TheSpiritFox

I'll be honest, that sounds like way too much work with the dual boxing and kinda irrelevant. Dual boxing just for a few buffs? To each their own I guess. If I wanted to dual two MMs though? Just overall? Bots/Traps, Thugs/time, Demons/nature pick two. All three will synergize well and play off of each other. All three do different debuffs in different amounts. Thugs/time and demons/nature will do the most damage. Bots/traps and demons/nature will be the most tanky. Bots/traps and thugs/time together will murder the fuck out of AVs and GMs the best imo.

Caltrops without recharge in the actual power is an excellent proc mule. It has a long duration, 45s and it's very possible to get the recharge with a high recharge build to the point you have a sub 30 second cooldown. It's a good place for overwhelming force knockdown, it is also a good place for a -res proc, and then if you want you can slot it out with up to 4 additional damage procs (I do) and if you buy them attuned caltrops stays amazing even when you exemp down to like posi levels. Epics with /traps? Bonfire stacking with caltrops can potentially drop AVs on their back. Mace will potentially softcap you defensively while giving you an AOE immob you can stack with web grenade to immob bosses pretty easily. Mu would be more resistance and another solid immobilize.

Caltrops is one of your more useful team powers. With a good amount of recharge it's up alot and you can slot it out with procs. It provides soft control via fear mechanics and slow and a proc mule that can stack on itself with enough recharge in your build. Trip mine is a garbage power and you should skip it in any sane build. Take caltrops and sacrifice somewhere else. You can slot procs in it surprisingly early and if attuned they add a good bit to your damage. I would skip trip mine and detonator. And tbh, triage beacon can be pretty solid at high levels, at low levels it's meh. Cool thing about triage beacon, it takes absorb procs and can trigger them on everyone in it's radius.

Bots/traps is my main and with incarnates yeah it can solo pretty much anything that's not an itrial. A truly nuts powerset overall, the only thing it lacks is high single target damage on non AVs. AVs you get to count your damage is alot higher because between your assault bot and poison trap you can pretty close to floor AV regen and add that to your DPS. I soloed the psychic clockwork king pre incarnates with my build. Died a few times because I had to keep giving them attack commands and it left me vulnerable outside of bodyguard mode. IO it out and it's a goddamn monster that can farm almost anything (abeit slower than like a brute in a fire farm)

Rad is strong solo and vs avs, weak on general teams due to toggles being difficult to set up and maintain with enemies dying. If you can control the carnage it's an awesome set. If you have to try to juggle toggles it can be a complete pain in the ass.

This thread has inspired me to make a FF/energy defender slotted for max knockback which only takes repulsion field and personal force field from the FF powers. Lets see exactly how miserable we can make groups.

I haven't tried force of will. If I were going to replace a power pool it would be aid pool in my build. I feel like I get a ton of mileage out of aid pool tbh. It is the difference often between my assault and protector bots staying alive and not. One thing with bots/traps that does suck, is that the protector bot bubbles are still single target. So things that die have to be rebubbled in combat and that takes a second, cascade failure with bots/traps can start and hit a point of inevitability that forces you to retreat or gets you killed. Aid pool has been the best way, especially at high levels or against AVs, to counter this. With a set with a more active heal I wouldn't take it. Bots/time doesn't need aid pool at all. Bots/traps though, you actually have the time to take advantage of and use the aid pool. Teams are often pleasantly surprised to find out the heal bot is the mastermind who's also throwing out nuts buffs, debuffs, and damage.

I don't use them all. Slip in a resist to help bot survivability. With /traps and maneuvers and the protector bot shields the bots are past soft capped. If I were going to fit them in they would replace the sudden accelerations, and I feel like bots kinda need those tbh. They go from blasting everything everywhere all the time to mostly knocking stuff down, which is worth the survivability tradeoff and more than worth the team aggravation tradeoff. Makes farming easier too. You can focus your immobilizes on stacking bosses and keeping them in burn patches, which is what I find keeps bots rolling fastest overall. With incarnates you don't need the extra defense from them. Support core and barrier rotating and stuff at level 50 has a hard time killing your team esp with aid pool helping. At lower levels it goes how exemplaring goes, you have your levels you're more powerful than others.

