Masterminds ride the razors edge between over powered and gimped. The patch was a dramatic improvement for my bots. I have 3 lvl 30 damage SOs in all my powers and when I used them for the first time after the patch my jaw dropped. I could smell nerfbat. then I began to think of how MMs were balanced on control over pets and their behavior. IF my bots all use their snipe style power all at the same time I can bring a white con freak minion down to 25% health with the Alfa strike(i also run assault and tactics YMMV). if this was consistent every time I told my bots to attack then I would be thinking were overpowered. but pet AI is different every time I issue an attack. some attacks miss, some pets use their more powerful attacks wile another runs into melee range. ive even noticed that my protector bots run into brawl distance but have no brawl attack. And if there is a Boss with an AOE attack forget it, my only bot left standing will be my assault bot. I did the lvl 25 respec, the AV at the end could wipe out my bots in 2 volleys consistently, and my PFF was almost useless.
The MM is also the only AT in CoX that requires real skill to play. for example setting up kill zones and choke points require stragity an planning, then you have to maintain control over pets so they don't aggro the map. These guys that can solo on the highest difficulty are using every trick they can to win, I highly doubt they are just sending their minions into a 16 mob spawn an going afk. control and stragity are key to MMs, people that do it well make us seem overpowered, people that are bad at it make it hard for MMs to find a team.
In short our damage got a bump, but were still squishy, we cant zone with our minions, when we die and the team looses a large chunk of damage/aggro, and we still require a lot of micromanagement. I think the trade offs for the small boost in damage are still enough to keep us balanced.
so we should test fixes for known bugs to see if fixing the known bug makes us too powerful?
what other known bugs should we be testing?
[ QUOTE ]
Resistance is more or less equal to defense.
A 10% defense reduces the chance your opponent will hit, but keeps the same damage. You still get hit for 100 damage a hit, but you only get hit 40% of the time. This gives you a survivability of 25 hits (10 attacks are needed, but only 4/10 hit, so you need 10/25 rather than 10/20)
[/ QUOTE ]
The problem is, as you stated, it reduces the 'chance' to hit. In the example, the mobs need to hit you 10 times to kill you but is missing 6 attacks out of 10 on average. Problem is, the mob always has a chance to get lucky, beat the odds and land those 10 attacks in a much shorter period.
Of course, they get unlucky too, but in that case the fight ends and you benefit from finishing with a little more HP. However, if they get lucky, you end up dead and in the context of this game, dead is much more of a penalty than finishing with a few more HP is a bonus.
While the resist guy also relies on chance to a certain extent, he's much less reliant on it than a defense AT.
This reminds me of the dual wield vs two-hander debates in EQ, it aint the averages that will kill you, it's the streaks 
As you also said though, getting a mix is the best approach. That's what made Regens so uber in the early days. It wasn't the base amount of regen that was whacked, it was the way the Def + Res pool powers acted to magnify the effect.
For me, Omega Surge hit the nail on the head.
If we are built well, plan our strategy in advance, and fight with skill, we can make a *huge* difference. If we zerg (or get zerged without warning), we're toast. In two situations, I've strategically placed traps and managed my robots (and used the environment to my advantage) to take down 2 red bosses, 2 orange lts and many minions at once. I've also ran around a corner, bumped into a boss, and been wiped along with my pets in under 5 seconds.
We have good steady dps at high levels now - this is weighed against a number of balances:
* - we're the only AT which LOSES damage output as we take damage (our pets die).
* - we have low HP and personal defenses (PFF aside). If we do get aggro, we can die very very quickly.
* - in order to remain effective at high levels, especially in large groups, we have to micromanage.
* - We can be an outright nuisance on some instance maps (caves/Oranbega)
IF everything slots into place, we can be a valuable asset to a team - so can any other AT however. *ANY* AT can solo relentless if built/played for it - some MMs can, some can't.
To me all seems fine. Good damage but not Uberdamage!
I checked it out last night, and really didn't notice any extra damage.
Come on devs, art guys, where is my Maid costume for my characters! 5 years now, its a simple request.
[ QUOTE ]
I checked it out last night, and really didn't notice any extra damage.
[/ QUOTE ]
As i see in your Sig your Mastermind is lvl 20. Is that correct? You wont see a big change at that lvl. Wait till SOs kick in.
I played my robotics/force field MM last night to test out the patch. My first henchmen are slotted with two DO accuracies, two DO damages, and two SO damages (so the damage aspect is at the cap for ED). My protector bot is mainly slotted for defense, with some accuracy and a heal thrown in.
