[Focused Feedback: New Powerset - Psionic Armor (Brutes, Scrappers, Sentinels, Stalkers, Tankers)]

So far I've tested (though not super in-depth) with psi-armor:

Tanker: Fire melee, psi melee

Brute: Fire melee, ice melee, psi melee

Scrapper: Katana, fire melee, psi melee

 

I've been running them through the first mission of Alexander's arc against the Warriors, since they're tough, do lots of lethal damage (one of the "weaknesses" of the set), and it's quick to jump into. I've been running at +2/8 with all of them so far.

 

Dealing with the lethal weakness hasn't been an issue, as it's easy enough to plug with set bonuses. The sustain with psychokinetic aura and devour psyche has been incredibly strong. 

I want to test it out against enemy groups that normally just curbstomp some of my other characters, like high-end Carnies, Malta, or Arachnos. We'll see how that goes tonight.

 

But overall, the set seems quite sturdy, and while a bit clicky, isn't so much that it becomes cumbersome.

[Just to bring it up for its once-per-year: Alternate Animations for Medicine Pool]

3 hours ago, Psyonico said:

I kind of consider Medicine in the same ballpark as Sorcery or Experimentation.  Both of those are also kind of original locked due to their animations as well.

Sorcery, Force of Will and Experimentation are MEANT to be origin-based powers. That's why you can only take one of them (though they're not locked to your origin, but I believe they were initially intended to be).

Sorcery is the magic-origin set.

Experimentation is the science-origin set.

Force of Will is the mutant-origin set.

Utility Belt (which hasn't been implemented yet) is the natural-origin set.
And Gadgetry (also doesn't exist yet) is the tech-origin set.

[Just to bring it up for its once-per-year: Alternate Animations for Medicine Pool]

Medicine is a really nice pool and has some very handy powers, especially for Masterminds that don't have a secondary with a heal in it, or to take with other ATs that might want to be able to self-heal, heal allies, or have a rez.

 

However, the tricorder device animation doesn't always fit the concept for the character. Why does a mage have to pull out a tech device to heal, or someone who has gifted themselves a bunch of powers through scientific alteration, or a mutant who has a grab-bag of assorted powers?

 

Can we pretty please get an alternate animation for the Medicine pool that's just pointing your hand and using a power to cause the effect, rather than the tricorder? That way it could fit into a lot more character concepts.

[Overhaul Kinetics for Masterminds]

13 hours ago, Lunar Ronin said:

Honestly, SCoRE/Resurgence should have never ported the Kinetics power set to Masterminds.  There's a very good, legitimate reason why Paragon Studios never ported Kinetics to Masterminds: There's very little support for henchmen.  As it stands now, Kinetics is a trap power set for players new to the Mastermind AT.  "Kinetics is a great power set, I'll pick that!"  Only for them to get to high level, and realize that their henchmen are unusually squishy because there's nothing outside of Transfusion to support henchmen... and then blame the AT as a whole.  I've seen it time and time and time again over the past six years.

 

It's way too late to remove Kinetics from Masterminds, but at least y'all can overhaul it so it is no longer a trap power set pick.  I don't know what that would look like, but I do see something that needs to be addressed.

Kinetics is by no means a "trap" for masterminds. It may not be an ideal set for a lot of builds, but it can absolutely work, and can plow through whatever content you want with it.

 

I have a beast mastery/kinetics MM that has casually solo'd GMs, and even took down Eochai and Jack in Irons at the same time (caveat: this was prior to the GM update some time back). 

 

In order to maximize MM Kinetics, you should ideally use it with melee-oriented pets, since that allows the pets to clump up on the target, making the best use of transfusion. While speed boost's +rech doesn't work on the pets, the +movement speed definitely does. It allows the melee pets to close with enemies much more rapidly, and change targets more rapidly as well. Not to mention chasing down runners and attacking them before they get too far away.

Transference and fulcrum shift both work extremely well on pets, and allow you to get away with less end reduction slotting on the pets, making it easier to fit in more acc/dmg, procs, or the auras on the sets that don't have a spare "pet" power.

