TheSpiritFox

Soulbound in Prince. A fair few of his attacks hit like a truck under damage boost.

Strongest MM? Thugs/Time or Demons/Nature. By strong, I am assuming "Tanky" and by "Tanky" I am assuming "How nuts does this get with a full no expense spared IO build" Also no expense spared for an MM IO build generally costs about half as much as building a brute or blaster or less. Demons/Nature built right has perma buffs. You stack a little defense on them with maneuvers and with the pet defense IOs and such and then just jack their resistance up as high as you can get it. Between the absorb and the absolutely ridiculous amount of aoe healing that /nature is capable of producing, and the resists demons have and nature gives which slow down incoming damage generally enough that you can outheal it even on minions to say nothing of the T2 and T3 pets, my pets are tanky AS HELL. That said, I am not and if I get aggro away from my pets somehow, it can cascade fail real quick if I get mezzed. But you know, that's why I built to have fly and super speed with celerity stealth IO going 100% of the time so that I can zoom around in the air out of mez range using my range extended /nature heal to invisibly sustain my demons from up in the rafters if need be. Thugs/time on the other hand is simultaneously one of the toughest masterminds to kill and one of the most effective at doing clouds of AOE damage while also being a pretty laid back and not super "Busy" set. The only real weakness is mez, and being tough enough to allow the pets to lead into aggro and take the alpha directly often clears you of that initial wave of alpha mez that can actually kill you if it lands at the wrong moment. Or you know bind break free macros to all of your power executions and wander around with a tray full of them at all times and feel like a demigod. It debuffs, it buffs, the vast majority of it's powers are fire and forget, with only one toggle, a point and click debuff, a few fire and forget aoe team and self buffs, a damage/recovery/regen buff that's pretty solid and worth throwing on your T3 or a team mate when it's up. Also it's 2 minutes long and you can get the timer down to like 25 seconds so you can buff like 4 pets continuously without being perfect on timings or you can buff your T3 pet and a few team mates continuously like a good support lol. Oh and that buff doubles healing from you on the target. You can dump a fair amount of healing on a team mate in a short time, or a pet, if you buff them first and chrono shift comes up. Thugs time has turned into my main. There is literally no content in the game that it can't manage to figure out, even if some level of strategy is involved, and it can often walk face first into engagements that kill 2 or 3 pets and also 2 or 3 teammates but you resummon and your position throughout feels pretty stable, losing pets is predictable through your heals and you just resummon and continue, it's not a cascade but just one pet taking a bit more than he can handle in a short time. Once incarnates come into play, alpha for more damage and barrier/support for pet protection? It would probably take me fucking forever but I could solo the Maria AV arc on +4x8. You put out *alot* of damage but over time it's still not like TW/Bio scrapper numbers. It's alot harder to keep a group of pets doing their ideal DPS against a large group of high level enemies. But at the same time you can chew a boss down pretty well, especially once it's debuffed and pretty close to helpless. Buy envenomed dagger for AVs. Just do it. Oh. Both of these builds take bonfire. Nature enjoys it more and depends on it less. Time needs it to help with the alpha, but once past the alpha time shreds through enemies faster than nature does and the slows really help avoid scatter, which nature does if you get in melee range which you're vulnerable in and can't heal as well from. Time is much more damage proc friendly and much better at soft control as a set. The thing that makes these two get my vote for "Strongest" is that both of them have alot of layers defending against incoming aggression. Like I kinda feel like demons/nature feels like playing a /bio brute sometimes. You're thinking about healing alot and you've got some good resistances and some kinda defense. You absorb and heal during the alpha to break it up alot. Take some of the damage on your health then absorb and take the rest on your shield while you regen the lost health. Certain debuffs or a mez getting through can fuck you up bad. Losing your endurance entirely can fuck you up bad. Thugs/Time on the other hand feels like playing a rad/dark brute. You've got a good bit of AOE, a good bit of CC, it's not always consistent in a fight but it's very consistent over time. You just kinda mow through everything. You have heals if something can hurt you. Not everything can. Once in a while something threatens to kill you. After you get incarnates, you have to look to find things that are remotely capable of killing you. Even endurance drain doesn't really matter that much. Losing your aoe debuff hurts. Everything else is fire and forget. Whatever's already in play, distortion field, farsight, chrono shift. The horse is gone. Endurance drain shut the barn door. Also the bit of up front heal and then a continuous heal over time for the same amount or more that is time's heal is really, really good for MMs. Less overhealing and more continuous protection of your pets for minions with significantly less than most player's health. Nature's heals work alot of the same way and pets just love aoe heals over time that keep them topped off.

