Poison Good Love

[Amilcar Labrosse]

Ihad a good concept for it. Skunk Man was a tech Thugs/Poison. The thugs were his friends from the neighborhood that helped him fight crime. Stink, Stank And Crazy Eddie(the arsonist) were the first tier henchmen. Stunk and Marv, the tier 2 henchmen. Leon his oldest and best friend was the Bruiser. Tier 9 /Poison was his musk scent that would spray on to his big bruiser Leon before he went rampage on the criminals. Leon really hated it. Envenom and Weaken and the other debuffs also represented his musk spray.

But you may not mind the lack of performance. Theme means a lot! About the only thing I actually enjoyed was the piddly heal. And that was just because of pass through targeting. You could target the mobs and the heal would hit their target, which was the henchman they were attacking.

I played my Necro/Poison on live, but I only played him to the teens I think. It was much slower and harder than my other MMs, it could even be one of the worst characters I played. For all that I enjoyed playing him. It's better now as the powers have a half power (small) aoe, but really it's best for single tougher targets, and probably works better in teams that can get you to those harder targets.

/kin is also fun as you end up with rage zombies, and works fairly well in teams, much better combo with necro than poison, you could always color it green and call it poison. I understand /dark works really well with necro, if you find /poison doesn't suit you, though I haven't tried that combo, you could also color /dark green.

I played my Necro/Poison to 50 on live and I was in denial about how sick I was of it underperforming. I wonder how crazy the single target heal in combination with the trash zombies drove you. I shudder thinking about it now.

I too had a fun concept for a necro/poison MM which was a mummy. You know like those poison traps in pharaoh's tombs? I colored the darkness powers sandy brown so it looked like his pets were rising up from the sands of ancient Egypt. Cool concept but poison is just so weak. Those tiny AOEs were just no fun.

What you have to realize is that Poison is mostly a HIGH DAMAGE set, with LOW DEFENSE. If you put procs in Paralytic Poison, it becomes a good single-target attack. If you put procs in Poison Trap, it becomes an awesome light nuke. With two sources of -Res, you can both deal damage directly, and also buff the damage done, by a lot.

Now, defensively, the powers are generally weak statistically and bad in other ways (animation time, recharge, AoE). The only place where they are actually strong is because -Res boosts your -Damage debuffing, thus you can throw a lot of -Res at a target, then hit it with -Damage, and that -Damage is amplified. But you're generally not going to get much value out of that except against Bosses and up.

1) when fighting small groups of enemies. So raise the difficulty level but NOT the size of the team. You can fight bosses pretty well with stacking debuffs on them, but if fighting lots of minions, those small AoEs for your defensive powers hurt a lot.

2) when paired with a strong defensive set. To me, this screams Controller, because if you pair Poison with Earth, Dark, or Plant Control, then you have a lot of damage mitigation and can afford to use a damage-oriented secondary. But on a MM where you're trying to keep pets alive... maybe use it with a Primary that is strong defensively. Try Robots, or Nature with high Recharge slotting that tries for a perma-Fortify Pack build. Maybe Necro/Poison, again with low spawn sizes, because then you end up getting the -ToHit debuffs from the undead stacking onto just a few targets. Single-target Glooms don't help much against 10-mob spawns, but do help a lot against spawns with just a Boss and 1 or 2 other mobs.

In the end, you can do well with Poison, but NOT like a true generalist character who can fight lots of mobs, or few tough mobs... fighting lots of mobs as a MM can get hectic anyhow, doing it with a secondary that really doesn't protect well against large spawn sizes is very iffy.