 

Kinetics is a set that requires some finesse to build for, and is less defensive than some of the other sets, but it is by no means a "trap". No more than a corruptor taking Kinetics and then opting to solo. At least the MM has a built-in team to benefit from the buffs.

 

If any MM secondaries need to be addressed it's Poison and Radiation.

Switch the Noxious Gas poison power to a toggle like everyone else has rather than a garbage 20-second long-recharge click power, and allow radiation's Fallout power to work on your pets. 

[How would you nerf tankers?]

1 hour ago, Erratic1 said:

 

Well, that is the beauty of area damage. You just have to make sure the sum of the damage being dealt exceeds the single-target damage value to be pulling ahead. Brutes may deal better single-target damage, but there is a value at which it is more effective to deal area damage (so long as you'll survive things pounding on you longer while you do so). Staying within an single AT for calculation, I typically calculate that breakeven point (on melee's anyway) as hitting three targets with an AoE. 

 

Consider the below screenshot of me testing my most recent Tanker's target build on the test server:

 

 

I did not think to screenshot things earlier in the fight when more things were alive, but notice the Recharge Time Bonus is 167.5%. That is on top of what is slotted in the power. My AoE attacks are up at under a third of their base recharge time. My big single-target attack hits for 440, but the big AoE hits for 213. Say the Brute would hit for 600. I only have to hit three targets to be at parity on my Tanker. And sure, I cannot chain my big AoE, but then the Brute's big attack cannot be chained either. As my Tanker is slotted, Spinning Strike is up every 4.7 seconds (if I maintain 167.5% recharge that is) whereas Crushing Uppercut is up 7.17s. So not only do I outdo the big attack so long as I am hitting 3 targets, but I can do it more often.

 

This is what, at least in part, @DrunkFlux is getting at.

 

Yeah, there are a lot of things going on in the "top end" builds for things that I'm not aware of and likely don't do. That's why I added "maybe I'm just doing it wrong" in my first post, because I tend to build more for set bonuses and theme rather than trying to maximize damage output. For instance, I don't have a single character with the +recharge proc in any of my attacks, rarely use hasten, and don't tend to have procs in my attacks in general (except on my trollers, then I'll toss a few procs into their aoe stun/sleep powers just to try and bring their clear times up above "glacial"). 🙂

 

Those three things alone probably skew my numbers really far below what would be considered "optimal". I just base my thoughts on what I play, and since I tend to play my tankers and brutes built in similar ways, I can definitely see my brutes clearing stuff faster once they get rolling. And the thing is, since balance is MEANT to be done around purely SO'd builds, comparing fully tricked-out and kitted builds with purple IO sets, unique procs, unique bonuses, isn't really proving that the archetype is superior/inferior, it's proving that the IO sets make a MASSIVE difference, and skew balance all over the place.

 

So much of it likely just stems from different build strategies. 

[How would you nerf tankers?]

1 hour ago, DrunkFlux said:

I'm primarily looking at things from an AoE focused perspective, as it depends also on power set use.  Tankers AoE potential out-classed brutes when you used AoE focused sets, or rather if you looked at things from using powersets identical across ATs such as say, fire melee on tanker vs fire melee on brute, fire melee on tanker far out-classed brutes version.  But this also continued with sets such as titan weapons, spines, radiation melee ect.

Okay, that makes more sense then.

So fighting huge crowds, the tanker does more damage.

Fighting single spawns at a time or low numbers of high-value targets, the brute does more damage.

And when you say "fire melee on tankers far out-classes brutes", there's an unspoken "when fighting tons of trash mobs", because the brute version has far superior single-target damage.

I guess it seems fairly reasonable to me. 

[why arent there more sonic sentinals]

14 minutes ago, Heatstroke said:

How is this done.

Go to this thread: 

The mod manager lets you change a bunch of stuff (though it's purely on your end, other people won't hear the sounds you change, they'll hear the normal ones). 

I changed the Force Field powers to have kind of a deep, bassy pulsing sound, which makes the force fields sound "angry", which I dig.

