Monos King & Galaxy Brain: Robotics

[Galaxy Brain]

Robotics

 

For the full details of the Monos-Brain Overhaul, please view the link below:

Monos King & Galaxy Brains Mastermind Changes

 

Robotics is a great Mastermind set, and has always been in the running for one of the top picks for pets. However, this is really only true after level 32 with the journey to that point being akin to downloading CoH on dial-up back in the day. Bots suffers from downright atrocious single-target damage, far below any other primary, and with AoE dps that only barely edges by it's closest competitor: Thugs. It'd be one thing if they were on complete opposite ends where nobody came close to their AoE while having the worst ST, but that simply isn't the case. Just for comparison lets look at Bots vs Thugs, Demons and Beasts for ST DPS:
 

 

Before factoring in -Regen, and without the global changes mentioned in the Global MM thread linked above, Bots base DPS (no enhancements) is at 57% the amount that Thugs can put out vs an Even-level enemy! Not to mention how much further other sets can pull ahead with their unique powers or inherent abilities.  

 

Lets compare Even-level base DPS as well, considering the output of their AoE attacks and factoring in the target caps:

 

 

Bots still falls just short of Thugs at just over 99%. The other sets also fall within a much shallower margin than the gap we see with Bots as they are now. The gap between AoE and ST for the other sets in comparison to each other just does not compute with how far the divide is with the Bots, and they don't have a unique lvl 18 power to help with this either!

 

Robotics are in need of some upgrades that address their early game, their ST damage, and also take a look at one of their most lack luster powers in Repair to make them into a true war-machine. The changes proposed in this thread will address these through:

 

1. Increasing ST damage by utilizing the T1-T2 pets primarily, so the set is not so back-loaded
2. Modifying certain AoE attacks to nudge their performance into a top spot again
3. Modifying Repair into a useful power to maintain the theme of Robots being a very durable set

 

General Bots Changes

 

Repair > Repair Drones | Altered to now be a toggled summon similar to the P2W pets

 

Aside from AoE damage, the other major selling point for Robotics is their durability. The Protector Bots supply shielding to you and the team, as well as apply the occasional heal to your robots while you are free to supplement with buffs and heals of your own! However, the unique heal found in Repair is often skipped due to it really not being competitive with other healing options. 10/16 Mastermind Secondaries have options to directly heal your pets, and comparing Repair to other Single Target heals it has an edge in restoring 100% health as well as 25% endurance, but the downside of a base 120s recharge is simply not worth it as a Single Target power. Compared to other ST heals such as Thermal's Cauterize, it loses out when you could pick that up and have it recharge in 4 seconds or less, and heal close to 400hp, which is good enough for most tricky situations outside of "my bot is essentially dead". Even the Protector Bots will heal ~210 HP to a single robot every 30 seconds, with two of them you can heal a total of 1680 health in the time it takes for Repair to recharge, when the most it can heal is 962 with a lvl 50 Assault bot with 1 hp remaining. Its not like you can use it on allies either to give it a niche, it only works on your bots!

 

So, what can we do to flip the worst heal in the game? Luckily, the Protector Bots also get access to Seeker Drones, which we can borrow and alter into something a bit more thematic:

 

 

Upon activation, summon 2 (Repair Drones) which occasionally heal your Robots with the same version of Repair that the Protector Bots use (as well as restore 25% endurance). In addition, they each provide a 15ft radius aura that boosts Regeneration by 40%, and Recovery by 20% to yourself, pets, and allies in range!

 

Like the P2W pets, these are summoned via a Toggle (1.25 end/sec) and have a 90s recharge once they are destroyed or you manually shut off the toggle. If either are killed, or you turn off the toggle, the Drone will detonate and cast an AoE version of Repair to all bots in a 15ft radius.

 

Repair Drones have 400 base HP at level 50 and 75% resistance to all damage.

 

This is a lot to break down, so lets start with how this functions. Like with the P2W pets, you will summon these little guys and they'll follow you for as long as you have endurance to run the toggle, or they are defeated / you shut them off. This gives you a choice to keep them out and provide continual healing for a hefty endurance cost, or to summon and detonate as fast as you can for a very good AoE heal to your team. Their armor plating likewise helps them take a couple hits to let you keep them around a bit, but is not so much that they cannot be defeated as well and spark the pulse-heal in a heated situation. The choice is your's to keep them out often and save them through tough fights, or spend them ASAP for a burst fo healing and then a lengthy cooldown.

 

The Regen and Recovery auras are icing on the cake between the 30s heals they provide to your bots, giving yourself and the team some sustainability and cementing them as the premiere tanky Mastermind primary.

