Simple Mastermind Doctrine and the Two Macros You Need (2009.12.27)

Simple Mastermind Doctrine & the Two Macros You Need
V 2009.12.27 by cfischer999

Introduction

There are already many excellent guides on getting the most out of individual Mastermind builds, optimal slotting and power choices, and complex macro schemes that involve twenty keybinds and rotating bind files to accomplish complete control of your henchmen. They’re very nice, very thorough, but perhaps a bit too much.

There is the Pareto principle, often expressed as the 20-80 rule: 20% of your features will be used 80% of the time by the user; 20% of your effort gets 80% of your usable results. The other 80% of the features and effort are nice, maybe even necessary, but will only be used 20% of the time.

This is the guide to the simple 20% that is the most useful tactical doctrine and macros. By understanding some simple tactics and creating two macros, you will have combat techniques that will serve you most of the time for most builds.

Some of the tactics will seem obvious if you have led teams, but it is taken to a whole new level of importance when you play a Mastermind. Your individual henchmen are stupid and weak. Together, all of your henchmen are an army and should be treated as such.

This guide addresses a doctrine that works well for solo play, small team play, and large team play when the team is not using some other specific set of tactics.

This guide does not address the Mastermind role in hyper-specialized teams, PvP, special techniques for specific Arch Villains, or to survive a speed run of your favorite Strike Force.

Just as in real life, no tactical doctrine should be blindly followed. Understanding why this doctrine and these tactics work should give you an idea of how it applies to the situation you are facing, and perhaps when not to use it.

This guide assumes you have read manual or help, and its section on Mastermind commands. (Hint: RTFM!)

Mastermind Doctrine

Effective Mastermind doctrine balances two opposed principles. It boils down to Offense versus Defense, but for purposes of Masterminds consider it as Force Concentration versus Bodyguard Mode.

Force Concentration (Offense)

Force Concentration is a real world tactical doctrine that works well in City of Heroes/City of Villains combat.

When you are in the role of the attacker, it is inefficient to send a thousand men against another thousand men, single-man on man in a “fair fight.” Instead, you send a few hundred of your men against one hundred of their men, while the rest of your men hold the battlefield in stalemate against the rest of their men. Your concentrated force of a few hundred overwhelms their first hundred men, and then moves on to their next hundred men, and so forth. Instead of one “fair fight” you break it into a series of “unfair fights” – unfair to your advantage!

The same doctrine that works for a full-scale army works for your smaller army. At lower levels and when soloing with Masterminds (and particularly when doing both at the same time!), your henchmen will not be unleashing enough damage to make entire mobs die instantly. Concentrate a large fraction of you and your henchmen’s damage on one target at a time. That first target goes down more quickly, and then you can move to the next target in the mob.

Think of it this way. Which is easier? You can fight 3 enemies who all die sixty seconds into combat, which means all three opponents are hurting you and your henchmen for all sixty seconds. Or, you can fight 3 enemies the first 20 seconds, then 2 enemies the middle 20 seconds, then 1 enemy for the last 20 seconds.

Bodyguard Mode and Defense

Masterminds have the lowest base hit points of all the character archetypes in the game, but there is mitigation for this. When a henchman is in a Defensive Stance and has been ordered to Follow Me (such as immediately after it was summoned), it is in Bodyguard mode. This mode allows henchmen, when they are close to your Mastermind, to soak up some of the damage that you would otherwise take from opponents. It also allows them to counter-attack your opponents and try to grab aggro away from you. When soloing and at low levels, it is vital to keep at least some henchmen in Bodyguard mode.

Luckily, henchman behavior works to your benefit here. Not only do henchmen in bodyguard mode respond to attacks on you, they also respond to attacks on other henchmen. Henchmen in Bodyguard mode don't sit there idly in combat. Within seconds they join the fray – and when they are returning fire they are still protecting you.

