InfamousBrad

For almost any super group, the base is painfully spartan, just one or two items per room. Why? I'll tell you why.

Let me offer you an example: the now long-defunct Aeon University Cheerleading Squad on Virtue. We had two very heavy (four to six hour a day) players, another four several time per week players, and three or four players who played at least three or four hours at a time once per week. A small villain group, I grant; we were bringing in about 25,000 prestige per week on a good week.

It took us six months to afford to put in that 6th teleporter beacon and a medical transporter. And nobody ever used the medical transporter twice. We never did get the badges necessary to put in the extra gear that would make a medical bay even vaguely useful. And when everything collapsed at about the six month mark (I was the main organizer, and quit out of disgust over patron power pools to go play Auto Assault for a few months), we still had neither the prestige nor the necessary salvage to finish upgrading the (then mostly useless) buff-creation stations; we had the tech one done, but the magic one was only to level 2. We had a supergroup mission computer, but to the best of my knowledge it never got used.

And because we were absolutely always tightly pinched for prestige, we had exactly zero decorative items, and no decorative rooms. Which really hurt the aesthetics of the base; it never really felt like a villain group base, and there's something just plain pitiful looking about a huge grid of undecorated and 75% empty rooms. When I envisioned building my own base, I envisioned something that would look like a Council base map or an ultratech lab map or an Arachnos lab map, with all kinds of things piled up and lit up and moving around. Not a tiny map of identical 2x2 rooms without a single door that opens and closes and with one tiny 1x1 item per otherwise blank room.

Now, I've done the math and discovered that one person with all 12 character slots in the same SG, at 240k prestige, is just about perfect for a one room workshop plus a salvage rack, inspiration storage module, and both level 1 empowerment stations. And if salvage weren't constantly desperately short, those empowerment stations would qualify as an occasionally good reason to visit the base now that the durations have gone up. But from that initial startup investment in prestige until the base gets enough power and computing power to pay for everything needed to put in teleporters is a long, long time.

Not only does nobody outside the group ever see the secret lair, for the first several months until a full set of teleporters is installed, nobody inside the group has any particular reason to see it except for a few minutes every couple of weeks to drop off salvage.

To beat a dead horse, I don't see any reason for decorative items to cost anything, period. I don't see any reason for non-functional decorative rooms to cost anything, period. I don't see any reason why crafted items should be less effective for their prestige cost than standard purchased items are, but they all are. I don't see why anybody would want a medical bay, at the very least until all zones have teleporter beacons, when it's less functional than a hospital, returning you to the map in a less guarded spot, at less than full health, as far from the mission door as the hospital or farther. Nor do I see any reason why a teleporter is restricted to two beacons.

There are several thousand super groups on the larger servers. There are maybe ten groups per server that are well positioned to use any of the features.

Statesman, could you please total up the prestige cost to put a teleport beacon in every CoH zone that's supported by the next issue? Remember to include a big enough base plot to include the necessary number of rooms, the cost of the necessary rooms, and to factor in the power and control costs. Then add the cost of even a bare-bones workshop with the 3 storage racks, 2 empowerment stations, and a basic table. Feel free to include or leave out the cost of a raid teleporter, a vault, and beacons; the PvE base costs are depressing enough. Then data-mine the server logs to find out how much prestige per player hour is the average for people in supergroup mode, and divide it by that. Then please find out for yourself, and tell us, how many player-hours it takes to build a fully functional but stark and completely undecorated supergroup base?

Then you'll have your answer as to why hardly anybody cares about bases. At least influence and infamy can be spent.

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Are we ever going to find out who was running that mysterious Superadine lab?

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That's pretty clear if you've read Freedom Phalanx. The "mysterious benefactor" uniting all the organized crime groups in the 1920s was Nemesis, and we know from elsewhere that Superadine is one of his inventions.

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I thought the reset trick didnt work for these since they are timed?

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You can reset a timed mission just like any other; however, it's not going to reset the timer, so you've only got whatever limit the timer sets to run through the mission however many times you can.

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And, I will add, once you get past about level 12 or so, when nearly all objects blow up in at most 2 shots, you can run the timer back up by at least 10 or 12 minutes in under 2 minutes. And since you'll know where the mobs for the appropriate side mission are, you can fly or SJ or TP straight there, bypassing all cops and most ambushes.

