Why aren't you playing a Mastermind

Complete inefficiency doing speed content. Simple enough.

Here's my dirty little secret for pet micromanaging... I don't. It's either all out aggressive or passive or, sometimes for strategy, Body Guard mode. Situational awareness, movement, and Team Teleport is the best pet control power, IMO.

Also, I let 'em die and resummon... no fretting over their 'death.'

Speed runs love my pets because they clean up the stragglers or rezzers for kill-alls while the Brutes forge ahead. Or, I'm sending pets to the next spawn ahead of the group.

Lambda? I solo crates.

But I can see how people who don't like playing a defender don't like MMs. On my MMs, I feel like a Defender with my own team of death.

Oh, and the crazy agroing of pets trials with 'Bosses' is fixed in a patch on Beta. Coming 'soon' to Live.

I had a Ninja/Storm and while all the chaos you unleash is fun (tornados and thunderstorms flying all over) it was too much of a hassle running around with Hurricane keeping things packed in to benefit from the massive tohit debuff (obnoxious Repel mechanic) and the pets being too squishy eventually got that MM permanently shelved. I pretty much refused to play the buff-oriented MMs before the casts became AoE for the same reason I hated Kinetics--I hate having to spend most of my time individually reapplying short-duration buffs. Since the quality of life improvement I tried out a Ninja/FF which is quite enjoyable. Pets are defensive enough to not be splattered constantly, and I can focus on Smoke Flashing to beef up the Oni's widespread damage or Jounin's nice single target choppy-choppy, and occasionally popping off cones of arrows.

I did try out a Demon/Trick Arrow once (just because TA is so lame on Corruptors or Defenders) and thought the lit up oil slicks blazing with demon fire sure were neat. Guess being able to insta-hold bosses when focusing Ice Arrow with the Prince was okay. Demons were pretty neat--might need to give them a second shake. A real shame TA is otherwise just so...one-trick arrow. Such a mediocre set that others outshine. Mercs are rather meh damage without slotting in Achilles' Heel procs (Thugs >), Bots are just kind of boring and blehcros have that terrible Lich and his wonderful uncontrollable knockback cone. Dunno about beasts since I didn't buy them.

I wish MMs had a really Advanced pet controls screen where you could check on and off what powers you want them to use so you could have more control over their behaviors. Nothing like having to tell a dumb-butt ninja to stop shooting his dinky little arrow and get into melee range to go to it with his ninja blade. Alternately, tell the range-oriented pets to not run into melee range to use their awesome Brawl attack.

One thing I do hate is you still occasionally have maps where the pets simply disappear, stuck in an elevator limbo loop. I wish Team Teleport would summon them out of that. (oh, and MM is the only AT I've ever seen Team TP useful on )

MMs can be an acquired taste, or some just love it, and some just hate it. but i love MMs. i dont play them often because i have altitis and there are a lot of ATs. The ones i do have, i adore and they kick ***. i even have one petless [can of worms! XD].



i dont play all the powersets though, for these reasons:

demons - too big and ugly and noisy. too bad they dont look like any of the other zillion demons in game. anything else would work for me.

bots - im not big into tech themes

beasts- to many damn wolves, lame looking lvl 18 extra power. damn. wolves.

that leaves ninjas, zombs, thugs and mercs... which i all have MM's of at various levels, a couple 50's. as for secondaries: i usually stick with Dark, Storm, Poison, Pain dom or maaaaaaybe Forcefield. I just dont like the other sets. those five i find either wicked fun or wicked useful for the AT, and usually compliment my primary or theme. storm dark and poison are much more interactive sets than some of the more shield based sets. and the epic pools round out my characters survivability and versatility.




it's one of my favorite ATs. I just started a beast/storm to give that powerset another try. we'll see how that ends up. what would make me stick with MM's a lot more would be pet customization, but that's a different topic i suppose.

still... badge unlocked alt pet models of in-game enemy group NPC's please! it only makes sense





and i'm so just not into meelee. :shrug: standing in one place and taunting enemies to you is not for me. i like to blast them across the room, run up to them, and blast them away again. yes, i am also into knockback when it's used in a smart and effective way. keeps my MM face pretty.

