ShadowsBetween

Errr... I don't have a thugs MM with Leadership, so I can't check. But I thought that the player's and the thugs' Leadership auras *do* stack. For the Thugs, at least. (They won't stack for the player character, you'll only have the benefit from your own auras, but the pets will get the stacked benefit of all three.)

Well, assuming I ever see a purple, I'll probably sell it if the prices stay as insane as they are. Why? Because I've never gotten good enough at the market to reliably buy them. Any that I get will be one lone piece of a set I'll never finish. Frankly, I'd rather have the inf to turn into prestige so that I can actually reach the point of having a functional base. (The base is fun, if frustrating, to mess around with, and benefits all my characters. A single purple drop currently isn't even a benefit to the character that has it, because I'll never complete the set.)

The Ember Demon has a fairly powerful heal that it happily uses on the other demons. I don't think it can target itself, but it seems to be on a faster timer than the Protector Bots' Repair, so it does a better job of keeping the little demons going. I've found that with the Demon/Pain I was testing, just the aura heal and occasionally tossing the Ember a few healing inspirations was more than sufficient to keep all of them at full health.

And yes, I wish the personal attacks for any other MM set were anywhere near as useful as the whip attacks. (I tend to build MMs with personal attacks anyway, but that's more due to my bludgeoning insistence against being told what to do, especially in a game. I fully admit that a Tankermind with provoke and all the leadership powers is probably more efficient, I just don't want to play one.)

I've been wandering through Cimerora and been invited to ITF pick-up teams with both my Necromancy/Dark and Bots/Forcefield Masterminds, and never been given "special" instructions regarding the pets. The *only* time I've ever had anyone say anything was with my Plant/Thermal controller, when I was told not to use Carrion Creepers.

I thought they changed that, and removed the time limit. Of course, they are about to totally change the server-side of the market, along with switching to an (ugly) new interface, which is almost certainly going to cause all kinds of havoc with the market.

I can't imagine it was a very new one, since that is a system that would directly punish anything like a support class for actually doing their job.

I've seen something similar, but only rarely. In one team I joined, one of the Blasters started freaking out when he realized that the controllers were targeting through him. (To be fair, it was the only way to keep him alive - he was one of the "Let's start the attack by hitting an uncontrolled spawn with my biggest AoEWHYAMIDEAD?" clan of Blasters.) He was absolutely certain that the Controllers attacks were drawing aggro to his character. The controllers stopped targeting him after he pitched a fit, and then he started raging that he was dead five seconds into every battle. Frankly, no one was that upset when he swore to put everyone on /ignore and finally ragequit the team.

The team leader didn't believe in kicking people who weren't actively getting other players killed. After the Blaster got annihilated by hitting eight players' worth of Nemesis goons with Fireball, everyone else just made it a point not to be standing next to him if we could see NPCs.

Except the "other sets" are also shared directly with Corruptors. And the MM version of Thermal and Pain are comparable to the Corruptor version - they heal for slightly less, and the debuffs are sllightly weaker. Exactly what would be expected given the default AT modifiers. Dark Miasma is shared with Corruptors, including the un-nerfed Healing Shadow. The comparison is that, of the power sets that are shared by both ATs, only Dark Miasma is "balanced" like this.

I have Jump Kick on one of my Brutes. Of course, part of the reason is that it's a Fire/Fire Brute, and I didn't want any of the swords or Fire Breath for thematic reasons. (So for the min/maxers, the character is clearly a cripple already.) I decided to try Super Jump anyway as a travel power, along with Combat Jumping and eventually Acrobatics once I have room for it. Jump Kick gave me another attack without having to add another pool. And honestly, I do not care for the Toughness pool at all. Of course, since I'm only taking two pools on that character (Leaping and Fitness) there's really no functional reason I couldn't drop Jump Kick and replace it with Air Superiority. But Jump Kick seems to work well enough, and it fits the character.

Exactly what I do on a team tends to vary - I'll adapt to what the team is doing as best I can. However, I don't build Tankerminds, and I don't play healers. Even my Controllers focus mostly on defeating the enemy, not healing. If you *want* to build a MM as a healer, it's possible. But with the base modifiers, if being a team support character is your main goal, you'd probably be better off making a Corruptor.

Have I ever been kicked from a team for having "wasted" power slots by not taking every heal and rez available? Yes. But only by build-nazis, and other power-tripping jerks who think that joining a team in a game is some kind of commitment or career. Most of the time, the only difference their kicking me made is that I left the team and one-starred the leader in the middle of the mission, rather than after it was finished.

