TheSpiritFox

This is pretty obstinate and disrespectful. You don't like having your idea that MMs are weak challenged. If you can't solo the ITF at +1 with your 50 Thugs/Traps you built it wrong. Promise. Incarnates are needed, but it's easy with the right ones. Achillles is something I end up slotting other places. Like, a thugs natures has it in the nature debuff, my thugs/traps has it in acid mortar and my thugs/time in slowed response. Not wanting to like stack it too hard, I ended up putting damage procs in the enforcers. I've never tried the build up proc. I'm curious at the damage difference it makes vs a proc. I'd like to see that mathed out, though I tend towards procs cause guaranteed damage.

I would honestly like to see you move empowering up to 6 and move the other 3 above it down 1 Buff empowering to compensate.

Demons/Ea worked out fine for me. Took bonfire for mitigation and it works well. My two actual complaints about /ea on masterminds are this. 1) EA truly does not do enough to help with pet damage or debuffing enemies and honestly needs some kinda help with that. Some CC, some debuff, some better buff that affects pets specifically. Maybe like double the EA buffs on pets if cast by the owning mastermind? 2) Far worse. Discharge is bullshit. Bullshit I tell you. We are the ONLY EA who doesn't get the extra pet AS THE PET CLASS which has the side effect of making an already busy ass set even busier. We didn't need discharge we needed a pet to cast it for us to save us both endurance and time like everyone else gets and I think that should absolutely be reverted and it won't be so we're stuck with discharge. And yes I said don't do it when they were testing no one listened. It sucked in beta and it sucks now.

1000% agree with this statement.

Dude NO. This is my slotting for thugs/traps across most of its powers. Also have super jump with kb IOs, 4 slots in stamina and 2 in health, maneuvers, tactics, assault, etc. This is about as ideal slotting as you can come up with for thugs and it is way cheaper than filling it with hami-os. You can fit two auras in thugs while still getting good enhancement values AND getting 2 +10% recharge bonuses just out of thugs. Enforcers get the hami os so you can fit two damage procs and a LOTG def/global rech. Bruiser gets the other 4 pieces of mark of supremacy for another 10% recharge, soulbound allegiance for bruiser buildup and DPS, and a hami to round out accuracy and damage values. Plus 4 auras in gang war and 2 maxed recharge IOs. This is about as solid a thugs/traps build as it is possible to make in the game. I went with a purple set in acid mortar purely for recharge bonuses, it doesn't help the damage much but the build has the slots to do it if you aren't taking personal attacks. If you are, then I'd reslot acid mortar while leaving most of the rest alone. This build is defense over offense but dude you are not slotting out your thugs traps the right way if you are not chasing set bonuses, recharge is GOD with a traps build it is your FIRST build priority. Also seekers are great. Actually great. Taking the alpha is an incredibly useful tool for a build which does not have an actual AOE heal like /dark or /time to actively help keep your dudes all alive at once. Seekers are how you don't lose a minion going into a group pretty much ever. Trip mine and detonator are garbage, but you're NOT capitalizing on your build potential with the slotting you described. The entire trick is recharge. My poison trap has a 30 second recharge, my acid mortar the same. I can keep 2 acid mortars out at all times and they stack. I have seekers up every 25 seconds. Caltrops is on a 14 second goddamn recharge I can have 3 caltrops patches out at once. You talked about downtime between traps. Nope. With the long cast times of trap dropping, I have time to throw a few web grenades in between trap casts with no personal attacks. Bonfire is permaed, there is always one on the ground unless its at the last mob group during a steamroll. I am constantly dropping traps, throwing seekers, caltropping everywhere and anywhere, and then microing my pets to specifically target hard targets like bosses while I let the aoe eat the minions and lts. Its more than enough to keep you busy especially at 50. Traps with sufficient recharge is a decently active secondary. And at the same time, tbh, its nice when all the traps are down, you have 5 seconds before any recharges are up, and you just sit there and watch the carnage in peace. Its such a chill playstyle, I highly recommend it. Thugs/traps is one of the strongest characters in the game and it is possibly the chillest playstyle of any AT or powerset combo in the game. Nothing feels as mastermindy as thugs or bots /traps. This build with incarnates can solo most +4x8 content incarnate content or not. It is literally designed to carry +4x8 ITFs. I can solo the entire ITF with this build minus the final boss because at +4 that autohit aoe shreds your pets and there's not a goddamn thing in the world you can do to stop it, trying to finish Rommy and his nictus alone would probably require you to stay in mission long enough to summon a lore pet several times after clearing every enemy within a half mile of rommy first. Traps is at it's strongest when the traps come up decently fast. Perma poison trap is like what? An extra 200 DPS on AV level enemies by neutering their regen? Permanently? You want poison trap up fast. Two acid mortars? Thats -20% resistance per acid mortar, -20% again if either of them procs achilles on a target, -20% on top of that if caltrops or bonfire procs annihilation on a target. -1000% regen, -80% resistance, -45% defense (all autohit if the procs go off) and that's a maximum of 4 powers used, 2 of which are procced out to actually do a pretty respectable amount of aoe damage all on their own. Thugs traps is a goddamn deathpit. You set up your traps and keep your minions in a bubble and you use things like seekers and patron attacks (lol) to pull shit INTO your death pit where your minions on defensive goto shred anything that looks at you sideways and you're basically close to unkillable so long as your minions are not individually aggro capped cause nothing in this game can survive like 46 dudes attacking it all at the same time lol. My thugs traps can lead steamrolls. If it's not +4x8, it just IS the steamroller. 55 second pylon kill with no lore pet. And it exemps well. Yes I have attuned purples. I literally was just buying all my enhancements and forgot to switch to non attuned when I got to the purple sets so fuck it, I have non boosted purples. Whatever.

