Dixa

lore pets make all primary/secondary combos across all at's viable for anything. they are a cheat, and should never be used in a discussion between actual performance between sets. many of the incarnate powers grant a significant power boost to most at's, but none on the level that those lore pets do.

a demon/storm will work on paper, and it will work on the pylon. it won't work that well in actual practice. It's unfortunate that the only boss dummy we have in the game is the pylon. It's size allows the demons to all be in melee range and cycle all of their attacks. in actual practice this is not how they perform against an av that's smaller than black scorpion. due to collision one or two of them wil be in melee range the rest sit back and cycle ranged attacks or endlessly trying to hop over one another. thugs doesn't have this problem. in actual practice, thugs will outdamage demons. it will outdamage all primaries in actual practice even if you can't be arsed to replace that arsonist. if you add storm into the mix then you aren't going to touch thugs/storm for damage. why? 1) the damage is entirely in their tier 2 and tier 3 pets. Other sets don't offer this. demons tier 3 is half damage half control their damage relies on the tier 2 and 3 and the one tier 2 and the one tier 3 that does toxic that also debuffs. beasts damage is almost entirely in the tier 1's. why is this important? two words: purple patch. 2) they have the fastest animating aoe's. in the time the robots tier 1 has fired off it's cones the enforcers have fired off all three. you don't actually need the arsonist to kill a pack. let it die. 3) they have a power that lets them park all 6 mm unique aura's without affecting their pet damage potential. 4) that same power - if you can keep them alive for the duration - does a ton of damage. have burnout? yeah it's pretty much no contest. now survivability wise I don't think anything can top demons/thermal with warmth on auto fire especially since you can just straight up buy full CC protection for yourself at the p2w vendor. there are enough enemy types endgame with tohit buffs that just chew right through time. again i'm not addressing what's fun here, because the OP didn't ask for fun. he/she is asking for damage. thugs/storm can't be beat. if you want the best overall will almost never lose a pet setup on +4? demons/thermal, but knockback av's will make you want to punch a baby.

lore pets should never be considered for any discussions regarding the balance between powersets.

if you are going to include personal attacks, then include them equally. you can slot -res in thugs personals as well to keep it up permanently and I never factor in lore pets for anything.

it's not the strongest. hands down, nothing is stronger than thugs. single target. aoe. it doesn't matter - nothing is stronger than thugs whether you factor in a secondary or not. it is the only set where all three tiers of pets do amazing damage AND it focuses it's damage evenly between the tier 2 and tier 3. all other sets have some sort of aura or cc or what not that takes away from their damage potential. even with leadership toggles, the enforcers lose to no tier 2 damage wise. they are also easy to softcap beasts? they can crit, but NOT with fortify pack up. if you perma fortify pack you don't crit and beast damage drops into the toilet. a purely single target focused set where most of the damage is on the tier 1's, heavily reliant on procs to handle +3's and don't bother with +4's without incarnate shift and it can't crit? point by point: good damage bc they crit - not with fortify pack up. that's a full minute of zero crits excellent buffs/debuffs from time - this is true no matter the primary beasts has nothing to do with it excellent heals/end recovery - again, nothing to do with beasts can soft cap pets defenses - not as easily as thugs who can do it without needing all of the mm unique io's allowing you to slot even more damage or procs excellent team support - mm's are not a very good teaming at in general. this is entirely on time, not beasts. mm attacks can be slotted with lots of procs - thugs beats beast in this regard. damage procs, debuff procs, a handy power to park all 6 mm unique io's without affecting your pets actual damage in any way? it beats everyone with only demons coming in second your pets hardly die? turn up the difficulty perma chronoshift - beasts has nothing to do with this. fun combo - I disagree. there is not enough power in it for me to find it fun given the total lack of aoe. it takes a beast player far longer than just about any other mm set that has aoe's to kill a pack especially if you are dumb enough to pop fortify pack and to your last point about fun - the op is likely finds the "fun" in POWER. the OP - like me - POWER = FUN. Animations? cuteness? fleeting. Power is forever in this game (until it's nerfed). thugs/whatever is where the power is. beasts is not in the running. if you want to compromise, get demons.

i'm sure beast is fine, but it's damage is horrible with fortify pack up and it's scripting is terrible. OP wanted best damage combo, and beasts is not on the list.

I was mostly being facetious. I don't think there is any one mm pet that can even take 5 damage procs.

absolute highest damage is going to be either thugs/storm or thugs/kin IF you can cap out fulcrum shift. of those two, thugs/storm is more likely to survive a 4/8 bots is NOT a high damage set. don't fall for that trap, especially post IO's. the highest damage mm primaries are those that have their damage entirely in their t2 and t3 pets. bots it's in their t1 and t3 with t2 providing mostly support. t1 pets take a massive hit to their damage due to level differences. any set that overly relies on their t1 pets for damage is going to be inferior to one that does not when it comes to straight damage unless you could do something like slot 5 damage procs or something. as for being mezzed - you can buy mez immunity by the hour at the p2w vendor.