Redside here. I've tried Tankers and Defenders repeatedly, and I just can't stand them. I know some people can do amazing things with those ATs, especially at high levels, but I frankly can't "hang in there" long enough to get to a point where it doesn't feel like I'm playing in extreme slow motion with them. (It doesn't help that I mostly solo. Yes, it's possible to build Defenders and Tankers that can solo. It's still much, much easier to build Brutes and Corrupters that can do the same thing, at least for me.)

Apparently, one workaround that some people have had some success with, is to simply wait until all the pets/hostages/rescued NPCs catch up to you and stop moving before you use the elevator. I've had pretty good luck with this so far. The issue, as near as anyone can figure out, is that if you use the elevator when the pets are still trying to catch up, they get "stuck" thinking your location is at the first set of elevator doors. You move, and the game teleports them to your location. However, they're still trying to reach the first elevator, which is now *way* over there. So they immediately run back to it to catch up to your last "known" position.

*Edit* There is also the bug that when you actually zone, pets sometimes seem to lose their ownership - you'll have Thugs or zombies following you that have a blue ally box, but that don't seem to be tagged as player pets. In this case, hitting them with a targeted power usually resets them. As near as I can tell, hitting them with a targeted power (heal, shield, whatever, as long as it's not AoE and can hit an ally) forces them to check to see if they are a valid Ally target or not. Doing so seems to force a reset on their ownership flag. Alternatively, you can use a command to dismiss *all* your pets, and then resummon them. Going into combat will also sometimes reset them, since it appears that getting hit with an attack forces the same check to verify they are a valid target.

On low level characters, I have dual-boxed Masterminds. It depends on what the other character is, and what sets you have. I tend to pair them up with a non-MM that I actually control. This probably isn't the "best" setup, but it seems to work to some degree.

Enter the mission, summon MM pets.
Apply MM upgrades and long-lasting buffs.
Target the other character, set a long range attack on Auto. (If you hate the personal attacks, anything that can be set to auto and has range will work.) Also activate Follow.
Switch to the other character.

When I approach a group of enemies, I sweep the mouse across to find a suitable target. As soon as I click on them, the MM fires off their power, and the NPCs retaliate by attacking the MM. This gets the pets involved in the fight without having to leave them on Aggressive. I'm then free to do whatever it is that the "playable" character normally does, with a bit of extra help from the MM and the pets. This isn't an ideal method for maximum XP - the MM is pretty much just following me around, and isn't actively doing much other than taking the odd alpha strike. Since Follow includes no pathfinding AI, it also means I have to make sure they don't get stuck.

Generally though, I don't play this way as a standard method of leveling - I tend to use it to make sure that all my characters have all the Mayhem badges up through about level 25, since it's actually not that hard to skip them accidentally. (Between Patrol XP and the overall XP boost for everything below level 20.) I'll also do this if there's a particular badge/unlockable costume piece that I really want on a given character. (For example, I have a somewhat Grim Reaper looking Axe/Dark Armor brute, and the Soul Taker badge title seemed fitting. I have another Axe/Shield character for whom I would really like to get the Ralaruu weapons.)

I'm seeing nothing to indicate that it is the video drivers causing the problem with Alt+Tab. The person who mentioned that in the first thread has an ATI card. Mine is an NVidia.

*Edit* Chad, thank you for the suggestion. I do have the shortcut setup with the "maxinactive FPS" command, though I currently have it set to five rather than one.

I did see that suggestion, and I did try it. The Windows key *does* switch from one client to the other, but it does so in a slow, clunky way. With Alt+Tab (when it was working properly,) I could make one keypress and be in the other client. With the Windows key, both clients switch to background mode, which I have set to 5 frames per second. I then have to mouse down and click on the taskbar icon for the game. The system then has to switch back from "Desktop" mode to the game, which takes another few seconds.

And I really, really don't want to run the game in Windowed mode. As in, it's not an option I will even pretend to consider seriously. I appreciate the suggestion, but I don't like the way it looks, I don't like the way it runs. My monitor is *not* a huge, high resolution widescreen, so to run two copies of the game side-by-side would require that I set them to display resolutions of less than 800 X 600. That would require moving all the interface panels around, since the game does not seem to save them for a particular resolution. When I'm *not* dual boxing, I'd then have to move everything around again to play fullscreen at a normal resolution.

At Kiken's suggestion, I have reposted this question in the Tech forum. I'd really prefer to find a solution that works with fullscreen though - I don't like windowed mode for a number of reasons. As for graphics card and driver, I've got an NVidea GTS 250 with the 196.21 drivers, which seem to be fairly stable for everything I'm currently running. Several of the recent NVidia driver releases have had what could kindly be described as serious issues, so I don't intend to update the video drivers unless it's absolutely necessary.