JupiterMoon

5 at least

slot t hem with either the stupefy set or positrons blast. it matters little which

either set gives you 6.25% global recharge (stupefy is also substantially cheaper)

not really worth the frankenslotting. they are best used as a phantom-army clone alpha absorber or as a debuff to keep up on eb's/av's (mostly for the -dmg which you cant enhance)

patron arcs are there to weed out the tofu blueside rerollers!

i'm not seeing a problem here. ta has it's uses.

i would love claws one of either broadsword or katana

broadsword and katana's parry/divine avalanche are fantastic tools. they should have at least given brutes broadsword.

but i doubt claws would be ported over as is. it would have the most aoe's that do dmg of all the brute primaries. they'll prob go the fiery melee route and remove spin or one of the cones, and move spin to 32

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My dm/invuln brute is tough enough where against anything short of multiple AVs I don't really have to worry about dying. I doubt willpower can say the same.

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Think again. We have a reliable report of a Willpower scrapper going AFK in the middle of a Rikti War Zone challenge spawn.

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My DM/Invul is AFK right now in the middle of said spawn while I type this message. I have Siphon Life on auto though. Took a while to find one with three soldiers. Hey, if a willpower gets to go AFK when their defense resistance isn't being tested, I don't have to go AFK with my lack of psy resists being tested.

And to Ryu: That Will in your sig. Is that your only one? You can't base your knowledge on how "teh awesome" willpower is when you pair it with Katana. By the same vein, my DM/invul is insane, regularly tanking for ITF's, but that doesn't make me an expert on how Invul performs by itself.

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Wait when their defense debuff resistance isn't being tested? I think if you went afk in a mob with a ton of defense debuffs, both the WP and the Invuln wouldn't do very well :-p It only takes a few to get the cascade rolling.

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unless the resistances+regen in willpower are enough to keep the incoming dmg at bay.

i try to not build my wp scrappers/brutes/tankers for smash/lethal defense. just the exotics. outside of arachnoids poison claw none of the exotic dmg types debuff defense that i'm aware of - not counting pain in the butt circle of thorn earth caster thingies.

and one cant ignore the fact that as a tier 9 power, SoW > unstoppable

before the change to the end cost of the upgrades, i took hasten on all of my mm's so that i could upgrade them faster at the start of a mission. this left me with no end, even on my io'd out mm's who were approaching 4.0 eps recovery.

with my current mm's, two level 45 end reduction io's in both upgrade powers makes them a non issue - assuming you have stamina. stamina reduces the time between ticks of endurance recovery. even on my traps which uses even less end than ff due to no toggles i pushed stamina off till 35, but i didnt skip it. for ff i always get stamina at 22.

soul extraction can likewise be put off until later. it's great to have the extra pet when it's needed especially when a tier 2 or tier 3 pet dies, but with near 30% defense in the build i proposed there they shouldnt die often. not even the tier 1's vs a +2 boss unless it's a boss with some form of tohit buff - something thankfully villains dont run into as often has heroes.

if you find yourself with end problems due to having to replace pets constantly and having to re-upgrade i would work towards improving their survivability as much as possible and as soon as possible. at 24 when your tier 2 and tier 3 drop down yet another level vs. you you'll be glad for it.

in recent months i've levelled two new mm's - thugs/pain and bots/pain. i didnt power level them (mm's powerlevel themselves). i always built for maximum pet survivability at the low levels and skipped any personal attacks.

the latter

your best defense as ss/fire is a very very strong offense

pop purples for those times you feel you really need the defense.

handclap cant be as effective as fault simply because there would be little reason to ever play sm. tremor pales to foostomp...PALES by a large margin. fault's awesomeness is the justifcation for sm being a high end set.

handclap is fine as is. give it a better stun and use it after a controller roots. bam - ghetto hold.

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IMO, Dual Blades does not work too well with Willpower, mostly because both sets are quite demanding and require you take eight of the nine powers to get the most out of them. What AoE you can get from the set comes fairly late.

Dual Blades works best with Fire, Stone, and (to a lesser extent) Invulnerability. Basically, the more optional powers there are in the primary, the better the synergy with DB.