This is only about the fourth time that I've raised the concern that a 100% chance of getting a persistent temp power is too good a loot for one side mission. If it gave something useful 100% of the time, they'd still be worth doing, but not as certainly worth farming.

This isn't "posting an exploit on the forums" because the devs have told us over and over again that farming isn't exploiting per se (to my occasional disgust re: Barracuda, which they not only haven't fixed in this issue but have actually made even easier to farm). However, I am firmly of the opinion that when we see that people are farming one mission over and over again, it means that by definition that mission's ratio of risk to reward is disproportionate to the other missions and needs to be adjusted to make it less farm-worthy.

That's weird, because I've had the exact opposite effect; the things I've fired it at immediately lose aggro on me, and most aggro on my regular minions, and spend at least 3/4 of their time swatting Posse.

How I use it: Jog up to the Elite Boss or troublesome Boss and fire Noxious Breath, Envenom, Weaken, and then Gang War. This usually (but not always, once in a rare while my +DEF toggles actually work) results in my getting hit by the EB and/or one or more nearby minions, which triggers Bodyguard. Once the EB's aggro is transferred off of me, I hit a keybind that does "petcom_all attack defensive" on the EB. If that doesn't persuade the Bruiser to go to melee mode, I hit another keybind that does "petcom_pow bruiser go aggressive" and then hit that other keybind again as soon as he starts throwing melee attacks.

From then on, any time that I have time left over, I throw Paralytic Poison at any troublesome minions and LTs, but most of my attention is directed at continuing to debuff the EB and using Alkaloid to heal my regular minions (mostly the Arsonist).

What are you doing differently?

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Shhh, lets just ride the good times for once and let the devs nerf it later

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Dude, that is exactly why it was so important to me to hit level 32 before the code freeze, so as to not have that happen. Why not? Because when they swing the nerf bat in a hurry, they always over-correct. Better to let them go over the numbers at their leisure before anything goes live and get it right the first time.

It's hard to isolate individual attacks' damage numbers in a mastermind fight, so I'll keep my eye out when I go back in today, starting with Psymon Omega's arc at level 32, vicious difficulty.

Edit, after some testing: OK, vesus level 33 Longbow: Knockout Blow closer to 140ish, Hurl closer to 80ish. I must have mis-read the attack chain. Sorry.

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The concern: Is the rate of fire on MM/Thugs/Bruiser/Hurl right? Part of me hopes that it is, but for an attack with that much damage it seems to have an awfully high rate of fire. I can almost justify it, because when the Bruiser gets stuck in the pack (which he seems to do about half the time) he has that ranged attack to fall back on. On the other hand, wow is that a lot of ranged damage for what is basically a brute.


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Well speaking from experience as a Tanker having used Hurl, it does about the same damage as Haymaker (the double overhand attack-exactly like Air Superiority-and since I'd expect the Enforcer to have Haymaker and not Air Supe when u see that attack compare contrast w/ his Hurl damage.) all things being equal, ie slottage, buffage etc. Which will be the case w/ the minion since all attacks are based off the same slots.

As far as the rate of fire, having not seen the MM pets in action I can't confirm/deny, but the power itself on a Tanker at least has a moderate recharge, its 'downside' is the longish (3 sec or so ) animation.

Hope this helps...

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It does. And I went and checked the statistics under Brutes in CoH Planner, which lists the recharge time at 8 seconds, which feels about right. (I don't have a stop watch handy, but I was going to guess 8 to 10 seconds.) Yes, the animation time is the same, and pretty long. But the damage seems much higher than what you're suggesting. When he hits a level 33 Rikti soldier (at level 32) with Haymaker, with 3 +dmg SOs, I think he does 56 points of damage. When he hits the same soldier with Hurl, it does 102 damage, closer to what he does with Knockout Blow. (In both cases, beginning of a fight, so little or no Fury.)

So no, his Hurl attack feels to me like it's closer to the damage output from the Carnie's Bronze Strongmen's version of the attack than to the player character version. I could be wrong about that, I've never run a super strength brute that high yet. But I was astonished by the amount of damage on that attack. Pleasantly surprised, yes, but I worry that it may be too good. I guess there's nothing unusual about having two "extreme damage, moderate speed" attacks at level 32+, but it's perceptibly more damage per attack than I'm used to from either the Assault Bot or the Commando at the same levels.

