page 3 [FOCUSED FEEDBACK] Mastermind Archetype Adjustments

[Maxzero]

On 11/19/2025 at 2:48 AM, Arbegla said:

 

I ran some incarnate level (+7/x8) missions on test just to see if I could and I noticed that 1) Incarnate romans suck, but more importantly 2) The procs that I do have slotted seemed to do full damage on the mobs. I run the support hybrid so I wasn't able to test that specifically, but my degenerative interface proc worked wonders once I got the hang of fighting level 57 mobs.

 

Sure but there are also nerfs to 'base damage' to partially counteract the buffs from the level changes. How are THOSE changes going to work in Incarnate content?

[Maxzero]

12 hours ago, Neiska said:

 

I understand this is a "warm-up." But given to the changes in the past 5 years, I have little faith that MMs will be actually made better. Most of their changes to MMs over the years I have disliked. The new sets are fun. Generally, dislike the primary shake-up they did 2ish years ago. (Robots in particular.) It hasn't "all" been bad. But I have low expectations that MMs will be made superior or "better" than they are currently, even less that they will nerf the things like ATS or powersets that are already OP. 

 

I mean lets be honest a Crabber or Illusion troller is a MM but with benefits.

[Valeraxiel]

12 hours ago, Neiska said:

 

I understand this is a "warm-up." But given to the changes in the past 5 years, I have little faith that MMs will be actually made better. Most of their changes to MMs over the years I have disliked. The new sets are fun. Generally, dislike the primary shake-up they did 2ish years ago. (Robots in particular.) It hasn't "all" been bad. But I have low expectations that MMs will be made superior or "better" than they are currently, even less that they will nerf the things like ATS or powersets that are already OP. 

  This. SO MUCH THIS. I really dislike the "C'mon guys wait and see trust the process hurr durr, it'll be better yiff yiff" that I've been seeing. MMs have been waiting. For years. We aren't sought after ever because we come with too many issues and not enough upside compared to other ATs. One look at multi-star content, fast-moving teams or even a goddamn cave and we get the "Uhh, can you swap?". Already playing one of the most complex ATs, and we've been mid AF for a min now. Meanwhile DP/Martial, Ice, Fire, Dark, SS, Bio, Inv etc etc Blasters/Corrs/Scraps/Brutes have just been dumping on the game for AGES and its cool. Hell, even Fire/Kin Trollers ran rampant for a while. But here is where we draw the line of "But what if its too good?" GOOD. High skill things SHOULD have an equivalent level of reward, or else why bother (and don't give the that "Love of the Game" or "For the plot")? Why would I wanna play at 120 percent compared to my peers, to only be 70% as effective? I don't, but that's how it feels playing MM outside of the niche scenarios that have already been covered in this thread. TLDR: We have enough things working against us. Its ok to let us actually be strong. Tune it THAT way. Signed, a tired MM enjoyer.

[tidge]

Is this WIA?

 

+MaxHP boosts (from set bonuses) are showing the same amount of net HP for each tier of henchmen.  This was checked while standing in Dark Astoria.

[Dispari]

59 minutes ago, Valeraxiel said:

  This. SO MUCH THIS. I really dislike the "C'mon guys wait and see trust the process hurr durr, it'll be better yiff yiff" that I've been seeing.

 

I don't think I said that. Just that panicking and posting doom and insulting people a bit premature (and immature).

 

It's not like I don't also want MMs to thrive. I bought CoV because of MMs. I made a Necromancy MM day one and swapped to City over Guild Wars, because I didn't have to find corpses just to have pets. MMs have always been my favorite AT because I play pet classes in every game they're an option. They're currently awful and I will acknowledge that. They pretty much have been ever since the difficulty maximum was upped to +4. And the reasons are many. Once the holidays are over and devs get back to work, I will absolutely be looking over the changes and offering my feedback to help them improve.

 

19 minutes ago, tidge said:

Is this WIA?

 

+MaxHP boosts (from set bonuses) are showing the same amount of net HP for each tier of henchmen.  This was checked while standing in Dark Astoria.

 

Yes, it's based on the owner's HP values. They get more than they "should."