I hate /ff. Stating my bias. It just feels old, clunky, and like it doesn't contribute enough to your character or a team. Defense is easy to come by, lots of other things are not. For beast? They're a defense based set. You want defense based secondary. /Cold, /Traps, /Time are your top contenders. /Nature is solid but it pairs better with demons than beasts imo. More synnergy. I highly recommend /Time. Beasts are super mobile. Melee pets can be hard to keep under like a forcefield gen. /Time and /Cold both allow you to buff your pets and then they stay buffed even if they run around a bit. /Time includes a pbaoe debuff that's solid and a heal that I feel like for beasts would be the tie breaker. The one argument I have for /traps is that if you DO have an easy time with pet management then /traps will give you the most time to spam your primary beast attacks while being fully active with the secondary. But I feel like you'll get the most mileage out of /time.

Here's the macros answer lol

This is my Bots/Traps and yeah...it's a goddamn monster. This is pre-incarnates btw. I design my builds as much as I can not to have holes and then add incarnates, and bots/traps is absolutely one of those builds that you can get away with this with. I soloed psychic clockwork king (took a few tries) with this build and that fucker doesn't stay in one place. I could easily solo ITF on +0 and very painfully solo it on +4 with this build with full incarnates. Throw T4 barrier up and you and your bots are pretty close to immortal for 30 seconds and hard to kill for the remaining 90s. Hasten isn't perma but it's not terribly far off, and you could definitely adjust sets to give it even more recharge. Burnout tbh is a pick I chose to let me stack triage beacons, caltrops, and acid mortars in a pinch. Easily replaceable with like a LOTG mule or whatever else. Yeah it's as good as you've heard. Light on single target damage at times, honestly if you get the prestige ranged attacks they help everywhere but iTrials for knocking bosses down a bit. But with proper pet management you pretty solidly melt things and the real benefit is that you do it in almost complete safety. Mez protection, bodyguard, tank pets, decent defense and resistance for you, aid pool to keep your pets alive, and some fairly nuts debuffs in some areas particularly regen. For incarnates? Musculature is the MM alpha, we get more out of it than most anything else. Support is the MM hybrid for the same reason. If you build to not need the endurance from ageless you genuinely do not need the recharge. The defense debuff resistance one can help but is mostly unnecessary. Barrier core though...yeah. It's kinda an actual "I win" button. Pick your interface, pick your judgment, pick your lore. With reactive interface, ion judgment, and the longbow lore this build can destroy most normal content and solo DA arcs at +4x8. Villain Plan by Mids' Reborn : Hero Designer 2.6.0.5 https://github.com/ImaginaryDevelopment/imaginary-hero-designer Click this DataLink to open the build! Level 50 Science Mastermind Primary Power Set: Robotics Secondary Power Set: Traps Power Pool: Leaping Power Pool: Medicine Power Pool: Speed Power Pool: Leadership Ancillary Pool: Mu Mastery Villain Profile: Level 1: Battle Drones -- CaltoArm-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(A), CaltoArm-Dmg/EndRdx(3), CaltoArm-Acc/Dmg(3), CaltoArm-EndRdx/Dmg/Rchg(5), CaltoArm-+Def(Pets)(5), SuddAcc--KB/+KD(7) Level 1: Web Grenade -- Acc-I(A) Level 2: Caltrops -- ImpSwf-Dam%(A), Ann-ResDeb%(7), PstBls-Dam%(9), JvlVll-Acc/Dmg/End/Rech(9), Rgn-Knock%(11), Slow-I(11) Level 4: Triage Beacon -- Prv-Absorb%(A), Prv-Heal(13), Prv-Heal/EndRdx(13), Prv-EndRdx/Rchg(15), Prv-Heal/Rchg(15), Prv-Heal/Rchg/EndRdx(17) Level 6: Equip Robot -- EndRdx-I(A) Level 8: Super Jump -- BlsoftheZ-ResKB(A), BlsoftheZ-Travel(17) Level 10: Acid Mortar -- TchofLadG-%Dam(A), TchofLadG-DefDeb(19), TchofLadG-DefDeb/Rchg(19), TchofLadG-DefDeb/Rchg/EndRdx(21), TchofLadG-Rchg/EndRdx(21), TchofLadG-DefDeb/EndRdx(23) Level 12: Protector Bots -- SprCmmoft-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(A), SprCmmoft-Acc/Dmg(23), SprCmmoft-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(25), SprCmmoft-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(25), DefBuff-I(27), DefBuff-I(27) Level 14: Aid Other -- Pnc-Heal(A), Pnc-Heal/+End(34), Pnc-Heal/EndRedux/Rchg(50), Pnc-Heal/Rchg(50), Pnc-EndRdx/Rchg(50) Level 16: Force Field Generator -- LucoftheG-Def/Rchg+(A), DefBuff-I(29), DefBuff-I(29), ShlWal-ResDam/Re TP(31) Level 18: Aid Self -- Heal-I(A) Level 20: Field Medic -- RechRdx-I(A) Level 22: Poison Trap -- UnbCns-Dam%(A), UnbCns-Hold(31), UnbCns-Hold/Rchg(31), UnbCns-Acc/Hold/Rchg(33), UnbCns-Acc/Rchg(33), UnbCns-EndRdx/Hold(33) Level 24: Hasten -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(34), RechRdx-I(40) Level 26: Assault Bot -- SprMarofS-EndRdx/+Resist/+Regen(A), SprMarofS-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(40), SprMarofS-Dmg(42), SprMarofS-Acc/Dmg(42), SprMarofS-Acc/EndRdx(43), SuddAcc--KB/+KD(43) Level 28: Seeker Drones -- CldSns-%Dam(A), CldSns-ToHitDeb(43), CldSns-Acc/ToHitDeb(46), CldSns-Acc/Rchg(48), CldSns-ToHitDeb/EndRdx/Rchg(48), CldSns-Acc/EndRdx/Rchg(48) Level 30: Maneuvers -- LucoftheG-Def/Rchg+(A), LucoftheG-Def/EndRdx(37), LucoftheG-Def(37) Level 32: Upgrade Robot -- EndRdx-I(A) Level 35: Charged Armor -- Ags-Psi/Status(A), Ags-ResDam/EndRdx(37), Ags-ResDam/Rchg(39), Ags-ResDam(39), Ags-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(39) Level 38: Tactics -- AdjTrg-ToHit/EndRdx(A), AdjTrg-ToHit/EndRdx/Rchg(40) Level 41: Super Speed -- Clr-Stlth(A), Clr-RunSpd(42) Level 44: Electrifying Fences -- GrvAnc-Hold%(A), GrvAnc-Immob(45), GrvAnc-Immob/Rchg(45), GrvAnc-Acc/Immob/Rchg(45), GrvAnc-Acc/Rchg(46), GrvAnc-Immob/EndRdx(46) Level 47: Combat Jumping -- LucoftheG-Def/Rchg+(A) Level 49: Burnout -- RechRdx-I(A) Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Dash -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Slide -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Quick -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Rush -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Surge -- Empty(A) Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A) Level 1: Supremacy Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A) Level 4: Ninja Run Level 2: Swift -- Empty(A) Level 2: Health -- Mrc-Rcvry+(A), NmnCnv-Regen/Rcvry+(36) Level 2: Hurdle -- Empty(A) Level 2: Stamina -- PrfShf-End%(A), PrfShf-EndMod(34), PrfShf-EndMod/Acc(36), PrfShf-EndMod/Rchg(36) ------------

