Masterminds: Praet zone events and a mini rant

I was going to put this in the Going Rogue section, but I noticed at the End the post was about more than just the issues with zone events so I'm putting it here.

So yesterday I'm playing my preatorian MM a thugs/poison, and decide to go for some of the zone event stuff. I get into a team, start wasting some ghouls, and one squashed escape later: nada. I don't get access to the emote or the badge. The temporary power is nowhere to be found, and I have no Idea what's going on.

Looking around I discover that a player gets access to certain rewards based on participation in the raid. Damage and de/buff are all tracked, so I assume I just didn't do enough. Two raids later, and I've been working my butt off. Controling my henchmen through the ridiculous AI, my punks are just doing work, my arsonist is not only surviving, but bringing the AoE carnage, and my enforcer's are bringing all the dakka there little hearts can bring. God bless them, there wasn't a single "were givin'er all we've got cap'in". Through all this, I'm tossing a weaken or envenom to this boss or that one, but my focus is on making sure my henchmen are doing what they should. Yet for both of those raids, I still don't get the badge or emote options. Must be a bug.

I /petition, having no idea how it could possibly be, that I'm not participating enough, when I get this response:

I too have experienced this. It is a pain the butt.

Solo a zone event to crash the server by making it try to divide by zero. That'll show 'em.

Join a team? Are rewards counted individually or does being on a team count?

It does seem really rude the mastermind pets damage doesnt count.

Devs hate MMs. The new Task Forces aren't very MM friendly either.

Feh. This is worthy of beating your head against the desk. I suppose I understand if pet kills CAN'T be counted for progress, but if they just AREN'T, well, that just about takes the cake when it comes to design oversight.

At least debuffs are counted for the credit, so it's just a matter of summoning fewer pets and reducing their participation relative to yours. I would recommend picking up some Temp weapons from the Market for use in the event. Seems awfully kludgy to have to use a workaround, though.

That's incredible. Since when do giant monsters or other zone events not add up the participation of the whole team and reward appropriately to everyone in the team? That's just stupid and a very bad precedent.

I don't get the "pet's don't count" attitude either. If you look in the combat chat box all damage and kills are attributed to "You". I'm hoping that is just a case of a GM who doesn't really know what he's talking about.

I ran the Protest event on my Thugs/Dark MM solo; obviously no problems since I was doing it solo, nobody to compete with. But I ran the Syndicate Takedown and The Great Escape events both on full teams, with a couple extra people who weren't on the team, and I still got the top reward.

Based on your story, the only main difference I can see between my zones events and yours is that I was firing Night Fall and Soul Tentacles into large groups trapped in Tar Patch, and I was stunning all the minions with Howling Twilight.

The OP was Thugs/Poison, which doesn't have a lot of mass debuffing power. It can totally cripple one hard target or spread a few single target debuffs around, but /Dark has powerful AoE debuffs so you probably got a lot more credit for debuffing than he did.

I also don't recall under-20 MMs getting Night Fall or Soul Tentacles... the OP was apparently leveling a new MM in Praetoria and doing the zone events at their normal level rather than bringing in a high level MM from Primal Earth. That means he likely has no real damage to contribute.

I was in fact a level 19 thugs/poison. The powers I had available for use toward counting my participation were sands of mu, nemesis staff, hand grenade temp power, alkaloid, weaken, envenom, and neurotoxic breath. I'm not sure if the leadership powers count as buffs when considering participation because I had all three of those toggles running often with multiple teamate henchmen in it's area of effect every attempt.

I mean isn't the point of tracking support abilities, when considering participation, to recognize the entirety of a player's contributions to the team? Now, I might as well forget about my henchmen and just spam neurotoxic breath the whole time. That minion with one hit left? He gets envenom. Three bosses there? Normaly I would take the time to debuff one while ordering an attack on another and by the time the first is dead, I can knock down the third with nemesis staff and have my henchmen kill the debuffed one. Takes too much time controlling henchmen that I could be using debuffing or healing. Because I only have debuffs that track my progress and need to use them as much as others use their primary and secondary together, I'm going to hit each of them with as many debuffs as I can possibly muster, forget trying to kill them, so that I get the reward I actually earned my first three runthroughs.

Also I also know, from other masterminds complaining after the event was done, that this issue is not limited to poison. It is an issue that strikes at the fact that many players of Masterminds worry about controlling their henchmen more than using whatever power is up the moment it's available. My run through the great escape where I got my ghoulflex emote? I used alkaloid more in that event than I did the entire 19 levels prior. I used it regardless of target health, my only focus that run was getting enough usage of personal powers to get the reward. It worked, but that's not a good way to play mastermids and the game should not reward you for that slop.

Sorry, I skimmed over the part about being a Praetorian MM rather than a Primal one.

Zoning bug: /releasepets

Note that this is NOT interchangeable with /petcom_all dismiss.

My Demons/Poison seems ok. Im getting event rewards, but Im very Crack whip heavy and debuff everything making up for some AOE. But still Im single target. My way around this was slotting my debuffs with recharge enhancers to debuff more things and different targets.

However this is concerning, because pets...regardless of who they are summoned by, are still powers. If I have to choose it, in this game it's a power, and therefore should count as DPS, Debuffing or anything else any other toon can do. I mean, it's our primary power! If it's a primary then it should count, else it would be a secondary support...right?

I see folks are gonna go full steam ahead on the whole "Posi hates Masterminds" thing without asking for proof that he ever actually made this statement, never mind the equally ridiculous conclusion that Mastermind pet damage isn't counting for Praetorian events because of this supposed fact.

EDIT: Look at how much he hates Masterminds! He hates them so much he doesn't want their pets to dismiss when zoning. Oh wait, but there's that bug with zoning, that's probably Posi's fault too.