Dakkaface

Magic origin characters can use hammerspace/summon bound items as needed, really the most flexible. One Tech origin character is a Robotics MM - if ever something is needed and it's implausible he would have it, summon a basic minion. Your robot flies in and delivers you the thing. My newest Science origin character has the 'duffle bag full of cash' backpack. I fluff things coming from the bag.

You want Thugs. You make drugs, you have gang members for dealing and protection. Thugs are also top tier of MM primaries with Demons. They're not especially great on base DEF or RES, but they're pretty good, and you can build for perma-Gang War for a constant 16 pets or use Burnout for double-Gang War and have 26. Ninjas are really, really fragile. They're arguably the worst MM set. The one upside they used to have was that they used to be proc-monsters because of the fast attack speed, but then procs changed from a percent chance to procs per minute, and now they don't even have that. They're squishy melee pets with no DEF and no RES. If you are put off of Mercs because of how bad people say they are, definitely don't take Ninjas. Mercs at least have range, even if they occasionally run into the fray because everything but Brawl is on cooldown. Also, what you take as a secondary can shore up weaknesses in the set. If you're saying your guy has no powers that kinda limits what you can access as a secondary. Traps? Force Field? Poison? Trick Arrow? I think Traps is the only well regarded one of those. You might be able to get Ninjas to work if you slap a bunch of bubbles on them, and shoot their DEF through the roof. It's a bit goofy to think of them sneaking around with the big bubble around them though. I have a friend who ran Mercs/Traps, and liked it, but he also did make heavy use of procs for bonus damage. Touch of Lady Grey's negative energy proc can be slotted into the T2 or T3 pets, which helps mitigate that heavily resisted Lethal damage. I've never used or run with Poison so I can't speak to it's effectiveness, but it could work for thematics. Thugs/Poison might work? Can't say. Ninjas/Trick Arrow seems like a natural combination but don't do it. That combines the worst MM primary with the worst MM secondary.

I'm with @Riverduskon this. +4 content is hard on an MM because your primary is three entities that are -2 to you and two that are -1. The majority of your henches are dealing with enemies that are +6/+5 to them. Get that T3 Alpha ASAP because it applies the shift to your pets as well. I'm really not sure MM's are cut out for +4 content because of the very nature of henchman mechanics, but I'm fine with that. */Mind isn't an MM secondary on Homecoming. The only thing close is Empathy or Pain. Are you remembering something from Thunderspy or another server or just misremembering the secondary?

Nice basic overview. Just a couple minor corrections. That is the standard number of henchmen, but not the maximum number of pets from your primary. Beasts, Ninjas, Bots, & Mercs cap at 6 henchmen and don't have additional pets in their primary. Necromancy has the ability to quasi-res one hench that dies as a ghost, then resummon, so it can have 7. Demons and Thugs can use Hell on Earth/Gang War to get an extra 10 pets each for 16 total. Once you include the effects of Burnout, Necromancy can have 8 out with two ghosts, and Demons and Thugs can have 26. Henchmen don't actually have Super Jump. They have Super Leap, which is Super Jump + minor Run Speed. And that sounds better than it is - the pet AI doesn't use the jumping part of the power for travelling the way players with Super Jump or Mighty Leap do.. Instead the henches run along the ground after you unless they need to jump to clear an obstacle or there is no other path to your location. A large part of their travel is just warping to keep up with your location.

Eh, I'm with @Redlynne on this one. Entangling Aura is really useful when slotted correctly, but it's kind of niche and not high powered. It's 80% for a Mag1, 50% for a Mag2. With a few basic Hold IO's you can just jump into minion and Lt spawns and almost perma-hold while your pets maul them. Synergizes best with melee pets though, since you want to be kind of close for your PBAOE buffs anyway. You can stick the +2 Mag proc from Lockdown in it, and hit bosses with it too. It is useless against EB's and AV's, but when you just need to ramapge through a mission and clear out all the mobs, it ups your survivabilty considerably and makes clearing spawns almost effortless. It's skipabble if you're planning on running really high end challenging content, but it's gold for the casual player. Also, the visual effect is pretty neat.