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not really true. you dont need a lot of recharge to use bf+av combo as your main bread and butter. that leaves open a lot power choices

the best learning mm is going to be necro/dark

you learn the following:

goto
cone positioning
pet positioning
how to CC
the importance of bodyguard

while still being both solo and team viable (personal preference, but i use only the lich on a team and sometimes grave knights. the zombies themselves are more of a liability on a team)

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Bots/traps is perhaps the most versatile thing to play in this game. You have a tool for every situation. Played right, there are very few things that cannot be done. The biggest thing about traps is it tends to require a bit more situational awareness than most sets. You need to know what the situation is before you can apply the right tool.

Perhaps the best tool for your particular team is something to eat the alpha strike. Specifically: seeker drones. There is just something about making the baddies waste thier best attacks on something that explodes in thier faces to debuff and perhaps even stun them.

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seeker drones are our phantom army

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I'd at least consider /Poison too for it's AV killing potential. While /Traps probably does a better job all-around, I don't think you should just write-off /Poison for adding punch to a good team.

That said, StrykerX is perfectly correct. Any well played MM is going to boost your team, so if you have some preference thematically, go with that. I like Bots/Traps in that regard, but whatever seems good to you would be fine.

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only play poison if replacing pets with regularity on normal spawns appeals to you

it prob also has pvp appeal, but i could care less about pvp in this particular mmorpg.

what level?

how it plays at lower level is different from a respec io build.

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masterminds have lost no power from cov launch

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I wonder how folks can make statements like this. I mean, it's quite possible that over two years the design could shift and change in little, undramatic ways with a gradual impact that wouldn't be noticed to anyone who hasn't taken a big hiatus. Clearly the END cost of enchanting one measly zombie has been drastically increased, and that's a much bigger hassle than enchanting them in succession at the start of a mission (I have to do that with the bubbles anyway, so the enchant was just another button to cycle). Seems like a nerf more than a buff, as we're talking a power that could just as well cost zero END without inviting any balance problems, unless not having some END consumption problem to manage is considered unbalancing (and that may well be the devs' PoV).

I'm also wondering if the recharge time of PFF was two minutes last time I played either (I recall being able to give orders through the PFF, so I didn't have a constant need to drop it). I'm darn sure my undead survived battles a lot more easily than they do now--they're getting hit, and the bubbles just ain't mitigating the damage like they used to. Defenses were "rebalanced" at some point. How did that affect FF?

Again, 20 levels with no defeats, now I'm having trouble getting through any mission without turning tail and running to the door and resummoning. The proof's in the pudding for me. I did an AE mission tonight with some CoT. Whenever a mage started throwing fire, it was one-shot city for the undead. I don't understand how making them so soft to fire and lethal is considered workable, because it's kind of hard to categorically avoid those damage types. At least the ninjas have super-reflexes baked in.

You guys probably know a thing or two about that: what types of foes should I be looking for in the twenties? I looked for Mooks, Trolls, and Warriors, but I kept level 20 as the cap. I also got a bunch of missions that auto-level that scale 45-54, which is apparently just an eight-stacked team can roll in and mop up. There's little moderation in what I saw.

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i can make that statement and back it up. i have more 50 mm's than i do of any other at in this game across 4 accounts and have been playing them since cov launched.

the end change on the upgrade powers? nope not seeing it. ok if you are playing a stupidly squishy combination of primary and secondary and think that replacing a pet every 30 seconds is actually normal mastermind playstyle then yes - that would prob be an issue.

but not me. all of my masterminds go for high survivability and high damage. i replace pets very rarely no matter what i'm fighting. also, two end reduction io's or so's in both upgrades - and every build has the extra slots i dont care what your secondary is - eliminates this as a problem entirely.

none of my mm's, including my 50 necro/dark who doesnt have a single io in it - has no issue with the end costs of the upgrades and feels as powerful as it did at launch. the only real nerf we've seen has been to poison trap and it's not a nerf that made a direct impact on the overall at's power

so yes i can make that statement, and back it up handily.

as for ff - at level 20 i would grab some level 20 crafted defense io's for both shields and dispersion bubble. you did take dispersion bubble at 20 right? there's also room in a necro/ff build to have manuevers at this point and still not need stamina. the only time you shoujld be replacing pets at a high clip is if they are outside of your ffg/manuevers range.

