I've had a lot of years to think about Masterminds

[William Valence]

So when the game was Live, the two things I bugged Synapse about were Energy Melee and Mastermind inter-set balance. Since MM's overall were not seen to be under-performers I never made any progress on them outside of Incarnate content. Well here are the ideas I've had in my head for a long time to bring Necro, Mercs, and Ninjas up to the level of  Thugs, Bots, and DS. Never used BM, so no idea where that one is.

 

*NECRO*

 

This is and easy one and a lightweight one. Lich is fine as a control boss, and Grave Nights are ******* baller, however it's base survivability as a set is low, and zombies are probably the worst T1 minion. Take the Cloak of Fear icon, recolor it Necro colors, and give the following to Zombies on their T2 upgrade:

 

DEATH RATTLE: Passive - 15' radius -5% tohit, -10% damage, 3% chance to mag2 fear 10s.

 

Against an even con enemy that would be -12% tohit and -24% damage if all three affect the target.

 

*NINJAS*

 

For a Melee pet that has no resists and only defense, them having less defense that Probot buffed bots or Enforcered Thugs is pretty bad. All three ninja types should have their defense upped to 16% (All) at least to match thugs. With no resistances to layer with their defense they should get defense debuff resistance (25% base + 25% per upgrade max 75%)

 

Jounin should lose the Poisoned dart power, and gain a passive Poisoned Blades power that adds -regen to its existing attacks.

 

Oni is a hot mess, and needs to lose and replace some powers. Drop the fire sword attacks. Whenever I played my Ninja/Time I noticed the Oni had issues bouncing between the sword attacks and other attacks. Move Fire breath to being a starting power, and char to the T1 upgrade. This would put both control powers on the same upgrade and open a spot on the T2. Give the Oni Incinerate on the T2 upgrade to make the difference on the loss of the two Sword attacks without adding another weapon draw animation to juggle.

 

Smoke bomb should be infinitely better without poison dart to **** things up, but maybe allow it to accept recharge intensive pet damage sets just to ease some of the burden of slotting.

 

*MERCS*

 

Honestly the pets themselves I don't even know. They seem over stuffed with kit they won't use right and may just need to get trimmed up a bit and focused. However I've thought a lot about Serum, and here's what I'd do with Serum if possible.

 

Make it and enhancement mule. You can stick any enhancement you want on it and that slotting will apply to your target, like a form of super soldier serum. When you use the power, for the duration, it gets the full benefit of the slotting with the kicker that it is unaffected by Enhancement Diversification, similar to Alpha slots. There would be no crash, it would have a constant recharge unaffected by recharge modification, and it could even mule aura IOs.

[Elthenar]

Necro is a strange set. It's never going to have top tier damage due to the Lich being a control pet and not a DPS pet.  The T1 pets are better than you think IMO. They have a ton of resists and their base brawl has excellent DPA for a pet.  The only thing I would add is an ability similar to Envenom from Poison. It would have to be weaker than the MM version, and with the pets being 2 levels down it get resisted making it even less effective. However, with 3 zombies using it would it add up to a small but noticeable effect and it would add -regen to zombies.

 

Ninja's aren't too bad either. They need more defense though.  They are freaking ninja's and they are easier to hit with a punch than pet dogs, random thugs or robots and Bots and Beasts still get those nice resists on top. Give them all the same defense as Jounin. Maybe even bump that up a few points. Make them the Super Reflexes of MM pets. Easy to soft cap the defense but when streak breaker hits you it sucks.  For the Oni. Just add Fireball to his skill list.

 

Now Mercs, those guys need help. I've given my thoughts on it before but I am willing to keep repeating because I love Mercs. They just suck is all. They are right there with ninja's as having the worst defensive stats of the MM sets. Bots, Demons and Beasts all sport better resists and they too have healing.  The damage on the set is low for several reasons. A big one being that the Spec Ops are saddled with long cooldown (2 and 3 minutes), 0 damage CC skills that they will never be able to use correctly. As such the Spec Ops have no AOE at all. Then the commando. He's not nearly as bad as the Spec Ops. He's decent even. He's just saddled with all the drawbacks of an AR blaster who took the munitions pool. LRM has far to long a cooldown for the damage and activation time it has. Full Auto has a long, narrow cone making it hard to hit whole groups and it has a fairly low damage per activation. Fortunately is he does has 5 total AOE's so he can still keep busy when the two big ones are on cooldown.  Oh, and serum is simply awful.

