Got complaints about being a mastermind in a group

[ParaBruce]

8 hours ago, esotericist said:

It's really funny, sometimes, how many problems can be solved with polite, patient communication.

 

Yup. One of my high-priority rules for myself and bits of advice for others is: "Say a bit more than you feel inclined to in the first round." 

 

I've been part of a ton of tedious arguments over the years where people were having rival definition wars, without being clear about what they meant. I was part of an unproductive exchange about a particular Defender power set just this week. If one of the participants had been willing to say "I'm talking about whether it's useful in the context of fully planned, generally expensive builds that make full use of IO sets and procs" rather than "that's not endgame, you don't know what you're talking about, I'm going to insist my definition of endgame is self-evidently correct", it could have moved on to something useful much more quickly.

 

Likewise, "I can't get through this doorway right here, because pets and people have it completely blocked" is much more likely to get results than a grunt or angry fuming in silence. Say something like that, clarify more if people need it, and give them some time to act on it, and very often the problem gets resolved.

 

@Lines, right on about waiting it out. 🙂

 

[PaxArcana]

6 hours ago, Lines said:

There's one door in particular on office maps which appears in corridors on the corners, and there's like a small conference room on the other side. The game often likes to spawn mobs in there. That's the door I always think of when this conversation comes up.

I know the door.  And, funny thing?  I set my pets up twenty feet down the hallway, on aggressive/stay.

Then, I peek in just enough to tab-target a mob, before dashing back behind my pets.  If the mob(s) follow, great, it's laser-to-the-face time.

If not?  That's why that MM took Teleport Foe ... 😄

Willingly, unwillingly, the mob IS going to be in the hallway for some face-lasering.  😄

[Nayeh]

On 8/10/2019 at 6:49 PM, Maxzero said:

 

Gotten more complaints from Steamy Mist stopping NPC from following then pets.

 

Get more complaints about using Fade on a MSR than anything else. 🤣

Spoiler

*Fade does not provide Concealment*

 

[kelly Rocket]

22 hours ago, PaxArcana said:

I know the door.  And, funny thing?  I set my pets up twenty feet down the hallway, on aggressive/stay.

Then, I peek in just enough to tab-target a mob, before dashing back behind my pets.  If the mob(s) follow, great, it's laser-to-the-face time.

If not?  That's why that MM took Teleport Foe ... 😄

Willingly, unwillingly, the mob IS going to be in the hallway for some face-lasering.  😄

I just charge in and give my pets a Goto command to get them fully inside the room after I eat the alpha.

[PaxArcana]

My goal as a Mastermind, is never to be actually attacked, myself.  That's why I have henchmen, after all.  😄

Doesn't hurt that the MM I was thinking of when I wrote that post, is Robo/FF.  I don't even throw debuffs at the badguys ... just robots.  😄

[kelly Rocket]

My goal is generally to be attacked so my pets will fight without me having to compromise my safety by turning off bodyguard mode.

[PaxArcana]

If you never get attacked, bodyguard mode is irrelevant.  😄

[kelly Rocket]

1 hour ago, PaxArcana said:

If you never get attacked, bodyguard mode is irrelevant.  😄

Only way that could happen would be if you were playing with an uber-passive secondary like FF or Sonic, and never using any attacks either. Which I could never do because I'd be too bored.

 

Besides, I'm a Darkseid style mastermind. Sure, I'm a planner and a commander, but I can also go one on one with Superman 😄

[PaxArcana]

9 hours ago, kelly Rocket said:

Only way that could happen would be if you were playing with an uber-passive secondary like FF or Sonic, and never using any attacks either.

Basically, any secondary that relies on Buffs, rather than Debuffs or Attacks.

/Empathy, absolutely can be played for no-personal-aggro.  So can /Pain and /Thermal.

 

/Nature and /Cold can be focused entirely on the buffs, avoiding things that might draw aggro, at least until level 20+ (when you have four or more pets out).

 

🙂

Also, if you just wait for your pets to get aggro (via damage) before throwing out the debuffs, you get attacked pretty rarely, IME.

9 hours ago, kelly Rocket said:

Which I could never do because I'd be too bored.