Combat Balance

A good rule of thumb is to have half of your henchmen on offense as Concentrated Force and half on defense as Bodyguards. The moment you have two or more henchmen, you can set your controls such that you have one half of the henchmen concentrating their firepower on one opponent, and the other half remain

Name them, Group them, and Command them

• Give the Henchmen individual names.
• Group your Henchmen into two groups.
• Create the Command macros that tell each group what to attack.

/macro Primary "petcom_name Pet1 attack defensive$$petcom_name Pet2 attack defensive$$petcom_name Pet3 attack defensive"

/macro Secondary "petcom_name Pet4 attack defensive$$petcom_name Pet5 attack defensive$$petcom_name Pet6 attack defensive"

1. Select the enemy target
2. Press your Primary button. Your Primary force will attack that one target.
3. Attack or debuff that target as appropriate (or debuff other targets those debuffs will keep your henchmen alive longer).
4. Your Secondary force will remain in bodyguard mode. They will counter-attack once you or one of your henchmen are attacked.
5. At any time, select a new target and press the Primary button to redirect your offensive power to that new target. Usually this is after your first target is killed.

• Assault Bot: A-Huron
• Protector Bots: P-Delaware and P-Florida
• Battle Drones: D-Atlanta, D-Boston, D-Chicago

/macro Primary "petcom_name A-Huron attack defensive$$petcom_name D-Atlanta attack defensive$$petcom_name P-Deleware attack defensive"

/macro Secondary "petcom_name D-Boston attack defensive$$petcom_name D-Chicago attack defensive$$petcom_name P-Florida attack defensive"

1. Selecting a target.
2. Press Primary.
3. Add your own damage attacks against the first target.

/macro Primary "petcom_name Reynaldo attack defensive"

/macro Secondary "petcom_name Roger attack defensive"

Two-Target Temptation

It is tempting, either to begin the fight with a bang, or when you are down to only two targets, to dedicate the Primary group to one target and Secondary group to another.

Resist this temptation. Over half the time you are tempted to do this, it is the wrong thing to do. Learn to recognize when it is the right thing to do.

Why Avoid Two-Target Temptation?

First, when you tell your henchmen to attack, they are not in bodyguard mode. Until you can summon, upgrade, and buff henchmen to the point there are one-or-more doing sufficient damage, they are not guaranteed to soak up the aggro you will take when your Mastermind attacks.


To understand why this, it helps to understand everything that goes into Threat and Aggro. This is complex stuff, but remember:

• A Mastermind is more inherently threatening than you would assume.
• At low-or-mid-levels the damage a Mastermind will do per attack can be more threatening to an opponent than any individual Henchman’s attack.

• The first Target gets 100% of the damage from the Primary henchmen and 50% of the damage from the Secondary henchmen, for approximately 75% of all henchmen’s damage potential.
• The second opponent gets 50% of the damage from the Secondary henchmen, for approximately 25% of all henchmen's damage potential.

• Malta Sappers (who can sap all of your endurance in one or two hits);
• Raider Engineers (who can summon a force field generator to defend all of the mob)
• Rikti Communications Officers (who will open a portal and bring in reinforcements)

1. Select the Target.
2. Press Primary.
3. Press Secondary.
4. Add your own attack against the Target.

1. Select the first Target
2. Press Primary
3. Select the second Target
4. Press Secondary
5. Add your own attack against the Secondary (or Primary) Target

The Other 80%

After these simplified controls, you can branch out to your other options.

Advanced Pet Controls

With the Primary and Secondary buttons in your tray, you can safely remove the 'follow me' 'attack my target' and 'stay' buttons the game placed into your tray at character creation.

Use the Advanced Controls in the Pets window for those occasions where you need to have them all stay, all follow passively, send only one henchman in to attack something and then immediately recall him so he pulls enemies towards you, or so forth.

Those are the other 80% of the pet commands that you will use less than 20% of the time, and usually you will not have to use those in the heat of battle.