There are a couple for changing Sonic Blast's powers to a bass pulse, a banshee-type screech, or more of a gender-neutral scream that's less grating.

There might be more, as I haven't checked the list in a year or so.

 

 

[why arent there more sonic sentinals]

On 5/30/2025 at 6:00 PM, Heatstroke said:

i cant stand the sounds.. i tried one.. I play with headphones.. the sounds were just super annoying.. 

Yeah, the base sounds for sonic blast are atrocious. That's why I've grabbed a few sound mods to turn them into something less grating.

[How would you nerf tankers?]

42 minutes ago, DrunkFlux said:

 

Baseline tanker damage is actually 0.95, brute 0.75.

Brute damage is low as it is to accomodate for fury, when you run the numbers though as I do in my post above, brute falls WAY behind tanker currently, so does scrapper for that matter.  AoE damage is king in general gameplay, and scrappers only remain relevent due to having especially good ATOs that brutes 'dont' have.

Having played both brutes and tankers throughout the years, both pre- and post-tanker changes, I've never seen my tankers vastly out-damage my brutes. 

It always makes me wonder if this "huge damage disparity" is purely because of the push for a lot of tanker builds to be stuffed to the gills with so many procs that the actual damage numbers barely matter, and it's all about maximizing procs with every swing.

Because I rarely put procs in attacks, unless it's just there for a set bonus (like Mako's Bite, Touch of Death, Bombardment, etc). So my brutes consistently out-damage my tankers by a rather hefty margin, at least once their fury gets rolling (which usually takes a couple seconds in the first spawn of the map).

 

Maybe I'm just "doing it wrong" as it were.

[I do not like Tunnel maps]

3 hours ago, Octogoat said:

I recently redid this mission after twenty years and thankfully remembered to go right to the sphere

 

One time I did that one she spawned on top of the sphere. I spent SO FREAKING LONG scouring the islands for her, then finally peeked up top and got so mad.

Yeah, she was "arrested". Body? Oh, no, trust me, I put her in jail. Which one? Oh, you've never head of it. It's in Canada.

Trust me.

[I do not like Tunnel maps]

10 hours ago, mistagoat said:

Precisely this! Bad on their own but a special kind of hell if you're playing a MM on the more vertical maps!

It was even worse back on live. Back then MM pets had collision, so 2-3 MMs in one of those purple cave maps was an absolute nightmare.

Particularly if you had to escort an NPC out.

[Mastermind Ideas]

One of the ones I'd really like to see, and would be "easy" to make (as it uses assets that are already in game) would be an Elementalist MM set.

Tier-1 would be fire imps.

Tier-2 would be a jack frost and a lightning gremlin.

Tier-3 would be an earth elemental.

 

The personal attacks could be air attacks (since there's no air elemental), Gust, a single-target Jet Stream, and Summon Tornado (weaker version, call it Dust Devil or something).

 

The imps could start with flares, with the upgrade giving them firebolt, and then fireball.

Jack Frost could be a damage/debuffer, while the gremlin would have lightning attacks (obviously).

The earth elemental could be very similar to the Seismic Blast set, or optionally could go with Stone Melee instead if you want it to be a tanky type ala Thugs' Bruiser.

 

For the 18th level unique, I think it might be interesting to have it summon a medium-duration temporary pet (say 30s duration, 120s base recharge) that summons a water elemental (could use the model of Marine's Barrier Reef), and have it use healing, abs shields, and throw out water blasts. 

[I have a question about Thugs/ for anyone out there.]

On 5/25/2025 at 5:54 AM, Crysis said:

 

Been there, done that.  In fact, one of my very first incarnated MM here on Homecoming was a Thugs/Time and I had several in-game friends who also had Thugs/* MM’s.  We all setup secondary builds that somewhat gimped our soloing abilities, but when combined together was bonkers levels of offensive capabilities since the Thugs were all way beyond softcapped to DEF.  Take every MM personal attack and proc them out, do some silly things with secondary slotting…..really stupid OP’d all Thugs teams.

 

Back on live I was in a group that was all Thug/* MMs. We did the ITF and were just rampaging through everything, then got to Rommie and went "Hey, that's a nice army you have. Wanna see ours?" 