 

Mercs need a lot. Like Ninja's, their survivability needs a lot of work, Beef up their resists across the board and give the medic the same range as the other Mercs, so he's not always the closest target amd gets wrecked. Take Frag Grenade away from the medic, so it stops getting all the AOE aggro. To the spec ops. the frag grenade you took from the medic would now be given it to these guys. Seems odd that the freaking medic has AOE's and nades and the Spec Ops guys don't.  Those long cooldown CC powers, lower the recharge to like 15 to 20 seconds and make them only have a chance to CC.  Make the tear gas do some damage to fill out the Spec Ops AOE dps. For the commando, again he's not so bad. His warts are just serious magnified by how bad the rest of the set is.  If the only thing they did was fix LRM, I'd be ok. LRM is one of the worst skills in the game. It's awful for a blaster, it's even more awful for a pet than can't improve it's recharge by any means.  There are MM pets with abilities similar in damage that have a quarter or less the cooldown and significantly faster activation times, like Foot Stomp, Swarm Missiles or Terrible Howl.  You could legitimately knock 3 minutes off the cooldown and a second off the activation time and it wouldn't be OP at all. For Serum, I'd like to see a similar tack taken like what was used on the Beasts Tier 7. Add a nifty passive to it. My original idea was to give a much lesser version of the Serum buff to all the pets permanently. Specifically +res all, regen and recovery. Not huge amounts, because they would be balanced around them being enhanceable abilities.

[Shadowsleuth]

Mercs could be helped by turning serum into an AoE buff with no crash (a pet that is not fighting because of a crash is a useless pet).

 

On the fragility of Ninjas, I've had teammates describe them as being made out of paper mache soaked in gasoline dancing around a lit match. 

 

Ninjas could definitely use a buff to them.

[Soulstinger]

Necro really is an odd set; with the boss being control AND Soul Extraction requiring a dead henchmen.

 

I've never really liked Soul Extraction; the pet doesn't last long and the cooldown is HUGE-- maybe reducing the cooldown significantly would help; as you still have to lose a henchman to even cast it.

I would also agree that zombies feel like they could use some small boost, either in survivability or an offensive component.

 

[Voldine]

I just want to drop a reminder here that necropets get a drain life ability from the second upgrade.

 

Fragile until 32, then they get self-sustain.

[William Valence]

Just throwing my bona-fides in here because I may have shirked on that end.

 

Necro/dark was my most played combo from I6 to shutdown. The last thing I remember doing in live was going on test and soloing Ms. Liberty and Penny In Recluse's Victory, at the same time. That same character soloed all the other hero RV AVs as well. The zombies version of healing was not sufficient for self sustain, and 26% resists was not bueno enough for pets that were -2 to the things you were fighting. The pairing with /Dark carried it, and even with the insanity that was /Dark, Zombies died a lot.

 

Because of the purple patch, a Minion rank henchman takes 22% more damage from an enemy that cons even to you, so with their resists they still take 90% of the damage that hits them instead of 74%. Not including the damage they take from BG mode. And they don't resist everything. Notably missing resists to Lethal, Energy, and fire. And if I remember the parses correct, Zombies were shown to be the lowest damage T1 henchmen. Basically all the damage from the set is funneled through the Grave Knights. Something that becomes more apparent when you don't notice a drop in DPS when doing a TPN because as a Necro you didn't upgrade Zombies or Lich and it didn't matter because you didn't get any real damage through them anyway.

10 hours ago, Elthenar said:

Ninja's aren't too bad either. They need more defense though.  They are freaking ninja's and they are easier to hit with a punch than pet dogs, random thugs or robots and Bots and Beasts still get those nice resists on top. Give them all the same defense as Jounin. Maybe even bump that up a few points. Make them the Super Reflexes of MM pets. Easy to soft cap the defense but when streak breaker hits you it sucks.  For the Oni. Just add Fireball to his skill list.

The problem is he seems to have too many powers for his AI to handle. There was a thread on the old forum that had him attacking a dummy in RWZ for like a half hour or something nuts and they counted the times he used his powers, and it was silly. He would ignore certain powers just to use others over and over again. It matched my observations at the time that he had issues juggling the different powers, especially ones with the sword animations. Giving him another power would just make that worse. It's part of the reason I recommended just giving one strong power in place of the two that were removed.

 

8 hours ago, Soulstinger said:

I've never really liked Soul Extraction; the pet doesn't last long and the cooldown is HUGE-- maybe reducing the cooldown significantly would help; as you still have to lose a henchman to even cast it.

