Blackstream

@Stormwalker Masterminds are actually bordering on overpowered at pvp. I've pvped with many builds, but by far my strongest build was my Necro/Storm mastermind. I literally never lost a fight with this build, before or after the I13 patch. It didn't matter if I was fighting against stalkers, tanks, blasters, aoe masters, or single target specialists, that build won against them all (including other masterminds as it was specifically designed to be anti-mastermind). There were actually multiple times I took on multiple opponents at once and came out on top. The funny thing is people told me my build wouldn't work because storm was too end heavy, but I never heard that anymore.

Dealing with aoe fire. Bodyguard mode extends 60 feet. First off I was a necro/storm so my pets actually had a huge amount of fire and cold resistance which was a lot of the aoe damage I could run into, and my build had a huge amount of tohit debuffs which would often kill any chance at aoeing me down anyways. But even without that, bodyguard mode extends out about 60 feet which is a HUGE distance and bigger than any aoe. All you have to do is stay out of aoe range of your pets, and they either have to waste their attacks hitting you, or they focus on your pets only which greatly reduces their damage and is generally just a bad idea because you can just resummon and the whole time the pets are wasting them while you're debuffing, healing, whatever. Some builds (pain dom, probably thermal) can just sit and take the aoe fire and heal it off too. I also use taunt on my MMs. It's hard to focus on pets when I'm using challenge on my target. I actually used it more to get people off my teammates, but if I really wanted to protect my pets, hopping out of aoe range of my pets but still in bodyguard range and taunting was an okay strat.

Any MM that wants to pvp though should go into the forums and look at the bind guides. I would often do things like keep my grave knights and zombies in defensive follow while telling my lich to attack. Or keep only my zombies in bodyguard and tell my gks and lich to attack.

I have to disagree, or at least clarify a few things you said. Granted I haven't played for awhile so if anything's changed feel free to let me know, but I used to be a super avid mastermind player, as did my friend.

Mercenaries - These guys are most definitely not heavy on the damage. In fact, especially when I was playing, I don't know if they got a buff since then, they are regarded as by far the weakest set for damage, since they don't deal impressive amounts of damage to begin with, and their damage is the most resisted type in the game to boot. Also, their LT unit, the spec ops, actually makes the set more controllery oriented. They have multiple aoe mez grenades, and with proper micromanagement (i.e., unsummoning and resummong, which is easy to do with binds, and only applying an upgrade on them when you need that tier of grenade), you can have an aoe death mez up for pretty much every spawn. But even without, they don't contribute much to damage and contribute a lot to controlling the spawns, making them a somewhat tactical set. The LT class in general is a very large part of the dps in any set, so taking them out of the damage roll makes it play way different. And of course the medic also doesn't really contribute to damage making it even less dps.

Poison - Way wrong. The debuffs are by far the best in the game bar none. The only thing dark miasma really has on poison is that the debuffs in poison are single target, versus DM which is aoe. But poison is bar-none the best at taking down a single target. Poison also has much more debuffs than DM. DM pretty much only excels at two things, tohit debuffs, and damage debuffs. Poison throws the kitchen sink at them, including killing regen for AV fights and the such.

Traps - Time Bomb I'd addon to say it's only really good on sets that explode instantly. Traps used to be overpowered because of poison gas trap, and how it'd pop out a cloud for each enemy in the explosion radius. Also the choking animation is actually just a forced animation and has a tendency to work on AVs. But it's generally lackluster since the change.

Pain Domination. I'd like to point out one important thing about PD that makes it incredibly good on masterminds. The damage you take from share pain is actually absorbed by bodyguard, and I believe you actually get enough regen from the set to counter the -regen from share pain, and you end up being able to practically spam share pain all day.

Robotics also does insane amounts of damage in the right circumstance. Namely, with the level 32 upgrade, if you can get enemies clustered, the Incendiary missiles do retarded amounts of damage really fast. Same for thugs, the arsonist is key to gameplay in the late game.

Necromancy, you don't have the ability to raise things you've killed. You raise your pets out of thin air, don't need any bodys, and the spirit you can raise comes from the dead bodies of your own minions. Which btw I believe works nicely with time bomb, since it's both instant and gives you a soul extraction.

I'm not as experienced with ninjas, as they're a bit too fragile with me, but with smoke flash, ninjas are probably the highest dps out of all the sets, if you can get everything in melee range. Only problem is that it's really expensive to maintain.

Not even in the slightest.

My problem with CO is not the power system, but the actual powers themselves. It's not that there's only a few uber builds (which is more or less true), but that even the non uber builds pretty much break down into dps and less dps, and healer and crappier healer, and combinations of those 4. It's like, do I want to specialize in aoe dps (fire), or single target dps (melee), or possibly long range cone dps (gigabolt). Or maybe some weak dps (ice). But I can mix it up by combining my dps with some of my other dps to make playing interesting. Oh and there's buffs to make me live longer, or make my dps hit harder. And heals.

Powers outside of this box are very few. There's skarns which removes buffs (nice for pvp, sadly useless for pve)... and does dps. There's... shields, which are just hp buffers which are just proactive heals. I can't even think of anything else. There's a few kinds of mezzes too I guess.

I'm not a fan of grind, but I also don't like systems that say "Okay, no more leveling for you till next week". I'd rather they remove grind by making the levels just come faster. And failing that, I'd prefer UO's powerhour system where for the first hour in every day that you log in you get mad exp, so that all a casual has to do is log in for an hour every day, but if you really wanted to, you could keep going after that.

It should be X amount of experience in a gameweek, not X time. The way this system sounds, you could try to level for 4 hours, but end up in a crappy group and get nothing done and basically screw over your leveling for the week. This is also gonna make leveling teams that much more anal about who they take with them and how good their party is. I predict a lot of people ragequitting teams the second there's a hint of any slowdown, and possibly little pug action depending on how the exp timer starts (if it's only while in combat, or from when you log in, or what).

Pre also benefits pet hp doesn't it? Or was that removed in the pet pass.

I realize that the test center is subject to change and that I shouldn't expect what's on it to go to live as is regardless of feedback (even though that happens a lot), but it boggles me that a patch dedicated to improving the worst powers in the game.... made them worse.

I liked the trailer, but I'd rather see this cutscene using the ingame engine, because as pretty as this was, I'll never see anything like this ingame.

Well I for one am currently not paying for any Cryptic products, and with the advent of this crap, I do believe that not even the pet pass in champions online will bring me back. Greedy bastards... even trying to cash in on the $25 mount crazy.

And for the record, cable pricing is retarded and probably indicative of what'll happen to the internet should corporations ever get to set their own policies. Paying $40 a month for access to 'standard' websites, and probably something stupid like $60 a month for 'premium' websites, and $100 a month for unlimited access.

And don't get me started on airplanes. Used to get free meals on them if they were long flights, and sodas and snacks were guaranteed, and if there was a movie, it was free to watch. Now? $5 for a pair of headphones. Sucker. Hope you brought your own.