Consolidated Mastermind Issues and Problems thread

My biggest problem with MMs is pet control. setting them to passive seems to be the only thing that ges them to listen at times.
'goto' actually means 'start heading there untill you feel like attacking something' (often I've seen pets lliterally take just a single step then turn around..
'stay' means 'if you feel like it otherwise just run off and attack something'

2 things that would help alot:
1) Pets NEVER leave the range of supremacy unless ordered to via GOTO or you run away with pets on STAY. (mentioned in OP)
2) STAY command creates an immobalize debuff on the pets that only gets removed when a different order is given (ie even AoE won't make them run, it's up to the MM to pay attention and manually move them)

Not leaving supremacy would be a massive help but the STAY change would help with ranged running into melee, wanting to keep pets off a dangerous PBAoE mob while keeping bodyguard mode, keeping pets in melee instead of running away from low damage AoE, etc

Beast Mastery:

Tier 1 Wolves + Alpha Wolf: Need an additional low-cooldown attack so they do not have a 33% 'idle period' time.

Tier 2 Lionesses: Need an additional low-cooldown attack so they do not have a 33% 'idle period' time.

Tier 3 Dire Wolf: Needs an additional low-cooldown attack (or two) so it does not have a 33% 'idle period' time.

Example of Attack: A Flashing Steel clone, or simply another use of each of their 3 second cooldown attacks (Vicious Bite for all wolves, Claw Rake for Lions). A Flashing Steel clone would help not only their single target disparity, but vastly improve their AoE.

Fortify Pack: Change the +Regen to +Max HP, perhaps 10% base +1% per stack, to a maximum of un-enhanced +20% Max HP for it's duration. A superior metric than +Regen on low-HP pets.


The attack changes alone would, definitely, help with their big damage crisis. And having bluntly superior ST damage would make their lack of AoE less of a 'design flaw' and more of an 'acceptable sacrifice'.

Fortify Pack giving Max HP would be a worthwhile survivability boost over... pathetic regen with pet base HP.

There's a pretty severe AI issue that's cropped up recently. It was reported in This Thread but basically MM pets will charge some of the AVs in incarnate trials and some missions. Specifically they will run back and forth as if they can't decide if they want to charge the AV, then eventually they will charge. It's confirmed for Lambda, BAF, and the final mission of the Tin Mage Task Force. In my experience setting them to passive will keep them in line, but others have reported that even that didn't work.

Lioness's Lion's Roar don't stack with each other.

I've updated the first post with the latest issues.

Has anyone PM'd the Powers lead (Arbiter Hawk?) on this thread?

Oh, and a couple of things on the list have been fixed. I'll try to quote them from the OP tonight so you can update.

But the AI is the big booger as far as I'm concerned. Well that and the pet non-responsiveness bug.

Did better than PM ... I talked personally to Arbiter Hawk and to Black Scorpion a little bit about Masterminds. With Arbiter Hawk, it was about the UNsurvivability of Ninjas and the like, and some ideas to change the status quo about that. Surprisingly enough, he said that someone in the office had suggested to him that Ninja Pets should have a zero recharge time, be dirt cheap to summon and be paper thin on HP ... so that you can spam them as summons (unlike everything else). That way, Ninjas literally are disposable minions and you just summon them by the HORDE.

We joked that doing something like that would be very thematic/cinematic, but in the context of the game not exactly practical (except maybe for Genin).

I also mentioned the "Nemesis LT Vengeance Buff" as a way to introduce an Inverse Ninja Law to Ninja Pets, but his response to such a thing was not favorable. That's something that works out better in cinema (hence the trope) than it does in gameplay.

Arbiter Hawk also is very aware of just how far behind the curve the Mercs primary is, and is actually keen on doing something about that (although he did not divulge specifics, nor did I press him for any). Since there are A LOT OF THINGS that Arbiter Hawk cannot talk about, I wasn't about to pressure him or try to trick him into divulging information on this.

I also asked Arbiter Hawk about the prospect of folding the Recharge Intensive Pets into the Pet Damage Sets grouping (and eliminating the RIP IO grouping altogether) so as to allow multiple underperforming MM primaries (Mercs, Ninjas, etc.) to access the RIP uniques without being forced to resort to "picking the RIGHT secondary" to have access to these game changing survival auras. I'm not *entirely* sure he understood the direction and purpose of the argument, since he was giving me a little bit of pushback on doing that (which makes sense, since you want to analyze things carefully before making changes like that), but I'd like to think that he appreciated where I was coming from in advocating for this change.

And amazingly enough ... *DURING* dinner, Arbiter Hawk pulled out his cell phone and was reading the forums to stay on top of things!



I asked Black Scorpion about the Pet AI and possibly trying to get at some improvements to its responsiveness to Player Inputs. This led into a very convoluted explanation of just how ... weird ... the coding that controls this part of the game is, which went a bit over my head (I'm sorry to say). The key takeaway though is that doing anything about the Pet AI is **nowhere NEAR simple** in either its implementation, nor in its implications, given the interconnectedness of the game code at this point (which can have absurdly far reaching effects that are total head scratchers).

Best example Black Scorpion gave of a "I broke WHAT?!?" modification to the game code was a fix done to Poison Gas Arrow for Trick Arrow for Players. Somehow, this fix created a *BUG* when the exact same power got used by Manticore ... in that it resulted in a (functionally speaking) infinite duration Sleep. It was basically a "side effect" of how powers don't work the same for NPCs as they do for PCs, and somehow Manticore had gotten programmed to originally use the PC Poison Gas Arrow instead of his own "copy version" of the same power back when he got created. So a fix for Players of this power gave Manticore an extremely BROKEN version of the same power, in a way that you'd never anticipate that kind of linkage going into the spreadsheet/database unless you KNEW it was there ahead of time. Yes, the bug got fixed ... but it was a total Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment when the Powers Team realized what was happening (and why). It basically came down to somebody taking a shortcut many years ago in order to make a deadline which left behind a landmine waiting to blow up in the face of anyone who wandered near this piece of the game.

Suffice to say, Black Scorpion is "interested" in doing something about the Pet AI ... but he didn't say that working on it is on the schedule (nor, honestly, would I expect him to say that, so moderate those expectations kids). My takeaway is that Black Scorpion is ... aware ... that the Pet AI has "room for improvement" but that doing something about it is going to amount to the programming equivalent of Dumpster Diving, and that there probably isn't anyone else who is really up to the task of getting that "entangled" into the code without injuring themselves in the process (and breaking large swaths of the game while they're at it). So upgrades to Pet AI are very definitely in the "wait and see" category ... but the Devs are certainly aware of the less than optimal condition of the status quo.

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

Hopefully they can do something about Ninja, Merc and Necro soon.

I figure with them paying attention to how Beast performs, it is a good time to hammer them with other primary issues.


I honestly don't think Pet AI is as bad as some of you think. This game's summoning system is actually better than a lot of games I've played.

The biggest issue is knock back. Pets simply can't react when a target is knocked back until the target is about to get up. This issue CAN be reduced (not eliminated since other people can knock back). The best way is simply not giving knock backs to the pets. :P

Despite all the KB resistance in the world on my MM, my pets fly like chaff driven by the wind at the first hint of KD/KB from any source.

Imagine the howls if a Scrapper or Brute were standing solid on a Ice Slick, but couldn't attack because their attack powers were flopping like fish.... I do believe those subforums would spontaneously combust from the rage.

Y'know, it's nice that they're going to give some love to Blasters.

Now when are they going to fix the problems with MMs?