 

 

 

New Attribute | Disintegration

Laser, Photon, and Plasma Powers now have a chance to proc Disintegration on enemies hit, allowing further laser attacks to deal more damage

 

The real major change to Robotics is the proliferation of Disintegration from Beam Rifle to the OG laser wielders. Aimed at making the non-assault bot pets more offensively useful, as well as propping up their ST damage output, Disintegration works similarly to what we see in beam rifle:

 

Both the Mastermind's personal Laser Rifle attacks and the pet's Laser/Photon/Plasma attacks have a 25% chance to trigger Disintegration on enemies they hit. When triggered, the enemy will be afflicted with an Energy DoT equal to 50% of the power's damage over the next 10 seconds. This DoT can stack up on the same target from multiple attacks, and while the target has at least 1 Disintegrate DoT active they will receive an additional Energy Damage proc when struck by further laser attacks equal to 25% of the Laser's damage! 

 

The stacking DoT and bonus damage on attacks that aren't Missiles/Flamethrowers aim to to help you not have to slog through missions before you have the Assault Bot, and still boosts ST DPS once you get it on the team to help still with that spot between 26 and 32. With this mechanic in mind, along with the other global changes + bots  changes below, lets see how they compare with the similarly changed primaries:

 

 

With Disintegrate the DPS climbs to be 75% of Thugs instead of nearly half! This is a substantial improvement, but with Disintegrate also being able to be applied in an AoE with certain attacks we felt it was important to keep Bots as a lower end for ST while not being abysmal. Also, with the new Repair Drones they trade ST damage for survival.

 

 

Likewise, with these changes they climb to be the top AoE set with the baseline being a bit better than Thugs with their changes (see Other thread), and with Disintegrate they have a healthy 16% lead. Keep in mind these values are assuming the 25% chance of causing the status, so with luck the damage could go higher!

 

Along with the tweaks below, our goal is to make Bots the Tank analogue in Homecoming where they can spread a lot of damage across the field and survive well, while not being the fastest to take down a single target on average.

 

 

 

Battle Drones

These MK1 Battle Drones are your bread and butter minions through your time as a Bots MM, but they are somewhat lackluster later on. There is one noticeable power that stands out negatively for them.

 

Battle Drone Mod 1: Full Auto Laser | Reduced activation time from 6.33s to 4.33s

Available from Upgrade Robot

Yowza, 6.33s is a long animation! Simply lowering this down to 4.33s will be a huge QOL improvement as the bots are no longer rooted in place so much.

 

 

Protector Bots

The Protector Bots allow the set to be incredibly durable with their helpful shields, heals, and debuffs. They can stand to gain a few QoL changes though!

 

Protector Bot Mod 1: Force Shield | Single Target > Targeted AoE

Available from base summon

Same philosophy as regular Force Fields, having to shield each bot one at a time takes up far too much of their time and changing it to a one and done buff will work wonders.

 

Protector Bot Mod 2: Repair | Additionally restores 25% Endurance

Available from Equip Robots

Altered to match the Repair Drones. They both share this same power.

 

Protector Bot Mod 3: Photon Grenade | Boost base damage by 1.5x (22.52 > 33.78 at lvl 50) | -20% Heal on Disintegrating Targets

Available from Upgrade Robots

While primarily a stunning attack, the damage dealt by the Protector bots is somewhat lacking. Boosting this move will help Bot's overall AoE damage and slightly help with ST damage as the bigger base damage allows for a bit more Disintegration DoT. Additionally, this alongside the Mastermind's own Photon Grenade apply a -Healing debuff on enemies who are suffering from Disintegration.

 

 

Assault Bot

The inarguable backbone of your robotic forces, the Assault Bot has always brought the heat. It only requires a few changes in tandem with the new Disintegrate mechanic as well as touching up the powers it gains from the Equip Robots, which many bots players force it to skip!

 

Assault Bot Mod : Plasma Blast | Disintegration Spread

Available from Equip Robots

The bread and butter attack for the Assault Bot, this change allows them to spread the status to assist the other bots in the set as well as spread DoT.

 

Assault Bot Mod 2: Dual Plasma Blast | Increase Target Cap from 5 to 10, increase Blast Radius to 8 ft  | Disintegration Spread

Available from Equip Robots

Something that goes unnoticed is that the Dual Plasma blast from the Assault bot is actually a Targeted AoE attack! Splashing off the primary target, up to 5 others within a tiny 5ft radius can currently be affected by the impact. This slight change will help push the Bot's AoE damage up a bit more as it will be easier to catch more targets as well as spread any disintegration effects like with the Single target Plasma Blast.

 

Assault Bot Mod 3: Flamethrower | Decrease animation time from 6.33s to 4.33s

Available from Equip Robots

This power is the sole reason so many actually opt to skip the T1 upgrade on the Assault Bot. Like with the Battle Drones, a 6.33 second animation is insanely long to be rooted despite the power actually doing very respectable damage for it's recharge. Shaving 2 seconds off of the time will simply let the Assault Bot be more fluid in it's actions and let the set function a bit more smoothly overall.

