WumpusRat

I just finished leveling up and incarnating my shield/axe tanker (she's a D&D fighter portaled into Paragon). The taunt is pointing your weapon at them and shouting, then smacking your shield with the weapon repeatedly until you get interrupted or do something. And backhanding people with the shield is why brawl is still on my hotbar, even at 50. I put an acc/dmg in it, and use it to finish off enemies that are clinging to life by a thread. Either slap them with the shield, or if they're down you kick them in the face.

Well, you have to remember that powers aren't meant to be balanced around having all sorts of IO sets and procs. They're meant to be balanced around SO slotting. So saying "I do fine with them with my fully loaded IO'd out build and incarnate powers" doesn't really say much for actual balance. I was mowing stuff down with my fully built mercenary/traps build before the changes as well, but that doesn't mean the mercs weren't in dire need of adjusting. Also, as I said, the set's damage hinges almost entirely on Fortify Pack's passive bonus -- the ability for the pets to crit. If you actually use the FP "buff", your pets' damage will drop drastically, as they lose +20% damage and the ability to crit for 60 seconds. Which is why most people (myself included) only use it as a mule power, and not something you actually want to USE, which is a terrible point to be at for a power in the kit. Apparently their goal is to revisit Thugs, Demons and Beast Mastery in the same vein that they did for the other sets, so we'll see what happens when they get around to it. I'd really like to see Fortify Pack simply done away with, and the +damage/crit from it shifted over to the Pack Mentality stacks, so that power slot could be used for something actually useful that you'd WANT to use, rather than just a mule power.

Beast Mastery needs some attention. Right now it's absolutely the bottom-tier of MM sets, and the only thing that keeps it slightly viable is the crit bonus from Fortify Pack. And honestly, an entire set's performance shouldn't hinge on a single power. The easiest way to test this is to create a Beast Mastery MM on test, kit them out however you want, and kill a few groups of mobs. It'll likely go just fine. Then use the Fortify Pack "buff", and watch your damage PLUMMET. The problem is that the defense buff wipes out your Pack Mentality stacks to turn it into defense. Which, in and of itself, wouldn't be a huge deal. The problem is it also "prevents the pets from gaining Pack Mentality while it is in effect". So for 60 seconds, your pets lose +20% damage and the ability to crit. The cooldowns on the various buffs/debuffs/heals they have need to be drastically lowered, as well, especially given that they pop them on-cooldown even when not in combat. And the lioness puny +6% defense for 15 seconds buff is on a 120s cooldown. That's nuts. I'd like to see Beast Mastery, Thugs and Demons get the same overhaul that the other sets got. Resist/defense buffs in the first upgrade, and something specific to those pets in the second. The tier-1 thugs could likely use a bit of buffing as well on the defensive end. They have even less defense than the ninjas do (tier-1 thugs have zero resists, zero defense, only the pyro gets some fire resist). Demons are very solid, but streamlining them to bring them into parity with the way the other MM sets work now would be good. Personally, I'd love to see Fortify Pack just nixed entirely, and give Pack Mentality the innate bonuses that FP gives them. Then change Fortify Pack into something different, that could be unique to that set.

One thing I noticed after testing out a few things is that the numbering system breaks down once you get past about 23 pages. The number of dots on the bottom doesn't change, but it will skip a few numbers. And even scrolling back and forth won't actually show you the correct number. To test it I just kept shifting a character further and further right to extend the number of tabs of characters that it would have to jump through to get to her, and the numbers started vanishing. It would go "page 1, page 2, page 4, page 5, page 7", etc. And even if I manually scrolled back and forth, it would never show me the proper number. So if you reach a certain number of pages, you lose the ability to quickly jump to that page of characters. That's most likely due to the fact that the code never imagined people would have 200+ characters, I'd guess.

Mastermind powersets are the most difficult to add, from what I understand. Because what the power summons is hard-coded into the power. I recall the original devs saying that's why they couldn't (easily) do pet customization. If the Homecoming devs can create new MM sets, then it shouldn't be much of a leap to simply re-create the existing sets, allowing them to disentangle the static pet summons and opening up more options for ALL sets. Arachnos, Council, Family, Longbow, Carnies, Circle of Thorns, etc, etc, etc... So many interesting flavors of Mastermind potential.

