ShadowsBetween

And email spammers often point out that people getting the spam "just need to hit delete." The reason all of my characters are hidden from searches is that not responding DOES NOT WORK. If I don't reply, I usually get the invite again. (Since I clearly must have clicked Decline by mistake.) But hey, if you can't see how it's rude, then I don't need to explain why I tend to use /ignore rather than /reply on people who do that to me, either.

Protector bots being the obvious example here - they have no melee attack at any level, not even Brawl. And yet they're still running into melee range of the targets. There seems to be a hard-coded script running, probably meant to benefit the demon pets. (Attack three times, then run to melee range.) This is combining with the slightly wonky way that pets choose targets to begin with, and causing pets to go chasing off after enemies on the far side of the room. (Even more so than they did before, I mean.)

Then there's the fact that giving a pet the Follow command seems to suppress their AI entirely for about five seconds. That's probably intentional, to keep the pets from instantly gaining aggro again. But between standing around after a Follow command, and the time they waste trying to run to melee, they're spending a lot of the fight... not fighting. I really hope the devs are devoting some effort to fixing it.

For Live characters, no. That's the entire point behind not adding Inherent Fitness to any character that currently has the pool version - the game will not automatically remove the pool version until you deliberately respec. The slots getting deleted on Test happened because they basically deleted the original Inherent Fitness powers, and added a new set that is coded in a different way.

There is often a pointer in your compass that will lead you to the next door or contact. However, I have noticed that some of the Praetorian missions don't have this, or it doesn't seem to work properly. If that is the case, you'll just have to read the mission briefing and see if you can puzzle it out. You can also bring up your map - in some cases the outdoor object that you need to click on (the roses for Cleopatra, for example) will have markers on the map, even though you don't get an objective pointer in your compass.


Enhancements don't stack. You can combine them. I think you might be seeing the level tag (Damage enhancement, level 5) as a quantity. Enhancements have a specific level. For the storebought ones, this is the level where they will be at "standard" effectiveness. If you are lower than that level, they will be slightly stronger than normal. If you are above that level, they get progressively weaker, and eventually stop doing anything. That's where combining comes in - combining two of the same enhancement will add one level to whichever is stronger. IE, adding a level 10 enhancement to a level 7 will give you a 10+, which is effectively a level 11 enhancement. There are limits to this. You can't increase one by more than two levels, so a 10 could become 10++, or level 12, but not 13. You simply can't combine them past that point. Also, you can't push one more than three levels higher than yourself. At level 7, you can use level 10 enhancements. Since they're already three levels higher than you are, they'll simply replace anything you try to combine them with. You can increase them to 10+ once you are level 8, however. And if you're level 13, you could combine a level 10++ with a level 15 to get a 15+. (Which might sound complicated, but you're essentially just adding one level to the stronger enhancement, which is the level 15.) There are other complications, like Dual and Single Origin enhancments, and Invention Enhancements, but those can all be safely ignored until later, and most have tutorials in the game that at least attempt to explain what's going on.

Masterminds get three different pet powers, which each summon a different number of pets. And the number increases as you go up in levels. The basic pet power is available at character creation, and eventually summons up to three pets. At level 1-5, you get one pet that is equal to you in level. At level 6-17, you get two pets that are one level lower than you. At level 18 and up, you get three pets that are two levels lower than you. The second pet power summons up to two pets, and becomes available from level 12. The third power summons only a single pet, and does not unlock until level 26. However, the pet powers can be enhanced, and this will improve all the abilities used by the pets.

You also gain two powers that exist solely to make your pets stronger. These powers are area of effect, and usually only need to be used once each after all your pets are summoned. (IE, summon all six of your minions, then apply both of the upgrade powers.) If a minion dies, the replacement does not have the upgrades applied. Because the upgrades have their endurance cost balanced against all six pets, some people choose not to upgrade the replacement minions until more than one will be affected. At the very least, it might not be a good idea to upgrade them in the middle of combat if you're running low on endurance, since this could disable your ability to use your other powers.

The Mastermind pets overall are rather complicated, and it's probably a good idea to check the Mastermind guides for more details. I happen to like Masterminds, but they aren't really an ideal starting AT, since you're adding minion control on top of everything else you're trying to learn. On the other hand, if you can figure out Masterminds, most other classes will probably seem simply by comparison. Just be aware that your pets will at least occasionally do everything in their power to get you killed. And that some players dislike Masterminds due to past experiences with ill-behaved pets. (The two main complaints are that pets will run away and find something large and toothy, and kick in in the shins for you. And that pets have a nasty tendency to block doors. Both situations can be largely avoided if you just pay attention to what your minions are doing.)

