Dixa

traps isn't as great as you are making out to be, and with the p2w vendor now offering status protection by there is no reason not to go time if you want a generalist set. triage beacon is actually trash for your pets outside of the tier 3. your tier 1 and tier 2 have too little health for it to be noticeable. there is a really good version of traps out there that is actually godmode as it turned triage beacon into a pulsing pbaoe regen that heals more per 2s pulse than any rank 1 pbaoe heal in the game, has unlimited duration and a 4s cooldown. detonator was replaced with auto turret from blasters. trip mine and caltrops are one power. web nade is aoe. ffg has unlimited duration. stuff like that. but it's not here.

this is exactly what I said. the secondary's are too busy to take more than one or two attacks - if any. and that only a few at's can Ron Popeil their secondary.

when a healing proc goes off in triage beacon, it does not affect everyone in range. it may affect one or 2 or maybe 3. It used to affect everyone, but when they changed nearly every single proc io's to ppm it changed a lot of things. as an example - controllers used to do nutjob damage with their aoe roots by stacking a ton of damage procs. it would hit every single target that got rooted. today? 1, maybe 2. triage beacon is overpowered on the other server, but traps in general is god tier there.

too many people OVERestimate beasts/anything because of some pylon test some 'feeling' or anecdote. it's a purely single target set, most of it's damage is in the tier 1 making it horribly nerfed to all hell against anything higher level than you and you lose their single dps edge - the ability to crit - the minute you hit fortify pack. the top performing sets regardless of secondary is going to be thugs and demons. on the pylon, thugs SHOULD be edging out demons because all of it's damage comes from the tier 2 and tier 3 pets whereas for demons it's mostly in the tier 1 and 2. but what sets these two apart is their level 18 powers which give you a place to park practically all of the pet aoe aura's. without having to nerf the damage, accuracy, sustain and procability (is that a word? it is now!) of your actual pets. secondary can vary. I will say that when you consider your secondary you need to also understand that at it's core, this game does not have a defensive set that does not have one or more mob groups in the game that can hard counter it. there are two exceptions, and these exceptions only work with demons - EA and Thermal. Time is great, but time melts to mobs with high tohit buffs or mobs that can quickly stack several hig mag stuns on you (F malta, seriously) and because the set has no defense debuff resistance, is very prone to cascading defense failure vs. mobs group that may have no +tohit but do have -defense debuffs on one of their attacks. only one has to land to start the cascade. if all you care about is pew pew, /storm is the secondary to go with. you can buy status protection from the p2w vendor, so there is no need to even consider that in your decision making (except malta, cause really man, F gunslingers). I have only been able to take one MM combination through the maria Jenkins av arc (blue side arc with tons of av's of all shapes and sizes) on 8/4 without having a single pet death, and it was a demons/thermal. This was before ea. While I believe EA would be tougher, EA does not have the offensive punch that thermal does through it's debuffs. which is too bad, because the only time I lost a pet was when I dismissed it to replace it when it would get knocked back and stuck in some invisible rock on the floor. Faraday cage's -kb solves that and on paper should be glorious as the absorb is just as good as the nature absorb but it's cooldown is practically nothing. I do know that If I were to make an mm that exclusively grouped today it would be EA. target your tier 1's for the absorb and just let them go crazy. so bottom line: highest damage in a vacuum primary: tie thugs or demons toughest primary in a vacuum: demons. no, not bots. DEMONS highest damage combo so far: demons/storm on the pylon, in actual practice it's going to be thugs/storm because of collision, pet size and the bruiser being a brute. demons do their highest damage if all of the pets can be in melee range. on smaller targets this won't happen. the pylon is massive, so it skews practical results. toughest combo: demons/ea. NO, NOT bots/ff due to cascading defense failure which can be pretty common as you turn the difficulty up and how many mob groups have even minor +tohit buffs. For me, toughest combo is one that has the potential to not lose a single pet due to mob damage and the absorb in EA puts it over the top especially vs. mobs that have autohit aoes.

status protection shouldn't even be considered anymore. you can buy it for an hour at a time on these servers.

it would be hectic to do so especially while leveling and you'd have to burn a power pool choice to get some form of taunt. after the tanker changes, i'd just go with a tanker and let your partner go ham.

the problem is you've tried to approach this AT like it was a bloody scrapper, without realizing that 3 of the usually max 5 attacks in a typical scrapper/tanker/blaster/defender/etc. rotation are - for you - always on DoTs. you only have room for 2 spammable abilities unless you plan to 100% ignore your secondary, and only tankers/brutes/scrappers/stalkers (unless they are click heavy like bio) have that luxury.

share this build, chief. you may have here the best overall mm build - period. why do I say that? you can buy cc protection for yourself from the p2w vendor, and faraday goes a long way to addressing the actual weakness of demons - getting stuck in ragdoll after a knockback. end use would suck if you are trying to keep whip debuffs up and use the rather spammy ea stuff. I find that if you target a t1 for the absorb then the weak t1 pets get the bigger shields while your less vulnearable t2 and t3 get the smaller onces.

