Yet-to-be-adjusted Mastermind sets.

[khy]

Some ideas for improving the play experience of thugs/beast/demons.

 

1) Thugs - instead of just giving them a heal and calling it good, I think it would be more interesting to give them an alternate. Give each of the baseline thugs an absorb instead. Something that would last 45s with a 60s cooldown would be ideal IMO. This gives them a boost to survivability while also giving them a unique feel to the other MM sets. If that isn't enough, focus on the idea of 'Enforcers protect the grunts' and give one of the Enforcers a regen aura. Extra regen combined with absorbs should allow the pets to be a little meatier, without just giving them all self heals and calling it a day.

 

2) Demons. What if all Demon/ masterminds had an ability - blood pact - available from level 1. It'd be a toggle power so they could turn it on/off at will. When a demon would take fatal damage, deal 5/10/15% unresistable damage (based on the tier of pet) to the Mastermind and instead heal the demon in question to 50% health. The idea being that the MM uses their own well-being in order to keep their pets in the fight. It fits the demon-summoning theme, and adds a new layer of risk and reward to the mastermind. Turn it off and the pets act exactly like every other MM pet - turn it on, and you have to watch your own health much more closely but don't need to worry about pets being out of the action too long. Just beware big nukes that can wipe your entire team at once...

 

3) Beasts. Rather than giving them more heals, what if instead beasts gained a new innate power : Cornered. Beasts gain a damage boost based on lost health, up to 50%. If an attack that does more than 50% of the beast's health would kill it, it instead is reduced to 1 HP and gains 5 second untouchable (This effect would have an unenhanceable 180s cooldown). The idea here is that wounded/cornered beasts become more aggressive and more damaging the closer they are to death. But since MM pets are squishy and vulnerable to being 1-shot, big damage nukes would give the MM at least a few seconds of big damage and a chance to pop an AoE heal if they so choose.

 

Obviously the numbers would be adjusted based on feedback and testing, but the goal of these suggestions would be to make each of the sets feel more unique and less like the other sets. Just giving every pet a self-heal can help their survivability overall but does nothing to really help each set stand out.

[kelika2]

the problem with absorbs is they dont last long, its always a tossup for a player to use them because the damage can stop at any time.  now lets put it in the hands of 21 year old code.  can be a total waste or never enough

the other problem with the 50% thing is the leapfrog thingy that raise of the phoenix has.  on, off, on, off, etc.  and with low pet health pools its always going to be yoyoing or never on depending on your secondary.  beast/cold has rather high defenses, mine are always full health or just plain dead and very rarely in that middle ground

and regen on tiny small little healthpools is highly insignificant.  the way regen works in this game is % based.  even regenning 1% a second still takes over a minute to get back up

 

strait up healing should be easier to put in on top of just being more useful.  ninjas quality of life was gigantically improved from that change

[Rudra]

34 minutes ago, khy said:

2) Demons. What if all Demon/ masterminds had an ability - blood pact - available from level 1. It'd be a toggle power so they could turn it on/off at will. When a demon would take fatal damage, deal 5/10/15% unresistable damage (based on the tier of pet) to the Mastermind and instead heal the demon in question to 50% health. The idea being that the MM uses their own well-being in order to keep their pets in the fight. It fits the demon-summoning theme, and adds a new layer of risk and reward to the mastermind. Turn it off and the pets act exactly like every other MM pet - turn it on, and you have to watch your own health much more closely but don't need to worry about pets being out of the action too long. Just beware big nukes that can wipe your entire team at once...

And how would this work with Bodyguard Mode? (Also, given Bodyguard Mode was added to keep MMs alive, how long do you expect MMs to live when they are sacrificing their own HP to their pets? Remember, MMs aren't very tanky without Bodyguard Mode.)

[TygerDarkstorm]

I'm not sure I'm on board with these, but obviously, I don't speak for the devs.

 

Demons were the S-tier set from which the other sets got modeled from for either creation or changes. I don't foresee them getting a massive overhaul the way the other sets did. They're still like A-tier.

 

Beasts, again, were modeled after the demons and already do a lot of the extra things that were given to the sets that got overhauled. I don't think Beasts need a massive overhaul, they just need tweaking. I'm trying to remember what their big issues are--something to do with their AoE and their attack chains/timing being super wonky. Otherwise they're actually a solid primary.

 

Thugs: I'm not sure how to tweak these guys to fit the new format. I don't know that things need a heal or absorb. Henchmen are relatively disposable--HC has made it cost nearly nothing to resummon and buff henchmen, and if you're that concerned about letting henchies die, grab a secondary with heals. Thugs are also a pretty sturdy primary as is too, so a heal seems sort of redundant.

[khy]

4 minutes ago, Rudra said:

And how would this work with Bodyguard Mode? (Also, given Bodyguard Mode was added to keep MMs alive, how long do you expect MMs to live when they are sacrificing their own HP to their pets? Remember, MMs aren't very tanky without Bodyguard Mode.)

That's precisely why I thought it'd work best as a toggle. If you're wanting your pets to soak up damage from you being hit, you'd turn it off. If you're on a team with a tanker or two, maybe you're at max health more often than not and you'd gain more damage and utility from keeping your pets alive. Giving the player the ability to choose which is more important is the goal.

 

28 minutes ago, kelika2 said:

strait up healing should be easier to put in on top of just being more useful.  ninjas quality of life was gigantically improved from that change

I agree it's easier, I just thought that giving all pets a ST heal seemed... not lazy, per se, but uncreative. Like there are other options that can be looked at to achieve the same goal in different ways, thus introducing wider variety in the (already quite varied) powers.

