kelly Rocket

Kill faster? They only run if the fight is protracted and they don't think they can hurt you. This was specifically coded in at some point after the game launched. If you kill them fast enough, you won't get any runners (Except for the one guy coded to run in most early "overworld" groups in Atlas). If the fight goes on for a longer time and they can obviously see that you're kicking their asses and they haven't managed to hurt you at all, they run, as anyone would in real life when fighting someone who's apparently the Terminator.

I hate to say it, but this sounds like "Make enemies stupid plz" to me. Because generally they run when they're heavily outmatched, which I mean... they should?

Sure, but they also resist more of them 😄

I suspect you'll have trouble succeeding here. Dark is debuff based and AVs have a lot of debuff resistance. You have very little -regen outside of Howling Twilight which you can't cast often. Even with my Bots/Time with Bots' -regen, and Time's -regen, I still found I had to wade in and use kick, sands of my, and the blackwand to actually outdamage AV regen on a lot of them.

Already in testing on Justin. Also it's not completely obsolete either way, as Overwhelming Force is a Universal Damage set, and the unique in the set has a Chance for Knockdown proc, which you can slot into powers that do not do knockdown/knockback at all, and make them do some knockdown.

Dude... Gale is one of the most powerful powers in the game. When slotted properly it's arguably OP. With Sudden Acceleration or Overwhelming Force, Hasten, and a bit of recharge bonuses from IO Sets, you can pretty much just chain knockdown whole spawns and never let any of them stand up. SCREW damage. It doesn't need it. It's one of the strongest mitigation powers in the game. The only changes I'd make to Storm would be to let the player choose whether to have Hurricane repel or not, and possibly make O2 Boost AoE.

My personal feeling is that Nature is great, but wants tougher pets like Demons, Beasts, Bots, or Thugs. Ninjas are too fragile, they're going to die in one hit when they get hit. It might work once you get Wild Growth to perma, but that needs Hasten and a fair chunk of global recharge bonus (Because you need to get Hasten's uptime to the point where you're eating enough of Wild Growth's recharge time before it drops). Personally I'd try to get as much +Recharge on the build as possible and get Bastion's uptime up... It's never going to be anything close to perma, but it's helpful to be able to cast it frequently. The main problem is that Nature is great, but it has a lot of little mitigation bonuses, rather than stacking one type of mitigation. And unfortunately with the way CoH works, stacking one type of mitigation to its cap (Or close to it) works much better than having 3-4 types of mitigation that don't stack close to the caps. You can get Wild Growth to around 16-17% resistance, but that's... not a lot. It's helpful, but Ninjas are likely to die in one shot still anyway. That does stack with Spore Cloud's -damage, but -damage is resisted by damage resistance, and mobs tend to be resistant to the types of damage they deal, so... And yeah, you have -ToHit, but it's a base of -11.25, which you can enhance to maybe -18%. Which of course will be resisted, and if you're fighting +4s (As everyone does on teams and sometimes solo), then you're only going to be doing 48% of those debuffs which comes to 8.5% -ToHit, and 8.1024% -damage. The radius on Spore Cloud is also very small, and it's a mob anchored toggle which means if the mob decides to run off or dies early in the fight you may lose the effect entirely. I'm absolutely not trying to say Nature is bad. It's great. But... You probably want to stack that 17-18% resist on a pet type that has great resists to start with, not on a pet type with pitifully low defense and no resist at all like Ninjas. Ninjas, I feel, really, really, really want their Mastermind to have a Secondary with extremely strong shields. Force Field, Sonic, Thermal, Cold, Time, etc.

I have a bit of a suggestion: The designer restricts the placement of slots based on character level, but in a respec, on Homecoming at least, there's no such restriction. You can, at level 20, respec and put 5 of your slots into the power you just got that level, if you want. This also means that it's possible to 6 slot a level 50 power now, where it never used to be. It'd be nice if the Hero Designer allowed for that. With a mode where it just completely ignores slot level and lets you distribute them however you like.

Yes I did. But notice I never in that post said anything about me being the team leader. I would like to see team leaders get that power, and I do think the team leader's job is to dictate to the team how we approach the missions. That doesn't mean I expect to be that dictator.

I don't like powers that are so bursty. Even when I take Build-Up I forget to use it. If it were more like 30-60 seconds duration I'd be fine with it, even if it had the same 50% maximum uptime. But I can't be bothered with anything that only lasts 10 seconds.

