Odds and ends

At some point in the last week or two I completed my silly goal of acquiring all the mastermind pets! I still don't have the final upgrades for my merc/ff yet, but I've seen all those in action so my enthusiasm has waned a little. I'm not really sure where to go for my next project, so I've started up several duos on protector for no good reason other than that I can. Brute + Corr is the name of the game. Pointless screenshots to follow.



Here is my fire/energy brute and son/son corruptor.

I was really surprised at the speed and low end cost of the fire primary - wow! Damge is not as spectacular as the other sets, but boy is it end/speed efficient.

Son/Son also seems to be a great second in a dual - autofire on shriek makes for a handy debuff.



This is my stone/da & rad/thermal pair. Stone is a brute set I've been looking forward to playing for quite a while, and I was not let down. The sheer "smash factor" of stone is awesome, right from the start. Stone does have very high end costs, but somehow it seems worth it when you have 2 attacks capable of one-shotting at level 2 or 4. (4 is a better choice or else your fury building is dependant solely on brawl...)

/thermal is of course the pure-bot type secondary, so I had to do one eventually. And autofire on a rad attack is a nice debuff.


This would be my ss/fire and son/cold. I wasn't particularly inclined to do ss again after having played an ss/ice tank to the mid 30s, but I figured rage made an interesting pair with blazing aura. Fiery embrace + rage will actually allow for some interesting damage #s too, albeit rarely.

I've already got an active rad/cold corr that I'm playing more as a solo blaster type, so I don't feel so bad for just using this one as a backup buffer.


And finally...my dm/fire and dark/kin duo. (You can tell I'm going for rough visual themes with these pairs eh?).

I haven't got a chance to run this pair together yet, as I started the brute a while back and need to catch the corr up 1st. I'm anticipating a very late bloom as far as duos go, as it won't be much of a buff-kill relationship until speed boost at 20. Not sure if I want to take assualt/tac early to offset that or what - the corr here has the build I'm least certain of. I can see how it could be a really fun solo blaster type power combo too.... I may wind up playing them solo and then matching up at 20.

/end pointless screenapallooza and dialogue no one is monitoring.

Fiiiiirrrrrrrrrrre! (and other goodness)

Our trio of mastersmashers hit 32 tonight, and I got to spend about 20-30 mins with each of mine afterwards examining each of the pets and their final upgrades. First off, some screen shots of the fully buffed army:



It may be hard to see everything, but detailed shots of all the buffed pets are out there elsewhere on the net anyway. Graves & Lich pick up nice red eye glow, zoms get red glowy hands. Tier 1 bots look about the same, tier 2s get a little glowy lightning rod thing on their backs. Assault gets a big fatass missile launcher that is kind of hard to miss.

Not sure abouth the mercs, ask PoD.

The breakdown:
Zombies: They use their life drain a lot - it's a great improvement, versus a non mobile enemy their cycle looks like spit/punch/heal rinse & recycle. If the target moves mid cycle, they will often restart on a spit or punch. Basically - if the target is not moving they will use the heal whenever it comes up. Damage on the heal (siphon life) is just barely less than clobber too (and more versus smashig resist enemies), so it's a great addition to their arsenal. I think it was healing them about 79 points.
Graves: They use siphon life very rarely, and apparently only if starting at range - ie right before charging into melee. This needs more testing but that's how it looked to me. In melee they will just cycle the sword attacks - which provides a practically constant damage stream. Damages were something like 44/53/~60/83 versus evens I believe. I did see them both crit, one after the other, for 108/108 with a debuff out at once point. So - definitely an improvement, but I wish they would cycle the heal in combat - with 1 so it healed them about 150 points.
Lich: Well, he basically still sucks, but now he sucks a little less. The upgrade adds Petrifying Gaze (hold) and Fearsome Stare (cone fear), which he appears to just tack on to the end of his cycle - so Life Drain/tentacles/torrent/ / dark blast. Sort of like the zombies, if a target moved he would restart his attack cycle from the lowest available power in that list. Not that exact order everytime, but that seemed to be the gist of it. I do feel that Necromancy has plenty of damage though - so having the lich not be a damage whore (although tents with 3 damages does about 30-40 points after all the ticks) is ok.

