Pseudo-pets are guards

I ran into an odd situation in a mission this evening, where a pseudo-pet was acting like a guard.

I've run into cases where pets are guards -- if you are attacking the group guarding a hostage, and any one of them summons other mobs, the additional mobs are considered to be part of the guard on the hostage, and they won't move until all of the mobs, both original and summoned, are gone -- in missions where you have Carnies guarding, the Master Illusionist's summoned Illusionists, Phantasm, Dark Sentry, and Decoy Phantasm are all considered to be guards, and even if you defeat the Master Illusionist, until the last summoned mob goes down, the hostage stands pat.

I ran into a curious issue that reveals that pseudo-pets are also considered to be guards. I had a mission on my Brute where there were two Knives of Artemis guarding a hostage, and I tossed in a Ball Lightning to pull them closer, then ran in and started punching. They both went down quickly, but when I went to the hostage, he just stood there. He remained standing, motionless, until the caltrop area about twenty feet away vanished.

The way that pseudo-pets work makes them, for the most part, immune to anything characters can do about them (with the exception of lighting an Oil Slick, although lighting it just exchanges that pseudo-pet for a Burning Oil Slick pseudo-pet). Having them treated by the game as an additional guard seems to be counter-intuitive, because they're not an actual mob that can threaten the hostage.

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"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses."
-- Bruce Leverett, Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers

This particular bug (?) has been around a long time AFAIK. It's annoying.

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the bugs that have been in the longest are the most annoying...

It took a -player- to fix the broken teleporter beacons...


<waits for Tyrannical Jerk to come in for the smack down...>

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Ignoring anyone is a mistake. You might miss something viral to your cause.

Hey, I keep hoping they'll fix a graphics issue that has been around since the game released and make Paragon City compliant with the worldwide IALA Maritime Buoyage System (although I realize that it's a cosmetic issue that's way, way down on the priority list, and that there are probably less than a hundred people in the playerbase who can even tell that Paragon City is in violation of the MBS). Everyone needs a long-term goal.

(if you're curious, the International Association of Lighthouse Authorities [IALA] maintains the worldwide standard for the position and marking of navigational aids like buoys; the vertically-striped red-and-white buoy means 'deep water on all sides; deep-draft vessels can pass on any side', which looks wrong when it's parked ten feet away from a pier. I've learned to mostly ignore the buoys, but it's still a nagging itch whenever I see one -- except for the two or three that are appropriately placed)

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"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses."
-- Bruce Leverett, Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers