TygerDarkstorm

Welcome to CoH where very little ISN'T a viable combination! 😛 Beasts/Nature is a very popular powerset for MM's (I suspect for many people, myself included, because they fit thematically) and should service you just fine on your journey to 50. 🙂 I have no experience on the combo at 50 yet so I can't comment to that. If you're looking to team, I highly recommend the numpad binds from here: These will make your life as an MM much easier, especially with beasts who are very speedy melee pets that can have a tendency to run off and pull extra mobs. But I always feel the best way to know if you're going to like something and if it will be viable for your needs is to start playing it; levels are easy enough to come by that I've deleted toons that got into their 20's because I wasn't feeling something with them.

Some of us in our 30's are not just parents (and/or teachers) as others have pointed out, but also students ourselves. It's not just teens and young 20's people going to college/trade school to better themselves. 😉

Agreed. I twist the origins about to fit the concept of my character. I understand where others are coming from for their desire to see more "natural" type sets, and I'm not opposed to seeing some of those sets come about, but the natural origin can be used for more than just someone who uses gadgets (which, as you mentioned, can arguably be science or technology origin). Characters that are not of a human species may have a natural origin for their "powers" because it's just something they're able to do as part of their species (i.e. your electric eels example).

I didn't get mine out of the 20's, but I had rolled a Thugs/EA that seemed fun at first, but the more I started playing her, the more I didn't really like EA on the MM (especially after having made an elec/EA troller). Again, I know my experience is a bit nuanced since she didn't pass 30. I don't have an exact reasoning for why I didn't like it, but it was a combo of being unbelievably end heavy (and I say that having a demons/storm MM), and of the galvanic sentinel replacement being an AoE version of the T1 which just felt kind of redundant. Mostly it just quit being fun compared to the troller (which I know is subjective) and so she got scrapped.

How do you get to 20 in 4 runs? XP in there diminishes the higher in level you get, and even with a double xp boost and starting at level 1, I've only managed to get to level 10 in 3 runs. I imagine that 4 runs would only manage to get to about level 12. But the point of this is also to talk about alternative methods to getting through the low levels. Not everyone likes to endlessly spam DFB into the 20's. @Mashugana one method not mentioned in your OP is MSR raids; at least on Everlasting. Chaos United runs them almost nightly and you can practically take a toon from 1-20 in a single raid.

I would love to see more story content in AE! I went to go level one of my lowbies in there as a change of pace, but could only seem to find pages and pages of farms. 😞 The farm stuff being available to all levels is great for my fire farmer as I can do them to test out how her build is working out as she's leveling up, but it would be nice to find some stuff for my low-level, non-farm toons to run as an alternative to the same entry missions I've done hundreds of times and/or running DFB endlessly.

Thanks!

This is a neat look! For powersets, if you wanted to "Merica" her, you could do AR/* or */AR, or even DP or Beam

Thank you @Player2 and @biostem!

Lich Freeze Elfvira (Mistress of the Dark) Polly Shockit Space Shifter Hailstorm Mary

Thanks nihilii for the detailed answer. I was thinking of demons healing when I made the post but forgot to mention it, d'oh. Didn't realize it was good enough to run without any sort of healing from the MM (my demons/storm MM is only level 20ish and I still toss O2 boost out to them). Once I get my farmer going I may try your demons/cold concept; seems like something that will need good enhancement investment at/around 22 to make sure it stays powerful.

Just out of curiosity, how do you keep your pets alive with /Cold? Or do you have to do a lot of resummoning? Use the medicine pool? I've seen that /Cold might be pretty good for soloing for MM's, but not having a heal feels awkward for me, personally (thinking from a leveling up perspective, not at 50 and kitted out as I don't PL through fire farms typically). I don't delve much into theorycrafting, but I love MM's and one that isn't /Traps that can solo hard content is appealing.

Well, dominators are not a support AT, so if you're referring to support in this game's traditional sense (i.e. buff/debuff, heal), then dominator is not the AT you're looking for. Dom's are a damage dealing AT. Also, controls aren't super necessary for much of any team content. Not that they can't be used or aren't, but once teams get steamrolling stuff you won't find your controls doing a whole lot to help keep the team safe like back in the old days. Keep in mind that when teaming with a control AT, you don't want to launch your controls the second you get to a spawn (with maybe the exception of the sets with mass confuses); you generally want to wait until the tanker/brute/whoever takes the alpha and groups the mobs up then launch your controls on the spawn. Granted, this isn't always true for everything, so YMMV. I would try one of each, but your description of what you want to do makes me think you'll be happier with the controller than the dom.

I am not a dom expert by any means, but after reading these forums and reddit about them, they have become one of my favorite AT's to play. A dom is not really like a controller at all (other than the fact that both AT's have control primary sets). While controller secondaries focus on buffing/debuffing/etc., doms have assault secondaries, making them play more like a blaster or blapper. They're also one of the few AT's where you actually want to focus more on your secondary than your primary. Meaning, you don't want to spam your control powers like a troller because all your real damage comes from your secondary anyway. You want to do just enough to lock mobs down and then start blasting away at them with your secondary. I'm sure the better dom experts will come to better expand upon what I said, but hopefully that gives you a rough idea of the differences. As to defenders and corruptors, that has more to do with whether you want the defender based modifiers or whether you want to do more damage. However, there's more intricate caveats to this and I believe a thread regarding their differences already exists somewhere. Certain blasts sets are more "corruptory" than others due to their ability to maximize scourge (fire, water, and 1 or 2 others I'm forgetting). Then other blasts sets are great on defenders either because of the way defender stats can multiply their secondary effects or due to their ability to be proc'd out with IOs (sonic blast for stacking -res and DP for procs, for example). There is some debate on whether it's better to just roll defender due to their superior buff/debuff numbers and ability to proc out their damage to be on par (or better) than a corruptor. But, again, I'm lacking details and I'm fairly sure there's a thread about these questions lurking around the forums or reddit.