Actually I rarely, if ever lead teams. I don't like the social pressure. And I wouldn't personally kick people from my teams unless they're using knockback badly. I just find that 99% of people who love knockback do in fact use it badly. PS: Knockback isn't meaningfully better mitigation than knockdown.

I'd rather have anything except this, just about. I hate the normal Build-Up and skip it on almost every character I build.

Disagree. The knock* powers are something I definitely think everyone should just have. Only Focused Power Use and the pinnacle power in this are really super strong. And as it is, there are already 3-4 power pools I consider practically mandatory on every AT, so adding another pool like this when I can never even find room for a damn travel power on a build in the current state of things would just have me tearing my hair out.

I like this suggestion, but it feels so mandatory, and power slots being as tight as they are, I'd want this as an inherent pool like Fitness, tbh.

I think you're reading into my posts, things I didn't say. I said you should be using them, unless you're FF or Sonic. Not that you should ignore the primary. Though, to be honest on a big team I leave the pets on Bodyguard usually, and just focus on support. But I'm generally playing something like Time or Dark where the support end is quite important. And I also make sure to either take the alpha on new spawns, or get up into the melee so I and the pets at least take some splash damage to get the pets participating in attacking. Occasionally if we have a really good tank and I just can't get any aggro or meaningful splash from what we're fighting, I'll give the pets attack orders, or just switch them to aggressive. But I'm generally busy throwing CC and Debuffs. That's because you're playing Force Field. Force Field and Sonic Resonance are weird exceptions that have nothing to really do during combat because everything except their bubbles and toggles are largely skippable crap.

Storm is fine. I could wish for being able to toggle off the repel component of Hurricane, but other than that it's fine. Especially given that I've heard they're testing a change to the Overwhelming Force KB->KD converter IO on Justin that makes it global. As in, you slot it in one power and all of your knockback powers now do knockdown instead.

You have a shallow understanding of support then. One /Storm MM applying -60% resistance to every enemy is a vastly more powerful clear time booster than 6 pets attacking. Or a Blaster nuking. Because you're buffing the damage of EVERYONE on the team. Potentially past the damage caps. /Dark can do this too. /Traps can do it. /Cold can do it even better. /Rad, /Thermal, and /Time can do it to lesser degrees. /Kin is just bloody obvious. Support isn't just damage mitigation, it's also a force multiplier.

Actually I'm pretty sure I'm saying you shouldn't ignore either of your powersets. And that unless you're one of the oddball super passive secondary sets, you should be throwing powers in missions because otherwise you're ignoring your secondary. And again, on big teams, your secondary actually has a stronger effect on team performance than your primary, as a Mastermind. That's just due to Support being kind of better than everything else in CoH in general.

Because you're the Team Leader. It's your team, your rules. This is *already* the case, it just changes the way it works from the team leader kicking you off their team to them being able to turn on that toggle and then you decide whether you want to stay or not.

Leaving the team is your prerogative. Team Leader gets to decide whether he wants those sorts of powers on his team. Also Force Bolt works fine when converted to knockdown. I have a Toon that uses it with Sudden Acceleration just to spam it for chain knockdown. Knockdown is just as good as knockback for mitigation, as long as you have enough recharge to just dribble the target.

Mastermind is absolutely a support AT. It just also happens to have pets. On a team your support powers are far more important than your pets. You're better for the team playing without pets, but using your support powers, than vice versa.

Sorry, but it absolutely would. You're playing a Support AT. You should be using your support powers.

I honestly would like to see not only this personal toggle power, but also a toggle power granted when you become a team leader that when you toggle it on, gives all your teammates within range a "buff" that converts all their knockbacks to knockdowns.

Eh. I should have said "Unless you're /FF or /Sonic, not using your endurance for the rest of the mission is Masterminding wrong." Those two are weird exceptions (And I never play them because they're so booooring with so little to do). Every other secondary you should be throwing powers constantly. So saying that resummoning your pets isn't a hassle because it's not for /FF and /Sonic is not really properly accurate, because being out of end at the start of the mission is a HUGE hassle for most Masterminds.

If you're not using your endurance for the rest of the mission, you're Masterminding wrong. Sorry. Also please note that for Bots MMs in particular, it takes the Protector Bots quite a while to finish bubbling the whole set of pets, and you, and they're quite vulnerable if you don't wait for that to finish.