Doctor Brainbottle

A scrapper or a brute might look at the fighting pool and conclude that crosspunch is the "only good attack", but they are spoiled for choices and have very high standards. Masterminds can't afford to be as picky: your other attack choices are pretty thin on the ground, so even the weakest fighting pool attack is "one of the best attacks you can get".

I have robot and thug masterminds, and I can't say I've noticed their minions losing their first equip when zoning. I suppose I can double check next time I play them, but I'm pretty sure I would have noticed, especially with my robots which I play the most, and the visual cues of both equip powers are pretty distinct and noticeable.

Wait, you really think the fact that you've been re-posting the same dismissive meme on the internet for fifteen years proves you... AREN'T arrogant and rude? And I can't say I'm impressed by how effectively posting this meme "sidesteps" arguments, when the very argument you are in right now was STARTED by it.

To say that a person who has the "duty" to do something is morally obliged to do it it is merely belaboring the definition of what duty means in the first place. Fire fighting isn't an easy job from a practical perspective, but it's a pretty simple job from a moral perspective: if someone's life is in danger, you save their lives. Not just "because you're equipped to do it", as if it's just some lucky coincidence you happened to be show up at a burning building wearing that getup and carrying an ax, you do it because it's pretty much the entire POINT of your job. There are a few other things in the job description, like getting cats down from trees... but when someone is trapped in a burning building AND someone's cat is stuck up a tree, it isn't a "tough call" to decide which is more important. Nobody is going to literally die if that kitten stays stuck up a tree for another hour. If you're a soldier in a war, your "job" is much less exclusively about saving the lives of random innocent civilians. In this job, there ARE other priorities to consider. If you are under orders to achieve a military objective, and you happen to pass by some civilians in danger, you might have the "training and equipment" to save them, but what about your strategic objective? The orders you would be ignoring are probably about something MUCH more important than just some kitten stuck up in a tree. It's very possible people WOULD die if you stopped to help these people. Lady Gray is fighting a War against the Rikti. This isn't fire-fighting, it's war. A war she can't win without the help of villains. That is the perfectly logical, in-game reason villains are invited to participate in her task forces, and why civilian casualties are disappointing but not considered "failure".

Robots in fact have a special animation for flying, that they use when under the effects of group fly (and sometimes very briefly after team teleport)

I have robots/time, with all 6 res/def auras slotted in the battle drones. With power boosted farsight I don't have to worry too much about accuracy, and with musculature as my alpha slot I at least partially make up for the lack of attack power. Even so, I'm definitely giving up some DPS to have all 6. Sometimes I don't even bother to summon the drones, and hardly notice the difference: the AOE damage from the assault bot is what really kills stuff, especially at my preferred difficulty setting of -1/8. But if you want to go after big single targets like AVs, AOE is less important and the first tier robots might matter more. Anyone can get musculature for the alpha slot, but without Farsight, you might need to slot some accuracy in the drones. But then where do you move the displaced res/def IOs? Protector bots need power and accuracy AND defense, and can also really use endurance recharge, so that doesn't leave much extra room. Assault bot only really "needs" accuracy and power, but it's a great place to put proc-on-hit IOs.

Yes, well, *I* know that Chrono shift is actually a lot more than just a heal, but if someone asks how they can be a better "healbot" I'm going to tell THEM it's a heal because that's the easiest way to convince them it's an important power they should spam at every opportunity.

Glacial Shield and Ice Shield both have a resistance component (to cold and/or fire), so if power boost doesn't work I wonder if it's because it checks the power for resistance, finds it, and concludes it can't boost the entire power. Edited to add: ah, someone already said it.

I have a thugs/pain MM that I enjoy playing as a change of pace, because it fits the character concept and yadda yadda, but if you want to know what's "most effective" I have to say that's pretty much a Bots/Time MM with mace mastery. Mace Mastery gives you power boost, and power boost + Farsight = utterly invincible robots. Oh, and Time also has two AOE heals, so you aren't really giving up a lot of healing power compared to something like Pain, you're just indisputably superior at absolutely everything else with no down side. Robots/Traps is arguably a little better at soloing AVs, but in general, for everything else Bots/Time/Mace is the answer before you even ask the question. I suppose it isn't really fair, but I'm too busy going "MWAH HA HA HA HAAA!" while watching my boosted-farsight-enhanced mechanical minions steamroll over everything to take the time to properly feel sorry about that.

I'd also love this, and yet I have to wonder... if it was "easy", wouldn't the original devs have done it that way in the first place?

Even from an RP perspective, no. This is a "Lady Grey" task force. Her name should be the first clue that she's a pragmatist who is willing to make some moral compromises, when asking Heroes and Villains to work together to fight the mutual threat of the Rikti invaders. By alll means you can role-play a Hero who is horrified by collateral damage, as long as you realize that villains, rogues, and vigilantes scoffing at you is just as much in-character for them.

Do you mean "Dark Astoria"? In any case, I want to be sympathetic, but.... no. Aside from the fact that it sounds like a lot of work for developers, I as a player don't want YOUR dialog box interrupting MY game. Have you tried just skipping missions that make you sick? I might not have your exact problem, but there are certainly missions I didn't want to play for various and sundry reasons, so I just DIDN'T. The game makes it so easy to find a new contact, it will even give you a free teleport to any level-appropriate contact you haven't met yet, who can quite possibly be in an entire zone you haven't visited yet. The devs want to empower players to progress their characters doing whatever they find fun, so if there was something actually "forcing" you to play maps that make you sick as the only way to progress your character, they'd see that as a pretty serious problem. But their solution would be to give you entirely NEW options, possibly involving a new contact or even a new zone. It will NOT involve adding intrusive, immersion-breaking dialog boxes to existing missions. I can pretty much guarantee that.