Summon your Lich and use /releasepets, use soul extraction, then re-summon everything and buff and you've got all your pets. If you've paired with /Dark, that's 8 dudes you have all the time.

[Soulstinger]

That trick works fine at the beginning of a mission. For the rest of the time attempting to do this is a lot of work, endurance, and an opening to get steamrolled while your pets are down.

 

Not saying it isn't a viable trick tho

[biostem]

I just want to be able to toggle/select which powers I want my pets to use or not use - like it'd be great if I could uncheck the brawl attack on my bots or mercs...

[lobster]

17 hours ago, William Valence said:

*NECRO*

 

This is and easy one and a lightweight one. Lich is fine as a control boss, and Grave Nights are ******* baller, however it's base survivability as a set is low, and zombies are probably the worst T1 minion. Take the Cloak of Fear icon, recolor it Necro colors, and give the following to Zombies on their T2 upgrade:

 

DEATH RATTLE: Passive - 15' radius -5% tohit, -10% damage, 3% chance to mag2 fear 10s.

 

Against an even con enemy that would be -12% tohit and -24% damage if all three affect the target.

 

This looks like a solid suggestion without complicating them (adding more to the attack chain).   It would be nice if there was a faint visual to the aura as well.  My only worry is that it wouldn't offer *enough* protection vs. the equivalent of +3-7s or whatever you are fighting.

 

You should be able to cast Soul Extraction on a living pet and have it just kill the pet and make the ghost, the price you pay is the lost recharge/waiting.  Easy fix, and suddenly a really good power (it was already OK).

 

 

Quote

 

*NINJAS*

 

For a Melee pet that has no resists and only defense, them having less defense that Probot buffed bots or Enforcered Thugs is pretty bad. All three ninja types should have their defense upped to 16% (All) at least to match thugs. With no resistances to layer with their defense they should get defense debuff resistance (25% base + 25% per upgrade max 75%)

 

Jounin should lose the Poisoned dart power, and gain a passive Poisoned Blades power that adds -regen to its existing attacks.

 

Oni is a hot mess, and needs to lose and replace some powers. Drop the fire sword attacks. Whenever I played my Ninja/Time I noticed the Oni had issues bouncing between the sword attacks and other attacks. Move Fire breath to being a starting power, and char to the T1 upgrade. This would put both control powers on the same upgrade and open a spot on the T2. Give the Oni Incinerate on the T2 upgrade to make the difference on the loss of the two Sword attacks without adding another weapon draw animation to juggle.

 

Smoke bomb should be infinitely better without poison dart to **** things up, but maybe allow it to accept recharge intensive pet damage sets just to ease some of the burden of slotting.

 

Man, my first mm (first one to 40 too, I think, but I don't think he made it to incarnation) was nin/poison...talk about squishy!  They definitely *need* a defensive upgrade, especially compared with the three sets that were added afterwards.  Given them some sizeable passive regen alongside the +def might help.  Maybe something weird like an inverted scaling resist: basically 25% of your life total% (so 25% at full, 1% at 4%, etc.) to help avoid alpha one shots (but not do much to save them from the second hit)?

 

I'm fine with jounin losing the darts....giving them lotus drops as a replacement would be cool, and help to push them up towards the top of the damage sets (which they should be fore how fragile they are).

 

If you're going to remove the oni's two melee attacks - why give him another one?  I'd say just give me a ranged attack (Blaze, or maybe even something like Hot Feet to keep enemies away from him) instead and make him a 100% ranged pet.  

 

Quote

*MERCS*

 

Honestly the pets themselves I don't even know. They seem over stuffed with kit they won't use right and may just need to get trimmed up a bit and focused. However I've thought a lot about Serum, and here's what I'd do with Serum if possible.

 

Make it and enhancement mule. You can stick any enhancement you want on it and that slotting will apply to your target, like a form of super soldier serum. When you use the power, for the duration, it gets the full benefit of the slotting with the kicker that it is unaffected by Enhancement Diversification, similar to Alpha slots. There would be no crash, it would have a constant recharge unaffected by recharge modification, and it could even mule aura IOs.

 

Mercs absolutely need streamlining and shifting.  Yep, kill the medic's bomb.  Yep, give the T2s some aoe and shorter recharging controls.  Maybe give the medic a long recharging rez that works on the other pets - that would be something unique and cool! 

 

I'm hopeful something might happen, but I haven't been paying attention enough to know if the HC team is actually going to do stuff like this in the future?
 

