore can't be "customized", per se, but there are white/blue pet options, like the Polar Lights.

What even IS the Battalion? All I've ever heard about them is that they're Out There Somewhere, and that they're allegedly powerful enough to stomp the average hero flat (which is how most level-50-and-on enemies are hyped, so that's kinda lost its scare factor). There's been no lore, no images, no data, no NOTHING. Just a bit of NPC chatter shilling them as a big thing. What's so big about them? What can they do? What do they look like? What's their origin, their culture, their motive? What differentiates the Battalion from the other 200 things that might reduce Paragon City to rubble this week?

Two words: Mind Control. Thinking over the implications of a powerful psychic mucking around inside people's heads with no pesky morals getting in their way is CHILLING. Pair it up with the aforementioned Storm Summoning, Traps, or any dominator secondary and you've got a recipe for "don't ever let this guy out of the Zig".

Can't exactly make a drinking game of it, is what you're saying.

Hailstorms. Thunderclouds. Meteors. One classic way in fiction of marking a character as a scary mofo is to give them the ability to call down ruin from the skies. It plays into that primal sense of wonder and fear people naturally have when they look up and see that vast, ever-shifting tableau looming overhead. It also implies quite a bit of power to be able to forego attacking directly in favor of just waving one's hands and letting the heavens handle the rest. Plus it's just really darn cool. City of Heroes, of course, has its own share of powers that do this - mostly rain powers, but some of the available summons also fit the bill. So, fellow heroes, villains, and other assorted power-wielders, what's YOUR favorite way to drop the sky on some unfortunate sod?

Now I wanna level up my rad/fire brute so I can advertise a farm with an admission fee of 1 inf. Just to be goofy.

Single target immobs do nothing to justify picking them. Pinning AVs? The AoE does that just fine. Damage? There are multiple pool powers that match it while doing all the damage upfront, making them objectively better in that regard. I dunno what could be done to fix this. Immobilize is just a very weak control effect, and a single-target version in a game that's all about AoE is downright pathetic.

Mag 2 anything is basically worthless. Sleep, being the most fragile mez, should really start at mag 4 and work up to be of real value for players.

Oh hell no. Like any of the squishy ATs, most of a MM's survivability on a team revolves around NOT having aggro. Tankerminding is, at best, a gimmick build that falls well short of an actual tank class. And telling MMs to run with less than the full complement of pets when those pets comprise the vast majority of their contribution to a team is ludicrous.