Jade_Dragon

I was watching a show on those huge cargo ships on The Discovery Channel the other day, and my first thought was how many Jump Enhancements I would need to put in Hurdle and Sprint in order to clear the deck by leaping up from the water.

Yeah, I think GG hit the nail on the head here. It's not a nice choice, but it's probably a choice that a lot of law enforcement officers who are going up against someone "above the law" have to face. The majority of the time, they'll do the legal thing and do nothing. But in this case, your hand is not being forced by your own ideals of morality, but by Washington's. You've got to decide whether his ideal of a better Praetorian society is worth both you and he being corrupted in order to achieve it.

Which is actually a very Vigilante thing.

Well, unfortunately at this time the gameplay does not really support you being totally separated from Arachnos. You still get all your missions (as a Rogue, that is) on the red side, and your Patrons are still the Arachnos Patrons. In fact, if anything the hand of Arachos is SPREADING, because HEROES will now be going around, wielding the powers of the Arachnos patrons, and summoning Widows, Tarantulas, and Mu Mystics, in the streets of Paragon City!

OTOH, you do have the option of using the new villain APPs now, and hopefully in the future new Patrons will be added. I was thinking of Patrons for the heroes, but a couple of independents who aren't really associated with either side, might be a cool idea too. But that means a lot more development time for the devs to come up with those power sets.

Anyway, I have one villain that is truly, completely and totally evil. His name is Dragon Lord Morgon, and back during the middle ages, he experimented with body swapping and mind control, until he could steal the body of a dragon. He then was imprisoned by the Circle of Thorns, but was set free in the present. He is extremely sociable, charismatic, and polite, and he is also a ruthless, sadistic monster who thinks nothing on experimenting on other beings just to make himself more powerful.

Most of my other characters are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I have one character that was framed for a crime he didn't commit and was forced to go to work for Arachnos. Another had his partner killed by another villain, and he has gone underground in the Rogue Isles until he can find a way to get his revenge. Said other villain is himself just trying to free himself from the Mob, and thinks he can use his power to take over and turn the world into a Utopia. (Much like Cole) And I have several heroes that went over to the Rogue Isles and went "undercover".

So yeah, the vast majority of them will either go Rogue, or full Hero. Then again, I have some Heroes that will go Villain as well.

Well, Vigilantes wouldn't have red side contacts yet, so they wouldn't be working with Mavis or Phipps. And just killing them outright, even if you went Rogue and gave up your villain side contacts, you could always come around and do them again, by going Villain again. So you don't want to eliminate a Contact that could potentially be important later.

On the other hand, eliminating a Contact after you are DONE with him, that would be a different matter. And I have to admit some of my "villains" I have role played as heroes under cover in the Rogue Isles, I have just assumed that once the mission was done, my hero turned on his Contact, beat the snot out of him and turned him over to Longbow. ESPECIALLY in cases like Mavis and Phipps. There's quite a few of my villains, whether secretly heroes or not, that end up wanting to beat their Contact into the ground, just out of spite. (Of course, there is the greater question of whether you COULD. For instance, I kind of suspect that while Mr. Bocor wouldn't be a problem face to face, you probably would never get the chance to get that close to him)

If that were an optional mission at the end of an arc that would eliminate the Contact, that would be cool.

Of course, the technology is new to Praetoria, and it will probably be a while before it can be retrofitted to the existing content.

Another possibility is Rikti War Zone, the only Tailor there is also a Surgeon.

You've set yourself for a challenge, IMHO the Mastermind is the most complex AT to play, and the hardest to master. Picking it as your first choice takes guts.

The main thing to remember as a Mastermind, though, is that individually you are only one fourth of the AT. At lower levels that could be as much as one half, but you're always going to get the majority of damage and survivability from your henchmen. Your Secondary is not only intended to supplement your abilities, it protects and supplements your henchmen as well, keeping them alive and making the stronger. You can take your own attacks, but they will mostly be useful only in the lower levels when you don't have a lot of henchmen.

(Basically, your damage will ramp down from 1-20. While you can still use attacks in the 18-24 range, you're really going to be pushing it to use them. And then once you hit the 30s, they really won't be useful any more, except to attract aggro and for the occasional control effect)

The second thing to consider, as others have pointed out, is that AoEs are horrible against Masterminds. They can rip through your henchmen and even Bodyguard if they are all stacked together. You have two strategies to deal with AoEs, one is to split up your forces so half of them run into melee with the AoE throwers, while the others stand back and fire at them from a distance. The other is to go into melee yourself, attract all the aggro, and take the alpha so when your henchmen get into melee with you, the enemies won't have their AoEs recharged.

You mention that your bots run into melee. This tends to happen with one or two, but they shouldn't all be going into melee. You can work with this tendency, though, by using a keybind to make that one bot who seems suicidal move to a particular location with Goto. If he runs into melee, well, he would do that anyway, but if he doesn't, he's still away from the others.

Another thought is that you make have them on Aggressive. You should set some or all of your henchmen to Defensive. Setting some to Aggressive and some to Defensive is actually a good way to get them to split up and not draw all the AoE into one place. But setting all your henchmen to Follow Defensive is how you set Bodyguard Mode. And that's how you can get into melee with a bunch of foes and survive it. I don't know if you've read up on Bodyguard, but there was a post on the subject just now, and I'm sure you can find it.