I've got a thugs/pain mm who took all the fighting pool attacks, and I was happy with the purchase, so to speak. Now mind you, the "raw dps" isn't super impressive, it's not like playing a brute or a scrapper, but you can knock enemies down, provoke some aggro, and generally keep enemies busy and distracted until your pets finish the job.

MMs are already a class that can "lead from the front". All you really need to tank with an MM is a taunt power, and an AOE heal. These are already available to MMs, in various secondary power sets and generic power pools, but I suppose we could create a new secondary power set for masterminds that is more explicitly built to support this play style. I'd give it: an AOE heal at a fairly low level, a bunch of melee attacks that don't do amazing damage but have a built-in taunt, a pet aura toggle that gives a huge defense buff to pets, but only vs. AOE, and a good mez protect power. Being a SECONDARY mastermind power set, you would then be free to pair it with any pet type you like. I wouldn't mind playing that secondary with demons, myself.

I've never heard of power levelers "believing the game is crap, and leave". On the contrary, let's be honest: some people's real problem with power levelers is precisely the fact that they AREN'T leaving! You can find herds of them hanging around in Atlas park any hour of any day, happily spamming the LFG channel for DFB and fire farms all day and all night. Do they LOOK like they're getting tired of it, and are going to leave any minute now? I'm not holding my breath.

I've spent an actual power pick on some toons to have "teleport foe", basically just to fix this bug when it happens.

If you ask for an "MM-like AT that leads from the front", MMs are the very definition of being MM-like, and I don't feel they're lacking in the lead-from-the-front department. If what you really want is a "Tank-like AT that also has pets", that could be an entirely different discussion, but then we have to talk about how wimpy the pets have to be to not totally outperform existing tanks that don't have pets.

the problem is "powexec_location me". You're trying to invoke the power the instant you press the key, at your current location (still hovering in the air). Change that to "powexec_name", and instead of trying to invoke the power instantly, your mouse pointer will be put into a mode to select the target location. Then wait for the fraction of a second it takes for your character to land before you select a location to summon the pet.

I have a thugs/pain mm that already plays like this. I took the fighting pool, and my playstyle is to run in and start punching things, and let bodyguard mode soak up the damage, which my pain secondary powers are very good at healing. Pretty much any mm secondary with a pbaoe heal power can "tankermind". It's already a thing.

With all due respect, in general with spaghetti code things get hardcoded that shouldn't have been. So in all likelihood it's far more work than just setting AE_XP=False somewhere. Never assume something is "easy, just change a variable!" especially in a dated MMO with years of bug-fixes and add-ons tacked into it, which tend to complicate the "if I change X, what unintended consequences happen?" factor. And how much actual demand is there for a non-AE server? The only way I could see it being justified if there were enough people wanting and willing to play on such a server, modding code and running a server just for "that one guy" is a bit disproportionate. I don't do AE, but it gives the people who would otherwise be spamming tells of "PL MEH" some content to rush through instead, so I'm perfectly fine with it staying. As someone who does not actually WANT this feature, I would be "satisfied" with the most half-assed imaginable token effort to implement it, because I'm not going to be playing on that server anyway. In any case, my original point was that it wouldn't require a "completely separate code base", and I still assert that is true. It matters little to me if the implementation is so half-assed that it breaks the game when it's turned on, or if there is a massive effort to overhaul and refactor the architecture to make this change as simple as it "should be": either way, it can be implemented as an optional feature in a single, unified code base.

I actually created a keybind that toggled off fly, with something like "powexec_toggleoff fly", and also started the summoning power for the pet. I didn't try to summon the pet at a fixed location, so I still had to click the destination, but maybe that's why it worked: I had time between activating the macro and selecting the destination for my character to fall to the ground. That being said, it's still an ugly workaround for an issue that shouldn't need to exist in the first place.

Or, all the AE NPCs and interactables could be removed without changing the code at all. I don't know that we need OP's suggestion, but this is a bit hyper...bolic. Again, you're still maintaining a separate code base for something that's easily ignored. Or are we going to get protests now for non-AE safe spaces? I'm not a huge fan of actually DOING this, but saying it would require a seperate code base is hyperbole. I'm sure it could be implemented as a setting in some sort of config file somewhere.

I love Homecoming, but they aren't big on "announcing" things. They discuss stuff on discord, and if you're not in that loop that's pretty much your problem. I don't know for a fact that they WILL do something on the 4th, but the lack of an announcement is standard operating procedure.

goto doesn't break bodyguard. As long as you are in defensive mode, you can tell your bots to follow, stay, or goto: anything but attack, aggressive, or passive.

but what part of my job description as a Mastermind does it say I should spend most of my time shaking my fists in the air with rage, bellowing that I am surrounded by sheer INCOMPETENCE? Article B, sub-paragraph 2 you say? Hmmmm.... shaking fists with rage... surrounded with sheer incompetence... yes, I suppose it's all in there. Never mind.