Aid pool is really actually a solid little pool if you have an MM with no healing like cold or traps. While the heal isn't a large amount, you can 5 slot it for a panacea 5 piece recharge bonus and take aid pool and field medic with their default slots and aid other becomes something you can fire in the middle of a jump with a quick recharge. The heal is lower than repairs but you can heal again in 5 seconds or less generally. Lots more healing over time than repair provides, and firing field medic makes it heal for more in a pinch. I think mine heals for like 380 with field medic popped? That's a solid chunk of a bruiser or assault bot's health every 5 seconds. I've had my assault bot tank AVs directly and healed him through it with aid pool.

Traps then time. Traps benefits from solo. You can establish your kill zone in the middle of the room and pull multiple groups into it while you let things recharge. Traps in a steamroll is still useful with a high recharge build, but most of what you bring to the table are seekers for alpha taking and force field generator, and caltrops for area control. Bots need mu unless you put sudden accelerations in them, which is tight. Time is decent solo. More mobile than traps with much lower debuff ability.

With bot shields, maneuvers, and farsight your bots should be close to soft capped. Do you have the pet uniques for defense yet? I highly recommend you slot the 2 5% defense auras. I found bots to be pretty solidly survivable. With good slotting like my thugs/time is even very tanky. Bots/time should be decently tanky. If you're having to resummon several times per map I would say your defenses need some work. Also, a note. Bots are unique in that their protector bot bubbles have to be cast, so after summoning bots you have to let them sit and buff each other for a second before they reach full survivability. One of the few annoying leftovers from ye olden times, protector bots are the only force fielders who do not cast in an AoE now.

Aid pool heal other is genuinely better than repair. Use a secondary heal or aid pool first. Repair is like your last option just can't fit it in the build any other way.

I actually really like Soul. Gloom hits hard af, recharges and animates fast. I have the immob unslotted with an accuracy, but with hasten at 1:58 recharge before ageless it recharges fast enough to double stack on bosses and hold runners if I start my chain with it. I like the blood widow extra pet. I find in sub 50 content I took her late enough she doesn't pop up much but can do ok. In 50 content sometimes with a support hybrid and barrier going the pets themselves can be really fucking tanky. Blood widow does some solid damage and takes a solid hit. I have a minute gap on my blood widow but perma on the others and I still fit 6 attacks so I have a full single target and AOE attack chain. Summon pets, if they die they die, artillery everything until it's dead either way. Above 55% resist to everything and softcapped melee and ranged damage helps a ton. I had to make a cardiac alpha for barrier because I had to make an ageless to manage end with musculature in lol. But ageless with musc alpha and assault hybrid and if the pets truly won't survive an alternate incarnate build lets me pump out kinda silly amounts of aoe damage. I'm not a fire blaster but then not much is.

My preferred slotting is 3 hami acc/damage IOs, 2 procs, and 1 LOTG.

They're a solid pet set. If you want them on the more tanky end, beasts with nature, thermal, dark and use fortify pack to softcap them themselves and you have defense, resistance, and great buffs or debuffs to help you out plus AoE heals to help all your beasts at once. If you want them on the high damage end, beasts with traps or time will let you softcap them with your secondary, time especially gives you an AOE heal and a -tohit aura which lets them be very safe without using fortify pack for defense which lets them crit and do alot more damage on the regular. They aren't the highest damaging set, but being melee only they're also not super hard to manage. Their biggest weakness imo is that they lack alot of the AOE that other sets offer in spades, thugs bots and demons all specifically do more aoe damage than beasts do and aoe is king in this game.