 

Edited August 6, 2019 by lobster

[Redlynne]

20 hours ago, William Valence said:

*NINJAS*

 

For a Melee pet that has no resists and only defense, them having less defense that Probot buffed bots or Enforcered Thugs is pretty bad. All three ninja types should have their defense upped to 16% (All) at least to match thugs.

I honestly think that Ninjas (as pets) were basically half-baked when they were released and just never got looked at ever again.  Part of the problem is that any sort of nod in the direction of the Conservation of Ninjitsu in the context of a Mastermind would mean that your Ninjas all get WEAKER as you deploy more of them ... which works in a cinematic context, but not in a gaming one.

 

However ... there is a somewhat ready made answer to this particular problem which functionally already exists inside of the game, complete with working examples/samples, functioning animation and FX and everything and it simply needs to be ported over to the Ninja Pets practically "as is" for it to work.

 

What Ninjas need is a VENGEANCE power ... just like what Nemesis Lieutenants all have (and use).  That way, instead of the Ninjas getting weaker as you summon more of them ... instead they get stronger every time one of them is defeated(!), which would mimic the Conservation of Ninjistu trope in a way that would set the entire primary apart from all of its competitors as a unique game mechanical trait of the powerset.

 

As far as increasing their Defense (which isn't even really "token" protection) ... I've long been of the opinion that the Tier 1 Genin ought to have a Maneuvers styled power that stacks Defense for all of the Ninja Pets (but not the Mastermind, other PCs or other Pet sets), representing the value of "combat choreography" by the Genin.  The Tier 2 Jounin would then have an Assault styled power that stacks Damage buffing for all of the Ninja Pets (but not the Mastermind, other PCs or other Pet sets), representing the value of "combat experience" by the Jounin.  You then have the Tier 3 Oni having a Tactics styled power that grants +ToHit to all of the Ninja Pets(but not the Mastermind, other PCs or other Pet sets), representing the value of "combat mastery" by the Oni "leading" his troops (at the direction of their "lord" the Mastermind PC).  Basically a Leadership Pool "pyramid" that buffs the Ninjas more/better when there are more of them.

 

Add Vengeance to them so they get stronger when one gets defeated, so as to ward off a cascade of defeats, and things would start getting rather interesting in a hurry for how they would "feel" in actual gameplay.

20 hours ago, William Valence said:

Jounin should lose the Poisoned dart power

Poison Dart is the absolute WORST possible power for Jounin to have been saddled with, given the way that they (mis)use it to waste critical hits.  If the Pet AI were smarter, it would make a decent power, but as is it's just a "shoot self in foot to spite face" kind of thing for them.

 

20 hours ago, William Valence said:

Oni is a hot mess, and needs to lose and replace some powers. Drop the fire sword attacks. Whenever I played my Ninja/Time I noticed the Oni had issues bouncing between the sword attacks and other attacks. Move Fire breath to being a starting power, and char to the T1 upgrade. This would put both control powers on the same upgrade and open a spot on the T2. Give the Oni Incinerate on the T2 upgrade to make the difference on the loss of the two Sword attacks without adding another weapon draw animation to juggle.

The Fire Sword attacks are ... cinematic ... but really impractical with how the Pet AI insists on (mis)using them.  At this point, I'd honestly say they ought to be dropped and that giving Oni the Enflame power from the Sorcery set would be a much more interesting choice (that wasn't available back in the Issue 7 days when the Ninjas powerset was created).

 

20 hours ago, William Valence said:

Smoke bomb should be infinitely better without poison dart to **** things up, but maybe allow it to accept recharge intensive pet damage sets just to ease some of the burden of slotting.

In an absolutely perfect world (which we don't live in, but I'm talking totally blue sky stuff here) ... I'd want to rig Smoke Bomb such that the ONLY Set IOs that could be slotted into the power would be ... (drum roll please) ... PROCS!

 

Basic idea being that if an Set IO is NOT a proc, it can't be slotted into Smoke Bomb.

 

So what Smoke Bomb would then do is "add" whatever proc IOs are slotted into Smoke Bomb to the enhancements that affect the Ninja Pet that Smoke Bomb gets used on, for the duration of the Smoke Bomb effect.  Essentially, the Smoke Bomb power becomes a "carrier" for those proc IOs to be temporarily added to the Ninja Pet affected by Smoke Bomb.

