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.

Except that's never going to happen. I'm soft capped, and so are the pets. They only take bodyguard damage if I get hit, and they only take additional damage themselves if they also get hit. Generally speaking, no attack is going to hit more than one out of 7 of us at best, given there's only a 1 in 20 chance of hitting any of us. And Time is a solid healer on top of all its other benefits. There's a reason I deliberately take alphas even on 8 man teams, unless the enemies are super mez-happy (And even then it's just because I find being mezzed annoying).

Waiting to throw debuffs sounds like a recipe for dead pets. I pride myself on how rarely I have to resummon. I don't micro the pets because I don't like it, and I consider our tools for doing so to be quite lacking as there's no "Go here and STAY here and don't fucking leave that spot" command, which means generally if you want to keep them in a specific spot you have to just spam the goto command forever to make them keep coming back... and that disrupts their attack chains. As for going toe to toe with Superman... Have you not played a /Time MM yet? Soft capped to ALL damage, and with 75% resistance as long as the pets are alive and in bodyguard. I'm god damn indestructible.

Agree 100%. No general balance changes should ever be made based on PvP, unless they can be made to only affect PvP. Because balancing around PvP is how good games die a horrible death through homogenization.

Only way that could happen would be if you were playing with an uber-passive secondary like FF or Sonic, and never using any attacks either. Which I could never do because I'd be too bored. Besides, I'm a Darkseid style mastermind. Sure, I'm a planner and a commander, but I can also go one on one with Superman 😄

My goal is generally to be attacked so my pets will fight without me having to compromise my safety by turning off bodyguard mode.

I just charge in and give my pets a Goto command to get them fully inside the room after I eat the alpha.

Yes, but he was asking about uniques like Miracle +recovery and the Gladiator Armor +3% defense IO and such, which don't give any enhancement value. As such there's no reason to ever boost them, and you're always best off getting those specific IOs as attuned or the lowest level they come in, as the level of the IO makes absolutely zero difference to what they do. Other stuff it's down to whether you're more concerned about endgame power or exemplar performance. Personally I go with everything attuned except my purples, superiors, pvps, etc, because I expect to exemplar down quite a lot, generally. Also while lower level content may be easy enough that you don't need some of your set bonuses, I really hate it when I lose global +recharge and perma-hasten goes bye-bye.

Good ideas, but we probably also want to switch them to the no-redraw animations. Redraw currently adds a significant amount of lag time into their attack chains. Also it looks silly because they often put the gun away and then redraw it even when they're going from one AR power to another.

Can't really be done. The activation/animation on Full Auto is FOUR SECONDS. And the activation on LRM is even worse, at 5.87s. Regardless, buffing their damage to make them even close to the DPA of other pets would require them to be absurdly strong, which would arguably make the Commando too powerful in terms of burst damage. Especially when you factor in what the best damage dealing primaries can do with burn patches, which Mercs doesn't have.

Ah, so it is. I was thinking of Blaster Build-Up where they get a 100% damage boost (As compared to Brutes who only get 80%).