page 3 [FOCUSED FEEDBACK] Mercenaries Adjustments

[The Curator]

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Mercenaries

• All Henchmen should now have some base damage resistances even before enhancing them via upgrade Equip

• Equip Mercenary

  • This power no longer has a recharge

• Tactical Upgrade

  • This power no longer has a recharge

• Serum

  • This power now accepts ATOs

[Maelwys]

Copying part of my response from the main feedback thread here, since it's particularly applicable to Mercs "Serum" changes:

MASTERMIND ATO SLOTTING:

Problem: Mastermind ATOs can only currently be slotted into the Pet summon abilities and specific Tier 7 abilities.
On Live, specific Mastermind Primary powersets have more opportunity than the rest to slot ATOs - Thugs and Demons and Necromancy have Tier 7 powers (Gang War/Hell on Earth/Soul Extraction) which can take the ATOs. But Beasts, Mercs, Ninjas and Robotics do not.
On Test there has been an attempt to resolve this by giving the Tier 7 powers of those latter four powersets (Fortify Pack, Serum, Smoke Flash and Maintenance Drone) the ability to slot ATOs. However none of those abilities benefit from Damage aspect slotting; and many of them do not benefit from Accuracy aspect slotting. Therefore much of the benefit of these ATOs is getting wasted (and Serum has some other potential issues with how +Damage enhancement interacts with +DamageResistance enhancement under the hood!)

Ideal Solution: Let all damaging Mastermind Primary Attacks have the ability to slot ATOs.
This would mean Personal Attacks from Mastermind Primary Powersets such as Call Swarm, Burst, Snap Shot and Pulse Rifle Blast would become able to take and benefit from the ATO sets and all of their various enhancement aspects - accuracy, damage, endurance and recharge. Having 3 extra powers per set which can potentially take ATOs would also open up a lot of build variety for Masterminds and drastically ease the pressure on sets like Mercs (which simply cannot cram every beneficial IO into its three summon abilities!)

Potential Compromise Solution: Let the T1 and/or T2 Mastermind Primary Personal Attacks have the ability to slot ATOs.
Similar to the above, but it'd limit the scope of MM ATO slotting to only one or two personal attacks; in case the Devs are concerned about opening it up too wide.

[TooManyButtons]

I've noticed that the MM primary attacks now have a circle around them that recharges after 30s and that the minions now get the attack icon in their bars after they get used. Does this mean the attacks now give a buff directly to the minions instead of debuffing the targeted enemy? If not, I don't see why this change was made. A 30sec recharging ring seems wildly out of place for an effect that you need to apply to individual enemies.

[Captain Powerhouse]

41 minutes ago, TooManyButtons said:

Does this mean the attacks now give a buff directly to the minions instead of debuffing the targeted enemy? If not, I don't see why this change was made.

 

With the exception of Demons (that were not given any changes this pass) these rings on all MM primary attacks indicates the special synergy bonus of the power has expired. In the case of MM, it means the focused fire buff/debuff applied by that power is now gone.

[TooManyButtons]

41 minutes ago, Captain Powerhouse said:

 

With the exception of Demons (that were not given any changes this pass) these rings on all MM primary attacks indicates the special synergy bonus of the power has expired. In the case of MM, it means the focused fire buff/debuff applied by that power is now gone.

 

I get that, but the power describes that the minions only do extra damage to the enemy targeted by the attacks.

 

Meaning there is no point in adding the icons to the minion's list of active effects. I would agree the ring would be useful when fighting Elites and AVs (cause those are the only ones that take longer than 30 seconds) but against regular mobs I'm concerned it could have a misleading effect.