Thug masterminds

Personally, I'd settle for letting Thugs Masterminds use the slider-enabled pistols that Dual Pistols got. Have a close look at, say, the Dual Pistols Autos as they fire. Notice how the slide jumps back with every shot like in the real Desert Eagle? Now do the same on a Thugs Mastermind and notice how not only don't their pistols' slides animate... Their pistols don't even HAVE slides!

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

That's true of most MM attacks.

Really, want to feel useless? Make a Ninja MM and take the bow attacks. It's like you're shooting mosquitos at the enemy. Really tired, sick mosquitos. And you can't even proc the things.

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I've always felt that Masterminds need to have a high ranged damage mod. Their attacks are already unimpressive by virtue of them only having three, one of which is AoE. But if the attacks were meaningful, then there would be a point to take them and I wouldn't feel like such a four-sided idiot for doing so anyway.

And, yes, my Ninja Mastermind has Snap Shot, Aimed Shot and Fistful of Arrows. I would like to put my money where my mouth is, please

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Mosquitos without the common decency to carry maleria too!

Originally Posted by VoodooGirl [*]Watching out for the Spinning Disco Portal of D00M!*

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I know what you mean. One does hate to feel like one is just standing there not contributing when it's clobberin' time. That's why I always end up taking the attacks, even though they are essentially worthless. I can at least act like I'm not just standing there letting the guys do all the work.

Pretendy time!

You... are General George Patton. You have just raced with the Third Army - tanks, infantry and the like - into battle. They're engaging the enemy.

You... step up and throw a rock at the Germans. Not a big rock. Perhaps a nice stone that, if there were a pond nearby, would skip 2-3 times. You hit a tank.

You have scuffed the paint. Someone will need to buff that out before the next review. You have, technically, done damage. You have just done mastermind levels of damage.

I'm not asking for one-shotting with my snap shot. Really. I just want enough damage that, if something's running off with 15 hit points left, I have a reasonable chance of turning and firing at it and actually killing it.

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You've been around long enough to have your permanent Nemesis staff! What more do you want?

(Seriously, I do not know how I survived levels 1-15 before I got that thing. Utterly indispensable. If only I could slot it for accuracy... )

*Laughs* I can't really argue with that.

Hey hey hey hey there now lets not say anything bad about rock. I doubt a MM attack could take out Col. Duray of the Preaotoria Army,
rock on the other hand......------> http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=258913

And they're terribad at it. Not only are Mastermind attacks almost never worth the cost of endurance to fire them, but they're also very rarely worth the time spent firing them when one could be using his vastly superior support powers or even just running basic henchman controls.

I take and use my Mastermind attacks on all of my Masterminds for no real reason other than because I want attacks, but I only ever use them against easy opponents. As a Mastermind, I can oftentimes outright FORGET I have a secondary and do just fine, and in those instances I simply have nothing better to do than plink away impotently at my enemies. But in any situation where performance actually matters and there's a real risk of danger, Mastermind attacks become a liability.

I ask you this - if it takes me seven or eight shots to take down a non-resistant minion, what am I really contributing? When every one of my henchmen can outdamage me, why am I even bothering?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The Vet attacks do some 3 to 4 times the damage of my Thug MM's pistol attacks. They really do decent damage. If I use only those in between doing pet-controlly-things, I actually am contributing a bit. My point is if MMs can have access to (free!) attacks that do good damage without wrecking the AT, then why can't their attacks (requiring a pick and slotting) perform similiarly?

I take the MM attacks too; I can't abandon concept completely, but I know I'd be better off numerically spending those picks and slots on something else and just use Vet attacks.

addendum: I know no every one has Vet attacks, but come Freedom they'll be available to anyone who wants them. Also, if you do Trials alot, the Vet attacks are disabled, so that's a small incentive to get the regular MM attacks.

Not sure how much hot water I am stepping into here, but are you slotting your attacks? The general consensus I am seeing is completely against taking them at all, so I am going to go out on a limb here and assume that you aren't bothering to slot them. That is the only way I can think of that your first rank pet's could ever out damage you past a certain point.

I also kind of have to laugh at the Nemesis staff comment. It may do "insert so many times more damage" here to an unslotted attack power, but it's also on a 16 second cooldown and is unslottable. It's great that it'll do upwards of 260 damage on a good day, but in that time period a slotted attack power ((Burst in mercs, since thats what I am looking at)) could do upwards of 480 under the same circumstances. That's rough math, mind you, and it's under the consideration of burst being slotted for damage and recharge redux IO's and being used every two-ish seconds, which I am sure we all know isn't really reasonable. But even only using it about half the time, sliding it in when you have a moment or between debuffs or heals, it'll still do comparable damage over time if not up front damage.

This is all just devils advocacy. I would in no way form or fashion object to a damage buff on my favoritist of favorite powersets. *Laughs* In this case I am just saying you get what you put into it. Spend a couple of slots and boost the damage on an MM attack power and it goes a way. I won't say a long way, but I definitely feel more useful in between healing/buffing/debuffing.

Ooo, what about a defender-like damage buff to Supremancy that degrades when you are surrounded by your pets?

If you have all six you get nothing but if you only have three you get 10% and if you only have 2 you get 20% and if there's only one you get 30%. If they're all dead you get 50%. Obviously there's probably more suitable percentages that could be made if someone researches it a bit more but if your pets go charging off (which they almost always do in attack mode) it would make you feel like you were being useful (or like any good mastermind; your minions stupidity is infectious ).

