Zeh_Masteh

It's not always a TF in general, but usually a tough mob.

Enemies with Dark Melee (one of those Council AVs, for example), as well as Romulus in the final mission uses soul drain (or a copy of it) that buffs damage and to-hit based on how many people are around them.

One of the Nictus in the last mish of ITF summons Lesser/Greater Unbound Nicti based on how many bodies are around it (I'm not sure about this one)

Ghost Widow from the last mission of Statesman's Task Force has a cone heal that's based on how many she hits.

Those were technically mostly PBAoEs and AoEs, but you get the idea. There are more I think, but those are the only threats high enough to consider desummoning pets off the top of my head.

lol QFT. I actually clicked on this message expecting the OP to talk about how Overpowered Kin was compared to the other buff sets, and how his popularity on teams, TFs, AV, GM fights was so great that he felt sad every time he switched over to his Stalker

Let me take a guess at what happened:

Since you were obviously on the team, you could not have had more than 7 melee toons on the team. You probably had less than that. Let's say you have 4 melees, 3 ranged, and you on the team (guessing).

The Nictus have a reverse-AoE heal, so if it used it on the melee group, it would have healed itself by 4 times its heal amount. The ranged toons were probably spread out, so if it healed off any of them, it would only heal by as little as one times its heal amount, and as much as 3 times its heal amount.

On the other hand, if it attacked you and your pets (who were attacking the Nictus directly, so getting more aggro from it), it would heal by up to 7 times its heal amount (your 6 pets and yourself), amounting to the same amount of healing as if the entire time (without you) stood in one place together and fought the Nictus (note that that would be a very bad team).

If we pretend that the Nictus healing amount is 1000 HP, then you and your pets allow the Nictus to heal itself (and the other AVs around it) for 7000 every few seconds (as opposed to only 4000 or 1000 in the examples above, both of which can easily be overcome by a full team).

I suggest doing as I do on the last mission of the ITF: desummon all your pets except for one (for Mercs I'd suggest Commando, though I use one Jounin as a ninja MM) and focus more on using your secondary.

Yeah, your time zone will be important, metatron: if it's 6:30pm on the West Coast, you'll catch the influx of late-night gamers (read: us college students) logging on at 9:30pm on the East Coast. Either way, 10am-8:30pm is a wide margin.. with that range, even if you don't get any US players you'll still get the after-dinner European players in the afternoon.

Are you sure about this? I remember that change (and remember hoping it meant /kin was being ported to MMs), but IIRC, the change was to prevent MM pets from receiving Recharge benefits from *outside* buffs, like AM or Speed Boost..

Can someone verify this? Otherwise, It'll be a pain for me to go test it =\

The procs won't show up in your personal combat attributes window, but at least the Soulbound BU proc will appear in the affected pet's combat attribute window. I confirmed this through my Soulbound Proc testing almost a year ago.

I can't speak for the other procs, however (though, clearly, Lady Grey and Achilles' Heel won't show up in the pet's combat attributes...)

Exactly how long was this break? The average skill of nearly all players continuously increases, and with the introduction of Alignment Merits, you'll see many more people with high end builds capable of outperforming casual builds (not to insult your build, which I haven't even seen, just speaking generally).

As for said needed wisdom, I approach teaming w/ MMs as pretending to be a very sturdy Defender: I keep all but two of my pets in BodyGuard mode and focus more on buffing/debuffing. This works out nicely for you as /poison, since you'll have the powers to make +4 bosses purr like -5 kittens

Also, a tactic that I learned not too long ago for dealing with speed runs? Put your pets on Passive/Stay. They will stand at the entrance until you slow down somewhere a certain distance from them. I've found this to be very useful on LRSF speed runs, especially the first mission. This tactic is even better if you pick up Grant Invisibility.

How did you go about doing this?

I sometimes try this as well, but the only way I could think of doing it was by naming three pets a certain way (eg, all begin w/ the letters "Ca"...), but I sometimes don't like restricting my pet names...

That happens sometimes: your demons were probably still being affected by some sort of debuff, so the AI thought it was still being attacked, and tried to retaliate. I'm not sure if it's WAI, but it's kind of like how when you're fighting bosses that spawn minions (like FrostFire), you run away, the timer runs out for the spawned minions and die, but the boss registers that as you killing them and aggros you again.

Anyway, the best way to stop them from running back after the mobs all over the place is to use Follow/Passive (or, the shortcut command Heel, but I always use Advanced and Individual controls). After a few seconds of them cooling their jets, you can put them back on Defensive.

I'm pretty sure that the devs intended for MMs to be the "tanks" of CoV.

Now, when I say "tank", I don't mean "Tankers", the City of Heroes Archetype with taunt auras, defensive primaries and melee secondaries. I mean something more along the lines of "meat shield".

If we think about the game purely on SOs (yes, IO game will change this greatly, but the game is balanced on SOs, plus villains were designed at the same time as the IO system, so the developers couldn't have known the long-term effects of such a system), If you have a team of 8 versus a mob size meant for 8, then the most dangerous time frame will be the alpha strike from the enemies.

With lower buff/healing numbers coming from MMs/corrs, and lower hp/resist/defense coming from brutes, brutes were really closer to DD, like scrappers with more HP.

MMs, however, had an endless supply of pets, and buff powers to keep them alive through the alpha strike, with no risk to any other player. MMs were probably expected to risk the life of a minion for a second or two, at which point the dominators would start dominating and the brutes could pull bits of aggro off the MM, stalkers take out hard targets, corrs blast/heal, etc etc.

As evidence (I have no proof, since the oldest posts on these boards only goes to 2008...), I show that pet upgrades used to be single-target and not AoE. Clearly, MMs were meant to lose pets on the fly and continuously replace them as the battles spanned out.

Of course, in reality, brutes became the tanks (this time, I can actually mean "tankers"), and MMs were given AoE upgrades to help with startup time at the beginning of missions (back when pets didn't go through instances). *shrug* my MM has no problem tanking for ITFs (besides Rommie at the end, who cheats )

A few other things: historically speaking, MMs were primarily given BG mode not b/c they were supposed to be tanking/not tanking, but rather b/c people kept complaining about ambushes that specifically target the player (those were nearly certain-death back in the day). Also, though Brutes have "Gauntlet", it's actually only single target, so if you find yourself chasing around runners, it's because you were too busy beating up on his friend to PunchVoke him.

Just a slight alteration: Scorpion is only giving S/L def, but the rest of the build works towards positional def.

You may get more mileage from Soul Mastery: With the same slotting, replace Scorpion Shield with Dark Embrace, 5 slots of Aegis, 1 slot of Steadfast Protection -KB proc. You will lose 2.5% ranged def, but will gain 4.6 % or so AoE def, 43% S/L resist, 23.6 dark/toxic resist. Very tasty layered defenses

Power Boost can be replaced with anything: Oppressive Gloom for mez (slot 1 Acc/Stun IO), Soul Tentacles for positioning (slot one Acc/Imm/Rech IO), or Nightfall for -ToHit (-5.63 unslotted already makes up for the lost Ranged def, slot 1 Recharge IO).

I've never gotten anything out of Power Boost on my MM, but YMMV. If it's worth it, keep it.