Please make MM upgrade powers passive

[Col. Kernel]

We get it, our henchmen are not our friends, they are indeed disposable (despite also being a sizable chunk of our HP and damage output).

Resummoning them in combat is to be expected.  Trying to chase down  the ONE zombie you just resummoned to Upgrade them will almost certainly result in the death of at least one other, if not the entire T1 squad.

 

So please, can we get the MM Upgrade powers made into passives, so the henchmen are already upgraded when summoned if I have the power.

Thank you.

[Doc_Scorpion]

3 hours ago, Col. Kernel said:

Trying to chase down  the ONE zombie you just resummoned to Upgrade them will almost certainly result in the death of at least one other, if not the entire T1 squad.

You don't need to chase them, just tell them to follow you.  Or let the battle play out and upgrade them after.

[Rudra]

Passive is your friend. Can go Defensive or Aggressive after upgrading.

[Col. Kernel]

I KNOW the workarounds, this isn't my first MM.  Withdrawing my henchies from the fight means my team mates have to pick up the slack, or may get additional aggro they can't handle well.  If I'm solo it means that they leave off attacking.  How often do you stop attacking in the middle of a fight?

 

Well Rudra tell you what.  Why don't you take one of your main powers out of your combat rotation every 3rd fight or so.  Get back to me and see how you like it.

[Rudra]

47 minutes ago, Col. Kernel said:

I KNOW the workarounds, this isn't my first MM.  Withdrawing my henchies from the fight means my team mates have to pick up the slack, or may get additional aggro they can't handle well.  If I'm solo it means that they leave off attacking.  How often do you stop attacking in the middle of a fight?

 

Well Rudra tell you what.  Why don't you take one of your main powers out of your combat rotation every 3rd fight or so.  Get back to me and see how you like it.

Sure. I do that with my Corruptors routinely every time I team with my friends. That said, why the hostility?

 

Edit: Sorry, you said every 3rd fight. No, I tend to do that much more frequently than every 3rd fight.

 

Edit again: Besides, per the other threads requesting this, the devs have already stated they won't be making MM pet upgrades passive or automatic.

 

 

Edited Thursday at 04:59 AM by Rudra

[UltraAlt]

10 hours ago, Col. Kernel said:

So please, can we get the MM Upgrade powers made into passives, so the henchmen are already upgraded when summoned if I have the power.

 

They can still fight when they aren't upgraded.

Wait to upgrade them until after a round of combat is over if it is too tedious to use the upgrade power during combat.

 

I'm assuming you know that you don't need upgrade them singularly or by tier.

As long as they are all within range, they will get the upgrade.

 

1 hour ago, Col. Kernel said:

I KNOW the workarounds, this isn't my first MM.  Withdrawing my henchies from the fight means my team mates have to pick up the slack, or may get additional aggro they can't handle well.  If I'm solo it means that they leave off attacking. 

 

Being in Defense mode doesn't stop your pets from attacking.

If you are attacked, your henchmen attack whomever attacked you.

If one of  your pets are attacked, they attack whomever attacked them.

They don't stop attacking when you switch to defensive mode if they are already in combat.

 

1 hour ago, Col. Kernel said:

How often do you stop attacking in the middle of a fight?

 

Everytime my characters don't have enough endurance to continue attacking and that includes when I think I will be taking them too low on END to keep toggles running.

 

 

 

 

[Col. Kernel]

7 hours ago, Rudra said:

Sure. I do that with my Corruptors routinely every time I team with my friends. That said, why the hostility?

 

No hostility here.  Yes, I stop attacking to buff or heal as well.

 

7 hours ago, Rudra said:

Edit again: Besides, per the other threads requesting this, the devs have already stated they won't be making MM pet upgrades passive or automatic.

 

Finally some useful information.  I'll have to dig up those threads and see what their reasoning is for not performing a simple QoL fix on a broken AT.

[kwsapphire]

17 hours ago, Col. Kernel said:

 

Finally some useful information.  I'll have to dig up those threads and see what their reasoning is for not performing a simple QoL fix on a broken AT.

 

I figured this was the case, If it hasn't been done by now, the Devs either WONT or CANT. I'm curious to their thought process myself. If they simply can't (within a reasonable amount of labor), I get it. Spaghetti Code. If they merely "won't" - well, I'll keep loving MMs no matter how underpowered they are. 🙂

Edited 23 hours ago by kwsapphire

[Arcticsieg]

Haven't been playing long enough to have a real good feel of the devs, but "won't" is the more likely of the two options. I've seen people talk about how the HC devs don't like copying/stealing ideas used on other servers and Thunderspy has the upgrade powers set to be auto ones. So that's likely a good reason why it hasn't happened.
Don't know about the code, but it certainly possible

[PeregrineFalcon]

Unfortunately, the Homecoming developers have already said that they will not make the upgrades passive. I think that summoning and resumming and upgrading is part of the intended gameplay loop.