If you find yourself using one of those often enough, you can click-and-drag that control from the Advanced Pet Controls into your powers tray.

Follow Me, Passive

Henchmen are stupid. Some types, such as the Thugs Arsonist, have a reputation for getting in close to an enemy for one short-range attack and then staying there to die. If you find this happens to you too often, and you do not wish to use the Advanced Pet Controls, consider crafting a macro to reign in your pets.

This macro would reign them all in, for a complete withdrawal.

/macro Fallback "petcom follow defensive"

/macro Fallback "petcom_name Pet1 follow defensive"

Advanced Topics and Recommended Reading

Masterminds Guides and FAQs, on the City of Heroes Forums:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=113938

Force concentration article on Wikipedia, to explain why it usually works:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_concentration

Pareto principle article on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

Mastermind strategy page on Paragon Wiki (which is one-half strategy and one-half game mechanics page):
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Mastermind_Strategy

Threat page on Paragon Wiki, to get a better feel for how much force is really needed to grab aggro:
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Threat

And all of the other Mastermind guides that will help you wring every last drop of performance out of your particular Mastermind.
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=113938

I'm going to let this one bubble-and-brew just a bit more before posting it to the Player Guides section. Thanks for those who gave me feedback!

I've been playing with this for a little bit now and I would like to add that the macros can be made much simpler.

What I did with my 'bots is prefix their names with which group I wanted them to be in. Because of the way petcom_name works, it applies the command to any pet that matches the given criteria. For the purposes of this example, "PA" for the Primary Attack and "BG" for the BodyGuard group. The macros can then be condensed to:

/macro Primary "petcom_name PA attack defensive"
/macro Secondary "petcom_name BG follow defensive"

excellent strategy and good advice. Thanks

I wanted to add to this my current implementation of this approach.

Based on Gold_Aproch's variant, I now use the following:

/macro PAtt "petcom_name P. attack defensive"
/macro SAtt "petcom_name S. attack defensive"
/macro PPsv "petcom_name P. follow passive"
/macro SPsv "petcom_name S. follow passive"

(I use the short naming scheme since the game only shows a few letters anyway)

I have my primary group have names beginning with "P." and secondary group similarly have names starting with "S." This means if I decide to change which group a pet is in, I need only change their name, and all four macros will be correct.

The reason for the Passive macros is to deal with a tendency I've noticed with mastermind pets; their tendency to race after a target and refuse to stop. Unintuitively, 'follow' and 'goto' orders are ineffective as long as a pet has anything in its aggro table; the only way to clear that I've found is to issue a 'passive' order. So having these lets you recall an entire group back to formation trivially.

To reset a pet group back to 'defensive follow' after I've given them an order to be passive, all I have to do is use the appropriate group attack macro with no enemy selected.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

The OP's information is OK but it really could be a lot simpler. There are better guides for the full Monty. See Sandolfan's bind guides which are in the Masterminds' guides stickied at the top of this forum.

The first thing you need to know is Bodyguard Mode. If your pets are in defensive stance, then they absorb damage for you. A Mastermind can get 75% resistance to everything, which is huge.

The easiest way to get bodyguard mode is to right click on your newbie macro that says "Follow". Pick Edit, and then in the text window remove the word "Aggressive" and put in "Def" (without quotes). Click OK. Now whenever you click the Follow macro you'll enter full bodyguard mode automatically. You can now run up and slug mobs and have more resistance than many brutes.

The other thing is the Attack button which works well enough out of the box. Concentrating damage is a good idea, as the OP points out. After running up to a mob and sluging it, or otherwise attracting aggro, you'll have full bodyguard mode but your pets will attack whatever they want. This is OK because you want them to pull aggro off you. Once you order them to Attack you'll loose bodyguard mode so you don't want some mob beating on you when you do it.