I would seriously consider going Necro/Poison, using Zombies as a slot mule for all of the defensive IOs and only summoning them as a speed bump on occasion. Slot up the personal attacks since you actually get 3 of them so you have a good attack cycle with Paralytic Poison added (use damage Procs to bypass the low base MM damage). Generally run just the Knights and Lich so you have fewer targets to heal with your single-target heal. Keep the Lich by you in Bodyguard, and send the Knights up front... it concentrates the damage, but also concentrates mobs together and gives you only two targets to heal. And keep the difficulty high but the spawn size small, this way you get all of the debuffs onto just a few targets and they become noticeable. Put Achilles Heel in the Knights, this also works better with fewer targets of higher-difficulty. With all this, it should play quite well against higher level but smaller spawns. On teams, this build's lack of AoE may not matter that much since there is usually a lot of AoE damage, so you can focus on sending the Knights at the bosses and debuffing the bosses/AVs. So it should also be acceptable on teams. Not a great overall build, but I think you can squeeze some lemonade as long as you realize what the set's strengths are.

Been working on my Poison MM a bit. Proc'd out Poison Trap is nice. But the to hit rolls seem really off. I rolled a lot of 95+ rolls. It seems like the 5% comes up a lot more than 5% of the time. 10 out of 55 dice throws were over 95%.

2 - Everything the set does good to well is brought together and elevated by venomous gas. But MMs dont have that. And while noxious gas is a very strong power the uptime is unfortunately pretty low.

It gives the same power to whatever henchmen you use it on, however bosses have a 1.25 modifier for their debuff strengths, Lts. have a 1 modifier, and Minions have a .75 modifier, and since it grants a power, it uses their stats.

I have a Poison/Sonic Blast Defender named Plaguebat, and he's actually really strong. Not just on damage output, but in terms of how much he can help a team melt down bosses and AVs. He often hovers into the fray just to keep his Venomous Gas on everything and place his Poison Traps. Enemy stats become near worthless, sort of like when you have a Trick Arrows or Radiation Emissions teammate. It feels like some halfway point between those two sets. But Venomous Gas is the key there. If Envenom and Weaken are your bread and butter moves, Venomous Gas is the main course.

The Mastermind version Noxious Gas is just... awful. Relatively speaking. It's a similar effect, but instead of being centered on you, the last person who wants to wade into the thick of a fight, it's centered on a pet. Sounds great, right? Unfortunately it's temporary and has a long cooldown. Why? No clue. It's not like Poison was too strong a power set to let Masterminds use the default version or anything, lol. But unfortunately, for a set so heavily focused on debuffing instead of healing/buffing (which are hard enough to play on Masterminds as it is), Poison just doesn't really have the tools to feel like it works at all on the Mastermind class.

I really hope the Homecoming devs look into this and try to address it. I wouldn't mind Noxious Gas having a long cooldown if, like Enchant Undead, it just gave your pets a permanent (but smaller) Venomous Gas aura of their own until they died. Make you reapply it if you summon new ones. Problem solved. They could make the AoE smaller, lower the stat debuff and make them stack, or any number of things to try to balance it, but it really should be a persistent effect like it is for other classes.

is assistant professor of philosophy at University of Puget Sound in Washington state. She is the author of The Philosophy of Envy (2021) and her work has been published in Philosophical Psychology, European Journal of Philosophy, and Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, among others.

My best friend in high school was tall, lean and pretty. She had a long neck and luscious dark hair, alabaster skin punctuated by a constellation of beauty marks, and a teeth gap that she flaunted before it was fashionable. She was funny and fierce, smart but not particularly diligent, and more self-assured than me in matters of romance and sex.

I loved her with a passionate intensity that had sensual undertones of which I was only confusedly and intermittently aware. We spent a lot of time together, shared many new experiences, and supported and relied on each other as intimate friends do.

And yet, I also envied her. I envied her for what I thought was her superior confidence, beauty and ease in navigating a difficult world. I would borrow a skirt of hers, and then, casually and without conscious intention to hurt, I would mention that others had found the skirt slutty. We would take our measurements, and I would resent what was to my eyes an undeniable, if hard to articulate, quantitative inferiority.

I now wonder whether she envied me for my permissive parents, my privileged upbringing, my scholastic achievements. I imagine she perceived my unconfessed envy, but we never discussed it or its manifestations.

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