I was about to say someone really loves their stone tank lmao

New bucket list item

I love the arsonist. I've got my thugs/traps and thugs/time no-expense-spared ioed out and he's a couple of points over all positional softcaps on both teams. He often takes damage, but with all the uniques he often survives it and I basically run into groups prepared to heal him and I just love watching giant burn patches obscure the entire battle while I stand there and watch the carnage.

Dark is actually the set I use bodyguard the most with on MMs. Cast darkest knight, run into melee with pets set to defensive goto, drop tar patch, cast heal, go from there. Because dark depends on debuffs rather than buffs pulling with anything other than darkest knight is asking to lose pets if not die, but once debuffed I just park myself in melee with dark and let the demons do their thing.

Petrifying gaze also stacks a nice bit of tohit towards dark's general theme of "Only AVs have more than a 5% chance to hit anything ever" and even if the fear itself doesn't stick, everyone who gets hit takes a nice accuracy debuff in a pretty decent sized cone. Its also, if you have the slots and are building for recharge, a solid spot for 5 pieces of gravitational anchor.

StJ/Shield or Katana/SR would be my picks. Though you could do dual blades/sr for the rogue effect.

Gimme an insects pet set please I want to order my giant stag beetle into battle.

I literally do not enjoy playing non MM supports for this reason. I build all of my MMs around few to no personal attacks, heavy support, heavy tanking, and as heavy pet damage as I can achieve. When I want to play a character that does actual personal attacking I start making blasters, scrappers, stalkers, and brutes. Well, my water/storm corr is a bit different but I consider that all attacking as well.l

There's really only ever a reason to make one of each of the epics. Like, I have 6 fully T4ed masterminds. Why would I do that with VEATs? I have a crab and it has a second spec for bane no reason to have to switch between characters when I can switch builds every 60 seconds.

My bane is my second spec. I made it a crab and then decided to drop a second about a billion on the most expensive single target bane build. Yeah, it does less overall damage than the crab by alot, but goddamn if it doesn't chew down single targets faster than the crab could ever dream of. I set up my macros and have it set up so I can lock my trays and switch. Costs me recharges. If I'm below 45 that means it costs me basically nothing to switch back and forth, at 45 and up content I have to think about losing lore pet cooldowns and that's about it. Means I almost never get to use TT or ATT on teh character lol, but ehh I'll take that loss.

I made two neckbeard themed characters and I am looking for the most neckbeardy badge titles in the game. Suggestions? Currently using Ninja Monkey but I want something even neckbeardier

I really suggest support. Hybrid does work, it is an absolute pain in the ass to use. You lose some of it's effective time resumoning, and it completely interrupts all of your flow. Its genuinely not worth the tradeoff unless you are DPS testing against a pylon or specifically about to solo an AV and want the extra damage for it. Support is fire and forget, which overall is much more useful, and it buffs everyone including your pets in a number of ways. I would say that the micromanagement of assault hybrid is not worth it. If you want to up your pet DPS with an incarnate, pick a radial interface instead of a core. MMs benefit more from radial interfaces than any other class because we throw out a larger number of attacks, it is easier to maintain full stacks of the actual debuffs with an MM with radial on a single target than it is to keep the same stacks of debuff on a single target for a normal AT with core, and the damage procs from interface add up quite alot with the number of pet attacks. Thugs in particular a hilarious boost to their damage with the arsonist and enforces all constantly throwing out aoes in very direction.

