WumpusRat

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.

A suggestion I'd have is for the sheathed weapons is to have an option to hang at the hip rather than on the character's back. The katana is at the hip, which looks nice, but when I went to check my broadsword/shield character her sword was across her back, when it would make much more sense to have it hanging at her hip. Same for the mace, axe, and dual blades. Having a pair of daggers on your back seems really awkward, instead of them at each hip. Being able to pick hip or back for the various weapons, if it's not much work, would be really nice.

Sure. Here's a shot of me using each summon in sequence, back to back. Each one fires off a bit over 4 seconds after the first one does. <edit> Just to make sure, I hopped onto a couple of my other mercenary MMs and they had the same results. About 4 seconds to cast each summon, and not being able to do anything until each one was done, so over 12 seconds of standing still to use all 3 powers. <edit #2> Tried it on the test servers as well, with the same results. 4 seconds to cast each summon, and delaying any other power from activating for those 4 seconds.

After leveling up my new katana brute, I realized that the sounds for katana are kind of meh. Not a big fan of them. I wanted something "meatier" like a sword actually hitting someone, rather than clinking on some metal. I just can't figure out how to actually make a sound mod. I tried the 'create mod' option, but nothing I can try gets it to recognize the 'proper folder/path' when I try to tell it where to start building it. I'm a complete novice at creating mods, so there's probably something simple I'm missing.

You can have the throwing knife as any origin, btw. Just go to the p2w vendor and give up your starting origin power, and re-select the throwing knife. So you can have a magical character who tosses knives at people, for instance. <edit> Funny, Decoy and I said the same thing at the same moment. 🙂

Kind of reposting this from the suggestion forum, since it seems to be an actual bug. The Mercenaries Mastermind set seems to be bugged in terms of the animation time needed to use the Soldiers, Spec-Ops, Commando, and Tactical Upgrade skills. The summons are supposed to be 2.03 seconds, but take 4.5 (approximately) to cast, with the MM being locked into the animation for the entire time. If they're trying to summon all three sets of pets quickly, it takes almost 14 seconds, rather than 6. Similarly, Tactical Upgrade is also supposed to have a 2.03 second animation, but takes 4.5 seconds as well, as it uses the exact same animation for summoning the pets. All the other sets follow the listed cast time for the powers, except for Mercenaries. Hopefully this can be fixed, because it definitely puts a much heavier load on Merc MMs when they're trying to replace and upgrade pets mid-fight. 4.5s for the summon, another 6 seconds for the two upgrades, and then another couple of seconds to re-buff them if you have something like /Thermal, /FF, /Cold, etc. 12-15 seconds spent locked in place to get a single replacement pet back into the fight.

It might be a bug specific to Mercenaries, then. Because from the moment I press the button and the animation starts, I can't do anything else for about 3.5 seconds, not even move. <edit> Actually I just timed it with a stopwatch (I was timing it in my head before). From the moment the power starts until I can move (spamming a movement key to catch it the moment I can) is about 4.5 seconds. <edit #2> In fact, ALL the Mercenary summons have that same 4.5 second animation, rather than the 2.03 it claims they have. I haven't checked the other sets yet, but I'll do that in a minute. But for Mercenaries, summoning and buffing takes 4.5 x 3 (summons), 1.5 (equip), 4.5 (tactical upgrade), or about 20 total seconds. <edit #3> Yep, it's specific to Mercenaries. All the other sets take between 10-12 seconds to summon and fully buff. Mercs take around twice as long, due to the extremely long animations for summoning as well as tactical upgrade. So I suppose this topic should be "Please fix Mercenary summon/buffing times" rather than for all MMs. 🙂

With the changes to how pet resists work, being tied to the 6th level upgrade, it might be a nice QoL change to increase the animation speed of the summon/buffing powers a bit, since it can be a nightmare to try and resummon pets in combat due to the long animations and that base pets (at least for certain sets right now) have zero resists until they're buffed. For instance, on my Merc MM, I was fighting a boss who was capable of nearly one-shotting my tier-1 and 2 pets (energy melee boss), so he was dropping them rapidly. Going through the animation of resummoning, rebuffing (since base pets are more or less just meatshields and nothing else), and getting them back into the fight was taking up so much time I could literally do nothing else. Just stand there summoning/buffing for about 20 seconds. And typically by the time they'd be ready to fight again, a couple of them had died. In situations where you're not running on low difficulty, this can quickly run into a cascade failure of the pets not living long enough to be rebuffed. An example would be the Tactical Upgrade for Mercenaries. The power says it has a 2.03s activation time, but the animation is about 3.5 seconds, or nearly twice as long. Perhaps the animation can be shortened, but the power still takes the same amount of time to affect the pet. That way the mastermind can quickly rebuff and get back to trying to mitigate the incoming damage or use CC, rather than being locked into long animations and doing nothing. It would also help out on teams at the start of the mission if pets need to be summoned and buffed, so the mastermind doesn't end up falling far behind due to spending 15-20 seconds standing around summoning and buffing while the team runs ahead.

