Allow Mastermind Attacks to slot Mastermind ATO's

[Bossk_Hogg]

Currently there's a significant gap in the sets with a pet at 18, and those without, as this allows for more chances to slot the global defense/resist IO's that honestly are needed for higher tier content. Additionally, the mastermind personal attacks are also skipped. Why not help kill two birds with one stone and open the set attacks to slot the mastermind ATO sets? It would incentive taking and slotting the attacks, adding utility to powers often ignored. Plus masterminds have the most limiting ATO's for slotting options, as only three to four powers per sets can accept them. 

Edited January 11, 2020 by Bossk_Hogg

[Monos King]

It's because they follow the same application as the ordinary Pet IOs.

Someone had an interesting suggestion slightly different that I will draw from though, about altering the nature of Supremacy. I'm against that, but I would like to see the superior MoS and CotM offer the +res and +def of every existing proc at the moment (so about +35 res +15 def) and have the old buff auras replaced with damage procs. Or vice versa.

If vice versa, I think your idea would be quite beneficial, with the ATOs being damage procs slottable into any ability.

[Redlynne]

Being able to slot the Mastermind ATOs into the personal attacks of the primary powersets would be something of a game changer.  It would mean that taking personal attacks could buff your Pets with the ATO procs, letting you avoid the necessity of putting those ATO slots into Pet powers.

 

Command of the Mastermind

Mark of Supremacy

 

I'm not seeing a single reason why these sets can't "also be coded" for use in the Mastermind personal attacks.  Both sets have Accuracy, Damage, Endurance and Recharge enhancement on the IOs themselves and the set bonuses affect the Mastermind only to begin with.  The only (possible) point of contention would be the procs, which are simply auras that affect Pets only, so there's no "real" hangups there either.

 

Ideally speaking, if you wanted to broaden yet "normalize" the possible slotting for Mastermind ATOs, I would recommend the following rule change:

 

Currently ... T1, T2 and T3 Pet Powers, but also including the Level 18 power IF it spawns Pets (so either 3 or 4 powers in each primary, depending).

Proposed ... T1, T2 and T3 Pet Powers plus also the T1, T2 and T3 personal attack powers, but NOT including the Level 18 power even if it spawns Pets (so 6 powers for all primaries).

 

This would help "normalize" the slotting opportunities for the Mastermind ATO sets while also "encouraging" Masterminds to take their personal attacks (even if only for use as mules for ATO procs).

[Mansome]

Better question why are you taking the pathetic damage personal atttacks to begin with? I never get these unless I absolutely have nothing else to take. There are far better uses for endurance. There are just not enough slots to be wasted on these attacks. Aside from the whips looking cool I can't think of a single reason to take these attacks.

[Outrider_01]

2 hours ago, Mansome said:

Better question why are you taking the pathetic damage personal atttacks to begin with? I never get these unless I absolutely have nothing else to take. There are far better uses for endurance. There are just not enough slots to be wasted on these attacks. Aside from the whips looking cool I can't think of a single reason to take these attacks.

Because; Reason -

 

They don't care for min/max FOTMs that everyone else does.  It is their personal choice.  And they would like to see something done to them, even if they are weak pathetic attacks....nothing says they can't be improved.

 

Personally, as you said the whips are cool....then I found out it was just the equivalent to the first rad blast as it recharged so fast.  Nothing wrong with a buff.

[Riverdusk]

Some of the attacks are definitely better than others.  Some also have some interesting proc opportunities (including damage or -res or +recharge) you can add to suddenly make them not so pathetic.  Call Ravens is a good example where you could slot both an annihilation -res and an Achilles heel -res.  Both should proc at decent rate and increase the damage of all your pets by a significant amount.  I definitely take Call Ravens on a beast MM.  There are others that can also be made good.  I wouldn't make a blanket statement that they ever all good or all bad.

 

Back to the original suggestion, I'd be all for it.  

[Galaxy Brain]

Im down for this as well, if not redesigning the rech intensive pet auras into something else and adding the defense and resist into MM Supremacy as a baseline. 

 

On a side note, I would love to see the MM attacks reworked as a whole. They cannot form a reasonable attack chain anyways, so the best use for them is for their secondary effects or control if present. Why not crank up their recharge to be much slower, but in turn crank up their damage and effect values? They would be used maybe like once or twice a fight but have much better bang for your buck.