I deleted my only lvl 50 MM but I've got a couple more brewing but they are very different to my preferred ATs and take a lot more work

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

well, as I said before, i have one of everything, and i have a demons/poison mm, its fun in small doses, but , to borrow alpha's thing for a second, I want to punch all the av's/eb's, gm's and npc's in the face..or rather kick them in the face. mm's generally cater to a playstyle of standing back, running the show and not getting your hands dirty much, and that's great, but I didn't even use weapon based characters till the carrot of weapon customization lured me in, I kind of like to be the fighter, not control the fighters from a somewhat safe distance.

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

To the title question.
My reason. My first villain to lvl 50 was a Mastermind... a bots/FF.
I had all my commands to the pets on my numpad, played it as good as i could, but I found it boring. I had decided that I wanted to unlock the Veat, so I did get the mm to 50. Now... she is simply gathering dust!

My playstyle is blapper and I love blasters/dominators and Def/corrs, so that must be my second reason.

I have a Ninja/Poison MM I play from time to time. I love the character concept, but I the actual gameplay frustrating: I am extremely reliant on my halfwitted flunkies to do anything, and their bumbling gets old rather quickly. It's a bit like trying to cook while wearing boxing gloves, I suspect.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bad_Influence So bad is this problem in Lambda, that I actually ended up deleting my baby Beast MM over it. Too many times the league is sitting at the main door, waiting for it to be time to acid the portals shut when all of a sudden, golly gee look! All of someone's Beasts, lead by that most annoying Direwolf [and does that thing ever SHUT UP, and here I was thinking Demons were bad...!].... when all the Beast pets break lose and make for Marauder as if they were so many arrows speeding to a bulls-eye. And suddenly its on, whether we are ready or not. Nice. The MM in question always says they're trying to heel, but the pets are ignoring him or her. Is this true? I dont know, and have little inclination to find out. I'm not getting another MM to 50 only to find they cant participate in half the end-game content anyways: as it is My MMs have yet to run LAM, TPN, Keyes or MoM - I may be crazy, but stupid I am not. The people I see dragging MMs through these trials almost never make a decent fist of it and end up causing tons of trouble.

I always unsummon my pets for the warehouse run on Lambda; actually, I usually unsummon them when we start the turret sweep, and I don't resummon them until we're ready to charge Marauder. Which is annoying, since I didn't take any of the attacks (I just use Veteran powers when soloing). Still, being largely useless is much better than being far worse than useless. :-/

-D

I run a mastermind, but I found it to be too slow and cumbersome, not free to fly around and whack things themselves. I felt like something kinetic was removed from my gameplay with them.

Efficient and effective AT, though.

I've been playing my Beast/Sonic MM steadily since Beast Mastery was released. It is awesome. MM tactics are completely different from every other AT in this game, so it's refreshing to play something so unique. It certainly is making it hard for me to play anything else right now.

Wild Streak - Lv. 50(+3) Beast Mastery/Sonic Resonance Mastermind, Amnesty - Lv. 50 Staff Fighting/Dark Armor Stalker

got a 30something demon/pain MM. It´s fun to solo teamcontent every once in a while... but most of the time MMs are just to much micromanagement for me to enjoy.
Crab's pets are so much better imho... and with Lore t4 I still have my small army

@Redcap

My first 50 Villain was a Merc/Traps MM. She's evolved a little bit over the years, but I still play her with a strong emphasis of support. She has the Medicine and Leadership PP's, and is overall a very active set. Placing mines, caltrops and traps while the pets do the heavy lifting and tossing-out the occasional heal or self-heal as needed.

She excels in BAF's, and is so-so with Lambdas (depends a bit on team composition). Mercs don't have quite the DPS as Thugs, but they dish-out more debuffs (stuns, -def, occasional KB and heals).

Like every other MM, I wish the AI was a bit better, but I've learned to work around their shortcomings most of the time. Like Zombie Man, sometimes letting the pets run free actually works better than trying to overly micromanage them, although I do make fairly liberal use of "Move to this location".

I haven't played any other MM yet mainly because most of the other alternatives haven't piqued any concepts for me yet. I'm not a big fan of Ninjas or Undead, I'm on the fence with Demons, Thugs are a little too close to my beloved Mercs, and Bots just never did much for me. Beast mastery has caught my fancy, and I will probably start one of them up in the near future.