Use the time while your henchmen are attacking willy-nilly to find a good target. Usually I pick something like a minion that can be killed quickly. This eliminates a source of damage sooner and makes your minions much more survivable. Once you're ready, have your victim selected in your target window, then click on the Attack button. Your minions will pile onto the target, dispatching it more speedily.

Once you are ready for more, and you have more minions (usually at least 3 or so, at level 12), you might want to try more extensive macros, or even as I prefer key-binds. You'll want to learn to make only some of your pets Attack. You can have partial bodyguard mode, being safer while still directing some firepower where it's needed. This is an important and sophisticated technique. Also, many melee pets (Ninja, Zombie, the Thug's Bruiser, maybe Demons too) work better if you use the GoTo command to order then directly into close combat. See the OP's posts and Sandolfin's guide for more info.

Summary:

1. Edit the Follow macro to give you bodyguard mode. Right click, pick edit, and remove the word Aggressive and replace it with the word Def.
2. Use the Attack macro to concentrate fire. This reduces the damage you and your henchmen take.
3. Later, Edit the Attack button to only make some of your henchmen attack. This leaves you with some protection from partial bodyguard mode. And learn to use GoTo to get the most out of your melee henchmen.
4. Full information in the guides stickied at the top of this forum. Especially refer to Sandolfan's guide, which I still use.

So many words for so little info.

Most English teachers, the write so many word types, would be proud

This approach is how I've always run my Thugs/Traps. His pet names are all in l33t anyway (he's a Keanu / Neo parody called Johnny Moronic) their names end in ' or .

That lets me divide them into a Defensive and Offensive group for easy control, which I needed to do as the Number Key binds were too fiddly for me, and I'd switched to a laptop anyway.

I did stick in "All Attack Target", "All into BG Mode" and "All Heel" as binds as well, all bound to the bottom row of the keyboard.

A rough breakdown of the binds was (from memory so could be syntax errors here) :

z petcom_name ' follow defensive
x petcom_name ' attack aggressive
c petcom_name . follow defensive
v petcom_all attack aggressive
b petcom_all follow defensive
n petcom_all follow passive
m petcom_all goto passive
lctrl+lbutton petcom_pow Bruiser Goto Aggressive
lshift+lbutton powexec_name Seekers

z is to regain control on the Aggressive group (useful with runners)
x (for eXecute) is the usual command for setting them on someone
c is the usual command for ensuring the Defensive group is defending me
v, b, n and m are for when I wanted to command the entire group. V is useful for when there's one target left or I'm safe and I want something dead. m is handy for Traps for setting up ambushes and pulls.

Can't remember the exact split, I think it was Bruiser, Arsonist and an Enforcer as the Aggressive group and 2 Thugs and the other Enforcer as the defensive / BG one.



The Bruiser also had Control + Click bound as Goto Aggressive to allow for the fact he's the only non-range Henchie in the pack (Shift+Click was bound to "Summon Seekers at this location").

As I said those are from memory so apologies if I've got the bind keys or commands wrong (lctrl, lshift and lbutton are the most likely to be wrong)

nice guide and here is an easy attack macro that works well for me and keeps most of the pets alive through the entire mission. This macro works by keeping all of your pets in bodyguard mode and they only attack 1 target at a time, than come running back to you for their next target.

Atk macro : /macro "ATK" "petcom_all defensive attack"

this works fairly nice as i have lvl'd a few MM's just using this one macro.
Just tab to your target and press it. I also have a few more extensive macros and binds i use but was keeping it simple here as i only add them after i hit 50 with each MM.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

This is a good idea for a guide. Admittedly I did skim it as well sorry, but maybe you can take that as a cue to be a little less verbose and get straight into the meat of it?

Most of the time I run using 4 simplified commands that are within easy reach:

1) Attack My Target - Depending on the pets this effects a half to almost all of my pets to focus on one target. Once I open up my aoe upgrades I usually command my pets to focus on the most central mob to maxmise the aoe volley, assuming there is no mob present that needs to be immediately dealt with.

2) All Passive Follow - I find this very useful to recall pets that are leaving supremacy (and therefore bg) range back towards me. Now obviously it would be better to instruct the individual stray pet in question, but I prefer this as it is a very quick with little fuss.

3) Full BG Mode - Don't need to explain this.

4) All Attack My Target - I use this when I have little to fear about my MM getting hit. My bots/pd mm uses this all the time in place of the selective version after hitting softcap.

Anyway, sorry for the thread hijack.

I used to stress this when I ran MasterMind Mondays back in the day. I like Thugs because the Brute will often go all crazy anyhow.

One technique I like is to use 'Goto Aggressive' for the brute or for buffed pets that can serve as tanks. The command sets an area marker the player can place and the commanded pet(s) will go there and begin attacking. Great for keeping attention somewhere else or for taking the Alpha from enemies with lots of AoE like Miner Lts.

Just wanted to say thanks to the OP and the others who offered useful information. I've been using the "2 party" system for a little while now, this refines it a bit and makes it a bit easier to use.

This was greatly beneficial to me when I was just looking into the whole mastermind concept but I also like to add that I think it really depends on the type of pet you have. For instance, I wouldn't and don't have the same controls for my Bots/ as I do my Demons/ including the various BG combinations just simply due to the way they play.

I believe every MM should either spend time really getting to know the main controls but also learn how to adapt quickly to changing circumstances.. The way I play on a team, for instance, is not necessarily how others would but it also depends on what you want out of your men whether they be cannon fodder or flankers while you take the brunt of attacks.

Personally, I prefer some attacks on an MM which most seem to be against. However, I find it much easier for me to pull aggro while slipping half my pets into BG mode, a couple staying in aggressive while another stays in BG mode and attacks my targets. When I first started my initial binds, I had every single pet on it's own bind with several variations in groups. However, I found myself typically following this course..

2 Tier 1 - Bodyguard attack
1 Tier 1 - Aggressive follow
1 tier 2- Bodyguard attack
1 Tier 2 Aggressive attack
1 Tier 3 Aggressive attack

3 Tier 1 - Bodyguard follow
2 Tier 2 - Bodyguard Attack
1 Tier 3 - Aggressive Attack

Switching back and forth between those two or all attack aggressive, all BG mode follow and all BG mode attack and Follow Passives are the only 6 binds I need now for almost all of my MM's. I use the GoTo only if I want to pull a group with one of my Tier 1's or GoTo Aggressive Attack for my Tier 3 but those are rarely used only in selective circumstances and probably will just take them off.

But, most importantly, I am still learning and adapting to various circumstances/mob types and I think that's the most important thing any MM can learn or teach himself. Yes, you can bind every single pet you have but the fact is, situations change and you have to adapt to it quickly.

I have often thought about getting groups of new MM's together and run AE training missions and show how to bind, how to handle various groups, especially those with alot of AOE and other tidbits for new or old MM's.. Almost like an MM Seminar, if you like. I do, ever so often, new MM training and how to use various controls and binds to maximize their pets efficiency, but many just don't care enough to bother. However, I do think there are those that do and would like to know not just what or how I do but many of us. Maybe some of the more experienced MM's could start something along those lines. Could even do an all MM TF as a training exercise instead of just buzzing through the missions, stopping to explain how/why you do individual settings.

Man I feel odd.

I use the numkey pad binds. But on a Mac machine they get a bit screwy in the sense the numpad messses up and regardless of what I try all the pets move and all attack. I found a way to fix it but to me be honest I either use all attack the center of a group or I use provoke.

Either way I had had no issues. Robot Traps, Pain Demon, Dark Thug. The only mastermind I run differently is my single pet mastermind DS Traps which I run always aggressive because putting 1 pet in bodyguard mode is instant death for it.

Unless someone proves otherwise this stuff is all preference.

I used to have a single keybind for goto-aggressive with the bruiser, but i lost it. Anyone remember?