New MM Powerset - Multiplication / Clone

[mrdeeds7]

This one seems like mechanically it would be easy to do. A power set based on multiple man, where the pets are all just more versions of yourself, obviously the power already exists with phantom army set to mirror. I don't even play MMs but this would be fun. 

[Glacier Peak]

Similar to Gang War, I could see attacks in a powerset like that. Only concern is what happens when 8 MMs team up, or even a league of them all with the same powerset?

Edited November 29, 2022 by Glacier Peak

[mrdeeds7]

I'm not sure I understand how that concern unique to a particular MM powerset? Does that not already currently exist in MM teams/leagues with the existing sets? 

[biostem]

On 11/29/2022 at 9:38 AM, mrdeeds7 said:

This one seems like mechanically it would be easy to do. A power set based on multiple man, where the pets are all just more versions of yourself, obviously the power already exists with phantom army set to mirror. I don't even play MMs but this would be fun. 

What kind of powers would you see these minions/duplicates possessing?  Pistols or rifles would be stepping on thugs or mercenaries' toes.  Would you give them something like energy blasts?  Different elemental powers?  More mundane attacks?

 

On 11/29/2022 at 9:40 AM, Glacier Peak said:

Similar to Gang War, I could see attacks in a powerset like that. Only concern is what happens when 8 MMs team up, or even a league of them all with the same powerset?

 But you're not concerned with 8 thugs MMs using gangwar all at once, or 8 illusion users summoning their phantom armies all at once?  If 8 people wanted to coordinate their costumes so you have a bunch of clones attacking, so what?

[Glacier Peak]

2 hours ago, biostem said:

What kind of powers would you see these minions/duplicates possessing?  Pistols or rifles would be stepping on thugs or mercenaries' toes.  Would you give them something like energy blasts?  Different elemental powers?  More mundane attacks?

 

 But you're not concerned with 8 thugs MMs using gangwar all at once, or 8 illusion users summoning their phantom armies all at once?  If 8 people wanted to coordinate their costumes so you have a bunch of clones attacking, so what?

No, because in the Gang War example,  that's 8 MMs x n (where n equals the number of pet spawns from the power(.

 

If body duplicates was the powerset, there would be (at a minimum) 8 MMs x n x 9 (other powers in the set that each MM could use). 

[biostem]

2 minutes ago, Glacier Peak said:

If body duplicates was the powerset, there would be (at a minimum) 8 MMs x n x 9 (other powers in the set that each MM could use). 

Where are you getting this other "9" from?  Thugs also get their other pets, besides what gang war summons.  Heck, necro MMs now get the pets from their direct attacks and multiple from soul extraction.  The OP didn't specify the particulars of the set, so I have no idea where you're getting your numbers from...

[Glacier Peak]

1 hour ago, biostem said:

Where are you getting this other "9" from?  Thugs also get their other pets, besides what gang war summons.  Heck, necro MMs now get the pets from their direct attacks and multiple from soul extraction.  The OP didn't specify the particulars of the set, so I have no idea where you're getting your numbers from...

I'm getting them from my first post, which you quoted, where I imagined what the power set could look like. Masterminds have henchmen, henchmen buffs, and the three individual attacks. I took the original concept and thought there would be duplicating powers involved, which seems pretty fair considering the topic. So instead of henchmen of a particular theme being summoned, it's your character - and if you've ever read or watched any kind of entertainment product with a character who has the power to duplicate themselves, there is almost always a scene where they do so in great quantity and the crowd of duplicates become a mob (similar to Gang War).

[biostem]

1 hour ago, Glacier Peak said:

I'm getting them from my first post, which you quoted, where I imagined what the power set could look like. Masterminds have henchmen, henchmen buffs, and the three individual attacks. I took the original concept and thought there would be duplicating powers involved, which seems pretty fair considering the topic. So instead of henchmen of a particular theme being summoned, it's your character - and if you've ever read or watched any kind of entertainment product with a character who has the power to duplicate themselves, there is almost always a scene where they do so in great quantity and the crowd of duplicates become a mob (similar to Gang War).

Are you envisioning the MM pets summoning duplicates as well?  That's not how I see it - you have your 6 main pets, the gangwar-like power, and then there's you yourself.  If you see this set as having the pets summon even more minions, then yes, I could see that as being too much.  At the same time, what they could do is have their attack be to summon a duplicate that charges at the enemy then explodes/burst/etc, which would really be more of an animation than an actual summon itself...

