Rossum

I think the Big Red Ball should be a zone-specific temp power. If you get hit by the Big Red Ball (it's auto-hit), then you get the big red ball. If you leave the zone (either by zoning or going into a mish), you lose the power. If nobody has the power, the next person to enter the zone gets the power. They get the power by being hit with the big red ball from a civillian.

The keybind thing doesn't seem that hard.

Say you're bots and you want your protector bots to allways have your back (since you havn't really slotted them for damage anyway)

/macro petcom_all attack aggressive$$petcom_pow prot follow defensive

Bam! Your protector bots make one attack each (probably a photon grenade or seeker drones), then start body-guarding you, and when another one of your bots takes a hit, then your protector bots will start contributing more to combat.

Heck, if you just use the macros it gave you when you started, just modifying them to be petcom_all instead of petcom_pow, just add the second part ($$petcom_pow prot def follow) to all of the macros, and there ya go.

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Who owns that damage, and how is it generated. For instance if the damage kills a henchman, will the balance fall on other henchmen or the MM? Do the henchmen receive the damage from an entity owned by the MM, so that when the MM is confused it might not work?

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It seems to me that bodyguard is taken into account when damage is calculated. Asking if the other henchman/the mastermind "take up the slack" when a henchie dies is like asking where the extra damage goes when you get killed by an attack that does more damage than you have hit points.

Now with numbers! For easy numbers, we'll say there are 2 pets within range (50%/25%/25%). The mastermind gets targeted with an attack that does 400 damage.

Because of bodyguard, this is equivalent to a funkey AoE that hits the mastermind for 200 damage, and each pet with 100 damage each.

Even if one of the pets only has 2 hit points left, he is still allocated 100 damage. That 100 damage doesn't (or shouldn't) jump ship and hit someone else instead.

The real question will be whether the damage vector remains the same (i.e. if you get tagged with smashing damage, is the bodyguard damage smashing or untyped?)

What would be even nicer is if the the to hit formulas were also used to see if the pet took damage in the first place. This would address the /Forcefield and the Ninja/ issue, since the pet could have a higher defense than the mastermind, so an attack that hit the mastermind might not hit the pet. This would mean that the delivery and damage vectors would need to be carried over. For fairness sake, I would say the "attack roll" value would be the same for the initial hit on the mastermind as the one on the pets. That way, unless there was some +Def going on, the pets would be hit by the attack that hit the mastermind everytime, since the pet's level is always at most the masterminds level.

Considering I can get my pets at around +45% defense, but I can only get me to around +15% defense, I could see alot of attacks that would have hit me miss my pets.