[tidge]

I finished up the Dark Astoria Heather Townshend arc at +3x8 (so even level in Incarnate). Clear all with no Lore pets and no active use of Hybrid.

 

M3: both took 17 minutes, but on Live I stopped 3 times to dump recipes! [I realized this was going to skew results, but I wanted that Purple recipe drop on Live :)]

 

M4: both took 11 minutes, with the only noticeable difference being on Beta, one of the final creatures necessary to defeat flew away at light-speed and went farther than I have ever seen an enemy go in this mission... up the hill and past the next room. This probably cost 15-30 seconds.

[Arbegla]

5 hours ago, Maxzero said:

 

Sure but there are also nerfs to 'base damage' to partially counteract the buffs from the level changes. How are THOSE changes going to work in Incarnate content?

Unless I'm mistaken, the only nerf is to base to hit, which as explained isn't that bad overall. There isn't a nerf to base damage as far as I can tell. If anything, you'll be doing more damage against +3s because the purple patch doesn't affect the scalars.

 

Now as for incarnate content, were MM pets were already even level, from my own personal experience it feels like the pets are surviving slightly more, but that could just be from the IOs I have being slotted and affecting pets now. There shouldn't be any noticeable changes in incarnate content from what I understand.

[Thezanman]

5 hours ago, Maxzero said:

 

I mean lets be honest a Crabber or Illusion troller is a MM but with benefits.

Illusion controllers are even more useless than MMs in high difficulty content due to phantom army being unbuffable: it is physically impossible to increase their accuracy (beyond slotting in the power) with e.g. Tactics or set bonuses, so they're limited to like 35% accuracy max in 4 star content.

[Gobbledigook]

12 minutes ago, Thezanman said:

Illusion controllers are even more useless than MMs in high difficulty content due to phantom army being unbuffable: it is physically impossible to increase their accuracy (beyond slotting in the power) with e.g. Tactics or set bonuses, so they're limited to like 35% accuracy max in 4 star content.

Don't Controllers have holds and buffs and pets are just a smaller part of their kit? where as with MM's the pets are pretty much everything to them.

[Thezanman]

3 minutes ago, Gobbledigook said:

Don't Controllers have holds and buffs and pets are just a smaller part of their kit? where as with MM's the pets are pretty much everything to them.

Generally yes, but Illusion in particular doesn't do much outside of pets. Of course there is the secondary set for support but MMs have that too. I just don't think it makes sense to say that Illusion controllers are a "better version" of MMs when they have their own weird issues with pets.

[tidge]

1 hour ago, Arbegla said:

Now as for incarnate content, were MM pets were already even level, from my own personal experience it feels like the pets are surviving slightly more, but that could just be from the IOs I have being slotted and affecting pets now. There shouldn't be any noticeable changes in incarnate content from what I understand.

 

On my full-kit build(*1), I didn't notice much of a performance reduction in Incarnate+3 content (so, 'even level'). Everything takes slightly longer, or the same.

 

From my testing, the biggest performance change was against the level-less Giant Monsters. These will be harder solo; I don't expect multiboxers to have any issues, unless they are super lazy.

 

(*1) Robotic/Traps MM, that I've basically tuned for "whatever" content. That is... it was built long ago to debuff enemies, keep aggro on the MM and to pour damage where needed.  Put another way: I can change playstyle enough that this build works in a realtively wide variety of content. The other builds on teh same character are now "silly" ideas like having only one henchmen or no henchmen at all. I have other MMs I like less that have alternate builds for different content because they need them.

[Thezanman]

I went to check how the level and base ToHit changes would affect Necromancy's Soul Extraction, and got some strange results. First of all, the summoned souls are all still one level lower than the Mastermind, which I feel should be changed to even level as well. Then I looked at their hit rates, and found that the Spirits and Tortured Souls are inheriting the ToHit penalties from the T1 and T2 henchmen they summon from, despite the fact that the souls are all the same level on both live and beta.

