Mastermind Pet Customization

I don't know who else would, but I put in a HUGE vote for the ability to customize the appearance of our pets. Make each pet cost a token if you must, but let us do it PLEASE! I have a couple ideas how we can do it.

1: full custom: do to them as we can do to ourselves (and our architect subjects). I'd much prefer this one. However, if it's too much, then how about this:

2. partial custom: give a few different appearance options for each kind of pet (low, middle or high; zombie, ninja, robot, soldier, or punk; unequipped or equipped with one of both upgrades). Imagine: humanoid robot options (male or female frames); living dead women (as messed up as we want them to look ... can even have a few clothing options so that they came from wherever they died); female punks; kunoichi (female ninja) and either gender ninja of various dress and color; female soldiers and uniform and/or camoflauge options.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'd LOVE to be able to customize my pets. Most of my MMs are concept and I have my pets doing all sorts of thing, each with its own identity. Maybe I put too much into this, but I KNOW I'm not the only one.

So, I request and put in a HUGE vote for customizing (even if only partially) our mastermind pets.

All in favor? Any reason why this CANNOT be done?

I'd love it to, but it wont happen. There's the worry of having masterminds doing 'pimp' characters.... Heck there's people who have even announced if we got female pets they'd do that.

I doubt we'll ba allowed to mess with the basic skeletons or images. We'll probably be limited to choosing a primary & secondary color, and having the pets outfit (for ninja, mercs, and punks) or overall colors (for robots and zombies) change to match those colors.

Still, an improvment that I would approve of.

This comes up about every three to six months here on the MM boards. Everyone would love customization. However there are some technical reasons why we don't have it.

The most important is that BaBs would cry. According to him, each new MM minion set takes a custom set of animations to wield their appropriate weapons. It takes as much work just to add one new MM minion set as it does to animate a whole new powerset for any other AT.

So what is Paragon Studios going to do? Just give one existing AT set a new look? Or give everyone a chance to play a whole new power set for an AT? It's a bummer but the ROI is clearly with the latter.

Positron just (apparently) announced power customization for Issue 16. MMs may get tintable minions. I wouldn't hope for full AE critter style customization, but I'd be overjoyed if it showed up.

Full pet customisation can't happen, because if it did then MMs would become so awesome that noone would ever play any other AT again

Undead robots???

I would be happy if, instead of color-tinting minions (which wouldnt be that impressive for the non-humans, just look at color tinting non-human models on test AE), we would be allowed to choose from a small selection of different model choices.

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This comes up about every three to six months here on the MM boards. Everyone would love customization. However there are some technical reasons why we don't have it.

The most important is that BaBs would cry. According to him, each new MM minion set takes a custom set of animations to wield their appropriate weapons. It takes as much work just to add one new MM minion set as it does to animate a whole new powerset for any other AT.

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I'm no expert, but I'm not sure if that would be true if it kept the same basic shape, only reskinned. In other words, you couldn't turn Assault Bot into a Terminator style humanoid without new animations, but turning it into a brass steampunkish thing that moves the same and fires from the same spots as the normal Assault Bot wouldn't require new animations ( I think ).

Except I believe it does. That's why weapon customization took so long. Also why we don't get as many costume options as we may want at any given patch. Granted we do have triple the amount of costume pieces now as in issue 4 when I started.

Power customisation has been said by the devs to be very hard, and very time consuming. They didn't think of it when the game was originally made (which was when having cosmetic control over your character was a novelty), and the programming would have to be changed big time.

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Except I believe it does. That's why weapon customization took so long.

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Weapon customization is something different, which is why we got it well before power customization.

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I would be happy if, instead of color-tinting minions (which wouldnt be that impressive for the non-humans, just look at color tinting non-human models on test AE), we would be allowed to choose from a small selection of different model choices.

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I would absolutely love this.

I want NPC models for our pets.

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I want NPC models for our pets.

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This. Most of the "humanoid" pets already use NPC animations for things, so it shouldn't be too difficult to at least allow for swapping the existing model for another one.

I can believe that AE-style custom pets would be a lot of work, but model swapping? You can do that in demo mode easily, with no negative effects as long as the model types are the same.

I'm saying that, to lighten the burden, they could allow limited pet customization by allowing only a couple of faces and outfit choices ... maybe add gender and skin color as well ... with existing customizations. Color customization would be a start, but otherwise I'd say make a few more possibilities.

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I'm saying that, to lighten the burden, they could allow limited pet customization by allowing only a couple of faces and outfit choices ... maybe add gender and skin color as well ... with existing customizations. Color customization would be a start, but otherwise I'd say make a few more possibilities.

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Gender customization for pets will not be an option if this goes through.

i look at its this way wine all we want then go try to make a new toon on wow and look at the 5 things u can do to make ur toon unique at 1st lvl...we have so much and im glad for that..oh and screw wow its like playing in thik syurp while sleeping

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Undead robots???

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Undead, with laser bolts coming out of their eyes.

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I'd love it to, but it wont happen. There's the worry of having masterminds doing 'pimp' characters.... Heck there's people who have even announced if we got female pets they'd do that.

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Funny. One of my MMs is a thug MM who is "The Oldest Professional", who got tired of her Johns so she used her magical ability to seduce to take 6 of 'em and start climbing the ladder of evil.


I just needed a bio to go with the closest approximation I could get to the crack ** style, a staple in CoH. There's even a contact blueside who looks like that. Druggie eyes and messy hair.


I thought they were more afraid of people making black "slaves".


In any case, this prohibition will fall eventually. Maybe not in CoH, but in the next game to come along with non-tamer based minions.


Of course, the bots you couldn't customize very much, but you could pick from several bot styles that already exist, like the current, or clockwork-style, or Malta mech-style, or Nemesis-style (steampunk FTW!)


But the 3 humans and zombies could all benefit from customization, though the zombies might be limited to zombies kin, you could still give 'em hats and shirts and whatnot, ala the zombie invasion types. There could be a number of CoT ghosts and demons you could use in place of the Lich, too.

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Undead robots???

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Undead, with laser bolts coming out of their eyes.

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Undead robots are stupid, to be sure (how can something that isn't technically alive be "undead", lol) but they've already been done before. I believe Warhammer has a faction that's undead robots.

The pimp argument is no longer valid for mastermind pets. You can toss it around all you want but guess what? If someone really wants to they can make their character a pimp archvillain in the MA now and they can be a lot more suggestive in that if they want then they can with mastermind pets.

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Undead robots???

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Undead, with laser bolts coming out of their eyes.

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Undead robots are stupid, to be sure (how can something that isn't technically alive be "undead", lol) but they've already been done before. I believe Warhammer has a faction that's undead robots.

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One of Katherine Kurtz's Adept novels included a WWII submarine that was animated by the same spell as it's undead crew, and Roger Zelazny wrote a short story with a vampire robot ( it sucked electricity ).

It really pisses me off how (apart from bots) with thugs etc, how they always change their outfits...

and in my opinion the thugs look like they should be in the village people

and the genin look crappy

so i am desperate for custom minions

Sadly, this has been brought up in previous posts, and while there are plenty who want this to happen, the folks at Paragon Wiki are saying that this won't happen in i16.

http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Issue_16