GuyPerfect

They're giving Blasters a mild amount of added survivability, and in the form of health rather than mez protection? I'm reminded of something...

I think this case in particular is something that was just never considered; that is, they didn't sit down and decide that pets shouldn't benefit from Ultimate. That still may be, of course, but I don't get the impression that's what happened.

Pets in general don't inherit any buffs from their caster. It's explicitly disabled in their definitions. However, I do think it should be tweaked so that the one buff they DO inherit is Level Shift, from any source. This would mean level shifts on pets are temporary just like they are on the caster.

On the other hand, when we're talking about Mastermind Henchmen, those aren't just some arbitrary pets the user happened to spawn. Those are the bread and butter of what Masterminds can do, where the secondary power set is... like, the toaster, which brings it all together. A Mastermind using an Ultimate, presently, will only increase the effectiveness of his secondary powers and his attacks lolwutderpbbq.

There's already precedent for Supremacy granting level shifts to Henchmen: they do it in Incarnate content so all the pets are even with the caster. Minions become +5 and lieutenants +4. So it would be a reasonable extension, in my eyes, to also have Supremacy propagate any additional shifts on the caster, including those from Ultimate.

It was recently brought to my attention that there is only one R in Quaterfield.

There was this one time, though, I accidentally called him Dr. Quartermaster.

I think the fact that it's still using the Cryptic Studios logo is a clue to why this is happening.

So there I am returning from the hospital in Grandville after loading up on "oh no you di'n't" Inspirations, right? I exit the Arachnos tower, turn around to face my mission waypoint, and the screen freezes briefly. Weird, but no ill effect. Must have just had to load a bunch of textures all at once or something. It happens.

But as I'm running along, this bug report box pops up in my face! "City of Heroes has crashed. You clearly aren't playing it anymore, so tell us what you were doing!" Uhhhhh, what? Hey man, it's not like that! I'm fine, really! So I made fun of the game briefly before clicking the Send button (click for full size version):



When I clicked Send, it quit the game. Gah! How unappreciative!

Every time I've seen everything, I see something new. (-:

The Top Dog got knocked off his high horse and fell down, down, down. He tried to run, but it was too little too late.

Um...



Mastermind Henchmen do. Lore pets do not.

Dogma and I were able to run a couple of tests and found that while Ultimates can be given to Mastermind Henchmen, they CANNOT be given to Lore pets. )-:

My Blaster briefly had Hold Enhancements in Surveillance in Issue 13 beta.

At this point, this is likely working as "intended," but if so the intent needs to change: Mastermind Henchmen aren't being buffed by the summoner's Ultimate.

This makes sense for normal pets, but for the Henchmen to not get level shifted is like having a Tanker whose attacks go up a level but whose shields don't provide any increased protection. Actually yeah, it's quite exactly like that.

And since Tanker shields DO benefit from Ultimate, so should Mastermind Henchmen. (-:

There were a lot of unanswered questions, so I decided to do a bit of SCIENCE!

I got some pets and an Ultimate Inspiration. First I summoned a Henchman and a normal Pet without using the Ultimate.



The boss Henchman cons yellow, and at +1 because of Alpha. The Pet conned white, also at +1.

Then I used the Ultimate, to see if it had any effect on already-summoned pets.



Nope, Bruiser now cons white, and the Rikti Drone blue.

So I summoned another Pet while Ultimate was active.



Tsoo Sorcerer here cons white, but he's a Lieutenant. Ultimate did not affect him: he's still +1.

Then I summoned another Henchman.



Nope, not these guys either. The Thugs and Arsonist are conning green, at +1.

I thought maybe Incarnate content might affect things, so I hopped over to Dark Astoria.



Nope, Bruiser's still conning white at +3. The minion Henchmen are at +5 because of the way Supremacy works in Incarnate content.

I decided to summon Henchmen again now that I was in Dark Astoria.



Still no benefit from Ultimate. The Enforcers are conning white, at +4, which is standard-issue for Incarnate content.

Not to leave any questions unanswered, I also summoned my Lore pets.



Nope, they're spawning at +3 as well, with the Cataphract conning blue.

When the Inspiration wore off, it conned white once again.



So the moral of the story is this: Pets cannot, under any circumstances, benefit from Ultimate whatsoever, regardless of whether you use it before or after summoning them.

One thing I didn't try was feeding an Ultimate to the Henchmen directly via the Pet window (or drag-and-drop), which I figure should work on Mastermind and Lore pets alike.

Just got done with a sub-5-minute Tyrant phase Really Hard Way run on Virtue. Spawned Lore just as the final phase started, and finished him before the pets despawned.

We had 12 Corruptors on the league, but I only got a look at 6 of them before the rest dropped. 2 Kins and 4 Rads, which is an astounding amount of +Rech for us and -Res for him. With all the Scourge damage plinking down on him in his lower step of HP, we were able to get him down in what appears to be record time as of this post. O-:

It increases the Recovery bonus, similar to Stamina.