New efforts!

[Vee]

Tier 9 power 'Hey Rube' that works the same as gang war would be nice.

[duane]

I would have liked to see the Masterminds get existing NPC groups as pets, rather than generic ones, myself. Skulls, Hellions, Outcasts, CoT. Of course, that would have made it more difficult as the Heroic MMs would then have to have been redone and balanced once Going Rogue came out and made them viable options. (Plus I'm sure the devs didn't want to deal with the headaches of people questioning the canonicity of it all.)

As for the clowns set, I still think it would have been cool and never quite understood the devs constant rejection of the idea. If they were worried it was too one-note, then it could have been a carnival/circus set, with clowns and other things in it. I would have loved to see the "Human Cannonball" power. :p

I had this idea once and posted in a community chat.  I cannot recall who answered but the short answer was that while the art assets would exist, masterminds were a difficult archetype to program.  If they were going thru that much effort they would prefer "neutral" characters instead.  I always hoped to command a team of longbow or sky raiders myself regardless of the alignment. 

While I was at it I wanted customizable pets. They were nice about it, but laughed as I interpreted the conversation. I was told to stop while I was behind as there was programming/logistical problems with that one too.  I miss those chats/events.  It was always cool to interact with the devs or community relations guy (Andy?) at the end.  I missed out for years on that stuff and never heard of the official forums until about issue 15/16.

[pinballdave]

Customizing mastermind pets was a lot of work, but it was fun to try things in AE. Any content that included that wonderful skyraider base was fabulous to me.

[duane]

Customizing mastermind pets was a lot of work, but it was fun to try things in AE. Any content that included that wonderful skyraider base was fabulous to me.

It was funny because they said there was absolutely no variation in the pets.  Wrong!  I had a soldier and traps mastermind and her soldiers had random faces and hair.  When Issue 16 came out I hoped we could have even colored their costumes and given the team all black or green... but... no.

[ryuplaneswalker]

I liked the active mastermind sets, too. I started with a robots/poison. It wasn't the most synergistic but i preferred a mad scientist with chemicals and robots to a drug-related gang. I loved the storm secondary. It worked great with robots, thugs, and even necro, but a new player didn't want to learn storm playing necro pets.

I really like when thermal was proliferated to masterminds. Flaming zombies were hot, Heh. Demons in thermal shields were hotter. Ok ok, I stop.

I think the last development in my playstyle was to mix up the pets stance. Of course the alpha strike (first battle) or boss fight I would turtle up with all on defensive/follow. Each mastermind secondary I would have one or two on aggressive, the rest in bodyguard. The Demon top tier pet was great to put on aggressive and follow around, especially if he had his ice sword out. I liked to follow the necro lieutenants around, too, providing support and just tearing up.

After the Fitness going passive, really MMs had no reason to not be active there were quite enough power picks to take personal attack powers to be active for those empty moments.

[Arcana]

In the same vein, I wanted a Sidekick Incarnate power. As the power tier progressed so did the sidekicks available powers and abilities.

Sounds like we could have gotten there by simply expanding Lore in the right directions.

[GN2]

After the Fitness going passive, really MMs had no reason to not be active there were quite enough power picks to take personal attack powers to be active for those empty moments.

Support/debuff powers were *always* better then attack powers on MM, and gave you plenty to do.

[Thunder Glove]

I was still looking forward to Gadgetry for my Bots/Storm MM, but... yeah.  Most of what I actively did was using those Storm powers, trying to keep opponents off their feet, though I'd sometimes take a potshot with the Pulse Rifle Burst (which also had a chance for KB).

When soloing, one of my favorite techniques against bosses was to turn on Hurricane, and put the boss on follow.  Hurricane would repel and knock back the target, but the auto-follow would keep me running towards them, all the while my robots were blasting the boss - and anyone nearby - with lasers and missiles.

Oh, man.  Missing the game AGAIN.

[LaughingAlex]

I liked time manipulation on my mastermind alot as there was some fun to be had using a maxed out farsight and chronoshift on my bots and then pinning my enemy mobs down with a disruption field.  Even funnier with interface reactive Radial Flawless loaded on and Clarion Radial Epiphany fired off before farsight.

[pinballdave]

Support/debuff powers were *always* better then attack powers on MM, and gave you plenty to do.

Beast mastery was a different animal (pardon the wordplay). The personal abilities of the mastermind were attacks and debuffs. Those animations were too cool to pass up too.

[CoyoteSeven]

I went to the trouble of putting in full PVP and Purple sets into my bots/traps MM's attacks. Just because I could.