[Rudra]

1 hour ago, khy said:

1 hour ago, Rudra said:

And how would this work with Bodyguard Mode? (Also, given Bodyguard Mode was added to keep MMs alive, how long do you expect MMs to live when they are sacrificing their own HP to their pets? Remember, MMs aren't very tanky without Bodyguard Mode.)

That's precisely why I thought it'd work best as a toggle. If you're wanting your pets to soak up damage from you being hit, you'd turn it off. If you're on a team with a tanker or two, maybe you're at max health more often than not and you'd gain more damage and utility from keeping your pets alive. Giving the player the ability to choose which is more important is the goal.

... A player is running their Demon/anything MM in Bodyguard Mode to boost their survivability because they are fighting on a high difficulty setting and the bosses can near instantly murder the MM character without it. Same player turns on the toggle to boost his/her/their pets' survivability, because pets surviving is a good thing. Let's say the MM has 200 HP, the T1s have 50 HP, the T2s have 100 HP, and the T3 has 200 HP because I really don't feel like getting real numbers for this. And the AoE doesn't hit that hard, only 100 HP from that higher level boss. So, the MM takes that 100 damage and breaks it up into 8 parts, eats 2 shares of it, and passes the rest to the pets at 1 share each. Except that the T1s and T2s were killed by that attack before the damage sharing is applied to them. Now, normally, as best I understand it, those shares would still count for those pets, same attack after all, so the damage would still be split for having all 6 pets at the time of the hit, and the MM is still sitting pretty with just that 25 damage. As stated, the T1s and T2s would normally have died, but instead they survive with 25 HP and 100 HP respectively. The damage they took from that hit has been resolved, so now the damage sharing gets applied to them. They now eat that 12.5 damage each from the MM. Because math must still be processed as things happen in a computer. However, because the T1s and T2s inflicted 5% and 10% of the damage that killed them back on the MM to survive, the MM just took another 5 hits totaling 35 points of damage. Basically from the same attack, just now from a different source. (5 points from each T1 and 10 points from each T2.) That 35 points is broken into 8 parts, the MM eats 2 shares for 8.75 damage, and each pet eats another 4.375 damage. (Edit: Because Bodyguard Mode isn't damage resistance, it is damage sharing.) The MM is now in a worse state than would have otherwise been because the MM's HP pool has been further depleted by the MM's own pets without any confuse effects required, and despite the T1s and T2s surviving, they definitely can't take another hit, let alone a major hit from that boss, in their weakened state. Further, the MM can't just summon fresh pets for defense, because the MM has 3 nearly dead pets and 2 critically injured pets already holding those summon slots, so either the MM has to take the extra steps to dismiss the T1s to re-summon or throw an AoE heal, if the MM has an AoE heal and it doesn't miss the pets like Twilight Grasp likes to do.

 

Sure, the MM can just turn off the toggle that injures the MM if the pets die to keep the pets alive, but we already have players complaining about the difficulty of playing MMs and this will add to it. And for those players that don't care about how MMs operate, how they are radically different from every other AT in the game? I fully expect them to just leave the toggle on and complain that their MMs are dying from everything. More so than they already do....

 

(Edit again: Summoning new pets isn't the heinous thing some players make it out to be. There is something to be said about human wave tactics when you have infinite forces to keep throwing at the problem. And for tougher fights, even without pet upgrades, it works better than struggling to keep mostly dead pets alive.)

 

Edited September 24 by Rudra

[khy]

That's fair. My personal experience is that while I use bodyguard mode quite a lot when doing content solo or in a very small group, whenever I engage with difficult high-end content I prefer to enjoy it with other people. When I'm doing KW, PI Radios, DA, etc. I find that I don't have to rely on bodyguard mode very much if at all. Oftentimes, even on sets where I'm directly in the action like when I play as /marine and use Whitecap to knock down entire groups, I can go an entire mission taking little damage while my pets get squished like grapes.

 

Resummoning/rebuffing is easier now than it ever used to be, an I am entirely grateful for that change but even with that it can be a distraction for the MM to be resummoning and rebuffing. Either you do it after combat while the rest of the group rushes ahead, or you do it mid-combat and half the time the pets just die again before you can get both buffs back on 'em. So the idea of using the summoner's health pool to extend the lives of the demons seemed like a fitting option for those like me who tend to spend the majority of these group missions near or at full HP.

 

But I know that my experience is quite possibly radically different than others who play, so I just felt like tossing my two cents out there.

[Uun]

17 hours ago, khy said:

Beasts. Rather than giving them more heals, what if instead beasts gained a new innate power : Cornered. Beasts gain a damage boost based on lost health, up to 50%.

Beasts already have Pack Mentality, which boosts their damage by 2% per stack up to 10 stacks. It is granted by successful hits by you or your henchmen.

[kelika2]

17 hours ago, khy said:

uncreative

its never about this for me.  its about fun and functional

at the end of the day i dont want to spend all my time resummoning and rebuffing constantly and even worse, doing so while the rest of the team continues onto the next group.  a group that i may miss due to the travel speed of pets.  without SOME self sustainability a masterminds usefulness has a negative cascading effect or can only work with certain powerset combinations.

 

beast/cold?  amazing, maybe a 5% chance for a pet to bite it

beast/sonic?  even with high resists (70%~ to most) all the little damage adds up.  and in large high level teams they might as well not even exist.  a self heal+regen effect would help them even if its not bellbottoms tucked into crocs unique