 

Alternatively, I'd expand the functionality of Smoke Bomb such that it would cause the Mastermind(!) to gain a temporary bonus effect to their Supremacy which adds +Defense to all Ninja Pets within Supremacy range for the duration of the Smoke Bomb effect.  Adding this functionality to Smoke Bomb would necessarily mean allowing Smoke Bomb to be slotted with Defense Buff enhancements and the Defense Buff Sets (for muling Kismet, Luck of the Gambler, etc.).

 

 

 

But then, what do I know of these things ... ^_~

[krj12]

I only made one MM back in the day.  A thugs/traps.   The one thing that drove me crazy was that the glass cannon fire blaster pet always wanted to run into melee range and scrap.

Meanwhile, the top level "tank" pet wanted to stay at range and hurl rocks.   The AI for this power set could use some tweaks.

 

[Elthenar]

On 8/6/2019 at 2:26 PM, William Valence said:

Just throwing my bona-fides in here because I may have shirked on that end.

 

Necro/dark was my most played combo from I6 to shutdown. The last thing I remember doing in live was going on test and soloing Ms. Liberty and Penny In Recluse's Victory, at the same time. That same character soloed all the other hero RV AVs as well. The zombies version of healing was not sufficient for self sustain, and 26% resists was not bueno enough for pets that were -2 to the things you were fighting. The pairing with /Dark carried it, and even with the insanity that was /Dark, Zombies died a lot.

 

Because of the purple patch, a Minion rank henchman takes 22% more damage from an enemy that cons even to you, so with their resists they still take 90% of the damage that hits them instead of 74%. Not including the damage they take from BG mode. And they don't resist everything. Notably missing resists to Lethal, Energy, and fire. And if I remember the parses correct, Zombies were shown to be the lowest damage T1 henchmen. Basically all the damage from the set is funneled through the Grave Knights. Something that becomes more apparent when you don't notice a drop in DPS when doing a TPN because as a Necro you didn't upgrade Zombies or Lich and it didn't matter because you didn't get any real damage through them anyway.

The problem is he seems to have too many powers for his AI to handle. There was a thread on the old forum that had him attacking a dummy in RWZ for like a half hour or something nuts and they counted the times he used his powers, and it was silly. He would ignore certain powers just to use others over and over again. It matched my observations at the time that he had issues juggling the different powers, especially ones with the sword animations. Giving him another power would just make that worse. It's part of the reason I recommended just giving one strong power in place of the two that were removed.

 

Summon your Lich and use /releasepets, use soul extraction, then re-summon everything and buff and you've got all your pets. If you've paired with /Dark, that's 8 dudes you have all the time.

 

 

Most MM pets have horrific AI. That's always been the buggabo with the class. I wasn't aware that the Oni had worse than normal AI though, usually when I am playing my ninja's I am more concerned with keeping the rank and file in melee.  Beasts have similar issues though.

 

As to the level difference, there is nothing to be done about it unless they make all pets equal level and then re-balance their damage.  I've been screaming for that for over 10 years though, so it's unlikely to be a thing. Still though, +1 to the idea.

 

As for Soul Extraction, I never liked in thematically. The whole idea behind necromancy is that it is the animated, soulless dead. I've always though Soul Extraction should be targeted on an enemy. Let it function like Victory Rush, just target the best available dead enemy.  Also, Mechanical enemies are differentiated in the system as proven by EMP arrow and similar powers. Use the same flag to make them invalid targets for Soul Extraction.

[Soulstinger]

I love the idea of Soul Extraction able to be cast on enemies/enemy corpses; or able to just cast on a living pet to gib it; definitely makes for a cinematic and tactical choice!

 

+1

[Dragonfire]

What I've been wanting on Masterminds for years is customization of the 'pets' - For mercenaries, why not let me have female mercs that look like my main character?  Or for a demon-themed mastermind, create male or female pets?  I was hoping to be able to get skeleton warriors for one of my alts that had skeleton armor - that would've been awesome.  That's been my bugaboo for a long time.

[JPax]

Just please remove brawl from the MM pets. Period. They don't need it and it makes ranged pets run into combat for that sweet sweet brawl damage. If it's there as a filler, I mean jeez, just adjust other abilities to fill the void of it's activation time via reduced recharges.

[Redlynne]

27 minutes ago, JPax said:

Just please remove brawl from the MM pets. Period.

Counter-proposal.

 

If Brawl CAN'T be removed from Mastermind Pets for ... logistical reasons ... how about editing the recharge on the Brawl power that the Pets get?  Give it a recharge time of oh ... say ... 1000 seconds ... so the Pets only try to pull that (STUPID!!) stunt once every 16+ minutes?