Interface applies to the pet attacks. Hybrid Support affects pets, but I don't think they generate thier own auras.

Yeah, when you zone, it re-applies all of your powers and plays the sounds for them. So all your training/upgrades for your minions reapplies, your leadership auras go back on, if your pets have any self buffs, they reapply, Really. AFAIK there isn't much of a fix other than to play on lowered volume, or lower the sound effects slider in the menu. This would affect all sounds though. I mean, alternately, if you have a mute button on your keyboard you could just mute volume before entering a door/zoning.

I picked Beasts/Nature purely for thematic reasons, and that char hasn't hit 40 yet. That said, my experience this far has been largely positive. Pros: High single target damage, pets can crit. Lots of heals Great fast recharging cone heal available from early on, easy to catch everyone in. Good spread of skills on Nature. Spore Cloud can really save your bacon. Beasts are slightly tougher than Ninjas. Damage not as dependent on the T3 Hench as Bots. T2 henches have heals. Entangling Aura is a little janky but can help keep mobs corralled for your henches. Cons: Melee pets. Hard to corral, irritating when you get mobs or objectives that explode on death. Fortify Pack is pretty useless as a click. If you use it you lose a big chunk of damage, and don't get it back for a full minute. But you still need to take it it to give your beasts the ability to crit. Not much +Res, no +Def. Howling. The delay between execution and effect on Call Hawk results in a lot of wasted casts. Not much AoE. The T3 has a cone and there is a cone personal attack, but that's it. There's some kind of animation or AI issue holding Beasts back. They will sit idle more than other sets, and it impacts their DPS.

Not worth it. Repair is kind of nice as an emergency full heal with range, but if you don't have an AOE heal in your secondary, Aid Other has way more uptime and is more functional for healing than Repair. Especially with how your protector bots can make you waste your cast by hitting your target with their own heal. It also means that if you want you can grab Aid Other, Aid Self and Field Medic. Medicine is especially helpful for Bots/FF, since you'll have plenty of time to apply heals, and your emergency strategy is just PFF+Aid Self.

Ah, went back and double checked it - for some reason I thought Spore Cloud had a Very Long recharge tag, and it doesn't. Base rech of 8s is actually more than fine, and I'll probably respec it in. I'm not sure why I was thinking it had a 4m value which would make it worthless. Livegiving Spores base End bonus is 1%. I mean, +End procs might work well in it, but the base value is pretty garbage for standard End Mods. Regrowth is far and away the better heal and it recharges pretty fast - but not instantly. Wild Bastion is a heal, but it has a minutes long cooldown, and Wild Growth isn't a heal, it's a Regen & Resist boost. Right now I use it to have a cushion for when Regrowth is recharging and to give myself more time to chuck birds at enemies for more Pack Mentality stacks. Like I said, I probably get more mileage out of it with Beasts than any other MM primary because I know right where they're going to be when a fight starts, and can position the spore patch to keep them within it for the first few enemies pretty easily, so it helps blunt the incoming damage when the most mobs are there to wail on the fuzzballs. It's also fast recharging so you can drop it and reposition it during a fight or moving from spawn to spawn. It's entirely skippable if you don't have Beasts.

I've not fully leveled my /Nature toon, but thus far the only thing I've skipped is Spore Cloud. The debuffs are nice but given the very long recharge it's not getting used much. I think the Rez is worthwhile, since it doubles as a strong single-target HoT, and it's nice to have on hand when grouping. Doubly so if TP is your travel power. I like Healing Spores. The heal is not amazing, but it's noticeable, costs nearly nothing, and is fast recharging if you need to move the patch. I probably get more use out of it as a Beasts primary though, since my minions are melee. It pretty trivial to slap the patch down in the midst of 3-5 mobs, order the pack into melee and let them sit there accruing heals and End. The heal is worth throwing a couple slots into, but the End buff is so tiny it's not worth it to try and enhance it.

