Warkupo

Hasten is a very good power and sometimes a cornerstone of a build *if* that build is designed to run and utilize Hasten well. However, blind application of the power is not only not always beneficial, but often has a negative effect on your overall performance.

The most basic and obvious example is the mid-level melee combatant who has Hasten on Auto-Cast and blows through his attack chain so quickly that he's too winded to fight the next. Sure he go through 1 or 2 spawns very quickly, but the time he spends resting is going to give the other non-hasten melee time to catch up. Worse, Hasten catches you low on endurance, shuts down all your toggles, and gives the boss a nice opportunity to remind you what the hospital looks like.

That said, I'm definitely not promoting the idea that Hasten is always *bad* either, even if it's going to bottom out your endurance. For example, Controllers and similar AT's that have very powerful, long recast powers will greatly benefit from popping Hasten after their use to bring them back faster. A melee combatant in a desperate situation may prefer to pop Hasten and quickly down an opponent to running back from the hospital with a fresh tray of inspirations.

The point I'm trying to make is that Hasten is not a lightning bolt sticker that you put on the side of your toy car and that makes it go faster. It is not always better to have Hasten regardless of the situation. Hasten is a tool, like any other power in the game, and not using it responsibly is going to get you killed.

On the subject of DPS, which I only bring up because someone mentioned using Hasten to drop less powerful attacks, I just want to point out that there is a "flaw" in the way we think damage works in this game that is largely a result of our reducing damage to an average based around second long intervals. There is, in this game, a large amount of what I like to call "overkill" that occurs.

You see, when "you" first started playing "you" used to do this thing where you would start off with your most powerful attack, and then finish off the enemy with brawl or some other light attack. The logic behind this was simple; You didn't want to waste your heavy hitting attacks on an enemy with barely any HP left. It was endurance management, it was damage management, it was smart.

The problem is, we stop doing this at high levels when endurance stops being a problem. We'll just cycle through our attack chain as quickly as possible because we believe this is how we're going to achieve the most damage, and it really isn't. Attack Chains are somewhat inefficient for things without a great amount of hit-points such as arch-villians or giant monsters because the amount of damage that they deal is greatly excessive to the amount of damage your average boss requires to put down.

In an even MORE nit-picky and top-performance-oriented world we would do things like figure out how much HP the boss has, and then figure out what attacks are needed to take him down in the smallest amount of time possible.

For example, I once did some analysis between Corruptor and Defender in an attempt to figure out which one did more damage, and while the results where, for the most part, predictable with the Corruptor coming out on top, the damage difference during normal play is still not really significant. What was basically happening (and these arent' the numbers I was using, but I'm just trying to make a point real quick) is that you'd have a case where the Enemy has roughly 300 HP, your Corruptor does an average of 120 damage per attack, and your Defender does an average of 100 damage per attack. While the Corruptor does a total of 360 damage after using 3 attacks, the Defender is still killing the enemy in the same amount of time because you only NEEDED 300 damage to defeat the enemy. The only time where a Corruptor noticeably pulls ahead are during Arch-Villain fights where the extra damage they are doing is actually being used.

All of this said, It's not really a big, game-altering deal, and I think most people are content to throw bosses into the pool of "dies so quick I don't care about doing this efficiently." Still, I think it's useful to be aware of it when you're agonizing over squeezing out 10 more damage per second how much you are actually gaining for your efforts to do that.

It performs well mechanically I just find it kind of boring stylistically. All of its' animations are recycled from Broadsword/Axe animations, and I already played those.

Leo_G Has a good handle on my perspective. It is not so much that I think this level of performance is out of the norm for this game, but that this level of performance is out of the norm for the effort that it should take to get to that level of performance.

I agree with Reppu's sentiment. I do not believe it is ever wise to make a game easy to the point that it no longer requires user input. Such a games rarely hold the attention of anyone. That is why Balance is important.

Generally I like making stupidly overpowered builds I will probably never actually realize in-game. I very much like exploring new content and experiencing the stories involved in them. I like playing with new power-sets and designing new characters to utilize them. I like that the combat in this game is still engaging despite its' age.

I don't like masterminds. At all. Every time one of you joins my team I groin silently to myself, and I'm constantly looking for reasons to get rid of you.

I think that it had potential, but it never gained the necessary popularity it needed to be terribly useful. I liked the idea that someone who was familiar with... let's say broadsword for an example, would be able to more capable of giving advice to Scrappers, Brutes, and Stalkers, rather than stick to one AT thread and unintentionally ignore the others.

For example, I remember people who where not Scrappers would randomly wander into the Scrapper forum with a Brute build they needed help on, just because they knew the Scrapper community at that time was good with numbers. Back then a general "Build" forum seemed like a good idea to me.

The one that hurts people the most.

I hear the next powerset for Scrappers: Shark Mounted Laser Rocket Launcher Explosion Fist; Will largely satisfy the disparity between Scrappers and their ego.

I'm going to share Techbot's sentiment. I might be okay with it during a very gimmicky boss fight, but as a general tactic of a enemy faction I probably would become QUICKLY INFURIATED. I know it seems like a fantastic idea from the perspective of a Brute or a Scrapper who is suddenly whisked away to valhalla to drink mead and crush skulls, but for any other archetype without built in mez protection it's like suddenly being ganked by a Stalker in PVP 4 years ago. Controllers, Blasters, Defenders, and the rest of their ilk all very much greatly depend on getting the jump on their enemies in order to come out victorious. Enemies with TP Foe will make the ambushes in First Ward look like a joke. A cruel, angry, relentless joke.