Before: With the difficulty turned up one notch, missions were still tricky. It was pretty frequent that my bots would be overwhelmed before they could finish the job and the mobs would come after me. I would die more frequently than any of my other archetypes.
After: Bots finish the job faster. Bosses still take a while to take down. A blaster could do the job faster. It would take all of my bots concentrating on a single mob to take him down in a reasonable amount of time (but still be outdone by any blaster or scrapper). All battles could be done faster with other archetypes, but that's fine because there's less risk to me. This performance level of the bots is what I more or less expected when I created my toon.
Devs: If you feel henchmen have become too powerful because the ehancements affect upgraded powers, please don't revert. Instead, just tweak the damage of the upgrade power. My henchmen were obviously underpowered before, and while I think they're fine now, if you decide to scale them back, bringing them back down to the level they were at just makes them underpowered again.
Arc ID#30821, A Clean Break
The only problem with defeating the Tsoo is that an hour later, you want to defeat them again!
"Life is just better boosted!" -- LadyMage
"I'm a big believer in Personal Force Field on a blaster. ... It's your happy place." -- Fulmens
[ QUOTE ]
This reminds me of the dual wield vs two-hander debates in EQ, it aint the averages that will kill you, it's the streaks
As you also said though, getting a mix is the best approach. That's what made Regens so uber in the early days. It wasn't the base amount of regen that was whacked, it was the way the Def + Res pool powers acted to magnify the effect.
[/ QUOTE ]
After making a spreadsheet to look at the relative balance of raw Regeneration, Defense, and Resistance, and how adding Defense and Resistance to Regeneration affected the survival of a Regen Scrapper, it became clear to me that the mechanics of defensive powers really needed a rework to make them comparable to each other.
Resistance is the base effect; if you have a Resistance of X%, then for every attack that hits you, you take (100-X)% of the damage.
Defense, instead of being a modifier to the attacker's chance to hit, should be a separate chance to avoid an attack; if you have a Defense of X%, then for every attack that hits you, you have an X% chance to dodge the attack and take no damage.
Regeneration, specifically Instant Healing, instead of being a 'heal fast' ability, makes each attack work similarly to Spectral Wounds; if you have an Instant Healing of X%, then for every attack that hits you, a short time (a second or two) later, you 'instantly' heal X% of the damage from that attack.
With these changes, the defensive abilities will, over time, average out to the same results -- X% of the defensive ability means that you average avoiding X% of the incoming damage. The increased healing rate of the other powers in the Regeneration secondary would need to be toned down, and probably something like making any increased healing from Integration not work while Instant Healing is active. Regeneration gets a bit of the short end of the stick by having to take all the damage before IH could regenerate it, so having an increased healing rate from other powers in the powerset -- but not to anywhere near the Integration rate while IH is running -- would balance it, although the numbers would have to be tweaked some.
"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses."
-- Bruce Leverett, Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers
Let me inject a stupid question here. The slots for the basic attacks are adjusted based off the minion summoning power slotting. Are the additional attacks given by the upgrade powers ajusted from the summoning power or the upgrade power?
"The only thing to crave is Immortality, and Death is the last rube to cheat."
They trained the Rikti to drop Fire on people, but they won't let them write (Censored) on their spaceships because it is obscene!
[ QUOTE ]
Now, if only my robots could actually damage another player...
[/ QUOTE ]
Oh please please fix this.
As for pet affecting enhancements. It's on the pet summoning powers themselves.
From my testing/playing so far, my wife and I heavily run our MMs on Protector (bot/ff, necro/poison). We definitely--in nearly all missions--do not kill through stuff and go through the missions any faster than say two Corruptors (fast) or two Brutes (insanely fast, if things go well).
What we do do fast, is take out single targets if we focus on them. That is the strength of MMs so far, and seems balanced. Weird tanking by virtue of letting them fire willy nilly in a crowd (they pick aggro, rather than us), or just having them focus on a poor victim and tear him a new one. I haven't see a middle ground.
If anything, MMs are guilty of being too much damn fun to play (even moreso than Defenders, which feels insane for me to say, but its true).
Nothing needs to be reduced, or increased, that I can see, from what's on live now. You guys hit a home run on this one.
Regarding the arguement of Defense vs. Resistance, all of the tests that indicate they are balanced are assuming one thing - hit points on par with a mid-level player. The henchmen have much less hit points than the players, so that one solid hit can kill a henchman where it would only wound a player. As a result, Resistance is definitely better. It prevents the one-shot kills. The lower the Hit Points the more important Resistance becomes. With 1000 Hit Points, sure they both average out. They take a 200 point damage and it will average. But if you have only 200 hit points, then they do NOT average out to be equal.
