Elthenar

Once again, I am requesting that MM pets be given the same flight speed cap as the MM himself.

Why. MM primaries all do damage of some sort. Whether it's melee or ranged is the single biggest difference. It's the secondary that changes how you contribute to a team the most. For example, is there a bigger difference between a thug/dark or demon dark or between a thug dark and a thug TA?

Agree with almost all of it with a few caveats. One, lore pet. The Banished Pantheon Ravager is the best by a fair margin. It has huge AOE's and it offers a beefy -res debuff. It's the only one with a -res debuff so it boosts the DPS of your pets and your whole league. Additionally, If you have a secondary that will help keep things alive like MM's tend to, I go with the core pet. For those that can't, like a TA MM or an AT like my Blaster, I go with Radial and a pet choice that can do so for me. Two. I agree about the Destiny slot. Clarion is the clear top choice. The one exception is if I have a secondary that gives strong AOE CC protection, like FF, Sonic or traps. Those sets also lack healing, making Rebirth attractive and Clarion less necessary Three. You take on Hybrid is dead on accurate.....for now. When the next patch drops and MM's can resummon and rebuff their pets often and cheaply, Assault will become more attractive. It will be little trouble to click Assault and drop a whole new set of pets without it seriously impacting your blue bar.

You should. A MM's contribution to the team is usually based around their secondary.

This made me chuckle. I have the exact opposite characters. A ninja/cold and demon/storm. For great laughs, put the Overwhelming Force KD IO in the Genin. Watch them throw Street Fighter juggle combos on people

My ninja/cold is fairly solid. With the shields, fog, maneuvers and auras I can get there positional defenses from 43 up to 50% for the Jounin. Then add in all the cold debuffs and CC, it's an effective combo.

When you are tinkering with pet mechanics, would it be possible to buff henchmen max flight speed to match that of the player? They still have the old 58 mph cap, which makes the new Group Fly still rather sad. A MM pet can hit that cap with base, unenhanced group fly.

No. Not even close. Disregarding a targets resistance, merc damage is sad. You could literally double the damage of every merc power and they would still be bottom 2 in damage.

It's because Mercs were the first set made for Master Minds. That's a big reason why it is so sub-par. It's why their design is so bad, it's literally the first draft for the whole damned AT. Thugs were not released until after COV came out. It's a much better designed set. In fact, That's consistently true across the board with MM's. The weakest sets are all the old ones. Of the original sets, only Bots are good.

Elec is that tanky? I've never really fooled with it

I did and in much more detail

One big bugaboo with the beta patch is that the MM itself now has a flight speed cap of 80 something percent. The pets still have the 56% number. They pets can hit that cap with an enhanced Group Fly at level 50. Making the pets have the same fly speed as the MM would be greatly appreciated. I'd also love to be able to make group fly only affect me and my pets but I am not sure that change is within the scope of this patch. It's something I've been banging the drum for for years. Even with Null the Gull, if you turn on Group Fly there will always be 1 or more people that get hit with it and get mad.

I'd say the question is well answered but there is one more tidbit to add. If I understand the mechanic correctly, Achilles Heel will only proc off attacks that have a -def effect. For the soldiers, that is every attack available to them except for the medic's grenade. Even their cones. With the Spec Ops, it's only their two starting attacks. With the Commando, it's only burst. Further, with Spec Ops or the Commando, those are single target attacks. That means one soldier alone can apply the debuff better than both specs or the commando. In short, not only are the Soldiers the right call for the Achilles Heel proc, it's the better choice by a huge margin. As a side note, give them the Overwhelming Force Kb to KD IO as well. It not only replaces a damage IO but the effect is hilarious with that many attacks.

I made a merc-nature before reading this and I a must agree with most of it. +1 for putting overwhelming force in the T1. I do that on most of my MM's with the exception of Bots, AssBot burn patches with KD added are just hilarious. If I run an Assault Hybrid, I prefer the Radial. The pet damage cap is fairly low and Nature gets their +damage pretty high as it is. If you end up on a team with a /kin or even another plant, it's very easy to run up against the cap. The double hit nature of Radial gets around that. You get your damage and still have some ceiling left to use outside buffs. Lastly, you didn't mention Entangling Aura. It is an excellent form of CC and is capable of locking down large groups. I am been tinkering with the idea of using Fold Space to group things around me to get held. The real beauty of it is that Overgrowth gives such a large endurance break that the end cost isn't prohibitive even before you get Incarnates and IO's.

Mercs need a massive overhaul. You could literally double the damage of every single power and they would go from worst damage to 2nd worst. That is not hyperbole. One assault bot can out damage the entire merc set.

I tested it. Group fly alone does make them hit the cap. Pets apparently top out at 58.63 which Group Fly can get them to unenhanced at 50. If you are just traveling, it can work. The fact that they keep fly regardless of distance should help keep them in and air and get them to your final position quicker than before. Not sure if it's worth the cost in powers taken just for that. The real kicker is how limited it will be in a combat use. There remains the matter of griefing other players. Even solo, it has a lengthy activation time and an absolutely unforgiving endurance cost. MM's already tend to have endurance problems, Adding in a .65/s power and having it cost 3 total powers to do it will be a deal breaker for the vast majority of builds.

I made the same request on the previous page. Even if it was just a Null the Gull option, it would be fantastic beyond measure. Same with Team Teleport. And honestly, who needs a lift anymore? Even a brand new player to home coming can get ninja run and sprint, that covers most bases, jump pack covers most everything else. Most people can simply buy a jet pack if they really need flight. I'd argue that 99.9% of the people who would use group flight or team teleport will be MM's. Or maybe a controller/SoA with ground based pets. Optimizing the powers for them would be a big QoL upgrade for everyone. Do the flight speed enhancements in Group Fly not apply to the pets? That would be.....unfortunate.

A question about Masterminds and the Group Fly power. Would it be easy to add some method of making Group Fly, and by extension Team Teleport, affect only you and your pets? Even with Null the Gull to let people opt out, whenever I use Group Fly on a team it hits someone and they complain. The option to take that decision on myself would be an absolute godsend for a MM player.

Have to be honest. For a second there I forgot villains existed

I do something similar. I use Clarion so CC's are rarely an issue. The thing people forget about Mace Mastery is Power Boost, which is just as important as Scorpion Shield if not more so. Power Boost will add about 6% of defense all to Farsight, which then buffs all your pets and team. You can also get up to 16% +tohit to the whole team as well. Those two things combined are a big deal. You can get damned impressive defenses on your own and have the Pets soft capped to everything.

Bots are great for playing Tankermind. Bots and demons are the only two that buff your own survivability. Of the two, I prefer Bots because I feel I get more bang for my buck by boost defense. A bots/time/mace will have strong defenses all around and S/L/E that is too the moon.

I'd be quite ok with 1. For the second, they are already zones they can use for that. Like the echo of Galaxy City. There are plenty of ways there already but for an event, they could just plop a portal right next to Ms Liberty.

Thugs is the primary of choice. Their leadership gives them strong defense against all damage. They have gang war to mule the aura IOs in. You can soft cap their defense with no help from the secondary. That frees you up to take a resistance boosting secondary. I'd lean towards sonic for max resists and the status protection bubble. Thugs also has synergy with sonic because the bruiser is a great mule for the disruption field. Thugs is a high damage set too and sonic offers strong resistance debuffing to amplify it. You will lack healing unless you take the medicine pool though. However, you won't really need clarion so much so you can afford to take rebirth as your destiny pick. That will let you keep a strong regen on them. Tldr, thug/sonic will have soft capped defenses and the secondary with the most resistance buffs along with status protection for you and your pets. It will also do really good damage

Forgive me is someone mentioned this already. It's a big thread. One, give MM's a way to make group travel powers only affect their own pets. Relying on everyone else to go see Null is unwieldy at best. Let us make the call and it will open these powers up to MM's for more broad usage. Think of how awesome it would be to have your bots hovering over an MSR and raining down fire! Two, fix Mercs. Most sets are playable but the abysmal damage of Mercs just ruins the set. Everytime I think about playing mercs, it comes to a halt when I see them firing on a green con mob and making little impression. I've made a number of posts about fixes. When I get time, I'll dig one up and copy/paste my ideas here. Three. Those Aura IO changes are solid gold. Do it!! It's a huge advantage for sets that have an IO mule power for those auras, like thugs or demons.

Paragon Protectors can be annoying but I'd much rather see carnie phase shifting addressed before PP's.