OK, finally got to level 32. Found one problem, one concern, one question, and one art critique.

The problem: If you apply the second upgrade while the first upgrade is still playing, the thug will "flicker" back and forth between the two models until dismissed. The only way to prevent this, someone was kind enough to tell me, is to wait until the 1st upgrade is done before applying the 2nd.

The concern: Is the rate of fire on MM/Thugs/Bruiser/Hurl right? Part of me hopes that it is, but for an attack with that much damage it seems to have an awfully high rate of fire. I can almost justify it, because when the Bruiser gets stuck in the pack (which he seems to do about half the time) he has that ranged attack to fall back on. On the other hand, wow is that a lot of ranged damage for what is basically a brute.

The question: Does the MM/Thugs/Enforcer/Assault buff include +Res(Confuse)? Why or why not?

The art critique: The fully upgraded Enforcer wears a necktie? And the fully upgraded Bruiser wears a pastel blue and purple batik disco shirt with a butterfly collar, open to the waist? That's not the kind of menacing thug I had in mind.


Oh, yeah, and one possibly unrelated question for the developers: Did you do something to the pet/minion AI regarding "follow" mode and Oranbegan portals? I just did a mission that was filthy with them, and not once did one of my thugs fail to follow me through the portal. Even on the one with a random destination, they all showed up where I was. That boggled my mind! If you fixed that, it should make it into the final patch notes before people use their freespec (assuming there will be one), because that's one of the big reasons why nearly all MMs take Pool/Teleport/Recall Friend.

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The Thugs are crackheads I am sure that is why they behave as they do.

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Don't be ridiculous. Crackheads run faster than masterminds' thugs. (But then, so does Stephen Hawking.)

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Well if you are farming them for the temp power, then there isn't a reason to do more than 1 per zone.

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On approximately half of the maps, there's a side mission to break into a villain hideout and steal their stuff. The "glowie" in that mission 100% reliably gives another randomly-selected temporary power, no matter how many missions you've done on this map. I haven't even been farming them hard and I think I've got something like 8 of them (not counting another 10 or so from story arcs and the ones you were talking about and the PvP zone patrol missions) just from the process of getting my level 5 to 30 contacts. If I'd been farming them hard, I could probably have scored another 6 or so.

But if they're not your kind of fun, and you don't want to mess with the side missions, then you can almost certainly bypass every side mission and nearly every ambush (especially once you get a travel power), fly or superjump straight to the bank, and finish the bank job in less time than the old bank jobs used to take because there are only about half as many spawns and the NPCs now get out of the way. So I'm not seeing any downside to this, and for those of us who like tearing up Paragon City, and who like the side missions, I'm seeing this as a pure win.

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so there's no point to doing 2 in a zone? that's kinda dum

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They're good XP, and they're a lot of fun, and some of the side missions give persistent temp powers. That's reason enough for me. Heck, if I didn't care at all about badges, it might be enough for me to do nothing else.

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I was updating my Mastermind Notes for Version 3.0 for Issue 7 and I noticed that the Recharge Times on all three teirs of henchmen are still set at Very Long. This is obviously incorrect as I know from previously stated notes that the recharge times for the 1st and 3rd Tier henchmen have been changed.

What is now the new appropriate term for the recharge times for all tiers?

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Level 1 60s, level 2 90s, level 3 90s.

Updating my previous bug report: It's not an indexing error. It's a queuing error.

Periodically, the Bruiser will decided that its next attack has to be Thunder Clap. Unfortunately, it will decide this when Thunder Clap is still far, far in the future. If left alone, it will stop at the edge of Thunder Clap range, stand there without moving and without reacting to attacks and without obeying any order other than to move or switch targets, until Thunder Clap eventually recharges. Then it fires Thunder Clap and goes on with its attack cycle.

TwilightSinger, to get that many PDP at once you probably triggered several alarms at a time in a Pawnshop robbery? For Masterminds it's almost impossible to miss them all, but go to whatever lengths you can not to let yourself or the thugs touch any of those cones of red light that are coming from the security monitors, and if you do, wait for the ambush (a double-spawn of PPD) and fight them before going on. That's how you keep from getting overwhelmed. If you just power through, boom.