Since I had one of my old Bot/FF MMs lying around who I hadn't kitted out with set IOs, I went puttering around killing some +1/8 council spawns (no bosses) with her. Her bots are all set up with 2xAcc, 3xDmg, 1xEnd. (30-35th level IOs). After each spawn of Council, the Assault Bot was at around 40% end, drones were at 70-75%, and Protector Bots varied based on which one paused to heal, but generally ended up around 25-30% end. On the plus side, the little repair bot is a serious champion. I ended up respeccing her out of the medicine pool entirely, since I don't need to use aid other on the bots anymore.

Alright. I haven't played for a couple years, just came back to the game a week or so ago, so I'm not aware of the stuff that was hashed out over the course of the beta. But yeah, I was mostly just street-sweeping in PI to test out end drain. I hopped into a council map at +1/8 and with 86% end reduction on the assault bot, 96% on the protector bots, and 75% on the drones, clearing one spawn of them would end up with the assault bot at about 65-70% end, the drones at 90%+, and the protector bots at about 60-70%. I was going to do more testing with running on standard leveling-up slotting (2 Acc, 3 Dmg, 1 End) to see how they fared, but if it's a known issue that the end costs are too high, then I don't really need to test it.

With the changes to the Robotics set for Masterminds, the tier-2 Protector Bots were given several new attacks, to bring them more in line with other tier-2 pets. That's good. The downside is that the endurance costs on a lot of their attacks seem quite high, and they blow through their end pool at an alarming rate. After some testing, you more or less NEED to have 80% or higher end reduction in the Protector Bots to keep them from hemorrhaging their endurance in the first 30 seconds of any given fight. I tested them at 50th level with full IO slots, with 65%, 80% and 95% end reduction, and with 65% their end pool was gone after one fairly short fight (dealing with 2 bosses, 3 lt's, and 6 minions). At 80% they can hold out a little longer, but will still start to run low if the fight drags out for too long. At 95% they were able to deal with 2 bosses and 1 minion by themselves, but they were at half endurance afterwards. I'm going to do some further testing, with various pet configurations, to see how they last in more protracted fights (such as against an EB or AV), but after testing them out for an hour or so it does seem like their end costs might need to be adjusted a bit. The other bots seem pretty fine as far as endurance goes; the drones with 70% end reduction can keep fighting almost endlessly, while the assault bot can last 3-4 minutes of constant attack cycling with 70%. The new attacks on the protector bots seem to be overwhelming their end reduction though.

Okay, here's the build. I'll just type it up since mids is outdated (I don't think it's got the latest patch that changes power levels and such), so I'll just note down what's what. The order of power picks doesn't really matter all that much, and it's easy enough to swap out the travel power and the stealth/infil powers if you want something different. For the pets, I went with all 6 auras (2 per pet) and then 2 parts of each Sovereign Right and Blood Mandate, for the 2-part set bonuses. It's cheap, and does what I want (namely get their acc/dmg/end high enough -- they end up with 91% dmg, 69% acc/end (the soldiers have 90% end), which combined with tactics and supremacy makes their accuracy fine, and they don't blow through all their end too fast). Power (slots): Soldiers (6): Sov Right (res aura), Edict of the Master (def aura), Sov Acc/Dmg/End, Sov Dmg/End, Blood Acc/Dmg/End, Blood Acc/Dmg Spec Op (6): Mark of Sup (end/res aura), Cmd of Master (aoe def aura), Sov Acc/Dmg/End, Sov Dmg/End, Blood Acc/Dmg/End, Blood Acc/Dmg Commando (6): Exped Reinf (res aura), Call to Arms (def aura), Sov Acc/Dmg/End, Sov Dmg/End, Blood Acc/Dmg/End, Blood Acc/Dmg Equip Merc (3): Steadfast Prot (res/def unique), Glad Armor (tp prot/def unique), Resist Serum (3): 3xRecharge Tactical Upgrade (3): Kismet Def/End, Def/End/Rech and Def/Rech for the 3-part bonus (recovery and smash/lethal resist) -- it's a low-level set, but you lose less than 1% defense, so it's not a big deal imo. Repulsion Bolt (4): Decimation Acc/End/Rech, Ruin Acc/End/Rech, Sudden Accel Kb-to-Kd, End Red (it's got a high end cost, so I wanted to get it down a lot plus some acc/rech) Deflection Shield (4): Gift of the Ancients Def/End, Def/Rech, Def, Def/Runspd Insulation Shield (4): Same as Def Shield Dispersion Bubble (6): Full set Red Fortune Repulsion Field (3): 3xEnd Red (such an insanely high end cost -- could have just gone with 2, but opted for 3 to save a little more end, and if you don't want to put lvl 50's in it) Damping Bubble (4): 3xRech, Gift of the Ancients Def/Runspd Health (3): Panacea unique, Numina unique, Miracle unique Stamina (3): 3xPerformance Shifter End, End/Acc, End proc (you could just opt for the proc and 2 EndMod IOs if you prefer or other sets, but I like the +move and health set bonuses) Medicine: Aid Other (4): Preventive Medicine Heal, Heal/End, Heal/Rech, Heal/Rech/End Medicine: Aid Self (4): Same as Other Medicine: Field Medic (1): Rech Leaping: Combat Jumping (1): Luck of the Gambler Def/Global rech Leaping: Super Jump (3): Full set Winter's Gift Leaping: Acrobatics (1): EndRed Leadership: Maneuvers (6): Full set Reactive Defenses Leadership: Assault (1): EndRed Leadership: Tactics (4): Gaussian's Fire-Control To-Hit, To-Hit/End, To-Hit/End/Rech, To-Hit/Rech Concealment: Stealth (2): Shield Wall (TP prot/Resist unique), Luck of the Gambler (Def/Global Rech unique) Concealment: Infiltration (2): Blessing of the Zephyr Move Spd, Move Spd/End -- for the little bit of ranged defense boost Mace Mastery: Scorpion Shield (6): Full set Red Fortune Notes: You don't really need the global recharge for this build, but I wanted it purely to drop the rech of Serum and Damping Bubble a little bit. Could easily shift those slots elsewhere though. Also, why all the +runspeed? I like to run fast. 🙂 Concealment is completely optional, as is whatever movement power you want to take. I opted for Leaping with this build because I like the protection CJ + Acro gives me, though you could easily replace Acrobatics with a -KB/KD IO in another power. My personal defenses end up with 30% ranged/melee/aoe def, 45% to smash/lethal/energy. I was a bit off on the aoe def the pets had -- I think I might have been thinking of a different /FF MM I had made. But it's still high enough to pass soft cap by a lot.