You did not at all choose a bad combo you don't know how to play /dark yet. /Dark is a bit different from most other secondaries. Time, cold, thermal, nature, traps, all of those can allow you to let the pets lead because they give you the ability to seriously buff your pets survivability or heal without thinking about it. Dark requires that you target someone for your heal, it WILL miss 5% of the time no matter how much accuracy you stack. And rather than buffing, dark is primarily a debuffing set. So how do you play Dark? You put your pets in defensive follow, and you pick a boss out of the group and cast darkest knight on him, then immediately drop your tar patch if it's up, then move into melee range with your pets following and fire off your heal. Bodyguard mode means you can take the alpha better than your pets can. Even my demons/dark, I send in the pets and it's really, really easy to lose 1-3 of them and demons are the tankiest pets, but often the T1s just melt. Unless the enemies are so debuffed they can't hit shit. Darkest knight both reduces accuracy AND damage, and with the exception of AVs nothing can resist -damage that I am aware of. So immediately, you use that and it's like adding defense and resistance to your pets. Once the fight has started and your pets start to pull aggro from you, that's when you can like give them attack commands if you want and such, when everyone is debuffed, slowed, less accurate, less damaging, and you're in melee range with your pets to start just spamming your big ass aoe heal. Try that method and you'll find that suddenly you're pretty good in a fight. Also, until you have enough sets to give you decent -recharge bonuses, slot some recharge, endurance drain, and -tohit in darkest night in that order. You'll need your endurance, but more importantly darkest night has like an 8 second recharge or something base and that is really annoying as fuck. You have to pay attention to it, drop it as soon as the fight is over so it recharges before the next group, and if you have to switch targets mid fight it really sucks to have an 8 second recharge, as you've seen you can die in that time frame. Recharge in darkest night will save your ass.

You should NOT be fighting +4s at lvl 20. Stop jacking up the level and jack up the number of enemies. Do like +0 or +1 x3 or x4 and don't go above +1 until you can handle +1x8. You genuinely cannot set yourself up to handle +4s without a solid team of buff/debuff/heals/aggro mangement/dps all covered, or being high level enough to slot out sets and turn your toon into a demigod.

The only guide you need to epics is this. "Do you need a shield? Take the shield. Do you need power boost? Take power boost. Do you not need a shield or power boost? Take bonfire." Good guide though lol

Demons/thermal is the best combination of the ones you mentioned, cold being next, but thermal has heals which you really need and cold is a defense set where demons are a resistance primary so mixing your mitigation isn't going to work well in a set with no heals, Cold absolutely needs to softcap the pets to really be solid.

lol nice Oh and now my Demons/Elec is finished and I forgot to list their names. Zappy Mcsummonsalot has 6 pets Zzt, Zzzt, Zzzzt, Zzzzzt, Zzzzzzzt and Zzzzzzzzt Those are Zs not underlined 7s lmao

Please allow grav controllers to wormhole lvl 54 bosses into my thugs traps death pit thanks

Yeah I can agree with that. No other powerset in the game besides mm primaries has like 6 default IOs it needs for the build to be solid and missing them is a compromise and a felt loss every time. The fact that my thugs MMs are infinitely tankier than my bots MM is ridiculous.

Sup all. So I have three blasters who I like. The fairly typical Archery/TA, a Fire/Ice, and a Beam/Dev. And like, I have no idea what or how exactly to build these out. I see alot of recharge and ranged defense, but like I haven't spent enough time on blasters to get a good idea of what the sets can do on the high end or what I should be building them to try to do. And money is no object, I spend whatever the best build I can come up with costs if I get something to 50. But like...what? What are my build goals and playstyle with each of these blasters? Whats possible? Do i have choices or is there kinda an ideal build for each one? How do I turn each of these blasters into an absolute murder machine with as much survivability as I can reasonably expect? Actual build suggestions for each would be nice as I am not really sure where to start on them, but I would like some meta talk more cause I can eventually figure out a build if I know what to build for, all my other 50s are IOed out beasts, help me do the same to these three.