 

I suppose I could go find the post if you really need me to.

[biostem]

Yeah, I get it - it's boring and repetitive to upgrade your pets when you resummon them.  Now, if you view your minions as your attacks, then think about how a blaster or defender has to click each time they use an attack, whereas you only have to click once to summon your pets, then a 2nd & 3rd time to upgrade them, then you no longer have to click as 6+ entities under your control attack without you having to click for each attack...

[kwsapphire]

1 hour ago, biostem said:

Yeah, I get it - it's boring and repetitive to upgrade your pets when you resummon them.  Now, if you view your minions as your attacks, then think about how a blaster or defender has to click each time they use an attack, whereas you only have to click once to summon your pets, then a 2nd & 3rd time to upgrade them, then you no longer have to click as 6+ entities under your control attack without you having to click for each attack...

 

I wouldn't call it "boring" or "repetitive." More like "frustrating and useless." My pets die, I resummon, try to upgrade, more die, resummon, try to upgrade, more die. There's content that I just won't take MMs into anymore, because I might as well be petless given the impossibility of keeping my pets alive and upgraded. (Lookin at you, Lambda!)

 

I'm not going to argue with anyone who thinks MMs have it good compared to other ATs. The fact that so many people outright refuse to play the archetype because of how annoying it is to keep resummoning and upgrading the pets speaks far louder to the truth of the matter. Not to even mention how all their secondary powers are more expensive and less effective than any other AT.

 

I say this as someone with a lot of Masterminds. Including one that has already soloed to 50 without using any enemy-affecting powers (other than pets), and keeping her pets on Defensive at all times. I have two more Soloist/Pacifist MMs at 17 and 19. The usual reaction from people upon hearing this is absolute horror at the tedium. But the slow pace is the point in this case, they're my personally-imposed penance for any of my toons that spent time in Fire Farms. 

 

It is what it is. We can't always have what we want. I'll live. 😛

[Col. Kernel]

7 hours ago, biostem said:

Yeah, I get it - it's boring and repetitive to upgrade your pets when you resummon them.  Now, if you view your minions as your attacks, then think about how a blaster or defender has to click each time they use an attack, whereas you only have to click once to summon your pets, then a 2nd & 3rd time to upgrade them, then you no longer have to click as 6+ entities under your control attack without you having to click for each attack...

The blaster's attacks don't run off and die, or aggro other groups, when left unsupervised.

To keep my "attacks" alive and not lose them (to death) I have to constantly micromanage them, even in bodyguard mode, or keep the henches in Passive mode (in which case, why have them at all?)

[battlewraith]

2 minutes ago, Col. Kernel said:

The blaster's attacks don't run off and die, or aggro other groups, when left unsupervised.

To keep my "attacks" alive and not lose them (to death) I have to constantly micromanage them, even in bodyguard mode, or keep the henches in Passive mode (in which case, why have them at all?)

 I think a better comparison would be if a buffer cast a buff on someone and then it just randomly blinked off and then had to be recast. 

[Col. Kernel]

On 3/13/2025 at 12:22 AM, UltraAlt said:

Being in Defense mode doesn't stop your pets from attacking.

If you are attacked, your henchmen attack whomever attacked you.

If one of  your pets are attacked, they attack whomever attacked them.

They don't stop attacking when you switch to defensive mode if they are already in combat.

 

Everytime my characters don't have enough endurance to continue attacking and that includes when I think I will be taking them too low on END to keep toggles running.

Not my first rodeo, chief.  I use Sandolphan's MM keybinds to direct them.

 

As for running out of End if you're over level 20 and running out of End you're not well slotted, or you're facing foes that drain your End.  Those are problems you can fix.  In nearly 20 years of playing I've only had ONE toon that burned End so fast that even a billion Inf build couldn't fix him.  I haven't recreated him on HC yet because I just don't have that kind of Inf to burn.

[Col. Kernel]

3 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

 I think a better comparison would be if a buffer cast a buff on someone and then it just randomly blinked off and then had to be recast. 

There are keybinds for targetting teammates.  How do I make a keybind to target a specific one of my T1 or T2 henchmen?  I'm not making custom keybinds to tag my T1s and T2s by name for every MM I have.

