Pherdnut

Nothing. Mother Main provides all.

Talked to somebody in gen-chat who bought 10 packs for 100 million each.

Then you're spending more than 20m. 100 merits is 22+ million worth of converters.

There are plenty of 50s that you can buy for less than the cost of making them. I don't craft for the most part.

Nothing wrong with 50s. Just get rare first. Much easier to hit defense or resist sets from there. I convert 10s, 50s, and attuned. 10s are probably easiest since there are so few sets per category but I prefer to avoid salting my own earth by dumping excess amounts of the same 2-4 pieces on the market. Attuned are nice for variety but also randomly acquiring useful stuff for pre-50 alts. In-set converting gets a bit weird though. Sometimes you can fall into lower level ranges while in-set converting and never go back up. I prefer stuff that reliably sells for 4 mill+. Usually at least triple my investment. No idea why people bother with farms but I'm grateful there aren't more converters out there.

I've always assumed it was supposed to be problematic. They're not depicting a utopia.

If you have an end problem after being 3-slotted on health and stamina, -global-recharge is the way to go in my experience. Especially if much of your drain is toggles.

2-3 slots in each of health and stamina + a few global -endurance set bonuses is all I've ever needed. The only ATs I don't play much of are Defenders and the hero-villain aligned ATs . I think most ATs are reasonable about end and that if there was never an END issue at any level, it would be pointless to even have END. But it's a needless PITA for MMs to struggle with their attacks for as long as they have to IMO. Too much for new players to trip on. End-game though, never had problems. If you have a super-thirsty build, I'd be happy to help you out with it.

Like compared to corruptors? Not sure what you mean. Defenders getting better support set stats makes a lot of sense. Do MMs actually cast support at a lower level?

Under 15? What are we comparing to? Melee and blaster primaries? Two of those aren't AoE. Aside from acid, the rest are 25-35. Not sure what oil slick is but it's at least 35.

Nobody should be struggling with END in any AT in the late game with reasonable equip, IMO. MMs can, however, be a PITA in the early to mid game if you refuse to slot -END. Some of the primaries' MM attacks in particular can be thirsty. But if you're not cycling whips repeatedly with a demons build, you're definitely playing sub-optimally, IMO. That's almost 30% worth of -res you're leaving on the table.

Team blockage and stupid-melee seem to have been fixed. Next thing I'd really-really like to see is the hybrids getting fixed. I've noticed that my upgrade 2 thugs lose a lot of costume pieces when re-zoning or simply rapidly moving to another part of a a zone. They seem to maintain all the bonuses. Recharge doing nothing for MM pets. The reasons that it doesn't is probably one of the most long-lived lamest unfixed bugs in the game.

I thought you could still layer well-damage-boosted caltrops to good effect with a lot of recharge but haven't tried recently.

Still not seeing a reason to take scorpion when positional soft cap is already in easy reach though. Why not get smash/lethal/energy resists from Mu on top of soft-capped MM and pets? But yeah, absolutely want to be tough as !@#$ and mez/CC resistant if I'm wandering into the middle of a pile of carnies to set off poison traps. Caltrops can be nasty with a group immob and high recharge.

This is an old thread but I beg to differ on Thugs/Kin being a weak set pairing for MMs. Enforcers with double-defense socketed, turns thugs into one of the toughest MM pet sets in the game regardless of what you get from your secondary. And that double-leadership aura is positional-defense-based so there's very little in the game that can ignore it. Kin is also one of 2 sets that can actually prevent knockback on your pets, along with a bunch of other mezzes, which makes clarion vs barrier more a choice about MM mez coverage vs massive res than the no-brainer over whether to allow your lvl 50+ incarnate-boosted pets to be undone by a humble ice patch. It's a very strong synergy. Then you get Fulcrum Shift and enemy mobs simply start melting. Kin can be a little demanding on an MM-player in terms of micro though. You really have to keep a tight leash to make sure your pets don't zip off and start aggroing things left and right before you even have a chance to react. Fortunately, the speed also means a lot less down-time when you use heel to do stuff like pull range-engaged thugs closer in for an enemy centered heal. You can also minimize risk of pets running off and aggroing new groups by switching to defensive stance (bodyguard mode) after picking targets when mob groups are almost finished. They'll finish their pre-selected target but will only retarget if something is attacking you. @Plainguy - Very helpful build. I didn't think it was possible to get positional def that high with just maneuvers. FYI, sadly Enforcer leadership auras only affect pets and not the MM and Mids erroneously shows +8.75 to all from an enforcer aura. IMO, something like this is the way to go until you get to destiny incarnates. High 30s + bodyguard with near-capped thugs is no joke. Then I think I might try switching to a resist-based defense for the MM to combine with Barrier. Much easier to beef up recharge time with a resist-focus for more regular gang war spamming and the thugs should be able to handle bodyguard even with heavy AoE if MM damage is getting reduced to 25-50% even when barrier is at its weakest. I managed to eke out a little bit more def with two defense enhancements slotted in Enforcers (makes a huge difference for the pet Def). Can probably get past 40% on the MM with +5s. Somebody feel free to improve on that. thug-kin-def-focus.mxd