Kenji_Naginata

This is good advice. imho. Debuff effects also carry relatively high threat values, and your proximity to the enemy also affects threat so if you have a secondary with strong AoE/PBAoE debuffs like DM or Time they're likely to make better use of it than a mostly buffing/healing set.

This isn't my first time to the rodeo either, and I've been playing Mastermind (with custom keybinds) since COV launch. Passive > Goto > Bodyguard/Attack spam works most of the time, but it's a band-aid fix on a much larger underlying problem. As The_Spad_EU pointed out, Pet AI is virtually non-existant. They simply rotate their attacks and stand wherever they feel like standing to accomplish this.

Pet AI routines are essentialy a series of scripted conditions. "If attack A is available, use attack A. Else, use Attack B" or "If standing in a fire patch, flail around in random directions and run six rooms away to aggro everything on the map." I don't feel it would be difficult or unreasonable to change the pet AI script to behave depending on 'ranged' or 'melee' preference (they're already supposed to do this to a degree, and the behaviour can be clearly seen in enemy AI.)

Melee preference would simply act as it currently does now: fire off whatever ranged attack they have and then close the gap to cycle their melee attacks. Fix the "randomly switch targets from the specifically designated enemy to a different one six rooms away" problem and this is already pretty workable.

The fix for ranged pets is, on paper, as simple as changing the condition to: "If attack A is available use attack A. Else, if enemy is in melee range, use Attack B. Else, wait 1 second until attack A is available."

This is obviously an overly simplified example, but it would fix ranged AI to the point of being usable with sets that incorporate knockback (like Bots/FF, or god forbid, storm summoning or teaming.) As it stands now, they end up losing more DPS from constantly running around putting themselves in danger than from simply ignoring their melee attack to begin with.

You may feel that a team asking for a specific AT or type of play-style is "unnecessary," but that hardly makes someone delusional for doing so.

It's all a question of context. What does your group want to do? My friends and I are "conceptualists." We do not play a build or specific team combination because they're the most efficient, we play them because they interest us. That having been said, we don't particularly like to die repeatedly and I think it's fair to say that's true for most people. As such, we try to make sure the basic essentials of team play are covered, unless we are going out of our way to challenge ourselves by placing arbitrary limitations on our team such as the "all one AT" scenario you described above.

Your line of thinking is a two-way street. You may think it "delusional" for us to want at least one "support" AT capable of buffing, healing or debuffing, for example, but if we know what kind of challenges we want to go up against and are looking for a certain AT or playstyle to round out our groups strengths, who are you to assume that we are incorrect in knowing what we want? If that is what's fun to us, then we are no more delusional than you are for choosing to roll a fire tanker with no fire sword attacks because they don't fit your character concept.

Put simply, if the benefits that they are granting to their teammates exceed the individual contribution they would have brought on their own, then yes, they are. This is what is commonly known as a force multiplier.

[Edit:]

And to the adoring fan hiding in the shadows: stick to not randomly repping people down if you have absolutely nothing useful to contribute to the conversation. I have tried to post respectful, thought-out responses to my feelings on this topic. If you disagree with what I have to say, join the conversation and explain why. Resorting to randomly rating people down for rationally defending their opinions is petty and childish.

I understand and accept that not everyone plays the same way that I do, and that is why I make every possible effort to ensure that they are actually a good match for the team (and visa versa) before sending an invite. Continuing the example, If you want to play a force field character that doesn't have any defense buffs, you are within your rights to do so. I am not going to tell you that you're "doing it wrong." However, not having these powers excludes you from being able to fill the role I asked for.

Sometimes a warm body that isn't sitting at the door is all I want or need. In that case, you are welcome to bring whatever character you think is fun to play. However, if I ask if you can fill a specific roll and you're not capable of doing so, you're going to get passed over. It isn't a question of whether or not you're "good enough" to play with us, which is why I get annoyed when I see names like "build-nazi" or "elitist" get thrown around, it's a simple matter of you not having what we're looking for. It's no different from a scrapper asking to join a team and getting turned down because they're looking for a defender.

That is neither what I said nor the message that I was trying to convey.

Additionally, your argument makes the flawed assumption that a person kicked off the team for "making everyone do more work" isn't actually making the team more difficult for everyone. Your justification here seems to be that if you kick such a person, you'd have to cover their job against the same number of enemies with fewer teammates, so you're not really saving yourself any work. Sadly, this is often not the case. That person may be putting the entire team's safety in jeopardy or forcing them to slow down in or order to accommodate their "unconventional" playing style. Even if it didn't result in actually making anyone's job harder, your team would be receiving better rewards for doing the same content with one less person to take a cut of the rewards.

Truthfully, I can't recall the exact number of people I've kicked from my team in years of playing, but I'm pretty sure that it's in the single digits. There is a very simple reason for this: if I ask someone to join my team, I am very clear about what we need and what is expected of them, and this changes contextually depending on what kind of content we're doing. By avoiding a misunderstanding or conflicting goals in the first place, this rarely happens.

If I send a tell to a FF character saying "We're looking for party support and extra damage," I expect them to have and use basic powers like their shield buffs. If they don't, I will ask them why. Perhaps they were on a solo build earlier and forgot to change, or perhaps they're a new player and don't know what their powers do. Most of the time, there has simply been a breakdown in communication and this player has not taken "necessary" powers because of conceptual reasons or because they simply don't feel like using them. In this case, they will politely be asked to find another group. I do not hold their play-style decision against them, but it is not my group's responsibility to pander to them, either.

In extreme cases, there isn't a reasonable explanation, and they knew they were expected to use these powers and chose to join anyway, even though they had no intention of using them. This is rare and I've only seen this happen a few times. At this point, I frankly no longer care what they want as a player, as their $15 a month is not more important than anyone else's. They will be kicked from the team and provided with a reason why.

As a more practical example, I teamed with a controller recently that would run off on his own into entire spawns start pulling them indiscriminately. Not sleeping or locking them down: pulling them. It didn't matter if we were already at our limits fighting things; he would diligently repeat this behavior for almost every group we encountered and then run back with dangerously low health... on a timed task-force run with limited defeats. It quickly got to the point where he put everyone else in danger and caused them to stop having fun because they were too busy constantly cleaning up after him. Several of my teammates actually said things to this effect. Since we were relatively close to the end, we simply asked him to stop, toughed it out, and then made a note not to play with him again.

I feel that this is a reasonable, balanced approach to the situation and it has worked for me for years, both in this game and elsewhere.