Oh and bonfire does not stack, making a new one gets rid of the old one. So you really don't need it to get down below a 30-45 second recharge, it has a 45 second duration I think, but at 30 seconds it's up every mob group solo and up often in a steamroll.

Kin is a limited set for masterminds. Team benefits are full steam ahead. Transfusion and siphon power work as expected and so does fulcrum shift. Speed boost has a negative impact on pets. They do not benefit from recharge, and they also do not meaningfully benefit from recovery. Pet skills cost x mana but only require 1 mana to activate. So if the bar is full, the entire cost is subtracted. If 1 mana remains, 1 mana is subtracted, the skill casts anyway, and 1 mana regen by the time the next attack goes off. From what I understand everything that isn't a player that uses powers works this way, which is why every class that has an elec attack set is pissed, endurance drain doesn't do shit. The negative side of speed boost is on pet movement. Increasing their speed increases the distance they move with like 1 "action" and pet pathing AI is based around base movement speed, so the extra movement they get causes them to have all kinds of problems moving. On an outdoor map it can be dealable, on a like office map or CoT cave it's a fucking nightmare. Anything with varied elevation is a nightmare. Transferrence is useless except for your personal stuff and Kin is an endurance light set to begin with. Pets don't care about endurance. Increase density is useful. Mez protection for pets helps, particularly knockback/knock down protection which is often hard to come by for them. Inertial reduction is useless. Fulcrum shift is fulcrum shift. Your pets will do tons of damage, but will have issues staying alive in high level content. Incarnates can patch a good bit of this hole, support hybrid and barrier destiny will do a ton for you, but there aren't that many beast MMs doing incarnate stuff because along with mercs and zombies they're just harder to keep alive. You get no real buffs that affect your pets besides mez, damage, and a little bit of resistance. Kinetics is not a debuff heavy set or defensive set or damage set, it's almost pure team buffs and designed around a player team not a team of 6 npcs. So how do you manage this? You need leadership pool. Your epic is kinda a choice between Mace for the defense shield, mu for electric fences and the resist shield, or heat mastery for bonfire. Bonfire honestly gets the nod here, you can give it a sudden accelleration and maybe an immob proc and slot your build out for heavy recharge (which you want for stacking fulcrum if possible anyway) you don't want to put any recharge into bonfire so you have max proc rate. It gets kinda nuts sometimes like bonfire and procs can be a significant damage source, but if you need the slots literally a base slot with a sudden acceleration gets you the primary reason you take bonfire: knocking everything the fuck down all the time so your stuff stays alive. I use bonfire to open on mob groups with my thugs time. Cast bonfire, defensive goto the thugs into the mob, and follow, and generally there's not much of an alpha to take. It's not hard to get bonfire down to a like 30 second recharge with a high global recharge build, and that's easy to get with kinetics both cause it's a light secondary and you can skip several powers if you want (inertial reduction, transference) which also helps with beast because that's the one set that taking the attacks is actually kinda needed and helps both your damage and survivability. Oh, repel, I forgot. With a sudden acceleration it's as good as bonfire is at dropping things on their backs. Endurance hog power, lots of corruptors and defenders build around using this power to survive. With bonfire as an epic choice and with pets that are most likely going to tank over you tanking because neither your pets nor your secondary boost your defenses in any way lol, I would not recommend repel. If you were playing a bots/kinetic specifically I might re-evaluate that statement because it's possible you could get yourself tanky enough with set bonuses to justify taking provoke and actually tanking shit from within a repel bubble. That bot bubble on the MM REALLY helps. Repel is skippable for a beast MM unless you want to build entirely around tankerminding with provoke, which I honestly don't recommend with /kin. /Cold, /Traps, maybe /dark, solo /rad. Building around actually justifying the use of repel would involve neglecting your beast attack power attack chain. Using them builds the pack buffs that help keep your pets alive. Any other misc tips? Slot all 6 pet uniques if you can. Pretty sure beasts can manage it. I think that's the best advice I can give you.

Sure it does you just have to imagine it as like those biker gangs that show up to support molestation victims in court Also I feel like your rules require heroes to be lawful or neutral good only and as a chaotic good alignment in real life I take offense.

A good deal of synnergy? Thugs/Traps or Thugs/Cold. Both defensive sets with solid debuffs. Both kinda need aid pool and the resistance uniques to help keep your thugs alive, but with those you can softcap your pets to all positions really easily. Cold blooms earlier than traps does and is more mobile than traps, but traps has stronger debuffs and soft controls and it's defensive power has strong mez protection so long as you keep pets in the forcefield generator bubble. Have a macro to target your bruiser on things alone so you can focus hard targets in bodyguard or keep him attacking something you've got in melee range. Cold is more forgiving of pet scatter but thugs still all need to be in leadership range of the enforcers to have about half of their total positional defense so pet management will always be important. I highly prefer traps for personal reasons. It blooms later but if you get it set up with enough recharge you can have your traps up all the time while being tanky as all hell and having room to pick and choose what you want to add to the build. With thugs/traps though I highly recommend leadership, aid pool, and either bonfire from heat mastery or electric fences from mu. I main a bots/traps and I spend my time playing team support, actually using aid pool and being useful with it while I drop long cooldown traps that buff and debuff huge areas with strong ass debuffs. Poison trap, after all the math is done, drops an AV's regen from 100% to 33% with the floor being 25% regen minimum. One poison trap about floors their regen, it's absolutely ridiculous, and with thugs you actually have high single target damage so you'll be decent at low levels, strong after 26, and with a proper IO build and good incarnates be absolutely ridiculous at 50. Take burnout for double gang war and then throw up a T4 barrier incarnate not just on your pets but on 20 punks all of whom benefit from overwhelming force procs... That and a lore pet and there's not really much you can't solo.