Your girlfriend is a sadistic domme isn't she

3 vital changes for MM not in the OP that absolutely need to be included. 1) Make the robotic heal power accept pet ATO procs/auras for aura muling to bring bots in line with other top sets. 2) MAKE LT DEMONS LESS CHONKY. THEY ARE TOO FUCKING FAT AND IT AFFECTS THEIR PATHING IN A WAY NO OTHER GODDAMN PETS HAVE TO DEAL WITH. FUCK VISUAL CLIPPING. EITHER MAKE THE MODELS SMALLER OR MAKE THE FUCKING DEMONS LESS FAT IN THE CODE SO THEY DON'T CONSTANTLY GET HUNG UP ON SHIT IN GAME, HAVE TROUBLE FITTING THEIR FAT ASSSES NEAR A GOTO TAG, OR BLOCK GROUPS BECAUSE THEY CAN'T STOP INHALING MOUNTAIN DEW AND CHICKEN TENDERS! 3) Make robots do knockdown instead of knockback. Having to slot a sudden acceleration into bots anywhere hampers a set that is already critically low on slot availability due to it's lack of an aura mule. Thanks!

So, just an annoyance, but one that's repeatedly an issue. I've been running heather townsend repeatedly and I keep losing Demon Lt pets because instead of pathing around enemies their fat asses get hung up on things and die unable to path to me past enemies. Thugs, beasts, ninjas, and necro definitely do not have this problem at all. Even the assault bot seems like the game thinks he is thinner than the fucking Lt demon pets. Please make them fucking smaller. I would prefer they be scaled down in visual size a bit as well, but at the very least standardize their actual collision with other in game characters to what most other pets have. This is a problem in teams as they physically take up more room in the game than any other pet set. I understand that given their absolutely stupid models this is to prevent them from clipping through each other. Fuck that. Either make them smaller please, or let them clip through things because having a pet that has legitimate pathing issues is a really basic problem you should not have with a minion set. It fucks up their AI with regard to Goto tags as well because being fatter it is harder for demons to get close to the tag like they want to, as everything ELSE about pet pathing AI is uniform throughout the sets. It is literally the Lt demon's fatness that is a problem here. Please make the stupid fuckers less chonky.

Its a fun set to play but it's going to fall off in higher level content. It's a much better defender/corruptor/controller set than mastermind set, it was clearly not built with us in mind and just was tweaked for MMs. The chaining mechanic means that if all your pets need a heal better hope there are no other people nearby for it to chain to, other than the first leap you have no control over what it does. It does not bring real controls to the table, nor does it bring strong defenses, and the thing about faraday cage is it's small. Keeping pets other than robots inside of it is going to be difficult to impossible even with the awesome new goto changes, but faraday cage was clearly designed around a group of heroes clustering up for defensive buffing and healing. In lower level content this set is fine. When you start wanting to take on groups at x8 yourself which is kinda something MMs are used to, this set is going to fall off sharply as it is in no way going to keep your pets alive the way you need. Energizing circuit is great in groups especially at low level but utterly useless for pets. This goes with /kin as a solid set for non MMs and a weaker set for MMs. I'd very much roll a controller or corruptor with this set before I'd roll an MM with it. If you have to do an MM, do demons or zombies, defense based pets are going to leave you reeling. Bots do not have a mule for pet uniques and with this set you need ALL of them.

I need to figure out converters. I don't use them much at all.

Oh shit really? I didn't know that. Thanks for the new information makes setting out easier.

The crafted IO supply is also low, especially for certain purple sets. And I am someone who builds expensive builds, every character I bother to take all the way to 50 gets an "ideal" build as I set it up and to do what I want it to do and I buy as many purples as is required to achieve that ideal build and such. Like I do alot of things that require high recharge and I'm counting recharge bonuses to make sure I don't get more than 5 of a type (usually only necesary watching the 7.5s cause luck of the gambler bonuses overlap with some set bonuses)

Would you like to buy a copy of The Rules of Acquisition? Yours for a mere 2 billion influence, you'll make it back in days!

Fuck threads and shards. Incarnates are an easy as fuck grind if thats what you wanna do. Make exemplared characters get extra private rolls on recipe drops!

Honestly no it's not I already think that recipes are too hard to come by and that the expense of them is as driven by the fact that they are a very limited supply as the price farmers are capable of paying for things. There are lots of people who make builds that never even use a purple because of the pricing and availability, I would like to see IOs become more accessible and less of a grind and the influence nerf directly affects IO grinding rates. As this is a free MMO there's a solid argument for evening out influence gain between farmers and not does not have to affect the IO aquisition rate and that there's plenty of reason to make higher end IOs more accessible to people to enable altitis which is alot of what fuels this game. TLDR: It's not a panic request, I've wanted higher drop rates for a long time this is an excuse to ask for it.