something like this is what i would do

Villain Plan by Mids' Villain Designer 1.401
http://www.cohplanner.com/

[u]Click this DataLink to open the build![u]

Level 21 Magic Mastermind
Primary Power Set: Necromancy
Secondary Power Set: Force Field
Power Pool: Teleportation
Power Pool: Leadership
Power Pool: Fitness

Villain Profile:
Level 1: Zombie Horde -- Acc-I(A), Acc-I(3), Dmg-I(5), Dmg-I(7), Dmg-I(9), EndRdx-I(17)
Level 1: Force Bolt -- Acc-I(A)
Level 2: Deflection Shield -- DefBuff-I(A), DefBuff-I(3), DefBuff-I(9)
Level 4: Insulation Shield -- DefBuff-I(A), DefBuff-I(5), DefBuff-I(11)
Level 6: Enchant Undead -- EndRdx-I(A), EndRdx-I(7)
Level 8: Teleport Foe -- Acc-I(A), Acc-I(19)
Level 10: Maneuvers -- DefBuff-I(A), DefBuff-I(11), EndRdx-I(19)
Level 12: Grave Knight -- Acc-I(A), Acc-I(13), Dmg-I(13), Dmg-I(15), Dmg-I(15), EndRdx-I(17)
Level 14: Teleport -- EndRdx-I(A)
Level 16: Swift -- Run-I(A)
Level 18: Health -- Heal-I(A)
Level 20: Dispersion Bubble -- DefBuff-I(A)
Level 22: [Empty]
Level 24: [Empty]
Level 26: [Empty]
Level 28: [Empty]
Level 30: [Empty]
Level 32: [Empty]
Level 35: [Empty]
Level 38: [Empty]
Level 41: [Empty]
Level 44: [Empty]
Level 47: [Empty]
Level 49: [Empty]
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Supremacy



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ytour pets are at ~29% defense to all but psi as long as you keep them within range of manuevers and dispersion bubble. you dont need pff unless you are a 'run to the end and click the glowy' newspaper mission runner.

come next patch you can pick up soul extraction sometime before then and put one extra slot in it, then save up some money for the recharge pet unique +5% defense and the normal pet unique +5% defense to give all of your pets ~39% defense to all but psi.

masterminds have lost no power from cov launch

if anything they've gained astronomical amounts with the invention system.

av's will always have ptod. without it they are trivial to any team with a dom or controller. this was an issue the first few months of this game where people THOUGHT that the powerhouses were scrappers and blasters, but the reality of the situtaion was controllers put them all to shame because they could hold all the av's and gm's they ran into and then proceed to solo them - with no danger of dying. that's a game balance issue.

concepts are one thing. i'm sure there's people out there who make a cahracter with nothing but power pool powers for concept reasons. doesnt mean it's a good idea for the game.

if they are too tough as an av, dial down your difficulty. TF's are easy enough as is for coordinated groups. they dont need to be any easier.

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it would have to have drawbacks for the extra damage - if you want to hit close to th elevel of a brute or scrapper, then you get scrapper/brute level defense to balance it out. so it would need -20% defense to all and -30% all resists to compensate.

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First, there's where the double standard comes in that I'm always talking about.

Brutes and Scrappers can click their defensive Tier 9 and not worry about faceplanting, just like a Tanker, but they don't see an offensive penalty for temporarily increasing their survivability. So why should a Tanker see a survivability penalty for temporarily increasing their offense?

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sure you can have that. it can be a long recharge clicky like dom, but can never be made perma.

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Second, that's more or less what my inherent proposal for Tankers was.


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your tanker would still have it's tier 9 if it chooses, which would completely bypass said drawbacks for most primaries. you cant use scrapper or brute tier 9's and then ignore the tier 9's for tankers.

if you want the extra damage, you have to give up some defense. there is a reason why the scrapper caps were lowered from 90% like tanks to 75%. scrappers used to be able to cap smash/lethal resists in invuln. but this is an mmorpg and there has to be a class balance.

heck it may even need a regeneration penalty, because with said proposed penalties a willpower tanker would be insane after popping it and SoW

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All I can say is prove it. I simply dont make invuls anymore because they cant take the same kind of beating a WP can overtime. Outside of Unstoppable invulnerability for scrappers sucks. WP was the smoothest ride to level 50 I have ever had with any toon. Invul not much so. Basically if it isnt smashing lethal you pretty much die or get overwhelmed. With IOs that could be different but WP with IOs is godly so it still comes out a head.