I just need the ability to change the size of minions. Please give me tiny bots. Oh it would be absolutely hilarious please give me a 2 foot tall assault bot.

Masterminds without healing abilities really need the aid pool, at least while leveling. A set like sonic with resistances over defenses, it's going to be a bit more important than like /traps or /cold but even /cold is a hard experience without aid pool. This is honestly why I only take mastermind secondaries that have healing in some form or another and my /traps still took aid pool to supplement triage beacon. I just can't not like /traps.

3 Raptors, 2 Triceratops, 1 T rex. :Edit: All realistic sizes to really make cave maps a living nightmare for everyone. Also I want a pet so big that it's melee attack has a 20 yard range.

Rad, spines, SS, savage, claws in that order for primary with fire as the secondary so far as just pure infl output. If you like using ST attacks Rad will do you well. If you don't mind cones spines will clear almost as fast. SS suffers a bit with only one AoE that absolutely needs FF+rech and no damage aura but not much, savage and claws trail a bit behind super strength but again not a ton. I have a rad/fire and spines/fire both fully kitted out. The rad is imo both easier and more fun to play efficiently but the clear times between the two of them are under 10s apart with my builds.

I would try /time over /traps for one specific reason. Beasts are all melee, and unless you forgo bodyguard mode by ordering them to attack specific targets, melee pets are just more subject to scatter. Especially with one or two running off while the rest stay where you want them. With /traps, the constantly mobile nature of beasts does not mesh overly well with the set up a killzone playstyle of /traps. /Time will do you much better. You can give lots of defense to your pets, have some solid debuffs and a really good proc mule in distortion field. And farsight is cast and forget every 2 mins. Getting perma chrono and perma farsight isn't super hard and your pets will have a hard time missing with chrono +tactics even against +4s with light accuracy slottiing. When pets run away they still stay mostly softcapped thanks to farsight mechanics which lets you focus more of your time on your personal attacks and buffs/debuffs/heals and less on active pet management. And I've been told beast is one you want to take the personal attacks help your beasts, so something to think about, /time has some powers you can totally skip (like the single target hold, or distortion field if you really need to, to make room. /Time feels like something of a roomy set thanks to how powerful the heal, the debuff toggle, farsight, and chrono shift are. Take those four powers and you can make just about any build with /time pretty viable in end game.

Can ninjas be gotten to the softcap? Thugs can be pretty fragile at times, my thugs/time had real serious issues in a hami raid with full incarnates up, is it possible to get ninjas to enough survivability with the right secondary and power selections, can they be softcapped without incarnates by anything? What's the tankiest ninja build you could make out of all possible secondaries, epics, potentially for surviving and competing in incarnate content? Can you min/max enough to keep them alive? :Edit: /FF bores the shit out of me.

If he's not specced for extreme levels of global recharge burnout is niche because it's not up often. It's a base 30 minute cooldown. My thugs/time took it because with perma chrono and perma hasten plus all the recharge I baked into his built to achieve both easily, my gang war is on a 2m 50s cooldown and burnout is like 7 mins now, so gang war and burnout are actually used alot to create damage absorption and extra damage. Being able to farsight 20 punks is hilarious. On a thugs/storm, if you don't have your recharge high enough for burnout to be up a decent amount, yeah I can see being better served by another power that's more constantly useable.

That I've submitted a ticket about before. I think they consider it a known issue.

The minions are only half the build concept. My thugs/time is named Jim Bob Duggar and he uses the light of God to manipulate time and protect himself and his up to 26 sons. It's really all about how you wanna see it. But I mean, yes this game is ridiculous. Do you really think that like IRL a WILLPOWER tanker could take more damage than an invulnerable scrapper? But that's how the game works. If you need your suspension of disbelief I can understand that, but it's not something most people have an issue with.

This game throws respecs at you and with unslotters anything you buy or make enhancement wise you don't need can be ripped out of your build at a moments notice and thrown back up on the AH. Some toons don't need like an extensive mids plan if you know the sets and what you want to build the character for, and at the same time I've bought the wrong set for what I needed or whatever, spent 120m on a set I ended up not wanting, and did exactly what I said. I ripped it out, relisted it for what I paid for it, and in the end all I was out was AH fees.