 

 

 

This means that the Spirits (summoned from T1 Zombie Horde) are not only less accurate due to being one level lower, but also have a lower base hit rate for no reason, so they are getting hit with two separate accuracy penalties. EDIT: Tortured Souls (T2) are also getting a double accuracy penalty after leveling up further. Maybe they could just have their base ToHit reverted to normal, but I would still prefer to have all the souls' levels raised to match the Mastermind's, even if it means giving a ToHit penalty to the lower tier souls. As it is currently, Wraiths have the same lower hit rate as T2 henchmen despite being summoned from the T3 henchman, and all of the souls still experience skewed damage scaling against higher level enemies due to purple patch, which this update is meant to address in order to allow for easier balancing in the future.

 

Edited 20 hours ago by Thezanman

[Captain Powerhouse]

3 hours ago, Thezanman said:

I went to check how the level and base ToHit changes would affect Necromancy's Soul Extraction, and got some strange results. First of all, the summoned souls are all still one level lower than the Mastermind, which I feel should be changed to even level as well. Then I looked at their hit rates, and found that the Spirits and Tortured Souls are inheriting the ToHit penalties from the T1 and T2 henchmen they summon from, despite the fact that the souls are all the same level on both live and beta.

 

 

The extractions being summoned at -1 is a bug and just pushed a commit.

 

Extractions before this being summoned at even level was an unnoticed bug, though. They were always intended to be tied stat wises to the henchmen they get summoned from.

[Maelwys]

15 hours ago, Thezanman said:

Illusion controllers are even more useless than MMs in high difficulty content due to phantom army being unbuffable: it is physically impossible to increase their accuracy (beyond slotting in the power) with e.g. Tactics or set bonuses, so they're limited to like 35% accuracy max in 4 star content.

It's true that in 4* content enemies gain an additional +30% base defense, and vs +3 mobs that'll reduce an unbuffed ED-accuracy-capped attack's Hit Rate to ~35%...

...but Phantom Army can take the Soulbound Proc (for 3PPM +40% ToHit and +80% Damage).
With ED-capped accuracy aspect; whilst that Proc's buff is active it raises their pre-clamped Hit Rate from ~35% to ~113% (vs +3s) and from ~18% to ~96% (vs +4s).


And it's active a LOT; since it lasts for 6.25 seconds, each PA spams attacks and at 3PPM their proc activation chance per attack is anything from 25%-72.5%.
Over the course of PA's duration for me it averages about ~55% uptime (it can take a few attacks per PA to kick in; but once activated it hovers around ~66%)

This is also why on MMs I tend to put the Soulbound Proc in my T1 henchmen rather than in my T3... the +Damage is a wash; but the +ToHit is far more valuable on the T1s!
 

Edited 6 hours ago by Maelwys

[tidge]

1 hour ago, Maelwys said:

This is also why on MMs I tend to put the Soulbound Proc in my T1 henchmen rather than in my T3... the +Damage is a wash; but the +ToHit is far more valuable on the T1s!

 

This has always been my preferred slotting for the %BuildUp piece (on MMs). For my typical T1 slots, the +Damage ends up being somewhat significant, as I typically have at least on of the T1 slots dedicated to one of the other globals (so at least one-third of the six slots end up not directly enhancing any of the T1 henchmen attacks).

[Maelwys]

32 minutes ago, tidge said:

 

This has always been my preferred slotting for the %BuildUp piece (on MMs). For my typical T1 slots, the +Damage ends up being somewhat significant, as I typically have at least on of the T1 slots dedicated to one of the other globals (so at least one-third of the six slots end up not directly enhancing any of the T1 henchmen attacks).

Yeah, there's been a lot of back-and-forth over the years about which is the best place for MMs to stick the Soulbound Proc... In the T3? (where its raw +Damage buff is bigger and the pet's damage output isn't hit as hard by the purple patch) Or in the T1s? (where it affects three pets; and they can make better use of any additional +ToHit).

Personally I'm firmly on team #T1; and the introduction of Lv55 (+4) mobs simply reinforces that viewpoint. Maybe I'll reconsider if/when they finally address the Hit Rate issue.

My henchmen are always frankenslotted. Trying to gain the most benefit from Procs whilst including all the Auras and ATOs and ED-capping damage and getting Accuracy "just right" is frickin' hard work (at least on Primaries that lack an appropriate T7!) so I almost never have the leeway to worry about more than two-piece set bonuses.