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(This is from the perspective of an IO'd build that concentrates on defense.)

My Invuln at 48 already has a base 35% def in all except Psi. By the time I finish the build I expect to have, with one enemy in range, around 40% in F/C/E/N and around 35% in S/L. My S/L resist is ~70% and my exotics are ~23%. The only thing I lack is a self heal; I decided early that non-Inspiration play was not a goal for this particular character and went with Hasten instead. (I plan on popping greens.)

If I ever obtained a PvP IO I could jump to ~38/43/43 defense.

With that much base defense (one mob in range) it means I am capping my defense at 3 or 4 mobs. Against S/L I am virtually unkillable against anything short of an AV, and have no issue tanking AE Dual Blade Lt. ambush missions where spawns can get as high as 20-30 level 52 Lt custom mobs. I am not yet Stamina efficient enough to go after big game; I simply haven't obtained the Numina and Miracle Uniques for that particular character.

I also cap out Hit Points with Dull Pain. It has a 4 second downtime which I can probably shore up. That jacks my regen rate. In a whole map full of custom Lts. tanking 20 52s at a time I needed to pop a green inspiration only twice when they got lucky with combos, and I certainly could have simply jumped out of the mob and hit Shockwave instead.

If my primary was Dark and I could use Siphon Life the build would probably be as tough as my /Shield, significantly better against S/L, slightly better against F/C/E/N due to higher health leading to better regen and Siphon heal, and significantly worse against Psi. That does leave Shields with much better damage, but it has that advantage over every secondary.

Plus I'm not sure we want to start saying secondaries are insufficient because they aren't as good as /Shield.

That also leaves my Invuln significantly better most of the time than my SR, with the Psi hole being matched by "untyped" damage. The much higher hit point total means Invul gets more bang out of regen and heals and survives alpha strikes from most mobs better. Also, against custom EBs my SR tends to get taken out by Build Up cycles if I am slow. My Invul has the resistance and higher health to suck those up; against S/L I don't even think I'd have to interrupt my attacks.

I used to be very down on Invuln, but seeing my high performance Invuln operate I am a believer. My SG mate had the same crappy experience with Invuln and was going to reroll until he saw me on that mission; he simply didn't build towards typed defense. If I dropped Hasten and went with Aid Self I would be significantly more survivable most of the time over my SR. I might have to watch out during the Dull Pain down times against exotic damage types.

Invuln *does* require a bit of thought because you do have to herd a bit to cap defense. It means against AVs you will want to keep some minions around, but to anyone used to doing that for /Shields AAO it really isn't a hardship.

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Defense is the name of the game in regard to top level survivability. Once you softcap, everything else is gravy, and you measure the sets against each sets gravy level at that point. Once wp and inv are near or at softcap, they are pretty even imo. Leveling up and not soft-capped however, I would give the advantage to wp thanks in large part to quick recovery and better overall survivability, especially on teams.

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not quite. willpower still has the added layer of superior regeneration

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It has good resistance to all power types

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I strongly disagree with this statement. WP has paper thin resistances to exotics (f/c/e/ne), 5.625% base and 8.775% fully slotted. It can be supplemented with SoW up to 23.4% - which is what Invuln can have all the time.

That's not to say that WP is weak to the exotics since it has a healthy dose of def.

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it makes up for this though by getting decent levels of defense just from the set to those same exotic sets, and one cant ignore the generous amounts of psi resists. since none of the exotics debuff said defense except arachnoids poison claws it takes very little to build up a decent amount of defense to the exotics which when combined with the regen makes them less of a problem for wp than for invuln.

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Question for the Shield Tankers out there ... what are your thoughts on Hover + CJ?

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depends on the secondary. you cant footstomp or fault or tremor while hovering. there are probably other powers you cant use.

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Superman "stepping it up" as you say when the fight gets tougher could easily be signaled by a fury bar. Whether that bar equals anger or not is completely up to the individual behind the keyboard.