Edited December 1, 2022 by biostem

[Rudra]

Personally, I think just giving MMs the ability to use their character model for their pets like Phantom Army's Mirror option would alleviate this. It would answer what attacks the pets get because the pets would just be the existing primaries, and allow the player to have a multiplication/clone set. Because having a primary of your clones for an MM leaves very little guidance for defining the clones' and the character's attacks. What would they even be? Just Brawl? Would they use guns? Elemental blasts? Energy blasts? Far simpler to simply use the existing sets and add in clones for the pets. However, that brings us back to the pet customization bit. That may not actually be possible given how MM pets work.

Edited December 1, 2022 by Rudra
Edited to change "room" to "guidance".

[WumpusRat]

Mastermind powersets are the most difficult to add, from what I understand. Because what the power summons is hard-coded into the power. I recall the original devs saying that's why they couldn't (easily) do pet customization. 

 

If the Homecoming devs can create new MM sets, then it shouldn't be much of a leap to simply re-create the existing sets, allowing them to disentangle the static pet summons and opening up more options for ALL sets. 

 

Arachnos, Council, Family, Longbow, Carnies, Circle of Thorns, etc, etc, etc...

 

So many interesting flavors of Mastermind potential.

[MHertz]

5 hours ago, Rudra said:

Personally, I think just giving MMs the ability to use their character model for their pets like Phantom Army's Mirror option would alleviate this.

Assuming the technical issues of how pets are hard-coded into MM summons could be overcome, this could still create problems.

As previously mentioned, Masterminds can summon lots of simultaneous pets. However, I think the above posts missed the point here, and that is that player models are far more complex than most MM pet models. They have more elaborate costume pieces, requiring more polygons; they can have body auras and path auras requiring more particles and light effects. A team of 8 MMs, each summoning 6 pets + themselves, could put 54 player models into a mission at once, which might be too much for the lowest-level graphics cards the system is built for. 

If you’re one of the players who avoids Trick or Treating because of poor frame rate, this would make it harder to play on certain teams.

 

Yes, Illusion gets the same ability, but not all the time, and not with quite so many models at once.

[mrdeeds7]

4 minutes ago, MHertz said:

Assuming the technical issues of how pets are hard-coded into MM summons could be overcome, this could still create problems.

As previously mentioned, Masterminds can summon lots of simultaneous pets. However, I think the above posts missed the point here, and that is that player models are far more complex than most MM pet models. They have more elaborate costume pieces, requiring more polygons; they can have body auras and path auras requiring more particles and light effects. A team of 8 MMs, each summoning 6 pets + themselves, could put 54 player models into a mission at once, which might be too much for the lowest-level graphics cards the system is built for. 

If you’re one of the players who avoids Trick or Treating because of poor frame rate, this would make it harder to play on certain teams.

 

Yes, Illusion gets the same ability, but not all the time, and not with quite so many models at once.

Ok this makes sense to me now. To address @Rudra in my mind, the duplicate minions would be "powerless" brawlers. No idea how this could work but one really cool defining power of this set could be something that confuses aggro so that enemies have a hard time identifying which is the player and which are the pets. 

 

Multiple Man has other powers that could be the basis for the non pet summoning powers.

 

Duplication Absorption: The original Madrox can absorb them back into himself at will, at the same time absorbing the memories, skills and experiences of the duplicate.

• Duplication Experience Transference: When Madrox merges back with his duplicates, he retains memories (albeit somewhat imperfect), knowledge, and experiences of the dupe that obtained them.
• Duplication Healing: He also uses merging as a form of healing - Originally, uninjured dupes "shared" the damage when they reemerged (e.g., if an injured dupe merged with an uninjured Madrox, the resulting Madrox had an injury half as severe as the original injury). Now, however, the core Madrox can reabsorb injured or even near-dead dupes without taking on any of their physical injuries at all

 

Mostly I'm just thinking about powerset proliferation concepts within the existing framework and animations of the game that might not be too onerous labor wise to even consider.  

[Rudra]

1 hour ago, MHertz said:

Assuming the technical issues of how pets are hard-coded into MM summons could be overcome, this could still create problems.

