Salutations. Whenever I do one of my tier lists about soloing characters in City of Heroes, I often get a lot of flak for putting Masterminds at the top. I put them at the top because my tier list always have a condition of being level 1 through 35, and as I've demonstrated on videos, when you are doing the lower levels with only SOs and with the content set at normal difficulty, then you can easily handle mob packs and even elite bosses without even hardly interacting with your other powers, because the minions are pretty strong and will carry the fight on their own as long as you are patient.
With that said, the comments usually come from people who, in playing the endgame and doing higher difficulty levels, find that the pets die very quickly, when you push up to +4 x8 or +5. I know where they're coming from, and I have struggled with that in the past myself. However, I know in the last couple of patches that the Homecoming team have done some reworks to Masterminds. Yet I never really sat down and tried to go through some of the harder content myself.
So I went ahead and did that, and I have a couple of videos to share in relation to this. They show how even at the lower levels with only SOs, a MM can handle x8+1 content, and at the higher levels, even with a poorly optimized character who has no Incarnates, can actually handle +3 x8 (Probably could have pushed it to +4). Because that character is poorly optimized, I fee there is no reason to believe that they couldn't handle x8 at +4 or even +5 if they had proper Incarnates and
better set bonuses, since 50% of your set bonuses are also given to your pets as long as you keep them somewhat close by and Supremacy is kicking in.
Don't get me wrong...I'm not saying if I was doing a Lv 50 tricked out tier list about solo play I would keep them at the top. I think that some of the pushback and opinions I get are people who have formed opinions on the Mastermind's performance in the past and have not reevaluated their performance since some of these updates took effect. So, perhaps their reputation to choke up on harder content is no longer warranted.
But what do you think? Do you think that Masterminds still struggle with high-end content? Have you tried playing with them since all of the changes that Homecoming team put into effect? What do you think about the subject? Looking forward to the conversations.
Lv 26 MM vs +1 x8: https://youtu.be/HsX9djc4KBc
Lv 50 MM (No incarnates) vs +3 x6-8: https://youtu.be/whpnNlBKxJ0