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Except the concept in question isn't a bar filling up with the character's damage slowly ramping up and increasing due to outside stimuli. Like for example, Stong Guy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Guy ) absorbing more and more kinetic energy.

The concept is a character who's no longer holding back. There is no ramping up period and it's a deliberate decision to cut loose. That is quite different than Fury in both how it would be executed mechanically and the core concept.


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sure you can have that. it can be a long recharge clicky like dom, but can never be made perma.

it would have to have drawbacks for the extra damage - if you want to hit close to th elevel of a brute or scrapper, then you get scrapper/brute level defense to balance it out. so it would need -20% defense to all and -30% all resists to compensate.

wow why is everyone harping on wonderwoman?

in the dc universe, she is second only to superman in raw power.

and jb what you are proposing is no different than a fury bar. it can be called something else, but it's still a fury bar. if tankers get that, NOBODY would ever play scrappers or brutes ever again unless the base dmg on all tanker abilities was nuked to compensate, and if their dmg isnt nuked then their defenses will need to be. it's called balance. you cant have this level of survivability and have any more damage than the AT currently has.

a tanker at the damage cap can do really good aoe damage right now with most secondaries.

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Because these devs didn't make the claim you're attributing to them. And the one dev that made the claim did so quite a few years ago, proceeded to increase Tanker damage by a sizable amount, then left the project around the same time many of the current devs came on to the project.

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I wasn't around when they buffed Tanker damage. Can you give me a comparison of when KoB was unchanged then buffed? Because I think it would be interesting for me to see the damage on it before and after.

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tankers were insane. invuln was deservedly nerfed into the ground not long after issue 4. an invuln/fire tanker should never, ever be able to solo a respec trial set for 8 people on invincible.

you guys should play a brute i think. forget the concepts and copying comic books. play a brute. sadly they made villains into pseudo-heroes if you follow the storylines. a brute is as close to a working version of what JB whines for you'll get in these games.

in order for any mmorpg to be anything but a solo grindfest, you need content that has to be completed in a group. for this - you need an assortment of classes that dont all perform the exact same functions. the trifecta of tank-healer-dps has worked for over 30 years of MUD's and MMORPG's and any attempt by companies to do something new has failed to date - the game became an anti-social solo fest or it's a korean grinder where yo ucontrol three chars at the same time.

the original system of picking whatever powers you wanted wasnt going to work. they knew this. i mean just look at how it's affected the AE. cryptic knew that for longevity of the game they were going to have to have some basics of class design. after all, these games are based on MUD's, most of which were based on DIKU which was based mostly on dungeons and dragons rulesets. they needed tanks, they need healers or buffers, and they needed dps'ers.

i'm sure CO will be a good game, but it remains to be seen if everyone and their mother isnt using the exact. same. powersets a month after launch because with the open endedness of the game someone somewhere will find some obscenely overpowered combination of powers - and every one will play them. READ: burn tankers issue 0-4

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yeah. the other set you mention - mostly SM - doesnt have rage and tremor PALES to footstomp in that if you actually use tremor, you lose fury. nearly three and a half seconds to fire it off, about the same animation time as shadow maul.

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And even without rage, SM has been shown to outdamage SS. And yeah, I'd agree footstomp is better than fault, but sm has another power for aoe dmg mitigation, SS doesn't, so I would hope SS's one aoe power was better, since it's using the other power just to keep up with SM's damage output while taking on negatives (end crash, minus def and 10 seconds of impotence) that SM doesn't have to deal with at all.

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um..i said tremor...not fault


dont touch my fault

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i have a feeling the side affect of having taunt affects, higher hp and the tanker hp and resist caps on brutes was they were designed to be a villain groups meat shields when a meat shield was needed.

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Lies!!

They did it for me. When I first started playing was always upset that I couldn't build IMO a "superman-like" guy. Tanks had the survivability lvl of supes.. but to me scrappers the DPS ability.
So no, they were NOT made to be meat shields if needed... I made a Christmas wish

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heh true. although i will say that my issue 4 invuln/fire tanker was a small god. herd up an entire map AND kill it quick? crazy stuff. i solo'd the terra volta respec trial at level 33 as that tanker while the rest of the team just watched.

it's probably a good thing they didnt give consume to brutes.