With the influence nerf, the thing I am currently worried about is if it drives some farmers off, there will be fewer incoming recipes onto the market. Already, there are times when it's hard to find certain very commonly desired recipes on the market, forcing you to use lots of converters to obtain the recipes you want for a build if you want a high end IO build on a character. With alts being essentially the "end game" of this game, I don't have a problem with closing the influence gap between farmers and non farmers but I DO worry about the availability of recipes if farming activity drops, because not only was that generating tons of influence but also forcing drop rates to be higher than they typically are in regular play, as a fire farmer can eat through more kills and thus more drop chances on a per capita basis than any mission running of any kind ever does. If farming declines, recipe supplies can potentially decline. While there will always (thankfully) be market players who do the converter roundup, I think it would not be game breaking to tweak drop rates up a bit to make recipes more available and ensure that prices stay lower, because prices are not going to drop just because there's less influence flowing around the economy if supply also dips.

Huh which set is the one with the ST heal besides Storm? I thought thermal was that one. Might have to give it a try then, that's the main reason I haven't gone thermal in a set yet. I love nature. I do use the hold but mostly at the start. I took fly on my demons/nature so I could swoop up and back without having pathing issues to lay down a heal, then swoop back in and hold dudes. For me it makes for fun gameplay lol, everyones got tastes. I've found between the heal patch, having permaed my three main buffs and having absorb up constantly, etc, I don't need to use the heal on my demons that often. Also as nature has zero mez protection I tend to hang back a bit from melee and not use the hold nearly as much when solo because the second you get mezzed your toggles drop anyway. Depends on the enemy group, harder ones like arachnos and carnies tend to have aoe mezzes that will fuck your day up unless you hang back somewhere where you can hit a good cone heal. I haven't made a /dark MM yet. I'm in the middle of getting a thugs/traps incarnated. I'm kinda addicted to traps. The playstyle is the most mellow thing in the world. Drop all your stuff and then just watch the magic happen, drop an aid other on something if you really need it.

Disagree with demons being best with thermal. Thermals heal is single target, it leaves you struggling in harder content to heal enough. Nature is a better pairing. Give you the resist you need, but also gives you all the heals you need to keep them alive in content while bringing solid debuffs to the table and the toggle hold aura is solid as fuck. I love bots, I do, but they really aren't the soloing beasts they need to be. For pure solo action I recommend demons/nature and thugs/time. I have one of each and even before incarnates both are tanky as fuck while doing great damage. Demons/nature is easier to solo, your shit will die less. I think thugs/time solos faster though especially after incarnates.

Enforcers do better with 2 damage procs. They have 4 attacks that do -def so you can reliably proc those on aoe targets with their cones and with their single target attacks.

Interesting back and forth. I didn't know beasts could hit those numbers defensively. At the same time I did know that fortify pack is a trade off, you ideally don't want it up all the time to maximize damage. Fulcrum shift helps and I can see why beasts is the one pet set you might actually want to use Kin on, I still just generally dislike Kin as a set tbh and would prefer almost anything else for an MM. My Kin is a Kin/Sonic defender, because if I'm going to have a Kin it's going to be one designed to get the absolute maximum out of the set and Kin/Sonic is actually a solid defender pairing both for buff/debuff and personal damage. Just a purely group oriented toon, but it's not like I have ANY trouble finding groups.

Pets have same defense softcap as us and has the tank/brute resistance hardcap. I don't know how to figure out what his pets are at with mids which is why I asked what his numbers were, I just saw both pet uniques, decent slotting on protector bots, and farsight with power boost which I would think should put you at or over 45% for your pets. Resistance is harder, especially on bots. The only ways to boost pet resistance is your secondary or the 3 +10% res pet uniques, and bots are hard to slot those into because you not only do not have a power that can mule pet sets like hell on earth or gang war but you also have a high amount of knockback on bots that can be annoying as hell to experience, knocking people out of burn patches and such, and which can only be dealt with by taking electric fences or again sacrificing slotting on bots for a sudden acceleration.