 

So rather than removing Brawl from them, just make Brawl something that isn't "available" to them to use, due to a LONG recharge timer.

 

How's that sound as a workaround?

Devs?

[Shadowsleuth]

Or replace brawl with a zero endurance ranged attack that does exactly the same amount of damage as brawl that recharges as quickly as brawl.

 

That way if the other pet powers are on cooldown or if the pet bottoms out on endurance, this ranged attack will always be available.

[SmalltalkJava]

1 hour ago, Shadowsleuth said:

Or replace brawl with a zero endurance ranged attack that does exactly the same amount of damage as brawl that recharges as quickly as brawl.

 

That way if the other pet powers are on cooldown or if the pet bottoms out on endurance, this ranged attack will always be available.

I like this.  Nice and seemingly simple  

Edited August 11, 2019 by SmalltalkJava

[Redlynne]

2 hours ago, Shadowsleuth said:

Or replace brawl with a zero endurance ranged attack that does exactly the same amount of damage as brawl that recharges as quickly as brawl.

You want our Pets to ... Throw Rock ...?

[Soulstinger]

Would be easier to change brawls re-use timer than create some arbitrary ranged melee type attack and somehow thematically tie it into every flavor of MM pet that requires one.

Remember this is a volunteer dev group working with spaghetti code.

[Redlynne]

6 hours ago, Soulstinger said:

Remember this is a volunteer dev group working with spaghetti code.

More like (barely) flying spaghetti monster code ...

 

[WumpusRat]

One of the issues with the mercenaries comes from the Commando. I posted a suggestion a while back to adjust him a bit, since his big two attacks (full auto and LRM rocket) are on ridiculously long cooldowns (basically just ported straight from other kits, and not adjusted for MMs, who can't slot recharge into their pets).

 

As it stands right now, the LRM Rocket is on a massive 240s cooldown, and Full Auto is on a 60s cooldown. Both of these powers could be dropped to 20-24s cooldowns, and it would dramatically improve the mercenary kit's damage output. 

 

Another issue is, of course, serum. Serum is kind of a joke of a power. What I'd prefer to do is to modify it slightly to function similarly to how the Beast Mastery power functions.

 

Just having purchased Serum, all your soldiers now have a permanent, weak boost to their abilities (it's super-soldier serum, after all). Give them like +5% damage, +5% to-hit, and +5% smash/lethal/toxic resists. Then if you use the serum on one of your soldiers, it would super-charge them, doing the same thing it does now, but reduce the cooldown to 2-3m instead of the ridiculous 16m cooldown it has right now. Or, optionally, you could use it without a target and it would give a weaker bonus, but to all your soldiers at once.

[Elthenar]

1 hour ago, WumpusRat said:

One of the issues with the mercenaries comes from the Commando. I posted a suggestion a while back to adjust him a bit, since his big two attacks (full auto and LRM rocket) are on ridiculously long cooldowns (basically just ported straight from other kits, and not adjusted for MMs, who can't slot recharge into their pets).

 

As it stands right now, the LRM Rocket is on a massive 240s cooldown, and Full Auto is on a 60s cooldown. Both of these powers could be dropped to 20-24s cooldowns, and it would dramatically improve the mercenary kit's damage output. 

 

Another issue is, of course, serum. Serum is kind of a joke of a power. What I'd prefer to do is to modify it slightly to function similarly to how the Beast Mastery power functions.

 

Just having purchased Serum, all your soldiers now have a permanent, weak boost to their abilities (it's super-soldier serum, after all). Give them like +5% damage, +5% to-hit, and +5% smash/lethal/toxic resists. Then if you use the serum on one of your soldiers, it would super-charge them, doing the same thing it does now, but reduce the cooldown to 2-3m instead of the ridiculous 16m cooldown it has right now. Or, optionally, you could use it without a target and it would give a weaker bonus, but to all your soldiers at once.

 

 

This sounds familiar. It's almost like I said the exact same stuff a few posts up lol

[Soulstinger]

Great minds think (complain) alike? : P

But forealz, I'de be stoked if this dev team took a balance pass on MM's, feels like they were ignored forever even on live

[SmalltalkJava]

I love MM as a class.  It’s my favorite.  However at times they definitely feel like a class that is stuck in Beta development and was never quite finalized.  

 

-Pet brawl

-pet one shot fragility 

-Attack command stance being on the same setting toggle as Goto, Stay, Follow. It seems to me that Goto, stay, and follow should be separated from attack.    I haven’t done a complete use-case break down on this idea but my thoughts keep leaning that direction.