I've actually got a design document for a superheroic MMO doodled up (it's not finished, but it's full of notes I've made over the years). Some things I'd love to see for "CoH-2": * An alignment system that isn't 'fixed'. Everyone starts out a vigilante as a new character, and based on what sorts of choices you make for missions (either by just taking the mission in the first place (such as choosing to rob a bank, or to save someone), or what you decide to do at the end, like a morality mission (do you kill the bad guy, betray the hero/villain, turn them in, etc) would determine if your reputation goes up or down. The higher it is, the more heroic the populace sees you. The lower, the more villainous. You wouldn't just do one mission and suddenly flip from hero to vigilante, or villain to vigilante, etc. It would require a lot of work to 'fall', and the same amount of work to 'redeem yourself' in the eyes of the populace. * A tree-like structure for choosing powers. Instead of just "you have Energy Blast as a powerset, which includes these 9 powers", you could choose "Energy Manipulation", which would open up various power choices, and as you branch out it opens up other ones, both offensive and defensive, etc. Including overlap between various powers. If you chose "Earth Manipulation" as well as "Fire Manipulation", by combining the two you could open up magma/lava-based powers, for instance. Would make it super easy for the devs to come up with new powers, as if it's something a tree doesn't already have but is thematic for one of them, they can just slot it into a tree. Or make it a "combine two powersets to make this power" ability. * Choosing the focus for your powers. DCUO does something like this, which I think it's pretty cool. If you choose, say, "Fire Blast" as a power, it doesn't automatically come from your hands. You could choose to have it come from your hands, or a gun you draw to shoot fire, come from some gauntlets, a staff, shoot flaming arrows, or whatever else you wanted to choose. Unlike DCUO, you could either choose a different one for each power (like if you wanted to be a walking arsenal with a ton of different weapons and tools) or have them all come from the same weapon (like someone who has a highly-configurable sci-fi pistol that can shoot a ton of different effects). * Configurable pets. If you wanted to be a mastermind-type with minions, you could choose how you want to employ them. Do you want to be the sort with just a bunch of faceless goons, who are all roughly equal? Sure, you can do that. Do you want to be the sort who has a bunch of goons and one Big Goon(tm)? You can do that too. Or do you want to just have one Right Hand Man(tm) who assists you in all your heroic/villainous deeds? Sure, you can do that too. Basically you'd have something along the lines of "control points", with the more you invest into any single henchman the more powerful they become. If you had, say, 10 points to spend, something like a tier-1 mastermind pet might cost 1-2, while a tier-3 might cost 5. Or you could make a big powerful minion/sidekick that costs a full 10. * More open world. This one is pretty obvious. Computers these days can handle open worlds without needing to segment everything off into zones. So a huge open city map would be great. And you could zip off to other locations, like the arctic, the moon, the jungles of south america, the african veldt, etc.

Sure, I can post it when I get home tonight.

After trying out the various attacks for the focus fire buff, I ended up dumping them and just took the new force bolt power instead. -15% resist in one shot feels more impactful than +3% damage per attack, and only costs me one power rather than 2-3. Plus slotting it with a KB-to-KD, I can use it to juggle mobs and keep them on their ass.