As for Elite Bosses, somebody taught me the trick for that ages ago. As soon as the first police spawn shows up after grabbing the loot, I fire off the three Luck inspirations I was carrying for just that purpose. Only a very few EBs can hit through that, and it buys me time for my minions to grab and hold aggro while I fall back on assisting. And yeah, sometimes, on the rare occasions I can actually get them to aggro on the EB with that much Luck on my side, Gang War really helps if for no other reason that the time it takes the EB to one-shot the ten of them is 10 shots that they're not firing at me or the minions.

Found a huge and deadly glitch with the Bruisers.

Periodically, if you order the Bruiser to attack a target that he is not currently standing next to, he will run up to about 2 feet out of his own melee range, and then just stand there. He won't move. He won't attack. He is just plain out of the fight, until one of the following happens: until the enemy he's targeted on moves, or it dies, or you use the Go command to move him yourself (and even that's problematic) or you switch targets and tell him to attack that one instead.

I've seen this bug on my Commando before, but not on my Assault Bot. I have a theory about that: it's because all of the Command's attacks aren't the same range. You see, when the Commando stops and refuses to attack the current target, he stops at the same range that the Spec Ops do when they're firing their sniper attacks. Which is also the same range that his rocket attack has. So here's what I think is happening.

When an attack order comes in, the AI looks up the range of the next attack in the attack queue. It then computes a path to the current target that will stop at exactly that range. When it gets to that spot, it fires the attack. My theory is that it's getting the wrong range number, either miscalculating it or (more likely) looking at the wrong row in the array. That when it has moved to the spot it picked, to what it thinks is "in range" for the next attack, it tries to fire that attack, finds out that it's out of range, and the logic fails, stuck. If the target moves, though, it has to recalculate the path to the attack, and apparently this time it gets the right range for the current attack in progress.

When this bug hits, both Mercs/* and Thugs/* masterminds are basically robbed of half of their ability to soak damage, and about a third of their damage output, until they wrangle some finicky commands to out-smart the broken AI. And while they're doing that, they're not supervising the other 5 minions, or attacking, or healing, or buffing, or debuffing. When this happens in the middle of a boss fight, and it has several times to me, it's a miracle if you don't end up kissing carpet.

(Yes, I've submitted this as a bug report - the part that fit, anyway. That's why I'm posting it here, because I didn't have room to explain it in the /bug form.)

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Is it just me, or were Mayhem Missions designed to turn fully-functioning, competent teams into a gaggle of blithering idiots?

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It's not just you. That ticking timer makes people crazy. A high level team can add all the smashing bonus time there is in the first minute or two. How long does it take to blow up 1 bus stop, 2 payphones, 1 newspaper box, 5 parking meters, 5 cars, 1 dumpster, 1 fire hydrant, and 1 truck? Once you've added that roughly 10 minutes or so, it's all cops and side missions if you want to add to the timer. And the PPD are no laughing stock any more; now they're tougher than Longbow. Which means that people who leveled up grinding Council newspaper missions are suddenly facing enemies much, much harder than they're used to, and that's where the rubber meets the road.

The double spawn outside the prison door makes rejoining your team after you click "Go to Hospital" problematic at best. The distance to the bank is long enough that, if people are going to follow their usual instincts to "meet at the mission" within the mission, each and every one of them will have triggered their own Longbow spawn. And Eris help the team that brings a Mastermind of any kind to a Pawn Shop robbery, because when those alarms start going off, I can all but guarantee from personal experience that people will run around like chickens with their heads cut off -- thereby triggering all the rest of the alarms at once, for something like a 10x normal size spawn of Longbow and cops.

For an individual, or a small team who are careful, or a big team with precision control, these things are better than sliced stupid people on toast. But you're right that there are many, many things in them that are designed to go wrong, and not just to go wrong, but to go wrong in ways that will make people instinctively jump the wrong way and do something stupid. And other than the massively overpowered stacking debuffs with the broken timers from the SWAT Enforcers, all of it perfectly fair.