A couple more tips:

To ensure you've upgraded everyone, open up your Pet Window, and then click on the arrow on the left side of the window that points in. It should make a bunch of icons appear next to the window. Once of those icons should represent the upgrade, it will be the same color as the upgrade power, and appear when you use the Power on the bots. Once you can recognize the icon in the set of them, you should know when your bots are upgraded.

Another trick is to always upgrade all your henchmen at once, when you first summon them. If you start losing bots, keep resummoning, but don't upgrade them if you can help it. When the battle is over, call them all back and do it with one application. Of course, don't let yourself be killed, it's okay to upgrade "on the fly" if you have to.

There should be two little red lights on the back of a bot that is upgraded. And as mentioned, they will ALL be upgraded if in the radius of the effect, even though only one gets the "machine comes out of the ground and welds on it" animation.

Don't ever try to wait for a bot to heal on its own. If you have no heal power, no green pills, and the bot is too badly damaged to keep fighting, dismiss it. It takes less time to resummon a bot and re-upgrade it than to wait for it to heal on its own. (It can also be more useful to save the green pills until you need them instead of trying to keep from having to resummon)

Of course, once you get to 12, and get the Protector bot, HE will start to heal your bots. Then you only need to worry about keeping HIM healed. (Until 18, when you can get two Protos which will heal each other)

Yep. I'm guessing you just never noticed the differences before, or hadn't played a Corruptor or something to compare it to.

Dark is still pretty much your best choice.

Yeah, it's annoying that the default controls don't set both Follow and Defensive. But then, they were created before Bodyguard existed.

Keep in mind that the mechanism of previous Contacts from the old "level band" (10-20, 20-30, 30-40) referring you to new Contacts happens only in Paragon City. Villains must do Mayhem Missions as they cross each level band to open up the Contacts in that Zone. So the devs are anticipating that you already know that mechanism exists to open up Contacts.

It would have been nice if the devs did give you a free Contact in your level band when you switch sides, but it was easier to just require you to do a Safeguard Mission. And in fact, you can do Safeguard Missions as a Rogue and unlock the Contacts even though you cannot access them yet. So it was at least possible to anticipate the switch and have some Contacts waiting for you.

The good news is, once you unlock a "regular" contact, they will continue to unlock Contacts across subsequent level bands, in Paragon City anyway.

Corruptors, Blasters and Dominators are all very soloable. Blasters tend to be the most fragile of the three, while Corruptors are the weakest offensively. Corruptors also take a lot more planning and strategy, if you're playing a soloable Corruptor, you want one with debuffs like Rad or Kin. So you don't just charge in blasting, first you lay down your debuffs so the foes will be weak enough to take on.

The Dominator is sort of similar. You want to lock down your foes before you start shooting them. But you can pick off the first few foes from a distance before you alert the rest of them by locking them down.

I have both an Inv/SS Tanker and an SS/Inv Brute who are the same character. The way I have my slotting set up, the Tanker is somewhat inefficient in terms of End, and uses it up quickly on heavy attacks, settling on well slotted weak attacks at the end. The Brute is the other way around, uses his weak attacks to build Fury, then unleashes his strongest attacks at the end, with them slotted well so he can keep using them without draining his End and having to stop.

They kind of act diametrically opposed. The Brute starts slow and builds up to high damage, the Tanker starts with high damage and tapers off as his foes get down to where he can hold them off indefinately.

I don't know if I would recommend such a build to anyone else, but it does demonstrate that the two are equally good, just in different ways. The Tanker's slow but can wade into anything without thinking, the Brute is fast and can steamroller through a spawn, but sometimes you have to stop and hold yourself back.

Also, a major consideration is whether you would like to have Unstoppable sooner, or Foot Stomp sooner. With Unstoppable you can become an engine of non-stop destruction that much faster. But you can only attack one foe at a time until you get Foot Stomp. So which would you like better at 32?

I would suggest picking up some control mitigation, maybe Intimidate from the Presense pool. You have no mitigation in Claws, and you have nothing but Defense mitigation in Super Reflexes. You really need something else, ANYTHING else to hold you over until you can softcap your Defense.

Try buying some Stun Grenades from the Market. Get Sands of Mu or the Blackwand if you have those Vet Powers for the -ToHit. And you may have to rely more on slotting and less on Fury since you may have to take on smaller spawns. (And Vet and Temp powers will help with that since they don't rely on Fury)

Of course, you've already come up with the best solution. You could have gone with another Primary, like Dark or Energy instead of another Secondary. It's about Set compatibility more than SR being the problem. But if you do feel like going back to your SR, hopefully my suggestions will help.

(And I plan on trying a Claws/WP Brute soon myself... )

I have to agree, I've been playing my Brute a lot lately, and even though I'm solo, it's been quite rewarding to see that Fury shoot up. I was never about maxing it out anyway, so I can maintain it a lot higher a lot longer.

I honestly think the whole thing about "it drops slowly as long as you are in battle and drops quickly when it ends" is the way it should have worked all along. It just makes more sense that way, even if the incoming Fury has to be lowered accordingly.