 

 

 

 

Overall these changes to Robotics aim to keep the set Tanky and AoE focused while keeping it's ST weakness to a degree. Their new laser-focus should help tremendously early on combined with the global MM changes before you have the Assault bot, and make for a much smoother leveling experience while still retaining the same overall niche the set provides.

Edited May 8, 2020 by Galaxy Brain

[tidge]

Repair Drones are cute, but they should not be a toggle but a Recharge Intensive pet. The Robots are already slot-starved if each of the three pets gets a KB->KD IO piece.

[Monos King]

1 hour ago, tidge said:

Repair Drones are cute, but they should not be a toggle but a Recharge Intensive pet. The Robots are already slot-starved if each of the three pets gets a KB->KD IO piece.

These proposals are made with pet IOs being an automatic feature for MMs in mind, either via the changes from our thread or by adding them to Supremacy in some scaling method or another.

 

It is pretty well known that this is essentially a need, so we're just exploring the look of horizons that aren't weighed down by the slot penalty all MMs face. It's definitely an issue that'll be visited, so we're not proposing anything revolving around cramming those 6 IOs in.

 

Note: They couldn't be Recharge Intensive anyway as they'd have to deal damage to qualify for that. That would come with some advantages and disadvantages that could conflict with the purpose of being heal drones.

Edited November 14, 2020 by Monos King

[Monos King]

Looking back also, wondering if a 15 second rech chain heal exactly like Rejuvenating Circuit is appropriate, with a 2 target max.

Reason being, the drones would heal based on which robot has the lowest health and might waste their heals on the same bot.

[tidge]

As I wrote in another thread: healing pets doesn't seem like a particularly winning strategy (*1), especially as a lvl 18 power. With the AI changes and an attentive Mastermind, pets are less likely to wander off to engage unexpected enemies. If the pets (or Mastermind, in bodyguard mode) are taking so much damage such that resummoning pets is not an option:

1) The Mastermind should probably change tactics for the mission difficulty.

B) Healing is almost certainly not going to be able to keep up with the damage coming in.

 

If it is a one-off case of a pet being damaged, just drag a green inspiration on the pet!

 

My experience (with Robots) has been that there are only a small number of circumstances where I feel like a pet heal of anykind was necessary: In my case it was only when I had 2 T1 and a single T2 and I chose to go boss-hunting in Perez Park that I felt I needed to keep the pets healed. Large groups of enemies that con at even (or higher levels) where the MM has very little beyond the (minimally-upgraded/slotted) pets. This is the only time in the game where I felt that I didn't have control over the 'difficulty setting' in level-appropriate content and had a serious possibility of being overwhelmed by the size and level of enemy groups. (I suppose the Hollows could do the same, but I didn't go there with my MM.)

 

(*1) From my past experience, the only combination of pets and healing that really synergizes is via the /Dark secondary. But the Heal (Dark Miasma) in the Dark set is the mandatory T1 choice, and it is a team PBAoE get all pets and allies at the cost of a to-hit roll. No matter how 'thematic' we can try to imagine redesigning the Robotics T7 as a heal, it shouldn't be inferior to a T1 power.

[Monos King]

Oh I see. You are just saying healing wouldn't be the best thing to add.

I actually value heals quite a bit, but that's just one thing. Our goal isn't to make bots unkillable, just in line with the other primaries. We'd like every power to be good at what it does, and of course to be thematically sound. Bots survivability, as you've noted, is already apex. So we aren't gonna go and make repair into something bots doesn't need just because it's survivability can be so good a heal is possibly skippable no matter how good it is. We just want to improve where bots is notably lacking.

 

This version of repair offers +endurance (something you will find all pets want) and offers regeneration and recovery to everyone. This is on top of healing. Repair Drones would improve slotting options vastly, while also maintaining the concept everyone is familiar with. 

 

Honestly, I'd love to see +HP or +Absorb from them in some manner though. Maybe added to the passive effect.

Edited November 14, 2020 by Monos King

[Galaxy Brain]

The idea I had in mind with it as a pet is that it backs up the Prot Bots with how they have mini-repair as well. Essentially having another prot bot or two worth of repair possible supporting the bots.

[Razor Cure]

It boggles my mind that a set can have about half the performance of others, and makes me wonder wtf kinda testing the original Devs actually did, if any.

That said, the -regen on bots really IS a huge factor, especially vs hard targets. Of course, that is not going to mean much at all in normal play (since the hardest target in that siutation would be +2-4 con bosses), but against elite bosses and avs, it really helps. On my bots storm (with no -regen in teh secondary) an AV's regen is basically nil for an entire fight.

I guess (maybe) the Devs assumed -regen would be much more useful versus normal mobs.

 

All these changes sound like winners, especially the aoe buffing/healing Prot Bots! A disintegration effect would be very cool too, and help update the set a bit.