8 Gang Wars, 5 had Burnout, so 5 more Gang Wars on top of it. We had an army of like 300 pets, all with 100%+ defense from 16 enforcer + 8 MM leadership stacks. 

 

We took his lunch money.

[Trying a MM for the first time. Again.]

While I don't think there's any "worst" choice for Beast Mastery, there are some that aren't quite as synergistic. Bear in mind these are just my personal opinions on them.

 

Sonic, Radiation, and Poison are the lower-tier picks for Beast Mastery IMO. While Sonic provides some massive resists and Cold provides a lot of defense, they have very little sustain in combat. You'll need to pick up Medicine to keep your pets up and running. The MM version of Poison has a huge weakness to me because they nerfed the tier-9 and turned it into a click-buff rather than a toggle, making it far less useful to MMs. 

 

FF can provide some VERY high defense, but still lacks sustain, so you'll need to pick up Medicine as well.

Trick Arrow has no sustain either, and is a very "edge of your seat", "kill or be killed" set with beasts, as you can turn them into killing machines with disruption and acid arrow, and lighting the oil slick on fire can provide some CC. I enjoyed it a lot, but it can be rough against hard, high-damage targets.

 

The ones I've had the most fun with in terms of synergy have been Nature (it lends itself really well to the beasts, and is an extremely powerful set for MMs in general), Marine (same deal), Kinetics (oddly enough, it provides almost no defense, but the beasts being all melee means they can clump on a target and the heal works well, plus a fulcrum-shifted pack is hilariously fun -- chasing everything at mach-5, and tearing stuff apart in seconds). Like TA, Kinetics is a very "kill or be killed" set.

 

Dark is also a very strong set, though I haven't played a beast/dark MM yet. Empathy and Pain are both decent, but Empathy needs a LOT of recharge to make it truly viable -- enoough to stack Fortitude on all your pets, and to bring the big regen aura down to as close to perma as you can get. 

 

I haven't tried Storm on a beast master yet, though I do have a demon/storm MM who is quite fun. 

 

But for "best" synergy and performance, I'd probably vote for Nature, Marine, Electric or possibly Dark, since those have everything you need in their own toolkits without needing to pick up Medicine. 

 

[I've never tried Hasten... should I start?]

I have hasten on a handful of characters. Generally it's never my go-to power choice, as I always want other stuff that I find more valuable.

If I'm going to pick hasten, it's because I have particular powers that I want to recharge as fast as possible, generally extremely long-recharging things, like Phantom Army, Overgrowth, or the like. 

And if I'm going for that, it means I have to tailor the build to cram as much global recharge into it as possible, which means forgoing powers that I might actually really want instead.

 

Generally my builds try to align with a particular theme, rather than going for "absolute best damage" or anything similar. I'll pick up set bonuses that conform to the theme, even if they're not the "best" choices for any given power. Same thing for cramming attacks full of procs, I generally don't do it because I've never seen the necessity of it. Likely due to the fact that I don't lean on hasten, which makes all the procs less valuable, at least to me.

[Super Sentai or Transformation Character?]

Closest thing I have to that is a character that's a mastermind in a mech that she can only use for a limited time (it's got power source issues).

 

In her "base" form she's got an energy rifle and a couple of force blasts from her gauntlets. Then she can "power up" by calling in a mecha (using a prismatic costume of a cataphract) that can deploy smaller mech to fight alongside it in battle. 

[Share your UI Setup]

I play on an ultra-wide, so I've got a lot of screen real estate to watch stuff explode. I'm at work at the moment so I can't post it, and I tried drawing it in paint but...my drawing skills with a mouse are terribad. 🙂 

But I'll post a screenshot when I get home!

[Controllers Need Not Apply?]

Forming ITF, no tankers, no brutes, no scrappers, no stalkers, no dominators, no controllers, no defenders, no corruptors, no blasters, no masterminds, no sentinels.

Good players only.

[Getting to the end of it]

22 hours ago, cranebump said:

I wanted to play a truly Batman type character, which, to me, demanded throwing stars (closest we can get to batarangs and such). This meant I had to play a Dom.