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

I am, actually. ACC/END/3xDAM. All three of them. I slot them, I use them, and I still feel the things are worthless. A Punk with all three upgrades has the same three attacks as a Thugs Mastermind. I'm sure they're on a lower damage scale (I believe it was something like 0.45 for minions while the Mastermind is 0.55), but here's the thing - my pets are slotted for damage, too - 3xDAM. I'm not sure if a single Punk can clearly outdamage my Mastermind, but I can tell you that something as simple as two of them can.

But this isn't really a question of who outdamages what. It's a question of "Why did I just devote three power picks and 16 slots to attacks that do a whole lot of not much?" I'm sinking a serious investment into these things, and I'm getting a joke in return. Oh, great, a little extra DPS, which just gets lost in the shuffle of even just a single boss level henchman for a damag-centric boss.

Whenever I've happened to send my Henchmen to attack one thing and ended up with a straggler minion eyeing me up, I've found it's a major chore to take him out on my own. If a minion is down to a third HP from random AoEs, then I can conceivably take down that minion in four or five shots by the time my henchmen are done wiping the floor with the rest of the spawn, but if a minion is at full health and - heaven forbid - resistant to my damage type then I may as well not even bother. I haven't calculated how much DPS Mastermind attacks contribute, but from empirical experience, I know it ain't much. My time, power picks and slots are much better spent taking things that actually help me, like my support powers.

When people say that Mastermind attacks are useless, they mean this in the most literal sense possible - they have no use whatsoever. There is absolutely no practical reason for a Mastermind to take and slot these attacks because Masterminds are intentionally made to have the game's WORST personal damage by a HUGE margin, and a margin which has only gotten wider in the years since they were made. The debuffs on the Mastermind attacks are next to useless and vastly overshadowed by your own support set, their damage doesn't matter and will at best have a marginal effect... Really, why would I ever want to take a Mastermind attack unless I felt like wasting a few power picks and a few slots on gimmicks?

That's all Mastermind attacks are - a gimmick. It's something you can do for the sole reason of demonstrating that you can do it, but without actually achieving any practical benefit from doing so. And that's from someone who takes, slots and uses his Mastermind attacks all the time. They're nothing more than toys that I use to play around with, but which I put away the instant the game becomes serious and I have to actually to worry about survival and performance. Mastermind attacks are the powers system equivalent of the slap/smack emote - they're funny to watch, but they don't do much. Taking and slotting them is about as useful as slotting Sprint and Rest. And Brawl...

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Here's the thing, though - this only helps petless Masterminds, and petless Masterminds are the weakest possible characters in the game short of the Determinator. This will constutute a buff which will simply never get used, like giving Stone Armour utility buffs only when the player is flying. I understand that the idea is that if your henchmen wipe, you'll get an instant damage boost (and not by much), but if your henchmen wipe, the LAST thing you want to do is stand and fight. You either run or resummon. Or you die.

Trying to judge the distance from your henchmen is also problematic. One could simply say that any henchman within Supremacy range removes part of that damage buff you have, but then all you're doing is creating a no-win duality. Your henchmen are your primary and only real source of damage, and a lot of that comes from the to-hit and damage buff of Supremacy. Intentionally encouraging the player to just round a corner and rob henchmen of Supremacy in return for personal damage is unproductive, because it's always better to have more damage on the henchmen. Yes, they occasionally run off, but a Mastermind really shouldn't be expected to be able to fight without the henchmen anyway. That's why Masterminds have the lowest hit points of any AT. If your henchmen run off, your priority is to get them back. Fighting one-on-one should only ever be done against harmless foes, like single minions or held critters.

What I want to see is the Mastermind being given enough damage for that damage to at least be visible among the hail of henchman fire. It doesn't need to outshine the henchmen, themselves, but I just want to be able to see that I actually did anything and not have my enemies laugh my bullets away.

Any character who has the option to take and use a power should, at least in SOME circumstances, feel like he WANTS to use said power, and this is never the case for Masterminds. We only ever use our attacks when we don't have anything better to do, which isn't all that common since everything else is better.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

You speak the truth. However, slotting MM attacks with every damage proc you can (along with Incarnate Interface) into them pushes them into some level of respectability damage-wise. Not great still, but at least I feel like my attacks hurt a bit now... and every once in a while all the procs will go off at once. Not bad at all.

I love my Nemesis staff. One of these days I'm going to get around to making a character whose whole reason for being a super is having it. Everything else will just be backup stuff.

That's really what it comes down to - in order to make Mastermind attacks even passable, you have to invest so much into them that there's really no practical way to justify it, short of "Well, I just felt like it!" That's my excuse, anyway. When the CoV ATs were made, I have a feeling that a lot of them were balanced so tentatively that the development team was too afraid to actually let characters use their powers unimpeded. Masterminds were given personal attacks probably because it was deemed odd for a mercs leader to not have a personal rifle, at least, but everyone knows you're not supposed to use it. It's like the AT came up to six powers then stalled and someone said "Well, we might as well throw in a few attacks." and then someone else said "Wait, they're a pet class, they can't deal damage themselves." and then someone else said "Who said anything about dealing damage? I said attacks."

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

YES!! I GOT MENTIONED!! YAY!!

Sorry, but someone referencing my Determinator challenge got me excited, and it made my day.