Not sure how difficult it would be to accomplish this, but something that would be kind of nice (especially for those of us with tons and tons (and tons) of alts) would be to make a label for each page of characters. If you mouse-over the page icon at the bottom it just says "Character Page #". If you could name them, that would make sorting characters so much easier. "Masterminds", "Blasters", "Fantasy Adventurers", "Genetic Abominations", etc. I know I'd love to sort mine by the various groups I have for them. I have several pages that are for my D&D adventurers, my alien race, my 'evil cabal of villains' group, etc.

Beast Mastery suffers from two major issues, imo. 1) The buffs/debuffs the pets have have cooldowns that are far, far too long. And the AI will cast buffs whenever they're off cooldown, making it spam their abilities every time they recharge, even outside of combat. Given that the buffs are short duration (15-20 seconds) and have 90-120s recharges, it means you're not getting anywhere near the use out of them you should be. 2) The set is completely reliant on the passive bonus of Fortify Pack. Without the crit bonus, BM's damage is miserably low. And if you ever USE Fortify Pack to give them some bonus defense, they lose both the ability to crit and the +damage effect of Pack Mentality for 60 seconds, in exchange for a defense bonus. So you have to choose damage or slightly higher defense. You can't have both. The power shouldn't have such a massive penalty. Overall, the set needs a lot of work. Cut the cooldowns of the various buffing powers the pets have in half, or more -- the set is all about pure melee damage, after all, so it should be the best at that. The lionesses and the dire wolf need a couple more attacks to give them a proper attack chain, and the heals need much lower cooldowns (60s for a 120ish heal is pretty miserable). Then Fortify Pack needs to be retooled. The set shouldn't be so reliant on this one power, and it shouldn't have such a massive penalty to use. What I'd like to see is changing it around to function more like Staff Mastery, in that you have several toggles you can switch on to direct your pets to fight in various ways. Make aggressive and defensive stances just provide bonuses, not penalties, with the ability to switch between the two as necessary. Could even add a third or fourth one if you really wanted to. Maybe 'Harrying tactics', where they slow, trip, and cause bleed damage. But the set definitely needs some work.

While I've definitely run a lot of builds that have serious endurance issues while leveling, honestly I think part of the fun for me is reaching a point where I can do all the stuff I was doing before, and not run out of end. It's a big sense of accomplishment for a character when I've gotten my end management "just so" and can still fight my way through stuff effectively and conserve my endurance at the same time. There are always solutions to end costs: slot more end reduction, both in your toggles as well as your attacks. Does it mean sacrificing a bit of damage or defense in order to do it? Yep. But learning that balance point is important.

Considering that the "Ninja Tools" epic pool exists, you could easily create more within that sort of theme. Archery Skills -- give a few ranged attack options, so you could have (say) someone who uses swords pull out a bow to fire off a couple shots at range. Magic Staff -- allow someone to pull out a staff, ala Scorpion's mage, and use some magical powers through it (though this would be nice as an entire set) Throwing Knives -- for 'vigilante-types', who have some various thrown blades on them (standard, poisoned, etc) Apprehend -- non-lethal takedown tools (slapping cuffs on someone, boloing their legs, etc) Sidearm -- pull out a gun and shoot people, or pistolwhip them with it

It was my understanding, based on both what I read as well as what I observed, that their taunt was a magnifier for the damage they dealt, to create a larger threat score for the spectres. If that's not the case, then that's fine, I'm okay with being wrong -- I'm just coming back to the game after a two year hiatus, so there are likely a lot of things that have changed. In my experience, after around 30th level the spectres weren't being very useful. It might simply be that the secondaries I have for my necros (Nature and Electric) weren't condusive to carefully studying what the spectres were doing, as I was usually busy firing off abilities, and there were so many graphical effects going off that the spectres aren't very visible among it all. And I was never saying they had to be "max slotted". 3-6 slots was among all three powers, so each one would have 2-3 slots in it. I just have difficulty squeezing that many power picks and slots into my builds, which are usually fairly tight to begin with, mostly because a lot of my slotting aims for set bonuses and the like. But this has gotten far off topic.