I only take Pulse Rifle Burst and Force Bolt unless you have a pressing RP reason for it. You can fire FB, PR Burst, then FB twice before Burst is up again. The damage is okay on Burst and it has a decent KB chance, so you can use it for finishing off low health foes or trying to add some CC. Photon Grenade is also a possibility, but I personally dislike that my bots photons are much better at CC than mine, so I don't bother with it.

Fair enough. Though you don't need a gaming mouse to have extra buttons to assign binds to - many regular mice have a wheel that clicks and two side buttons. That's three extra buttons for binds. It might behoove you to read through an entire thread before replying. The person you are replying to is 1) unable to use keyboard binds because of serious manual dexterity issues, and 2) incredible frustrated by people telling them that not using binds is playing wrong - which you are coming very close to doing.

My metric is looking at the sets overall. I get the roar/howl cycle interrupts are bad for Beast's DPS, but everything I'd heard about Ninjas indicated they were so fragile they'd be at the bottom of the stack. Also, I've heard that Beasts do benefit from Recharge Reduction, but haven't bothered to test it.

PaxArcana, you're being needlessly confrontational. BZ says he has issues with manual dexterity and he lives on a limited budget. Take him at his word instead of trying to find fault in his phrasing. I have friends who have issues of their own with games, ex. being unable to play games with QTE's because of dexterity issues, or play any games with a highly mobile camera because it induces dizzyness and vertigo. Take a step back, a chill pill, whatever you need, but back up and think about how you could help BZ instead of accuse him of lying. While you have offered useful suggestions, you're framing your posts as attacks, which pretty much guarantees your advice will be discarded. This isn't a debate forum. Black Zot, you're probably fed up to your eyeballs with people telling you to use binds, especially since you're able to play without them. I'm glad you found a way to play that works for you. But a fair number of non-Pax posters have been asking questions and making suggestions to make binds work for you without attacking, and you've only been responding to Pax. Even Pax himself isn't taking the stance in this thread that 'you need to use binds to play right.' He thinks your justifications for not using binds are bullshit, but he's not saying that you need to use them. I get that you're frustrated, but you need to take a step back and see what's actually being said too. Either way, this is getting a bit off topic from OP's question, so to re-rail and address the original 'don't need binds' post again: Clave Dark 5, on the topic of binds, while the numpad binds are the most well known, I think learning to juggle the nine-key is a bit much, and like you, I'd have to keep looking up what each bind did. But most MM's will function fine with three binds. Something to set Attack+Aggressive, something to set Defensive+Follow, and something to set either GoTo+Passive or Follow+Passive. Set them yourself on whatever keys are most useful or easy to remember for you, and you can pretty much familiarize yourself with them with 5-10 minutes of play. I use Z, X and C, and it's easy enough to issue orders without lifting my hand out of the WASD position. Q, E, and F are also possibilities for easy to reach keys - though I use F on my Robo/FF toon for my Fly/Hover toggle switch. Mouse4 is for Teleport on my Beasts/Nature toon. z "petcom_all Aggressive$$petcom_all Attack" x "petcom_all Defensive$$petcom_all Follow" c "petcom_all Passive$$petcom_all GoTo"

Really? From what I've head it's Ninjas that are dead last. Why would you say it's Beasts? I mean, from this post about their innate resistances and traits, they all share the same speed boost. But the first two tiers of Beast minions have higher defense and resistance, and with Pack Mentality stacks, higher damage.