 

 

[Redlynne]

37 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

On a side note, I would love to see the MM attacks reworked as a whole. They cannot form a reasonable attack chain anyways, so the best use for them is for their secondary effects or control if present. Why not crank up their recharge to be much slower, but in turn crank up their damage and effect values? They would be used maybe like once or twice a fight but have much better bang for your buck.

I beg to differ and I've already posted a Mastermind build in the Mastermind forums that "proves" what you assert here is not a valid observation for all primaries.  I say that because even with NO RECHARGE AT ALL ... I am quite capable of making a "reasonable attack chain" out of the personal attacks, and that only gets better with more recharge enhancement (and enhancement slotting in general, for what should be obvious reasons).  In fact, I even found a way to leverage the personal attacks in ways that no one else has (seemingly) tried or been convinced to emulate in other builds using other primaries ... and I say that simply because I haven't seen a lot of "copycat" porting of what I did into other people's builds.

41 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

They would be used maybe like once or twice a fight but have much better bang for your buck.

Right now I'm using my personal attacks out of my primary during the entire duration of fights.  My personal experience with how I use them NOW disagrees with your unfounded assertion of a hypothetical scenario.

[Galaxy Brain]

Sweet! Which primary?

[Redlynne]

4 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

Sweet! Which primary?

Ninja/Time/Mace

 

Seriously, if you haven't read the WALL OF TEXT CRITS YOU!!! for details on what I found, you're missing out on a MUCH wider picture!  Just today, I had someone (else) send me another PM about how different and so much more FUN the build feels to play with the personal attacks in the mix.  It's something you have to experience yourself in order to be able to *fully* appreciate the difference it makes.

 

That said, the personal attacks make for a good synergy when working with a secondary that isn't that Click heavy (or if it is, better for them to be on long recharge times like most of the Nature Affinity powerset does) so that you aren't "fighting" for animation time between primary, secondary and pool powers with a bottleneck for Clicks.  So this is something that will vary along a continuum depending on both the primary and secondary powersets, with pool powers also factoring into the mental calculus for this type of synergy.

[Panthonca7034]

11 hours ago, Mansome said:

Better question why are you taking the pathetic damage personal atttacks to begin with?

 

I'd like to point out that I had to read YOUR ENTIRE post at least 5 times just to make sure I was interpreting (or understanding) what you were saying correctly, thusly: I arrived at the correct conclusion of what you were saying and would like to point out what I agree and don't agree with.

 

Using a Mercs/Storm Archetype as an example: 3 self defense attacks include, Burst, Slug and M30, and 3 summon types.

 

While consumption of endurance is indeed something of an issue concerning masterminds, how the heck else are you going to defend yourself?! Or Why even bother playing as an MM?! I normally like to be able as an MM to have a rifle myself and be able to provide some measure of support because I don't like to sit in the back and just let the troops get ground up into meat as it takes away somewhat from the immersion experience, but then again my style of playing an MM archetype will vary in comparison to that of someone who could potentially play as a petless MM (in my opinion a waste of power slots). The one thing I can see the storm support set helping me out with is the Oxygen buff (to heal my troops) and the other storm powers providing with both some offensive and defensive knockback capability to keep the enemy disoriented. I wouldn't however like to limit myself to just having storm powers as a means of defense, as it would make me look a lot less like a mercenary mastermind as supposed to if I also included the rifle, slug and grenade powers.

 

 

The other thing I wanted to point out, is my perception of your choice of words to describe how inefficiently personal powers use endurance. I myself wouldn't have used those particular words, but I attribute the circumstances to whichever variables happened to have an impact on you at that particular time.

 

I will also take into mind that each of the different Mastermind summon powers and self-defense powers have some significant difference in the variable of what types of enhancements you are required to slot on them, making for an even greater degree of confusion as to which set do I like vs which set is deadlier...

 

Anywho, that's my two cents on the matter 🙂

Edited January 13, 2020 by Panthonca7034
Missing some important key points

[Galaxy Brain]

1 hour ago, Redlynne said:

Ninja/Time/Mace

 

Seriously, if you haven't read the WALL OF TEXT CRITS YOU!!! for details on what I found, you're missing out on a MUCH wider picture!  Just today, I had someone (else) send me another PM about how different and so much more FUN the build feels to play with the personal attacks in the mix.  It's something you have to experience yourself in order to be able to *fully* appreciate the difference it makes.

 

That said, the personal attacks make for a good synergy when working with a secondary that isn't that Click heavy (or if it is, better for them to be on long recharge times like most of the Nature Affinity powerset does) so that you aren't "fighting" for animation time between primary, secondary and pool powers with a bottleneck for Clicks.  So this is something that will vary along a continuum depending on both the primary and secondary powersets, with pool powers also factoring into the mental calculus for this type of synergy.

Proccing them out is good and all... but technically it'd be even better with procs if they got altered to be heavier hitters?

[Redlynne]

6 minutes ago, Galaxy Brain said:

Proccing them out is good and all... but technically it'd be even better with procs if they got altered to be heavier hitters?

Not necessarily ... and for that kind of thing the demonology is entirely in the details.  The personal attacks aren't supposed to be "nukes" per se.  What you're talking about is trying to min-max for PPM throughput, which is merely ONE parameter to be concerned with, but it's not the ONLY parameter to value nor is it even the most "important" parameter to value.

 

And you're also overlooking the kind of return on investment that I found when rigging up a personal attack power to push the proc chance BELOW the minimum, forcing the minimum proc chance to be enforced, and then using the "more often than you'd think you'd be able to get away with" simply through the ... shaping ... of the attack chain, yielding a HIGHER proc performance than it would at first appear to be possible to get over a given span of time of attacking continuously in a regular rotation of powers.  Yes, I found a way to legitimately exploit that bit of edge case behavior in an advantageous way.

 

So the answer to your rhetorical question is ... it might be better for SOME but not necessarily for ALL ... depending on what you place high value on (and why).

[Monos King]

4 hours ago, Galaxy Brain said:

Why not crank up their recharge to be much slower, but in turn crank up their damage and effect values?

This isn't totally directed at you, but it needs to be said. Masterminds aren't really supposed to do damage and I'm gonna disagree to oppose the dangerously magnifying storm of "more damage" suggestions lately. It's really bad. The pets do the damage and the caster buffs/debuffs.

 

Also the attacks aren't even weak. With just basic enhancement maxing, you can approach or exceed the strength of some of the t2 pets higher end powers. You may even rival some of the t3 pets attacks depending on powerset. You just aren't a blaster.

Edited January 13, 2020 by monos1

[Galaxy Brain]

I guess this all really comes down to the individual sets. But like, with Bots for example the stats on the individual attacks outside the Photon Grenade for stuns compared to what the bots provide is 🤔

 

I just think that given how few attacks they get, on top of costing more endurance, that they should all at least be on the level of the Demon Whips in utility at base. Whether that be from actual useful secondary effects, soft control, or just an odd heavy hitter in the mix.

Edited January 13, 2020 by Galaxy Brain

[Monos King]

3 hours ago, Galaxy Brain said:

Whether that be from actual useful secondary effects, soft control, or just an odd heavy hitter in the mix.

I agree there.

[Bossk_Hogg]

On 1/12/2020 at 10:02 AM, Mansome said:

Better question why are you taking the pathetic damage personal atttacks to begin with? I never get these unless I absolutely have nothing else to take. There are far better uses for endurance. There are just not enough slots to be wasted on these attacks. Aside from the whips looking cool I can't think of a single reason to take these attacks.

While crappy from a damage per endurance perspective, that can be somewhat fixed with slotting. Superior Command of the Mastermind provides 89% endrx, and Superior Mark of Supremacy 145%, providing amazing opportunities for frankenslotting of these IO's.

 

Masterminds can vary greatly in how much free end they have, tightness of builds, and how much time they spend using their secondary in fights. While I would like to see the attacks buffed so they all provide some sort of mechanism similar to Pack Mentality or a USEFUL debuff like -resist, they can add a decent amount of damage for a solo MM. 

[kelika2]

On 1/12/2020 at 11:02 AM, Mansome said:

Better question why are you taking the pathetic damage personal atttacks to begin with?

Because the best secondaries for masterminds have lots of downtime.  And dont gimme that individual pet control scheme junk

Bubbles

Dark

Radiation

Traps

Cold dom

These are the best sets to keep your pets alive and believe it when I say there is not much else to do after getting your big -tohit, or bubble(s) out for most of the game as everything gets plowed down

Personal attacks have a place in masterminds, its just people need to let go of the "pure emp no attacks lft" smugness mentality

[Redlynne]

Them: "The personal attacks are TERRIBLE!"

Me: "Damn ... this WORKS!  Really WELL!!"