There are so many things that could be done. If the models for MM primaries weren't hard-baked into the powers (at least that's what I remember reading from one of the devs way back in the day, when people were clamoring for customization), it would be a lot of fun to have options. Even with just existing models. Mercs could easily be Council, Longbow, Arachnos, Family, RIP, PPD, Nemesis, all sorts of options Demons could be Hellions, Outcasts, CoT demons, Rularuu, Carnies Robots could be Clockwork, Praetorian Clockwork, Council bots, or Malta bots Necromancy could be Skulls, Infected, Vazhilok, Shivans, Banished Pantheon Beast Mastery would be a bit tougher, since there aren't really a lot of animal models around, though you COULD use the Snakes or Wailers, maybe Ninjas could be Knives of Artemis, Cimerorans, Warriors, Freakshow Thugs have about the same options as Mercs, in terms of variety

The spectres' taunt is based on their damage, in that their damage is magnified by their taunt ability (+400%). The problem is that at higher levels, once you get your actual pets slotted up and you buff them with both upgrades, they deal so much more damage than the spectres that the spectres all have to gang up on one mob to make their taunt overpower your pets' damage. They MIGHT hold a minion or lt that hasn't been hit by one of the zombies' multiple aoe attacks (or anything a grave knight hasn't looked at yet, since they deal so much damage that there's no way one of the spectres is going to peel a mob off of it), but that's about it, and you can't direct them, so you can't tell them who to try and peel. After playing a couple of necro MM's from 1-50, my personal take was that the spectres aren't worth it at higher levels. Not for the slots you need to dedicate to them to make them useful. Those 3-6 slots and 3 power picks can be spent somewhere much more productive, imo. During the leveling process though, they're amazing. I had all 3 attacks in my build up to the mid-30's, which is about where the wraiths really started to drop off, as I only had 2 slots in each attack, and one was accuracy. If you have a build that you can dedicate a bunch of slots to your attack powers, then by all means use them and the spectres. I tend to try and cram a ton of stuff into my builds and can't generally spare the slots for my attacks on masterminds. <edit> I keep calling them wraiths. I think it's because that's what they look like to me. 🙂

The problem with the wraiths is that once you get up past the mid-game, they become more of a hinderance than a benefit. Since you have zero control over them, they can sometimes aggro things you didn't want to fight, or end up chasing enemies around with no ability to call them back. Their damage is incredibly lackluster, as well; at 50th level with +100% dmg, they have a single attack that hits for about 35. Supremacy and other buffs beef it up a bit, but it's still only about half the damage your tier-1's basic brawl attack is doing. Once I passed about 30th I specced out of the attacks, as they were eating up power picks and slotting that I could definitely use better elsewhere.

So why exactly would you NEED to respec your warshade? Just to pull those few enhancements out? That's definitely not what a respec is meant for. Again, I have to ask WHY you would need to constantly respec your character. You don't need to respec to fix a single slot; respecs are done to rebuild a character, not to minmax every level or two just to tinker with your build. You can do that all you want on the test server. And saying "it shouldn't take ten minutes" comes across as pretty entitled, imo. SOME games allow free respecs. Most don't. Most use it as a way to get you to spend money (either in-game currency or in some games real life money). Asking for free respecs simply because you don't want to bother spending ten minutes getting the money for one seems really, really lazy. You're asking the devs to change the code because you don't want to spend a couple minutes doing something that you acknowledge is easy and painless. Just grind out a few million inf, and buy yourself some respecs, if you're that addicted to respeccing your characters. Don't be lazy.

Hey now, if Kung Fu Hustle has taught us anything, rapidly slamming someone in the foot is painful enough to even stop a nearly-invulnerable Kung Fu master.

Respec recipes are cheap on the AH. A million or less. Know how long it takes me to get a million inf if I need it, even with lowbie characters? About ten minutes. My two "usual" methods: 1) Hop into one of the "level 1" AE missions and set it to tickets, rather than standard rewards. A couple of those can be done in under 5m with even a low-damage build (my record so far with a new necro MM is 2m1s), and you can get ~250-400 tickets per run. I do this all the time on my lowbie characters to get some starting cash after I do the first mission arc or two. Do a few runs until I get 1100+ tickets, use that to buy rare salvage, sell it, boom, my level-5 now has 1-2 million inf, and it took me about 10m. 2) Make a new character, level to 4 quickly (takes about 5-6m), buy flight as your level-4 power, zip around Atlas or Mercy and pick up all the badges to get the 5 merits. Use those 5 merits to buy 15 converters. Sell the converters on the AH. If they're going "cheap" and only about 50k each, that's still 750k. Which is usually enough to snag a respec. I don't have a "farm" character or anything, though I've tried a few of the big Council spawn maps at +4/8 with my invuln/SS tanker, and she does okay. Just kind of slow due to the lack of big aoe damage (foot stomp + cross punch and her incarnate aoe is all she's got), but she can still make about 100k every 60-90s just pummeling groups of Council dweebs. While I can see the appeal for having unlimited freespecs, I just don't see the need for it. You shouldn't need to tweak your build that often, and if you do, you need to be out DOING something in order to have a reason to constantly be fiddling with it. Which means you should be earning inf anyway?

Also one of the big powers of the set, Fallout, can't be used on dead henchmen. Only dead players. Which makes it useless for a solo MM. That said, I did doodle up a Necro/Rad MM to test out, and was able to run on +1/8 pretty comfortably, so it's not terrible. Just not ideal.

My general rule I operate by when I'm going out hunting giant monsters on my few characters that can solo them is if I spot one, I'll announce in general chat that I'm going to be killing <monster> in a few minutes, and anyone who wants to join is free to come poke at it too. Those that answer I'll invite to group and wait until they get there, and then we kill it. If nobody answers, well, I'll just kill it myself. I've never gotten so many that I've needed more than a single group, though.

And afterwards the monster alerts for her showing up is her popping up out of the water wearing an apron, a little paper hat, and towing a barge with her merch kiosks on them, waving passing heroes down to hawk items at them.

Lusca sitting curled up in a giant jail cell, wearing an orange prison jumper, a little sharpie-drawn "scar tattoo" under one eye, glaring balefully at the terrified little level-3 Hellion gangmember that was assigned as her cellmate.

I generally have a pretty firm idea of the morality of a character when I make them. Some are more heroic, others are more villainous, and others in between. Overall, I'd say that most of my characters end up in the vigilante role, as the ones I play the most often (my little alien Rikti-hunters, the plane-shifted D&D adventurers, and my mage cabal) don't have any qualms about killing people or breaking the law in order to get things done. Quite a few have run afoul of Longbow or other heroes when they're after something specific, and see no problem with laying a smackdown on some goody-goody who tries to talk them out of it. Though lately I've been having the urge to play a full-blown Red Side Best Side character again, and just go around gleefully caving in skulls and wrecking peoples' sh*t.