[battlewraith]

52 minutes ago, Col. Kernel said:

There are keybinds for targetting teammates.  How do I make a keybind to target a specific one of my T1 or T2 henchmen?  I'm not making custom keybinds to tag my T1s and T2s by name for every MM I have.

 Yeah, my point is that it would be stupid and aggravating to have to do that. I agree with your proposal.

[Col. Kernel]

9 hours ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

Unfortunately, the Homecoming developers have already said that they will not make the upgrades passive. I think that summoning and resumming and upgrading is part of the intended gameplay loop.

 

I suppose I could go find the post if you really need me to.

I would appreciate it.  Every post I've found someone says the devs won't implement this idea, but I haven't found a post with a dev comment yet.

[PeregrineFalcon]

1 hour ago, Col. Kernel said:

I would appreciate it.  Every post I've found someone says the devs won't implement this idea, but I haven't found a post with a dev comment yet.

Well, I got lucky. I expected to spend nearly an hour searching for it, especially since I couldn't remember who said it or when.

 

On 3/13/2021 at 2:17 PM, Number Six said:

There's a lot of text here, but I can save you all a lot of time and back and forth.

 

We considered making upgrade powers auto a while back (9-12 months) because it was a player suggestion that had come up a few times, but ultimately ruled it out. The reason was that there has to be some opportunity cost to give the player an incentive to try and keep their pets alive. If you want to get them back up to full strength, you have to spend extra time not using your secondary powers to do it.

 

So while the changes on beta are intended to make life a little less painful when they do die, the intent is not to make it trivial to have an infinite supply of full-strength pets out.

Here's a weird coincidence. When I posted yesterday that the devs had already said that, it was four years to the day after he'd said it.

[battlewraith]

That makes playing a mastermind sound so attractive lol.

[PeregrineFalcon]

21 minutes ago, battlewraith said:

That makes playing a mastermind sound so attractive lol.

It's part of the challenge of playing a Mastermind. It's also why my two favorite MMs are /FF, so that I'm not having to constantly resummon my minions.

 

Personally I think it's a good thing that the various ATs are so different, there's an AT out there for everyone.

[Rudra]

5 hours ago, Col. Kernel said:

The blaster's attacks don't run off and die, or aggro other groups, when left unsupervised.

To keep my "attacks" alive and not lose them (to death) I have to constantly micromanage them, even in bodyguard mode, or keep the henches in Passive mode (in which case, why have them at all?)

And neither does the MM have to do anything at all a lot of the time. I've set my MMs to Walk through entire maps and not hit a single key other than for moving the character and completely cleared the maps. Can a Blaster do that? We have trade offs for the ATs. Each excels and is hampered in different ways.

[battlewraith]

7 minutes ago, Rudra said:

And neither does the MM have to do anything at all a lot of the time. I've set my MMs to Walk through entire maps and not hit a single key other than for moving the character and completely cleared the maps. Can a Blaster do that? We have trade offs for the ATs. Each excels and is hampered in different ways.

Sure a blaster with an expensive build and some sort damage aura could probably do that. Depends on the setup. There are characters that can afk farm.  Yes all the ATs are different and have different strengths and weaknesses. This particular challenge though comes across as just a hassle. I suspect this is primarily a QOL issue and there would not be a particularly big impact on performance if you made the upgrades passive, it would just be funner to play. 

[Riverdusk]

Would probably have more luck trying to get them to lesson the animation time for summoning and upgrade, and I'd be for that.   Some sets especially seem to take forever for the pets to actually completely show up before you can even target them to upgrade them.  Or maybe if we can target them for upgrade without having to wait for the 'summoning animation' to completely finish, although that might be a technical thing that isn't doable.

 

 

[Rudra]

8 minutes ago, Riverdusk said:

Would probably have more luck trying to get them to lesson the animation time for summoning and upgrade, and I'd be for that.   Some sets especially seem to take forever for the pets to actually completely show up before you can even target them to upgrade them.  Or maybe if we can target them for upgrade without having to wait for the 'summoning animation' to completely finish, although that might be a technical thing that isn't doable.

 

 

If you are summoning a whole fresh set of pets, by the time your character finishes animating the last power, even if the last pet is not yet targetable, you can select any other pet, apply the upgrades, and all pets still get them. If you are summoning replacements, then target any existing pet, including Dark Servant if you went /dark, or any combat NPC being escorted, and apply the upgrades to them, and it applies to all your pets. Pet summon completion time is easily bypassed.