Also, just to add to the confusion, some of the Mastermind secondary sets give you "sort of" or "sometimes" pets. These are things that look like pets, and act like pets, but you can't actually order them around. Some of them will follow you, some stay where they're put, and most of them only last a certain amount of time. Some of the main sets *also* have such extra pets. Necromancers, for example, can convert a defeated minion into a ghost, which will follow them around. /Dark Miasma Masterminds can also summon a shadow pet eventually. Demon summoners can summon squads of tiny demons made of living flame, Thugs can summon a gang of street punks, and /Traps users have a number of gadgets that float, zap, shield, and explode their way across the map. Again, the guides section will probably be the fastest way to figure things out. At the very least, be sure to read the descriptions of all the available powers when you make a character. (When you make a new character, or select a new power, you can hold your mouse over a power to see a basic description of what it does, even if your character isn't allowed to actually use that power yet.)

It's a bit more complicated than that. The PPD are an Evil Supervillain police force. As such, the different departments are encouraged to fight with each other, since in evil villain logic this weeds out the stupid and the incompetent. Also, the "normal" PPD officers deeply resent Powers Division (that's you) because Powers types are all showboats with fancy super powers, and everyone else had to *work* to get the job.

The Resistance shoot at you because (as far as the average goon knows) you're a cop, and therefore the enemy. Even if you're not. See, the people in charge don't go around announcing that you're actually a traitor working for the Resistance. That way all the spies can't blow your cover by turning you in the first chance they get. And it makes your cover more authentic. And both the PPD and the Resistance are willing to sacrifice common soldiers to get the job done, even if that means ordering their super-powered allies to mow down their own people.

Welcome to the game, and enjoy your stay.

Really? I did not know that. Do the other healer pets (Medic and Protector bots) work the same way? And how did you find this out?

I'm not sure it's that big a deal. After a certain point, further upgrades to the base start costing millions of prestige. Even the mid-tier items are mostly in the 500,000 range. For the time and effort you'd need to "game" the system for enough to get the largest base and biggest items, you'd probably be better off grinding Purple merits. Sell the results, convert your billions into Prestige. Plus the character doing the grinding there is higher level, and is earning large amounts of Prestige just for running missions in the first place.

The pets dying when dismissed is new, and seems to affect everything but robots and demons. At one point, Thugs and Mercs would run "off the page" and fade out, zombies would collapse and vanish in a spray of bones and darkness, and the Ninjas would hurl down smoke bombs and "ninja vanish." Now, they mostly just keel over dead. Including a short ragdoll and a persistent corpse, and the "Aaughh!" defeated sound effect. Robots do still fly away with their rocket boots, and the demons get dragged back into the abyss, but all the other pets just drop dead.

The random appearance changes when zoning/summoning is an attempt to add a little variety. Since we can't currently choose their appearance, they added that little bit of code so that Masterminds wouldn't be standing in a sea of obvious clones. However, there is again a relatively recent glitch. If you zone with your pets, the ones with specific types can end up with the wrong names. IE, your Arsonist and generic thugs might swap names. This is only really an issue for the sets where the pets are actually different - bots, zombies, and ninjas aren't visibly affected, because all the pets within a tier are identical. The only workaround I know of is to be sure to dismiss the pets before you zone.

The deranged AI of some of the pets is a long-standing flaw in their scripting, and fixing it might not be possible. However, I'd love it if they removed melee attacks entirely from the Arsonist and Medic (replace Brawl with *any* equally weak ranged attack, please.) But that would only help if they fixed the "I must PUNCH you!" glitch, which is most visible with Protector bots. If all their ranged attacks are on cooldown, Protectors will close to melee range. Except, they have no melee attacks, at all.

There are no female pets because some players are idiots. I don't have a link to the post, but supposedly a Dev has stated that female pets will never happen, because "someone would make a pimp character." The fact that people do exactly the same thing with the male pets (thugs enslaved by a female dominatrix pops up a lot) seems to be irrelevant. I'd guess you can blame the ESRB for this one. As is, we're probably lucky to have a lot of female character costumes - I know of at least one game where the ESRB forced the developer to *remove* costume options in an expansion, or face being upgraded to a Mature rating. And most of the "censored" costumes were far less revealing that a lot of the ones we get.

As I said, I know almost nothing about the "defensive" powersets. Most of the characters I actually play are Controllers, Masterminds, and Dominators. I've tried looking through some of the guides, but quite a few of them are out of date, or only describe the defensive powers in relation to the melee powers. (IE, this power is redundant with Dark Melee, or power X and power Y work to cancel each other out, so don't take Y.)

As I said, I have a particular costume/powerset/backstory picked out. In the past, I've simply made the character despite not having a decent name, and then changed it later. The problem is, that of the money I've spent on Store items, I've spent more on name changes than on new character slots. So I'm not allowing myself to do that anymore. (Especially since some of the most troublesome characters actually ended up getting renamed several times.) In most any other MMO, it wouldn't matter - aliens and elves can both do just fine with a random "fantasy" name like Veralee.