As previously mentioned, Masterminds can summon lots of simultaneous pets. However, I think the above posts missed the point here, and that is that player models are far more complex than most MM pet models. They have more elaborate costume pieces, requiring more polygons; they can have body auras and path auras requiring more particles and light effects. A team of 8 MMs, each summoning 6 pets + themselves, could put 54 player models into a mission at once, which might be too much for the lowest-level graphics cards the system is built for. 

If you’re one of the players who avoids Trick or Treating because of poor frame rate, this would make it harder to play on certain teams.

 

Yes, Illusion gets the same ability, but not all the time, and not with quite so many models at once.

They already face that on MSRs and Hami's with 48 player models all going at it in a confined area. And in the case of the MSR, that is further complicated by the sheer number of mobs spawned with their own powers firing and the particle count all that entails. I'm also less inclined to believe that there are players running on legacy systems that old. Regardless, we do have the option of turning off particles in our game session using Particle Physics Quality under Graphics and Audio. It has a None (No Particle Physics) option that is supposed to turn off all those pesky particles that those old graphiocs cards may not be able to handle the volume of.

 

So using the claim that game system requirements at time of original launch should be a limitation on suggestions and development is a rather poor one. It limits the game's ability to be developed and grow. And as one of the Devs said on this forum, available tech and coding tricks helps alleviate this concern.

[MHertz]

2 hours ago, Rudra said:

So using the claim that game system requirements at time of original launch

I didn’t say that. You said that. I said the minimum graphics card that the system is designed for.

 

Yes, there are events where lots of players gather — I specifically called out Trick or Treating in my post. MSR is another, as you observe. So is AE, when it is filled with custom enemies. People can avoid those specific things if their systems are not capable of running them smoothly. (Some do, I’m sure. I know I’ve teamed with people whose systems are so old that they zone in 1-2 minutes after everyone else. I’ve also noticed that large costume contests don’t even attempt to draw all the characters present — so there is a hard-coded limit of some number X beyond which no new player models are drawn.) For those highly-attended events, think how much worse they’ll be when duplicating MMs massively increase the number of complex models on screen. MSRs could become unplayably slow. I remember the days when people weren’t allowed to summon pets during Hamidon raids due to lag. We don’t want to do that to ourselves again.

 

But if we are now saying ordinary door missions could potentially be more complex than some players’ systems can run, or that duplication MMs could bump against a hard-coded drawing limit, that’s a more sizable chunk of game content that could potentially be affected. Nobody wants to be in a mission with enemies or allies you cannot even target due to graphics limitations. So we tread with caution.

 

That’s not to say this problem is insurmountable. Heck, it might not be a problem at all. I have no data on polygon counts, particle counts, draw limits, or graphics card specs to point to. I don’t know how many users would be flushed out of the game for having older gaming gear, if the devs decided to say “screw it” and raise the bar a little. That’s for the developers to figure out. I’m pointing to it because player models are a different animal from pet models, and it’s a thing we must at least remember when we propose drawing up to 24 more complex player models than a team of 8 can now produce.

Edited December 1, 2022 by MHertz

[Rudra]

40 minutes ago, MHertz said:

I’ve also noticed that large costume contests don’t even attempt to draw all the characters present — so there is a hard-coded limit of some number X beyond which no new player models are drawn.

There is a coded limit beyond which no new models are drawn. Case in point: The Tyrant single player mission where a large aprt of the arrayed Arachnos forces don't appear until you clear out some. Also, city map instances where mobs and hostages are not rendered at all, no shadows to show their presence or anything, until you have cleared out enough of the map. It's not a player model thing. It is a cap on number of rendered characters regardless of player or non-player.

[BrandX]

23 hours ago, biostem said:

What kind of powers would you see these minions/duplicates possessing?  Pistols or rifles would be stepping on thugs or mercenaries' toes.  Would you give them something like energy blasts?  Different elemental powers?  More mundane attacks?

 

 But you're not concerned with 8 thugs MMs using gangwar all at once, or 8 illusion users summoning their phantom armies all at once?  If 8 people wanted to coordinate their costumes so you have a bunch of clones attacking, so what?

 

Energy Blast

 

Power Bolt

Power Blast 

Energy Torrent

 

Maybe with something that makes them worth taking, more than just KB.