Cool, according to this, only 14 people have made psy/fire sentinels. I have a bit of a unicorn. 😄

Yes! I totally agree with this! I love dominators after reading threads online and learning how to play them better (hated them before because I was trying to play them too much like a controller). I feel that dominators should have assault as a primary and control as a secondary as that's how you end up actually playing them in game. I also like the idea of frontloading the damage on dominators' control powers, and/or shortening the DoT effect.

I only have one undead character at the moment: Lich Freeze (Ice/Dark Tanker)

Oh let's see, I have a few over on Everlasting: Mad Cow Disease (Rad/Beam Defender who is a green minotaur) Bull Puckey (TW/Elec Scrapper and minotaur) Helen Fire (Fire/Martial Dominator) Clairification (Staff/Bio Stalker; play on the name Claire and the word clarification--i.e. what she does to her enemies) Robotnix (Bots/Traps MM; play on Dr. Robotnik's name from Sonic the Hedgehog) Ms. Phantastic (Illusion/TA Controller) Energizer Bunnie (Energy/Energy Blaster who looks like a pink bunny) Lich Freeze (Ice/Dark Tanker; play on "bitch please" saying) Reggie Menn (PB; play on the word regimen) Maria Macita Bonita (War Mace/EA Brute; my goofy Spanglish flair for WM/EA being "strong and pretty") Helen Ice (Fire/Ice Dominator) Purrdita (Dark/Savage Tanker who's a snow leopard; name inspired by Perdita of 101 Dalmations (I have a 3yo, lol)) Polly Shockit (Thugs/ElecAff MM; play on Polly Pocket) Hallow Halle (Demons/Thermal MM; play on name Shallow Hal) Guess that was more than a few, lol

I am admittedly guilty of falling prey to 1 and 3, especially when I used to play back in like 2006ish, as a kid, I struggled heavily with the redside content and AT's. Upon my return to HC and lots of reading/research, I actually am finding that many of the villain AT's are my favorite AT's now, and I'm trying to play the redside content more. Treating it like gold and attempting to solo it so I can read the mission text and such. Tend to run more team content and team oriented builds on blue side so I can experience the trials and TF's I didn't on live.

On Everlasting, I always see people post in gen chat and such that redside is the best side and how the storylines are so much better, and yet, if you're not at least in the 20's-30's, there's no one really running content on redside. Blue side can sometimes get 2 separate groups for DFB going, but redside has issues forming even 1, even if I take initiative to start one. If I'm in the mood, I've had some luck starting lower level paper mission groups, but it's definitely harder to find people for than doing something blue side. So if redside really is the best side, why aren't more people around leveling like they are on blue? I see people occasionally in the low level gold zone, but I don't think about teaming much there because I'm interested in trying to read the mission text and following the storyline.

Lol, as a fairly new to MM's player (though not new to pet classes in general), I didn't really want to mess around with what I keep seeing are one of the weakest primaries for MM. I ended up rerolling my beast/time MM to thugs/storm. 🙂

To sort of add on to the OP's question: With TW suffering from such long animations and needing to build up momentum, is this a primary better left to people who have maxed out 50's that can farm tons of inf for their TW character to have IO's? I tried to roll a TW/bio scrapper because I was curious about it supposedly being overtuned right now, but I got bored before level 5 because it felt so slow. I am a newly returning player (from live like 10 years ago, lol) and am kind of enjoying the game at my own pace. I never did a whole lot of hardcore end game in live, so I'm not in a rush to hit 50 right now. Because of that, would TW be a bad choice to go? Will the leveling be absolutely agonizing without being able to get IO's? I imagine it will get nerfed by the time I would even be able to get a TW/bio brute going, but the idea of swinging a giant weapon around is appealing in theory, if it can also be enjoyed while doing solo missions and occasional teaming to level.

I am by no means a master MM or anything, but I thought I would offer my two cents over my experience in the early leveling process of beast/nature. I chose the powers for thematic reasons, and did great until about level 10 (soloing missions in Praetoria). After that, my pets and I started getting squished, a lot, and I found the character a bit unenjoyable to play. So I rolled a beast/time MM and boy did I find myself enjoying her! I know /time needs levels before it really gets going, but just from this early perspective I already thought the play experience was much better. Granted, I rolled blue instead of gold and joined DFB's and Posi TF's because I wanted those experiences and to try and see if I could maintain my pets in a group situation. But the times I was/do solo, I feel more comfortable having /time than /nature. As always, YMMV, and other, far more experienced MM players may have gotten much better use out of the beast/nature combo than I did. Edit: And after coming to the boards here, I think I'm going to re-roll out of beast/ entirely. I enjoy them thematically, but have been a bit underwhelmed with them in game, and after coming here to the boards, I know why. I think I will be re-rolling my beast/time MM to thugs/time since I already have demons/thermal.