for all content? thermal imo. capped resists for the most part, just enough defense from the pet io's to make a dent and warmth on auto fire makes for unkillable pets. cold gets wrecked by mobs with high tohit buffs. the anti knockback from the cage is nice, the absorb is nice and the heal is actually good but that's all the set brings and the cage is TINY and does not follow you. as for cc protection for yourself, you can get that from the p2w vendor now.

as far as I can tell, everyone who has done actual testing with /ea including myself have not been impressed. it works better as a set on defenders.

teaming is always tough for mm's. not a lot is going to fix that.

until you get an immob power from the patron powers, EA can be frustrating to play with MM's. the energy drain is causing a terror response in mobs and they flee as if they have a rad emission toggle on them. the demons are so large it is likely impossible to keep them all within the faraday cage due to hit box collision. otherwise - on paper - it's a good pairing especially once you have the absorb.

it's a difference of 29% smashing/lethal resists for all but the prince, capped fire resist for most of them too while you are simultaneously healing all of them every couple of seconds. I have not taken any mm combo through the maria Jenkins arc without losing a SINGLE pet on 4/8 except demons/thermal with warmth on auto fire. the only hiccup was the prince getting stuck in geometry a few times due to knock back forcing me to replace it.

if you are dealing with a pack with a lot of tohit buffs - and those mob types usually do a lot of lethal - demons/thermal is capped 90% smash/lethal for all but the prince and you would play it by autofiring warmth every couple of seconds. cold however will kill a boss/av faster.

you should share this build. I know I personally poo-poo'd cold due to no personal cc protection, but since you can just straight buy that sh..tuff on the p2w vendor I would love to see what a well built cold looks like.

the two top performing for 4/8 for as many groups you can possibly deal with will be thugs/time or demons/thermal with incarnates the only thing the demons/thermal has to fear is tough bosses that knock back a lot as there is a risk that the prince and the two tier 2's can get stuck in the floor until you tp them out or resummon them. with incarnates anything with hefty tohit buffs will wreck /time and there are a couple of storylines and one offs that have such. all mm's want to punch a baby after fighting the awakened, so make your life easier and just roll blue side.

this right here is the kind of partisan thinking i'm talking about that is ruining the community. if another server team fixed it and it works, there is no reason not to adopt it elsewhere unless you really don't want to fix it ie. mercs horrible damage, standardizing end costs across at's, balancing damage vs. animation time vs. recharge time, etc. no, lets not have fixed sets or parity between sets so that when you make a thematic decision you don't also gimp yourself in some way, because one of our competitors that we don't like on a personal level did it first. i'm not saying I agree with all of the changes the various servers made, but there is only one server that has gone to great lengths to address the massive power set balance issues and defensive and QoL issues that the AT has, and it's not this one.

there are unfortunately a lot of politics and petty bickering between the various teams that is actually hurting the community at large. balance decisions are both being made in spite of, or not being made due to some other server doing it first. it's irritating and irrational but given how people behave anymore I guess I shouldn't be shocked.

this varies set by set, but mm do pay more for end for the same powers than other at's. I actually do run out of end as time because I try to stack it's two weak -regen when I can on bosses and av's. I also only fight at +4, so ymmv if you are playing at a lower difficulty. another server has fixed mm end costs and brought them in line with other at's and while it's noticeable, it didn't make them suddenly overpowered. not even a little bit. but because it was done on that other server if it was to be done here now the usual politics would jump into play so it's unlikely to happen here.

bots were overblown on the old servers, much of it being hyperbole that carried over from before the assault bot was nerfed but nobody could be bothered to run any actual numbers and continued to use anectdotes they are very weak single target even with the -regen on the assault bot and their aoe damage is not as good as people make it out to be for a few reasons: the aoes are in the tier 1 and tier 3, the tier 1 aoe is not only weak it takes 2342927507qw03423472047 seconds to animate, the tier 2 bot does pretty much no damage and it also spends a lot of animation time on casting and recasting bubbles as an example.

the pylon is nothing. it doesn't have tohit buffs, it doesn't have ground targeted aoe patches. it's so large the melee mm's can all attack it at the same time. the pylon is the literal vacuum people are trying to base balance on. it's not the actual game.

it's ok to have flavor, if you balance it slow moving zombies better hit like a truck when they catch you.

that's not a valid argument. not all secondaries just run toggles, some are very active. the base damage on the mm attacks is too low given their end costs. i'm ok with the damage being low because the pets are a constant DoT, but the end costs should be addressed. this game has and continues to have little to no concept on balance between the AT's let alone between powersets. don't make excuses or forgive it just because that's the way it always was. This is one of the weakest AT's in incarnate and +4 content by design, it does not need to continue to be crippled in other areas as well.

because with lore pets you are mostly a spectator.

with Degen incarnate, you no longer need to suffer with inferior single target damage by taking bots. plus, daggers.