You could also have made the character a scrapper, and just taken the weapon mastery epic pool. It would mean not having your "batarangs" until 35th level, but you could have batarangs, exploding batarangs, caltrops, etc.

[Longbow in Agincourt...]

21 hours ago, lemming said:

Just nick some random players...

 

A story arc where you start off (falsely) imprisoned by Longbow and have to bust out, break some heads, and either clear your name (for vigilante types) or just prove they were dumb to try and contain you (for redsiders) would be a fun arc. 🙂 

[Getting to the end of it]

I take breaks every now and then, sometimes for a few months at a time. I just got back from one, in fact.

 

I started to hit "burnout" (though that term isn't completely accurate, as I wasn't tired of the game itself) when I realized I was near the end of finishing up all my "D&D adventurers in Paragon" builds. I've made 30 of them, and ran out of classes to create builds for, and didn't have a new concept to jump into yet. So, I took a break for a bit.

 

But now I have a new idea for a group of characters, so I'll be starting to get those up and running. 🙂

[The Freedom Phalanx: why the hatred?]

I don't "hate" any of the Phalanx. I nothing them. I don't really feel anything about them at all. 

None of the characters are very interesting to me, and they're basically just 'generic icons who you're supposed to look up to'.

Well, except Manticore. He's the only one I feel anything towards, and that's just amusement at how many times you get to cave his face in on redside.

The redside "Who Will Die?" arc lets you kick his ass like...four times? Five? Something like that.

[Event badge annoyances]

Yeah, trying to get it done in PI is pretty much a lost cause most of the time. Nobody wants to leave the hotel-farm.

 

Last year I got a bunch of them done because someone was organizing them in other zones when they'd pop up, and we'd all swoop in and start working on them.

 

A large part of it also is that the halloween event is still in the first couple weeks, so everyone's trying to farm up. Once a lot more people get their farming done I'm sure they'll start looking at the other events for it, same with the haunted house mission, etc.

[MM primary also with matching secondary? (best synergy)]

On 10/3/2024 at 1:49 PM, benai said:

I prefer Ninjas and Mercs over all other primaries. After that comes Thugs.

If Beast doesnt have Fortify pack I would go with them as first choice of all even through they are currently the worst in damage and the perma howling also reduces damage because they cant attack. But i dont know which is the choice for beasts. You lose damage because of fortify pack and so you need either kinetics with fulcrum shift or marine with shifting tides to get your damage back again.

Beast/Nature works very well, and is thematic for a "druid" type. For my D&D characters-in-Paragon, the druid is a beast/nature MM. She has near-perma overgrowth (it's off by about 5 seconds, I think), so they actually do quite a bit of damage. 

And never use the Fortify Pack clicky. You dump all your damage in exchange for some defense. I just use the power as a mule for a couple of boosts (LotG, Shield Wall, etc) and take it off my bar.

HOPEFULLY they'll get around to updating beasts (and thugs/demons) someday like they did for the other sets. They said "soon(tm)" after the first update, but that was two years ago at this point.

[Non-Brute/Tank farming builds?]

11 hours ago, Neiska said:

@shmurtypants thoughts come to mind.

 

The first, is you “can” farm with MMs, but unless you are multi boxing, it’s far from efficient or stress free. Playing 2-3 MMs at once can be fairly fast, but it takes skill and practice.

 

But what I do now is play whatever you want, but have 2 tanks/brutes on follow. I am currently farming on my crabber SoA, and I have one Savage/Bio brute and a spines/bio tanker on follow auto casting their AoEs. So I can pretty much farm whatever I like with that setup. You don’t really even need two, one would be doable, it’s just faster with 2. 
 

No muss, no fuss, smooth and easy farming even on 4/8.

Depends on the MM, really. 

My bot/FF MM can cruise around in +4/8 in Dark Astoria pretty casually, but that's a pretty specific high-defense build with automated healing due to the maint drone, and I specifically tailored my build to give the bots incarnate-level soft-capped defense.

It's not the most efficient though, that's true.