[BadWolf]

The main (easily achievable) thing I wanted for MMs was male and female versions of the pets. Something you could toggle in the pet status menu, to give a female model of any pet. It was always really frustrating that my Resident Evil-themed zombie MM had a Jill zombie and a Rebecca lich, but they didn't look right. :)

My "I can't wrap my head around this class" was Dominators. Never got one to 50. (The same thing was also true of Corruptors, but that was mostly due to my insane love of Brutes and Masterminds and a limit to how much time I had to play.) It felt like I could never get the crowd control aspects rolling well enough to mitigate damage done to me, and I didn't do quite enough damage to take them out before they could hurt me. I don't know what I was doing wrong--probably saving Domination for "emergencies" instead of spamming it whenever it came up--but it never clicked.

Now Masterminds, they were among my favorites. All the fun of being a Defender, but your teammates did what they were told! :) I wound up with five of them at 50 by the end.

[blacksly]

Support/debuff powers were *always* better then attack powers on MM, and gave you plenty to do.

Huh. The Demon attacks can set up decent -Res debuffs on a single target. The Necro attacks put up decent -ToHit as well as providing a self-heal. Both also put out decent DPS compared to any single tier of your pets (on single target, anyhow... personal attacks didn't really do much for AoE). And there were many secondaries that weren't that involved, giving you plenty of time to blast.

[Biz]

The main (easily achievable) thing I wanted for MMs was male and female versions of the pets. Something you could toggle in the pet status menu, to give a female model of any pet. It was always really frustrating that my Resident Evil-themed zombie MM had a Jill zombie and a Rebecca lich, but they didn't look right. :)

Yeah I totally agree. The main thing missing from CoH was zombie boobies.

[Arcana]

My "I can't wrap my head around this class" was Dominators. Never got one to 50. (The same thing was also true of Corruptors, but that was mostly due to my insane love of Brutes and Masterminds and a limit to how much time I had to play.) It felt like I could never get the crowd control aspects rolling well enough to mitigate damage done to me, and I didn't do quite enough damage to take them out before they could hurt me. I don't know what I was doing wrong--probably saving Domination for "emergencies" instead of spamming it whenever it came up--but it never clicked.

My recommendation back then was to play Mind/Earth.  Not only was it training wheels for Dominators (you have so much control in practically every single power its easier to see how the damage mitigation combines with offense) its practically training wheels for the entire game from level one.

[Arcana]

Support/debuff powers were *always* better then attack powers on MM, and gave you plenty to do.

I'm not sure what you mean by "better" but they weren't always available.  My Necro/Dark mastermind couldn't spend all her time spamming support/debuff powers even if she wanted to.  The only thing really spammable was TG and that was nonsensical to spam unless you were fighting a very tough target or taking loads of damage.  You could easily, in fact, run out of endurance spamming that unnecessarily.  Outside of that, Dark debuffs were powerful and cycled on long recharges leaving plenty of time to use Necro blasts effectively.

[BadWolf]

I'm not sure what you mean by "better" but they weren't always available.  My Necro/Dark mastermind couldn't spend all her time spamming support/debuff powers even if she wanted to.  The only thing really spammable was TG and that was nonsensical to spam unless you were fighting a very tough target or taking loads of damage.  You could easily, in fact, run out of endurance spamming that unnecessarily.  Outside of that, Dark debuffs were powerful and cycled on long recharges leaving plenty of time to use Necro blasts effectively.

Same with Force Fields and Storm, really. Once you'd bubbled your pets/put on all your toggles, you really did have plenty of time to use attacks. Mind you, my Robotics/FF MM didn't, but that was more because he saw physical combat as beneath him than because he was too busy with other things. (Well, he was busy laughing at the poor schmucks getting lit up by laser crossfire--was there a button for that? Because I always just did it manually.)

Poison was pretty active, in my experience; ditto with Thermal. Beyond that, you could take the attacks without wrecking your build, although the Leadership pool always seemed like a nice alternative if you didn't have anything skippable in your secondary.

[Vee]

My "I can't wrap my head around this class" was Dominators. Never got one to 50.

It's tough to get a real sense of what doms can do til you get your first one to permadom. Once you do you suddenly want to make a bunch of them.

[headrebel]

Man, every day I can't play my MM is a sad day. There's just no other MMO that did the Pet Master class so dang well.

[Arcana]

It's tough to get a real sense of what doms can do til you get your first one to permadom. Once you do you suddenly want to make a bunch of them.

Actually, if you have a lot of experience playing blasters, then right out of the gate you can appreciate Dominators since they have a similar level of offense at low levels but someone pushed the pause button on the enemies and they aren't shooting back.  You tend to notice that right away.