WumpusRat

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.

The chance for build up will only affect you, not your pets, sadly. Otherwise it would be pretty nice. The random nature of it tends to make me avoid putting it into pets as well, since they won't save their big attacks for when it pops up. End reduction in pets affects how much endurance they spend on attacks, yeah. Just to double-check it (since someone in another thread doubted it worked), I took a completely unslotted build out to the RWZ and had the soldiers attack a target dummy. They burned through their end bar in about 50 seconds. Then I threw 3 end reductions in the power, and repeated the test. Their end never dropped below 95%, even after twice the amount of time constantly firing.

It's worked that way since Masterminds were introduced back with CoV, and was absolutely intended. Just like slotting acc and dmg improves the pets' abilities, slotting end reduction in the pet powers lowers their end costs. If it "wasn't meant to work that way", pets would run out of end in one cycle of attacks.

Since most people are largely against the idea (and as I said in the original post, I wasn't entirely convinced it would be a good idea, but was rather posting it to gauge how other people felt about it) I'm just going to ask the mods to nuke this topic.

She's sitting at 43 at the moment. I've kind of paused leveling her because of the animation bug with summoning and tactical upgrade. It's not a huge deal for the majority of the time, but when it DOES matter it's hugely impactful, and can cause a rapid cascade failure in your pets until you die. I was talking to one of the devs about it, and he's looking into it, now that we know where the bug actually lies and what might be causing it (or at least, what 'corrects' it momentarily). So fingers crossed that it can be corrected fairly easily.

We 6-slotted Stamina and liked it! I consider it to be more of a "pseudo-travel power" than a full-fledged one. You can only jump about 25% as high/far as superleap, and only run about 25% as fast as superspeed. While it does make you invisible, so does Superspeed. It's kind of a slightly upgraded prestige run power that you can get for free from the p2w vendor. That's why I used "per se", rather than just flat out stating "it's not a travel power". It is, but it isn't. It would be akin to Sorcery giving Hover instead of Mystic Flight. Would it still be a "travel power" at that point? Technically, yes, but also no.

I was looking through the power pools last night, as I was doodling up a new character, and something occurred to me. For most of the pools, you can select one of the first three powers at 4th level, while for four of the pools, you can only choose one of the first two. I know that the travel powers were changed to allow people to select an actual travel really early, which IS handy, but the remaining pools have certain things people might want without "wasting" a choice of the lower two powers as well. Now, to be honest I'm not entirely convinced this would be a good idea -- I can see WHY the travel powers were changed, but then I realized that Concealment was the same way, and it's not exactly a travel power/pool. It has Infiltration in it now, which does give a move bonus, but it's not exactly a "travel power" per se. The four pools that you're restricted to the first two powers in are Medicine, Presence, Fighting, and Leadership. For most of those, if you're taking powers in the pools it's because you likely WANT one of the first two powers. Medicine, for instance, is almost mandatory for a lot of Mastermind builds, due to many of their secondary sets not having an innate way to heal the pets. While other people might only want to take the pool for Aid Self, and don't want or need Aid Other or Stimulant. Similarly, Fighting is the most glaring "offender" of this category, as Boxing and Kick are often just "wasted" power choices in order to get to the powers that you wanted the pool for in the first place: Tough and Weave. So I suppose for the moment this isn't really saying "Hey, the devs should change these four pools", but mostly wondering who thinks it might be an idea that they could consider. I'm kind of half and half on it myself, as the only pool that I really see as having "wasted" power picks is Fighting, and only for certain characters -- Cross Punch with the bonus damage from having Boxing and Kick IS a very nice power, after all, though it does require two other choices. But would it be too much to allow people to pick one of the first three powers from Medicine, Presence, Fighting and Leadership rather than the first two? I'm not entirely sure myself.

Okay, I figured out where the bug is. Basically, the only time the Mercenary summon/buff animations activate at their listed activation time of 2.03 seconds is if you queue up one of your Mercenary rifle attacks. THEN it activates in 2 seconds, allowing you to fire off your attack. ANY other power doesn't cut the animation short, making you have to go through the full 4 second animation. Tested with aid other, temporal mending, farsight, dispersion field, and aid self (which has an additional bug of it simply not firing off at all, and dropping out of the queue). But doing a summon + burst? 2 second animation for the summon, as it's listed for the power. THAT works, but everything else makes the animation take double the time. <edit> A little further testing. ANY weapon-draw animation will kick you out of the summon/tactical upgrade animation, and end it at 2 seconds the way it should. Tested it with a couple of random temp powers (baseball bat and revolver), and the same thing happened. Since all three summons and tactical upgrade use the same animation, there's probably something glitched in that, and it's playing the "talk on the radio" part of it (the 2-second loop) twice. But for some reason triggering a weapon draw interrupts it before it starts the second loop of the animation. But no other power does.

Just tested it, and nope. The weapon just teleports to your hand. So if the restriction is based on drawing animation, a second sheathed location could be added for use with no redraw. It SHOULD be fairly simple, since they have weapon attachment slots for the hip and back, and I think a lot of one-handed weapons would look better hanging off your hip.

Just to answer this bit, the Equip Robot power is the thing that gives the assault bot his flamethrower, so if you summon your tier-1's and tier-2's and then equip them, then summon the tier-3 and then give them all the second upgrade, the AB won't have the flamethrower. However, it'll also have zero resists (since they've been tied into the Equip power) and no heavy plasma burst.

If some other people could test this, it would be really appreciated. One of the devs did and didn't see the same delay I'm seeing. If I could get some corroboration (one way or another) it would help try and track down what's causing it. Be sure to turn timestamps on with seconds, and queue up mercenary summons one after the other, to see how long it takes for the powers to fire off. According to the way the game works, and how the dev verified for his testing, it should be 2 seconds. On my end it's 4 seconds, even by timestamps, so it's not lag or anything like that (as it's also consistent, 100% of the time).

Yeah, I noticed there was no "no redraw" option for staff when I was making my monk character last night. I'll test it when I get home from work in an hour or so.