I find from my teams that my MM can fight better than Dominators, equal with Stalkers and Corruptors, and not as good as a well-played Brute. Brutes are the combat kings as far as I can tell, but I like my MM - it is very fun to play.
Now if they would only fix the cape mission...
[ QUOTE ]
Regarding the arguement of Defense vs. Resistance, all of the tests that indicate they are balanced are assuming one thing - hit points on par with a mid-level player. The henchmen have much less hit points than the players, so that one solid hit can kill a henchman where it would only wound a player. As a result, Resistance is definitely better. It prevents the one-shot kills. The lower the Hit Points the more important Resistance becomes. With 1000 Hit Points, sure they both average out. They take a 200 point damage and it will average. But if you have only 200 hit points, then they do NOT average out to be equal.
I find from my teams that my MM can fight better than Dominators, equal with Stalkers and Corruptors, and not as good as a well-played Brute. Brutes are the combat kings as far as I can tell, but I like my MM - it is very fun to play.
Now if they would only fix the cape mission...
[/ QUOTE ]
That's actually the reason to go with defense. 
Even if you give them 50% resistance they will STILL be 1 shotted. Give them 100% defense and they will only be touched at most 1/20 times.
n-n-necro
Here you come with a stupid name like Fixer - brutalkillz_
And not the good zombie army kind we here love in the MM forums.
what the hell Azu, this post is 3 years old.
That's one heck of a thread necro.
Azucar must have a Necro/Dark MM and found a hidden power that extends outside to the game into the forums for extracting the soul of a dead thread and bringing it back into a state of hideous unnatural life.
Global - @Proton Sentinel
Jack Devon Crab Spider VEAT; Virtue
Mordigen Earth/Storm on Liberty and Virtue
Technological Terror Bots/FF; Liberty.
50s: Zul Vakirol Thugs/Poison; Virtue. Kiyujin Katana/SR
The topic was brought back from the dead a while ago. It was on page 3 last time I checked after it had been brought back to us from beyond, but I guess Azu mistook it for a recent post. Some moron has been reviving old redname posts all around the board for kicks.
No, man. Azu quoted a person who posted on this thread in 2005, and there's no posts between him and that poster.
Actually it wasn't Azucar, even though Azucar did reply without realizing it was a necro most likely. I saw the post before he replied and there was no post past 2005. It was done through a technique I believe called ghosting where someone replies to an old thread then immediately deletes their post, bumping the thread without leaving a trace.
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Sorry about this screw up. I wanted you guys to test it before it went to Live to see if it made MM's too powerful.
[/ QUOTE ]
Thanks for the fix, but Posi we are the weakest of all ATs. It would take a major increas in our damage output to make us too powerful.
The PVP Robot bug is still there though. I tested it earlier. Lasers fire, the victim does the animation of being hit but NO Damage. I can not PVP. This is a PVP game and I cant PVP. There are rewards for PVP I can not recieve. Part of the game is essentially shout off from me. We need this fix REALLY soon.
[/ QUOTE ]
MMs are by far the most powerful AT, where have you been? I've played on the hardest difficulty since lvl 32, and second hardest from 20 to 32. I can survive things that most can't even think about.
And this is NOT A PVP GAME. This is a PVE game that had PVP added as an after thought.
Again I have to ask, where have you been living? Must be under a rock.
[/ QUOTE ]
>_> Dude, look at the post date of the guy your quoting. Your never getting a response.
just wasted 5 minutes looking at what i thought was an important thread.
Even felt a degree of umbridge that nobody cared about the effect on Thug MM's.
Doh
[ QUOTE ]
Sorry about this screw up. I wanted you guys to test it before it went to Live to see if it made MM's too powerful.
[/ QUOTE ]
I have a robotics/force field mastermind on live. He's level 22 now. I managed to get his Battle Drones slotted with the equilavent of one SO accuracy and three SO damages. He is definitely underpowered. I can't imagine the upgraded weapons using the enhancements being overpowered. All four of my henchmen run into serious problems with a +1 boss. I would have to back off, resummon them (after the boss would one-shot them all one by one), rebubble them, and then go back to the boss again. Even the battles with minions and lieutenants take quite a while. I even took the leadership pool to try to get their damage output a bit higher since they were so drastically underperforming.
Don't get me wrong, they're a fun class to play and I love them, but I see them being outperformed by just about everything else out there.
Arc ID#30821, A Clean Break
The only problem with defeating the Tsoo is that an hour later, you want to defeat them again!
"Life is just better boosted!" -- LadyMage
"I'm a big believer in Personal Force Field on a blaster. ... It's your happy place." -- Fulmens