 

Edited 4 hours ago by Maelwys

[Arbegla]

20 hours ago, Thezanman said:

Illusion controllers are even more useless than MMs in high difficulty content due to phantom army being unbuffable: it is physically impossible to increase their accuracy (beyond slotting in the power) with e.g. Tactics or set bonuses, so they're limited to like 35% accuracy max in 4 star content.

 FWIW, the purple BU proc DOES actually work in Phantom Army. And they spam attacks fast enough for they can double up on the bonus. So there are ways to boost their tohit, even though the pets themselves are unaffected by normal 'buffs'

[Arbegla]

2 hours ago, Maelwys said:

My henchmen are always frankenslotted. Trying to gain the most benefit from Procs whilst including all the Auras and ATOs and ED-capping damage and getting Accuracy "just right" is frickin' hard work (at least on Primaries that lack an appropriate T7!) so I almost never have the leeway to worry about more than two-piece set bonuses.


 

 

I went a different route for my pets, but I think we have similar numbers of acc/dam slotted. I might have more endurance reduction in my pets, as I notice in prolonged fights that even the T1s run out of endurance. Is this on your bots/kin? That would explain the lack of endurance slotted as speed boost covers the gaps in endurance.

[Jacke]

@Maelwys, thanks for that info on how you slot MM Henchmen and Illusion Controller Phantom Army.

 

I've yet to push the Controller to L50, but I will revise the build.  Already figured I'd want to give them ED-capped Accuracy.  Their attacks all have Base Accuracy of 1.0, so to approach final 95% Change ToHit, I'd need -Def as well.  It's an Illusion/Rad Controller, so there's Radiation Infection for that.  Adjusting the build to have this in PA:

• Expedient Reinforcements Attuned Acc/RechRed, Acc/Dam, Acc/Dam/RechRed, Dam/EndRed/RechRed
• Soulbound Allegiance L50+ Acc/Dam/RechRed, L50 Chance for BU

 

 

[Maelwys]

51 minutes ago, Arbegla said:

I went a different route for my pets, but I think we have similar numbers of acc/dam slotted. I might have more endurance reduction in my pets, as I notice in prolonged fights that even the T1s run out of endurance. Is this on your bots/kin? That would explain the lack of endurance slotted as speed boost covers the gaps in endurance.

Nah, that particular slotting is from a Bots/Time; but my (non /Kin) MMs all look pretty similar.
A few different slotting variations are here.
My Bot/Kin's main build currently has 26.5% EndRed in the Drones, 86.18% in the Protector Bots and 41.41% in the Assbot... and vs a Pylon (e.g. going flat out) all their blue bars drain at roughly the same rate (slowly!) without Speed Boost. With Speed Boost, they'll go indefinitely.

Robotics is definitely endurance hungry; and on MMs that don't have any form of additional Recovery/Endurance buffs from their secondary (or Ageless!) the Protector Bots and Assbot will eventually run dry no matter how much +EndRed you throw at them. But there are tricks. /Traps (for example) can stick a Panacea in Triage Beacon.
 

Edited 55 minutes ago by Maelwys

[Arbegla]

1 minute ago, Maelwys said:

Robotics is definitely endurance hungry; and on MMs that don't have any form of additional Recovery/Endurance buffs from their secondary (or Ageless!) the Protector Bots and Assbot will eventually run dry no matter how much +EndRed you throw at them. But there are tricks. /Traps (for example) can stick a Panacea in Triage Beacon.
 

 

I run a bot/traps/mu, and I definitely notice a difference with Panacea in Triage beacon, especially when I can double stack it. The +endurance helps a lot. I'm really looking forward to how the +recovery/+max end/+end discount affect the pets and if they can finally not have endurance  issues overall. I was able to down a 54 pylon on test without too much strive, and I can barely get it down to half health on live before my pets run out of endurance and the DPS drops. 

 

Back when the pylons were 'even-level' GMs, I was able to solo the entire RWZ raid, but it took some looping through to get the shield down. I wonder if I could do it again now that the purple patch isn't that big of a deal.