I micromanage my Henchmen to within an inch of their "lives" ... 😄

9 hours ago, kelly Rocket said:

I can also go one on one with Superman

... maybe after you get several Incarnate abilities under your belt, but before then ... MMs are kinda squishy w/o Bodyguard.  And even with, if the other guy brings strong AoE to the table. 😄

Edited September 3, 2019 by PaxArcana

[kelly Rocket]

14 hours ago, PaxArcana said:

Basically, any secondary that relies on Buffs, rather than Debuffs or Attacks.

/Empathy, absolutely can be played for no-personal-aggro.  So can /Pain and /Thermal.

 

/Nature and /Cold can be focused entirely on the buffs, avoiding things that might draw aggro, at least until level 20+ (when you have four or more pets out).

 

🙂

Also, if you just wait for your pets to get aggro (via damage) before throwing out the debuffs, you get attacked pretty rarely, IME.

I micromanage my Henchmen to within an inch of their "lives" ... 😄

... maybe after you get several Incarnate abilities under your belt, but before then ... MMs are kinda squishy w/o Bodyguard.  And even with, if the other guy brings strong AoE to the table. 😄

Waiting to throw debuffs sounds like a recipe for dead pets. I pride myself on how rarely I have to resummon.

 

I don't micro the pets because I don't like it, and I consider our tools for doing so to be quite lacking as there's no "Go here and STAY here and don't fucking leave that spot" command, which means generally if you want to keep them in a specific spot you have to just spam the goto command forever to make them keep coming back... and that disrupts their attack chains.

 

As for going toe to toe with Superman... Have you not played a /Time MM yet? Soft capped to ALL damage, and with 75% resistance as long as the pets are alive and in bodyguard. I'm god damn indestructible.

[PaxArcana]

3 minutes ago, kelly Rocket said:

as long as the pets are alive and in bodyguard.

.... which is precisely why I mentioned Area of Effect.

So, okay, you're softcapped and in BG.  I drop a 300-point AoE on you and the pets.

You may take only 75 (and then resist it down to very very little).  But each of your pets just took 338.  How many times can that happen, before you start losing pets ...?  At which point, the pet-killing snowballs (lose the Tier 1's, and you'll be taking 2 shares of 5, for 120; the pets will take 1 share of 5, plus full damage themselves, for 360 apiece).

 

Then, once your pets are all dead ... you just got a lot squishier.  🙂

[kelly Rocket]

5 minutes ago, PaxArcana said:

.... which is precisely why I mentioned Area of Effect.

So, okay, you're softcapped and in BG.  I drop a 300-point AoE on you and the pets.

You may take only 75 (and then resist it down to very very little).  But each of your pets just took 338.  How many times can that happen, before you start losing pets ...?  At which point, the pet-killing snowballs (lose the Tier 1's, and you'll be taking 2 shares of 5, for 120; the pets will take 1 share of 5, plus full damage themselves, for 360 apiece).

 

Then, once your pets are all dead ... you just got a lot squishier.  🙂

Except that's never going to happen. I'm soft capped, and so are the pets. They only take bodyguard damage if I get hit, and they only take additional damage themselves if they also get hit. Generally speaking, no attack is going to hit more than one out of 7 of us at best, given there's only a 1 in 20 chance of hitting any of us.

 

And Time is a solid healer on top of all its other benefits.

 

There's a reason I deliberately take alphas even on 8 man teams, unless the enemies are super mez-happy (And even then it's just because I find being mezzed annoying).

Edited September 4, 2019 by kelly Rocket

[PaxArcana]

1 hour ago, kelly Rocket said:

I'm soft capped, and so are the pets.

/Cold says, "yeah, the pets are all softcapped too - plus Frostworks' Absorb is like healing damage before it even happens".

 

/Empathy says "no-one dies on my watch".  😄

/Forcefield says "you can't easily kill pets who're hardcapped for Defense, and mine always are."

 

It all depends on both playstyle, and secondary powerset choices.  🙂

 

 

Edited September 4, 2019 by PaxArcana

[Zenogi]

On 8/10/2019 at 8:34 PM, Sovera said:

I ran a Citadel (CAVES!!!) and as usual paid zero attention to whom I recruited as long as they were willing. We ended up with FOUR MMs! IN TINY CAVES!

 

It was glorious and we laughed all the way through it 😄

This is what it's all about imo, whenever I've had the problem of too many MMs I just can't help but laugh at it all because I can't see or do shit it's just ridiculous to the point where I laugh 😂