Ninjas have always been a very high-damage set, given that they get a plethora of attacks with short animations, but it was difficult to keep them alive when running on anything more than very low difficulties, depending on your secondary. The new changes have definitely opened up more options for them, as the ninjas are less squishy, as well as having a self-heal to keep them going. When it comes to slotting them, the difficulty really lies in whether or not you want all the pet auras or not. If you do, then you're basically limited to 4 slots per pet, with the other 2 being taken up by the auras (since there are 6 total). Generally my slotting for them is to try and keep their dmg at 90+, acc at 70+, and end at 50+ when I hit 50th level and have a full build. Usually I err on a bit more accuracy for the tier-1's, due to their lower level. For instance, something like this: Genin: Command of the Mastermind (superior or not) Acc/Dmg, Acc/Dmg/End, Acc/Dmg/End/Rech, Rech/Aura, Mark of Supremacy Acc/Dmg/End, End/Aura (ends up around 96% acc/dmg, 72% end) Jounin: Mark of Supremacy Dmg/End, Acc/Dmg, Sovereign Right Acc/Dmg/End, Blood Mandate Acc/Dmg/End, Call to Arms Aura, Expedient Reinforcement Aura (ends up with around 75% acc/end and 96% dmg) Oni: Mark of Supremacy Acc/End, Dmg, Blood Mandate Acc/Dmg/End, Sovereign Right Acc/Dmg/End, Edict of the Master Aura, Sovereign Right Aura (ends up with around 75% acc/end, 91% dmg) As far as secondaries go, it all depends on your goals. As Evet said, /Cold, /FF, /Traps and /Time are all solid choices to improve the defense of your pets. Though I wouldn't call Ninja/Sonic "inconceivable". Ninjas with 90% resists are pretty durable. Only downside is that the kit has no +def or a heal in it, so you're relying on Aid Other to keep your minions standing. What I generally do is when I'm trying something out I've never played before, I'll hop onto the test server and level it to around 30 or so, slot it with basic IOs, and take it for a test-spin in a newspaper/radio mission, to see how it plays. If I like it, then I'll bump it up to 50 with basic IOs, and try again. If it's still fun, then I know it'll only get better once I figure out how I want to slot it up with sets and such.

A few things I'd love to see: 1) Actual "no fx" for the various patron shields. The "minimum fx" are still pretty blatant, and no amount of fiddling will get rid of the glowing aura around you. 2) An alternate animation for Aid Other/Self, that doesn't use the tricorder, but rather just waving your hands and healing. Could even be the exact same animation, just without the actual device. It would open up the Medicine pool to a lot more concepts, without needing to sacrifice aesthetics. 3) Some of the powersets that have "weapons" (fire sword, stone mallet, etc) have alternate animations that don't use the weapon, and/or the powers that don't have an option to use them (where appropriate of course), for more cohesive themes. 4) Some of the weapon animations that have the character leaping into the air and coming down with the weapon having an option to just make a large swing, without the acrobatics. Would fit certain characters better.

/Nature is a great secondary, there's no question about that. The problem is Beast Mastery. It was already one of the under-performing primaries, and with the upgrades to Robotics, Necromancy, Mercenaries and Ninjas, it's now firmly at the bottom of the pile. The pets are purely melee, don't have many attacks, have self-buffs on extremely long cooldowns and very short durations, and Fortify Pack forces you to choose between damage and defense, you can't do both. Ideally, I'd like to see them tweak BM, Thugs and Demons to follow the same theme as the other sets they revisited. Thugs and Demons don't really need much fine-tuning, they were already very good sets. Beast Mastery needs a thorough overhaul, though. One thing I'd really like to see is to do away with Fortify Pack, and replace it with something like "Pack Tactics". Make it an ability like the Staff Mastery power, in that you have several toggles you can switch on to direct your pets to fight in certain ways. It would give Beast Mastery a unique feel, as well as removing the penalty of using Fortify Pack. For instance, you could have it be something like: Pack Tactics -- Selecting this power gives you three toggles, only one of which can be on at any given time. Aggressive Tactics -- Pets have a slightly increased crit chance per stack of Pack Mentality (same as current) Defensive Tactics -- Pets have a slightly increased positional defense (melee, ranged, aoe) per stack of Pack Mentality Harrying Tactics -- Pet attacks will cause targets to be slowed, and have a small chance to knockdown opponents on hit I'd also like to see the various pets get a "Pounce" type ability (particularly the lionesses). You could more or less just clone Spring Attack.

Some of my favorite mastermind combos, when breaking out of the "be as efficient/minmax as possible" mode. Necro/Nature (my current project, basically a 'dark druid' sort) Ninja/Kinetic (mach-4 ninjas everywhere) Demon/Pain (sadistic demoness whipping her demons into a frenzy) Beast/Nature (a more traditional druid type build) Beast/Storm (an alternate to the druid build) Necro/Electric (bringing the dead back to life with the power of LIGHTNING) I'm determined to figure out a way to make /empathy work for a mastermind at some point. It's such a gimpy set for the most part, with massive cooldowns. Maybe a pissed off empathy defender who recruited some mercenaries so she could actually deal damage for once.