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oh yah, and none of the badges from the mayhem mish's seem to be tracking, defeat heroes, cops, cars/trucks, vault doors.
i see them in the list but none of them have the progress bar, not sure if that intentional

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They are tracking, you just haven't done enough. I think it was during my 6th mayhem mission that I got the first ones for destroying cars and trucks and for destroying random objects. And while I didn't keep count, I gather the one for bank vaults goes off at about 15 of them. After about 20 Mayhem Missions I still don't have the one for the cops, which somewhat surprises me in light of how low the first two were, but then I just got my Villain badge for defeating Longbow, too.

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Soloed the FF mission on Relentless and it spawned Luminary as a hero. I couldnt put a dent in her with my MM. Not cool.

If I am solo, I shouldnt have to face an AV lvl mob. I dont need to be spending 335k infamy every time I get a Mayham mission to change my difficulty.

Devs need to change this before it goes live.

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Umm, regular missions do this too. If a mission in a regular story arc has a Hero or Archvillain in it, and you're set to anything above +1 difficulty, you get them at full strength. The only way to guarantee that your mission doesn't spawn anything above an Elite Boss is to play with a team size of 1 or 2 and a difficulty of lowest or second-lowest. It's been that way since, what, October?

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Sounds like they need to change it to a targetted AoE, that can be used w/o needing an enemy, and make them aggressive to anything that's an enemy...

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That would be nice, but I don't expect them to make them targeted AoE. Why not? Pocket D. The other reason is that they really, really want you to have to go to close-ish range and line of sight to use it; they don't want it being fired around corners or even just through doors against enemies that aren't in line of sight.

But yeah, making them aggressive is almost necessary to get any use out of them at all. As it now stands, about one time in three that I summon them they don't even try to hit anything, or maybe take a swipe or two as the fight winds down. And if they're going to spawn as follow/defensive, let's go ahead and rename it Fan Club and be done with it.

Now that I'm in my mid to late 20s and getting more and more of the glue-bomb SWAT guys, I'm seeing a huge, huge problem with them, especially when they spawn more than two at a time. As it now stands, you get a 30 second time bonus for defeating a spawn that stucks so many debuffs on you, for such a long duration, that it takes you 60 seconds just to make it to the next spawn. With the duration on that debuff being as severe as it is, you lose time for fighting PPD, not gain it. The duration on the -spd and -jump debuff really, really needs to come down, preferably to no more than 15 seconds.

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3rd Tier:
Tiny

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Bwa hah. They should hard code that. They should all be named Tiny. (Mostly kidding.) Or maybe Bear. Do guys that size ever have any other nicknames?

As for your level 1 to 5 minions looking like punks, like wannabes -- dude, at level 1 to 5, you're a wannabe. You can barely scare a Hellion's girlfriend. How tough a gang do you think you can recruit at that level? I like the fact that they don't start looking perceptibly tough until level 6. Nor am I disappointed that they don't turn genuinely scary until level 32. As anybody who's been to Siren's Call can tell you, until you get to around that level you're not very scary, either. Even if you have a scary costume, until you've got a wide range of powers including pool powers, plus plenty of slottage with single-origin enhancements, you could be the scariest looking villain in the game and all that makes you is a punk in a Halloween costume.

It's only slightly more extreme than the way upgrades effect mercs, truthfully. The level 1 to 5 merc, un-upgraded, doesn't even have a helmet. And while the level 2 upgrade isn't quite as extreme a makeover as it is for thugs, it really is the point at which mercs stop looking under-equipped.

My brain just exploded. I was sure there had to be a pattern to the end bosses.

I have a suggestion to make the unkillable civilians a lot less aggravating, and it'd be easy to do: add another optional flag to /target_next_custom, nocivilians. That way those of us who aren't ever using them to do things like buff off of can /bind tab so that it skips them. (I also think that aggressive pets and minions should ignore them, but that'll be harder to code so long as they're targetable.)

