WumpusRat

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.

It seems odd that it's only for mercenaries, and also had the same delay when I created a brand new account and made another one. You can turn times on in options-windows, it's under chat options I believe, to have 'show timestamps on messages'. 12h, 24h, and 24h with seconds. Easiest way to check is to turn on timestamp with seconds, start one of the summons, and queue up another one. If it goes off 4 seconds after the first one started, that's what I'm seeing on mine. If not, then there's something really odd going on. Maybe my entire download of the game is bugged, and I need to reinstall. <edit> Actually, it can't be my install now that I think about it, because I made the second account using one of my other computers, so that was a fresh install of the game. Hrm.

True. Though with the "no redraw" option selected, I don't think it animates you pulling the weapon, so where they were positioned wouldn't matter? I honestly don't remember if it does or not, I'd have to check when I get home. If so, then it could just be an extra click "click for sheathed when not in use", "click again for sheathed at <second location> when using no redraw".

While it might be interesting to see an ability to "respec" a character beyond just re-picking the powers within your set, I'm not sure it's actually feasible from a code standpoint. Not without completely rewriting the archetype system from the ground up. Generally what I do is if I have an idea for a character with a certain powerset, I'll roll them up on the test server, bump them up to 50 and configure them with generic IOs, and see how they play, if it's a combo that I'm not familiar with -- therefore I don't really know what sets would be best for them. If it plays well and I have fun with generic IOs, then I know the set will be even more fun once I get proper sets built in and have a better understanding of how everything works together. Definitely saves me a ton of headaches if I try out a combo at 50 and realize that it's not as fun as I hoped it would be, especially since it usually takes me a week or two to go from 1-50 if I'm just focusing on one character.

Ah, okay. I tried reading a "how to create a sound mod" walkthrough, but my eyes started crossing about halfway through it, because it was talking about creating ogg files, putting them into special directories (and it didn't say WHAT directories to put them in), etc. The place it said the sound files were didn't have the files it claimed it would have, and it ended up just being a huge chore and I couldn't figure it out. So at this point I've basically given up on trying to create a mod. I'll just live with the current power sounds.

Retreating and resummoning is always an option, yes. However, I think part of the problem with mastermind pets is that the pets can be attacked and killed before they're able to actually do anything. While in the process of "appearing" during the summon animation, the pets can be targeted and killed by mobs, while the pets are literally unable to do anything in response, and before they can even be targeted by the mastermind to buff/heal them. It's similar to how rezzing Freakshow can be killed by mastermind pets before they finish their rez animation, if the pets are set to aggressive. They'll be targeted and sometimes killed mid-animation, even before a player can target them. But this thread was mostly in response to the fact that the Mercenaries set seems to be, at least on my end, bugged, due to the excessively long animation I'm seeing for Mercenary pets and upgrades. 4 seconds per summon, and 4 seconds for tactical upgrade, meaning if you're trying to resummon and rebuff even a single pet mid-fight as a Merc MM, it's about 10 seconds of you doing nothing else. As you can see in the screenshots Player-1 posted, his (her? I don't know) pets were summoning in 2 seconds, and afterwards other powers could activate. Whereas all my Merc masterminds require 4 seconds before another power can be used. I tried this on 3 different Merc MMs on the live server, 2 on the test server, and even went so far as to create a brand new account and created one on the test server, and ended up with the same issue. I'd love to have other people test this and see if it's happening for them, as well. Because it puzzles me that Player-1 seems to not be having the issue that I am.

I started remaking some of my "D&D characters transported to Paragon" the other day, and decided to make the Fighter a shield/axe tanker. So far she's doing really well, and my build on test performed better than I expected, so it's a nice goal to shoot for.