If I wasn't okay with it, I wouldn't buy it. An additional benefit to being a VIP subscriber is that I can always hop onto the BETA server and test things to see if I like the powerset or not, so it's not even like I'm making blind purchases either.

Forbin speaks the truth. I have *personally* done this, in other games, although in my case I just sucked it up and didn't eat that night instead of bothering some support guy. I'd probably have done that in this game too if I was able. Multiple times.

History Time:

In the olden days players liked to use the rationale that Mind Control didn't have a pet because of all it's confusion options. Basically, instead of a dedicated pet we got... whoever we decided to enthrall. Now, this didn't make total sense considering Illusion practically bleeds pets and still gets decieve (a confusion clone) but it worked well enough for our logical making processes. Then Plant Control came along and threw everything on its' head, and then Dark Control only further diffuses such rationale. So when you see people say "We don't needs pets; we have confuse" just understand that it's a very old logic that we still keep around.

Really, the reasons mind control doesn't need a pet is because it has a lot of solid control options out of the gate and has a lot of potential damage with 3 single target attacks that each have powerful mez on them as well as an AOE which is also has powerful mez on it. Mind Control can quickly become a dominating, containment making champion WHO JUST SO HAPPENS to be able to turn the most hostile enemy into their personal minion. More if you slot up confuse right and *all of them* if you take Mass Confusion. Mind Control is powerful enough *without* a dedicated pet.

Beyond that, the only way to add a pet would be to remove another power. The structure of how powers are set up, how many we can have, and at what level is "set in stone" more or less. It's not something any developer is going to change because it opens all sorts of potential flood gates like "why does mind get 10 powers and illusion only gets 8!? My scrapper only has 10 powers! wah wah wah".

So the only other way to get a pet on Mind Control would be to a remove a power in order to do so, and Mind Control is such a dominating powerset that anything you remove to insert a pet would only likely weaken it as a whole. Not to mention that you break another major dev guideline known as the "cottage rule" (which you can google if you want to know why it is called this), which states that a power should not be completely replaced by another power.

Freedom and Virtue are generally the most populated, with Freedom being more run of the mill and Virtue housing much of our Role Playing guys. Not that you can't play normally on Virtue, just that you should understand that before someone starts talking about their dark past and you're like "lol wut?"

Logic persists that I'd rather have three types which largely cover everything to be good than for one to be awesome and the other to have a giant hole waiting to kill me every time. If you can't get them all to 45%, try to settle around at least 30% for each; more if possible. That much will still make a giant difference in survivability and will only require a purple inspiration to jump to the soft-cap for when you really need it.

I think it should be free for the same reason that I think it would be silly if certain costume pieces suddenly required a fee of real money in order to change their color. The groundwork of this feature has already been expressed as something that I get as a basic functionality of the game, thus I come to a conclusion that I shouldn't have to pay extra for it.

That doesn't mean they won't still charge for it, just that my expectation is that it's a feature, not an extra.

As mentioned before, however, I'd buy it if that's really what they wanted to do. It would be far more deserving of my money than, say, a leprechaun.

Terrify is where a good portion of Mind's AOE potential resides. Solo you can usually stack it with Mass Hypnosis to activate the containment effect which causes it do deal double damage. For reference, it already does more damage than both Mesmerize and Levitate, at least, according to mids. Combine this with a rather fast recharge and a powerful fear effect it is your "available every fight" AOE control for dealing with the majority of situations effortlessly. I would not be willing to get rid of it.

The single target confuse is likewise still very useful, assuming you use it intelligently. Often times enemy factions will have an enemy that tends to make your life hell. Turning him against his allies will wreck similar results upon them. To give a few examples:

The Tsoo Sorcerers like to teleport all over the place, swooping in to heal an ally and make life difficult for anyone caught in his Hurricane which has the effect of knocking people back (assuming they don't have knock back resistance) and greatly lowering their to-hit while in the effect (making them difficult for melees to take down). By confusing him you gain a "pet" who will periodically heal you and make it difficult for enemies to hurt you.

The Sky Raiders have an Engineer in their ranks who likes to summon a pet drone which offers high amounts of defense to everyone within 30 feet of it. By confusing this drone you just gave your entire team a massive defense bonus while removing a major obstacle for your group.

The Malta have the ever famous "Sappers". Although a minion level, these guys can quickly wreck havoc on most adversaries by completely draining their endurance in a matter of seconds. This causes toggles to drop leaving your Tanker suddenly very prone, your defenders unable to help him, and you unable to do anything about either of them. Now, it's probably well enough to just hit this guy with your pre-emptive anti-alplha controlling goodness, but confusing him instead will help turn the OTHER dangerous entities within the malta ranks into a whimpering mess.

And those are just a few. Generally speaking ANY time you come up against an opponent and think "man these guys are such a pain" just remember in the back of your head how useful they could be if you had confused them.


I honestly don't think Mind Control needs a pet. It's been a very long established set and has done extremely well without one for *awhile* now. They have enough control and damage options not to really need one and there's nary a power within the set I'd give up in order to obtain one.

I've been calling it "FOR THE LOVE OF @#$ WOULD YOU JUST SHUT UP ALREADY!?"