If the glue guns either didn't stack, or weren't auto-hit, or didn't have such obnoxiously long duration, or the debuff ended when the cop who fired it died, they'd sure be a lot less annoying, and I know that your combat engine supports any or all of those adjustments. Bad enough what they do to me during that one fight, it's maddening that it then takes both me and my minions almost another minute after the fight to get back up to full movement speed. With SWAT Equalizers spawning in roughly 2/3 of the police spawns, the net effect is that I have to run the whole mayhem mission at half runspeed, and it takes me 30 to 60 seconds to get over a simple chain link fence because I have to wait for the -jump to wear off. These really don't feel like level 21 minions, they feel like level 21 lieutenants or level 35 minions. And they're not even worth extra XP.

It's not just the spraycan of upgrade juice that's following a weird trajectory. At the moment, all "thrown" attacks, ones that are supposed to have a ballistic arc, are going sort of random. If you team with a */poison MM, you'll see that his Alkaloid healing is following similarly weird arcs, and when you get your 3rd level 1 pet, the Arsonist, you'll see that his molotov cocktails also fly weird routes. Presumably it's a bug with the new physics settings and will be fixed.

Henchmen are movable. That's what the Go command is for. You've been playing a melee-oriented mastermind since October and you don't have a Go macro or keybind?

Well, there goes a perfectly good theory.

Level 23 thugs/poison mastermind, solo, villainous. Sent from Sharkhead (Kara) to Steel Canyon again. Only two side missions, a kidnapping and a Tsoo hideout. (Got Smoke Bomb from the Tsoo, sweet.) So if anything, I spent even less time and even less mayhem before getting to the bank. End boss was, however, Valkyrie as an Elite Boss. (And this time she very nearly cleaned my clock, hitting me at least half the time through 3 Luck inspirations. And my Gang War posse evaporated after the second AoE. From the difference between the level 22 and level 23 fights, you wouldn't think I was fighting the same hero.)

I give up. If there's any pattern to when the end boss is an Elite Boss/Signature Hero and when it's a Lieutenant/Boss, I have completely failed to see what it is, even after at least 9 Mayhem missions.

Is anybody collecting these reports and analyzing them? Or should I go back through the thread and see if I can get enough information from people's posts to compile a report myself? Either it's random, or bugged, or the pattern will only be obvious after a lot more examples are analyzed.

Another data point, and a new hypothesis.

Level 22 thugs/poison MM, solo, villainous. Sent from Sharkhead to Steel Canyon. Coincidentally, got the exact same side quests as the last mission, so I can say that the amount of time spent in the mission, the amount of smashing, and the number of side quests were absolutely identical. (My ghod are SWAT Equalizers over-powered for NPCs that level and rank.) The prisoner I freed was the same one, the female Radiation Blast corrupter or blaster with the pathologically ugly maroon costume, Stardusk. The end boss was a Lieutenant, and one I recognized as one of the three possible "get a cape" mission end bosses, Mr. Shock.

New Hypothesis about the End Bosses: Starting at level 20, even on solo/villainous, the first time you get sent to a new Mayhem Mission map, you must fight the signature hero for that zone. If you defeat that hero, you get the uber temp power reward for that map.

Testing the Hypothesis: If you have run one or more mayhem missions at level 20 and above, solo, on villainous, have you ever not gotten an Elite Boss for the end boss of the bank robbery the first time on a new map? If you have run more than one mayhem mission to the same map solo on villainous, have you ever gotten the Elite Boss other than the first time?

Edit: Forgot to mention that when I robbed the Tsoo hideout in that mission, and clicked the glowing box, I got a message in my chat spam that said that I had gotten "something," but I didn't. Tentative hypothesis: When that map is generated, the temp power for that box is chosen randomly without checking which ones you have. If it's one you already have, either you don't get it, or it recharges it by replacing the one you had with the new one. Anybody know if I'm right about this or not?

You get these missions the same way you used to get bank jobs. At your level, that means doing 3 newspaper missions in Cap au Diable, then talking to your broker. Instead of sending you to a bank entrance, she'll send you to a submarine parked along the shore - in CaD, that'd be just south of the airport.

It loads like any other zone of comparable size and complexity, which is to say pretty quickly.

Whether or not there are buildings to blow up is random; about half of the ones I've done so far had an arson side-quest. You can blow up vehicles, including trucks, and they do make a very satisfactory "blam" when they go up.

All of which questions would have been answered earlier in the thread, probably by the end of the 1st or 2nd page, which you should have read instead of asking a question that's been answered several times already.