Battle Drones: They get a laser full auto. I couldn't tell if it had KB on it or not, but it looked like it did not. The damage is very low - about 2pts per tick versus evens, but it appears to do at least 10-15 ticks. The cone is very thin, but decently long. It won't hit targets far to the left or right of center, but will hit about 3 or 4 enemies deep. A nice addition to their arsenal.
Protector Bots: They get seeker drones and a disorient grenade. The grenades recharge pretty fast, but only do about 30 points to even cons. The disorient from them is not 100% either - both would hit a lt, and he would still sometimes be ok. Their seeker drone usage is strange and erratic, not to mention amusing because they bubble the drones. I couldn't tell how they chose to send the drones to attack or not - sometimes they would just summon them and the drones would follow them around forever, never detonating, other times they would fly off immediately. The drones are -acc, -dmg and do minor energy damage (also might be - something else I forget). They did come much closer to running out of end, and caused me to debate swapping out their 3rd acc for an end reducer. A decent addition, but not as powerful as the grave (or jonin) upgrade. Which I think is just fine because all that aoe adds up real quick especially from the
Assault Bot: Wow. I did not think a ranged mm would be this fun. Woah. Seriously. They get two different rockets - one a standard aoe damage rocket, and the other one that causes a burn patch to appear under each target in its aoe - and these patches stack. Couple that with tar patch (or caltrops, glue + sonic arrow, etc.) and you have some nasty, nasty damage. The recharge on both these rockets is not bad at all - sometimes I saw them come up 2x in the same fight. When the fight lasted that long. Wow, seriously a ton of fun just running around outdoors burning shit up. Even with the acc penalty from gfly I was mincing even con bosses. Can't wait to do some more tomorrow.

tier 3 pets are goodness

No screenshots today, sorry. Not like anyone is watching! Hit 27 on my /dark pair over the weekend and that means - you guessed it! Tier 3 pets. Assault bot is very nice. Lich is, well, lich is a tier 1 or 2 pet really, he's really pretty lame/unimpressive. Sure, this might change with the final buff, but btw. assault/lich/oni with only the level 6 buff, lich loses hands down. With me doing nothing, a lich can take an even LT. Assault bot took a -1 boss. Still, that is fairly impressive either way I suppose. And he does heal himself, which is very handy. Not to mention he gets fear & hold at 32...that should be worth waiting for.

The only real thing wrong with the lich is torrent. It's like gale, only a little bit weaker - and he does it constantly. Unlike other pets which have different AIs at different ranges (basically everything except tier 1 mercs), the lich only has 1 ai - he rotates tentacles (a fairly small cone it seems), torrent, dark blast, and life drain as soon as they become available. Sometimes he'll stand around for 5-10 seconds (hopefully this will go away with 32 buff). Still, even doing nothing is better than using torrent. True, SOMETIMES torrent can be very useful - but that's in the hands of a player - it requires massive micro to be useful on a pet. I guess I could do that...and I'll probably wind up doing that eventually, but...bleh. It's just annoying.

I do understand that the lich is not a damage pet - he is more of a pure control pet like dark servant, with two attacks thrown in (blast & life drain). I'm sure I would love him for his control bonuses if not for the torrent bit...basically his tentacles don't seem to reach much from his default attack range, and I'm not into micro on this guy, so I usually only see one or two enemies immobilized at a time. Still, that is better than no immobilizing. Except for that bit about the knockback...oh, and did I mention the knockback?

Assault bot on the other hand, is a damage pet. With 2 dmg SOs his melee attack hits for 70! His lasers are nice too. I was rather dissapointed to see the short range on his flamethrower cone (think fire blaster, not ar blaster), but all in all I'm very pleased with him. Recharge time on flamethrower also seems very long, but that could just be the AI. All in all, very pleased with him.

Our 3 man team tore through the respec 2x the other day - once at vicious and then again at villanious after we couldn't damage the AV. On villanous we couldn't quite finish either (although we did make it to the AV despite the vines counter bug) - we were doing fine at damaging and surviving the AV but got taken out when the vines and ambush spawned simultaneously. We'll give it another go soon now that we've got commando/lich/assault bot backup...(ok, the lich probably won't help, but I didn't want to make him feel even worse by leaving him out of the list.)

On another channel, I've been working on my plant/fire dom a bit in the hopes of making him not suck (most definitely going to respec him asap). Worked from 14->16 over the last couple of days and I still really don't like him. His damage is very low and his control is subpar (except for Seeds of Confusion which is very good if you like confusion). I will start an ice/thorns eventually, but for now I'm really going to try to stick him out to 32 and see if it becomes worth it at any point.

/darks: 24 and counting

We hit 24 tonight and added our 5th (6th if you count nec spirit) pets to the mix - always a wonderful feeling anytime you get noticeably more powerful. Sure, the tier 2s lose a level, but that visceral satisfaction from the broadsword swings is doubled now, so I think we can call it even. Double bubbles for the pets from the prot bots are also handy - I'm guessing 2 of them nets you about 5-7% defense.


We are having no problems triading vicious, but I'm waiting until SOs to try bumping it up to level 5 (I forget the name). We did Ballista-1 tonight with pretty much no problem and another elite boss last night..the scrapyarder lt whose name I have forgotten - she was also nice and tasty zombie food.

Above is a shot of the /darks & pets with their usual teaming partner. You can't really tell what any of us look like though because we are in disguise. I was highly amused running around looking like a galaxy. Close ups on costumes below: