kelly Rocket

Protection from dying in a single hit wouldn't prevent pet deaths in bodyguard mode, as that's two separate hits when you and the pet are both targeted by the same AoE.

My only comment on the videos is that coming from Bots/Time that looks just horrifyingly slow. I have a Council Empire AE farm map, and playing it on +4/x8 I can take out 3-4 full spawns in less time than it takes your beasts to handle one...

Freezing Rain/Sleet has a very very low chance of knockdown. The fast ticking helps, but it still doesn't knockdown very reliably. Bonfire on the other hand is guaranteed, 100% chance of knockdown (Once you apply Sudden Acceleration or Overwhelming Force obviously), and will just dribble the enemies, never letting them get a chance to attack, so they're pretty different. If anything creates redundancy between Bonfire and Storm it's Tornado (Again, with KB->KD converter applied), but to me that's just part of the fun. I've got a Thugs/Storm I'm planning to go /Heat with for Tornado + Bonfire lulz. At least if I actually get around to playing the game again any time soon... stupid school and work.

Ah, makes sense. I've had times where I joined teams on a Time toon and they were like "We still need a healer" and I was just like O.o Admittedly I was playing a Mastermind or a Controller all the times that happened, but I was like, "Guys, I'm a healer, I promise. I promise you will be safer with me along than you've ever been, just about. Time is ludicrously good at keeping teams alive." And even when I'm playing MM, I'm focusing almost wholly on support. Especially with /Time, sometimes I realize after a spawn gets finished off that my bots haven't been participating because they were on bodyguard and I/they never got attacked, because I was busy throwing Distortion Field and Time Crawl and Time Stop and positioning for maximum effect with Time's Juncture, and throwing Mending and Chrono Shift and Farsight on cooldown. Maybe people aren't used to an MM who actually provides useful team support, I dunno 😄 For me, MM is a Defender that trades a small amount of support effectiveness for having a built in team when you want to solo 😄

I haven't tried out Crysis' build, but you could try mine. I've had no problem with it at all solo. In fact it solos well enough to be a farmer. Not quite as much inf/minute as a Brute, but it's not bad (About 2/3 of an optiminzed Brute farmer's speed, I estimate). I've soloed AVs (On +4/x8) and GMs and even an entire TF (Again on +4/x8) with it too. Click for build! Errr... what? Time is a healer secondary. It has the widest area PBAoE heal in the game, and the amount it heals for is better than any other set's AoE heal other than maybe Dark, if you count the HoT component. Granted it takes 6 seconds to fully apply all that healing, but that just means you can stack it, and use it pre-emptively.

And then go Heat Mastery for Bonfire 😉

Bastion is indeed a 25% Absorb, but it *is* affected by enhancements. With say, a full set of Preventative Medicine, it reaches 51.36% absorb. What that means is it scales to the max HP of the target. So if your tier 1 pet has 575 max hp, Bastion will give it a 295.32 hp absorb shield. This isn't bad, but it's not the 650 you initially wrote about. If you were using old Mid's for your numbers, it was probably showing you what 51.36% of YOUR hp (As in, the actual Mastermind you're building) was. My copy of Mid's Reborn shows 25%, and it gets better with healing IOs.

It'd sure be nice if we could get an admin post about whether this is likely to be fixed.

Is there any chance of getting the shift+click on pet summon power showing the pet's powers back?

Mobs that are higher level than you get a knockback mag reduction. I suspect they probably also get a teleport mag reduction. So by the time you're dealing with +3 or +4 bosses, the effective teleport mag is reduced against them below the level of their protection. This would mean that, yes, Ultimate Insps would fix the problem, but it's still not an explicit level check. It's an effect of the level difference giving them mag resistance.

Pets are mobs/critters, and therefore have a 90% resistance cap.

No Beasts/Traps doesn't surprise me. It's a thematic issue. Your wild animal pets are not going to be thrilled about a master who's a trapper!

No... As the Mastermind, I'm the Mercenaries' employer. I'm not part of their squad. I just pay them to do my bidding. Also, only the Medic has an SMG. The regular soldiers have assault rifles. And the Spec-Ops guys are special forces types, they are snipers who also have some (Really awfully bad) CC grenades and backup guns.

Unfortunately that means no teams ever, since every team I've ever been on (Even at low levels) is running at +4 I too have scrapped a Grav/ Controller I'd been building over this. I drew up a full endgame build, and played him to around level 22 I think, and then saw this thread and shelved him. I'll not bother continuing to play him unless they make Wormhole work on +4 bosses.

Basically because if you're going for pure maximum defense, Force Field is better. And if you want strong Defense and also utility, Time can crank out just as much Defense as Cold can--arguably more because Farsight doesn't have any holes, and can be Power Boosted--and it can heal, and has -ToHit, and ludicrously strong -recharge, some -regen, and a little -resist. The only compelling argument for Cold is that it does more -resist than any other secondary... But people considering it for that reason tend to end up going Storm instead because that gives you nearly as much -resist and a giant sized helping of damaging abilities and knockdowns on the side. It's not that Cold is bad, it's just that it gets a bit outshone on everything, and people largely only pick sets with "THE MOST" of something. Which Cold does have, but -resist generally appeals to someone looking to do ALL THE DAMAGE, which Storm does better. And Storm also gets a heal. It's a shitty one, but it's more than Cold gets.