You don't need to use the numpad binds, man. Or anyone else's binds. I can't used the numpad binds myself, and I hate that they would require me to take my hands of the mouse or WASD to use them. But binds exist to make things easier on you, and you can set 'em where it's convenient for you. Do you hit numbers 1-3 for activating powers, or is your left hand bad enough that you manually click all your powers? If you can move your fingers up to 1-3 to activate powers that way, you can probably use a trio of simple binds like me - my MM binds are on ZXC, which let me order my pets without moving my hands from the WASD position, and you don't have to hunt for them. Q and E are also buttons you can use that are right there while you're fingering WASD. Alternately, if your hand is bad enough that you do mouse click all your powers, consider setting up binds on your mouse. My Teleport bind is set to Mouse4. If you have no problem with your dominant hand and own mouse with a bunch of buttons on it, why not set some of the binds to the mouse buttons? Many standard mice have 5 buttons and you could set Mouse3 to Attack+Aggressive, Mouse4 to Follow+Defensive and Mouse5 to Goto+Passive or Follow+Passive. There are also gaming mice with 6-12 extra buttons that could be used for binds. The point is not that you have to use binds. But binds are extremely useful, and it is a major QoL jump if you implement binds that work for you. If no binds work for you, then yeah, you can't benefit, but do realize your situation is pretty rare and telling other players they don't have to use them isn't particularly helpful advice.

My Beast/Nature is at 23 right now. It feels like a decent set. They're melee and have to deal with the abysmal melee pathfinding, but they're fast like ninjas without the fragility, and they have some self buffing with Pack Mentality. Nature seems to pair well with them, since I can toss out heals constantly and between Wild Bastion, Wild Growth and Fortify Pack, they can get tanky when they need to be, and Nature has a very useful cone Heal+HoT. It doesn't feel like my Bots/FF where I just want to ditch half the powers for Pool Powers, but at the same time, it feels like I have to spend more time babysitting and keeping stacks of Bloom and Pack Mentality up, and less time inflicting CC.

I took all three attacks on my Bots/FF toon back on live, by that's because he was an ork and it made no RP sense for him NOT to be firing as much as he could. On Homecoming, my Bots/FF has Force Bolt (because he's forced to, and it's not bad.) and Pulse Rifle Burst which is purely for the knockback +Damage. I wouldn't bother with PR Blast. Photon Grenade at least has CC, but it's success rate is abysmal unslotted, and I don't want to waste the slots on it. I admit, most of my attack choice on this toon comes from enjoying the ragdoll animations, but It'd probably be strictly more efficient to avoid PR Burst. My Beasts/Nature on the other hand, has both Call Hawk and Call Ravens. The Beast attacks are nice in that they can add stacks of Pack Mentality which are a flat damage boost, and a crit boost, and a potential oh-shit defensive boost. Swarm is kinda naff with it's slow, but Hawk does high damage on a fast recharge, and causes knockdown and -Fly. Default range is pretty damn good too. Ravens also does -Fly, is my only AOE, and since I'm often trying to engage from within my own Healing Spore patch, I'm usually in range for it. -Fly is pretty valuable for melee minions. If more MM attacks had CC or pet interactivity, they might be more worthwhile, but flat damage is usually only useful for finishing off an enemy while the pet attacks are on cooldown. Demons, Beasts, and Necro seem to be the ones with worthwhile personal attacks for this reason.

6-slot every pet. Your Pets are your damage. Time and Dark are both great sets. You don't need Hasten. You'll spend most of your time managing your pets, not tossing out powers. Medicine is only good if your sets don't have a good heal. You're planning on Time or Dark, so that's not an issue. I run Medicine on my Bots/FF MM, but I wouldn't bother on my Beasts/Nature as he has superior heals in his secondary. Leadership is good. Your low level pets are eventually down two levels from you and your midrange pets are down one, so the To-Hit boost from Tactics is useful. Vengeance doesn't function on Minions though, so don't bother with it. I take Assault and Tactics on pretty much all my MM's. You don't need fancy binds - but the quality of life change is pretty strong. I could play without the Hover/Fly swap bind, or the mouse button Teleport bind, or the simple trio of Mastermind orders I use. But it'd be a lot clunkier, and since they make things a lot easier, why not use them?