You see the scattering effect before you have any ground target aoe's. i'm doing thugs/ela and saw it as soon as I was able to ramp up to 1/6 which was about level 8 or 9. goto doesn't stop them from running off to chase all of these mobs immediately unfortunately. not sure what goto changes you guys are talking about but the behavior is about the same as back on live.

which is why you have sets which on paper should not be doing as well that end up being best in class. Thugs for example. mostly lethal and smashing damage the two most resisted damage types in the game is always tops because their powers animate super fast and recycle super fast. bots should be doing more, but their animations are hideously long and their recharges even longer. If animation time is never taken into consideration, then this makes set balance a pipe dream.

It should, because powers do not start their recharge before the animation finishes, the animations can't be cancelled and you can't use anything else until the animation time completes.

huh. The base damage being higher makes sense because of their animation times and end costs - when looked at in a vacuum. Claws still has the best pbaoe spin move (almost twice the damage of whirling smash) if you will and Dark probably has the best short range cone now. the base damage on rend armor is way, way too high. The rest of the powers are ok. Momentum is what screws everything up. it basically removes the animation times that balance out the base damage and end costs. it's a STUPID design decision. recharge, base damage and endurance cost AND animation time since recharge does not begin until after the power has animated must always be taken together when determining power and powerset balance. you cant just look at one or two of those on their own. remove momentum, lower animation times, end costs and lower damage on rend armor which is the real outlier even for it's base animation time. I don't know what else they could do. momentum takes a full second off of rend armor. from 2.3 to 1.3. momentum is such a force multiplier that just 'tweaking' the damage alone is not enough to give it parity with other sets like battle axe or war mace or the other big hitters. if you math it out, rend armor does nearly the same damage over a minute and dps with a slightly higher end cost than knockout blow with one stack of rage baseline, all powers unenhanced. both powers have near the same animation times but knockout blow has a 5s longer cooldown and NOT EVER taking advantage of momentum. that's not ok. and if you aren't starting your attack cycle with rend armor so it's taking advantage of momentum, it just blows everything in the game out of the water and does more damage and dps than a double stacked rage knockout blow over the same duration.

you could make either work with either secondary, but not cheaply. thugs is the better choice, and pain dom is the better secondary choice if you are limiting yourself to just those two options. time is the BEST choice however, and you can make it purple.

poison traps -regen only lasts 10s btw. it's not reliable.

I dunno. what makes TW crazy is not so much it's base damage but how it can just bap bap bap bap during momentum. more about animation time - or lack thereof.

so getting one to 50 I can say it's for sure no thugs/time until you get a patron immob this set makes mobs scatter like crazy which can make it hard to keep your pets in the bubble and close enough together for your chains. the real stars of the set are the shield, the heal and the end restore powers. target the arsonist for everything so he gets the biggest shield and biggest heal. 4/8 fights take a bit and the pets do run out of endurance. chrono shift does ok with this, but the ea end regen does it far far better. but it's still no thugs/time unless you are fighting packs of mobs with copious amounts of both tohit buffs and knockback.

would love to see some builds posted with rad/wm or rad/tw

I would very much like to see a solid rad tanker setup with capped resists, paired with whatever is the highest damage secondary available to tankers (for av killing but still decent pack clearing)

so nobody ever fights crey or their malta packs have no gunslingers?

when someone asks about meta, they do not care about theme. they care about power. raw power and raw power only. nobody has answered the OP's question properly. I don't play brutes so I can't answer it, but he wants to know the META primary ie. the highest dps primary in any situation that's not SS.

any numbers/pictures using insulating circuit slotted up for heal? I would like to see how much of the bar it's covering for t1's, 2's, 3's and you.

solo malta x8 packs is what im thinking of

demons does go best with thermal as it maximizes their resists, gives you decent debuffs and -regen which can be made perma. I will warn you though that it's an extremely slow starter and if you can swing it, slap it on a 2nd account and use your main to level it up. but once you get going the only thing you really have to fear is bosses with high knockback as demons are prone to be stuck in ragdoll physics until you resummons them at times. the KB protection is the only thing EA has going for it in my opinion the rest of the set is very underwhelming overall as the numbers are tuned too low.

kin works on thugs as well without the drawbacks fortify pack gives. it will also do more damage because the damage is on tier 2's for aoe and the tier 3 for single target - and the bruiser destroys all other mm pets when it comes to single target damage. it is however a later blooming set and the tier 1's have zero resists base so they will die a bit no matter how many increased densitys you stack or auras you have. you can also fully max out their damage, accuracy, procs and other things they do without making any sacrifices because you can just use 4 to 6 slots in gang war to hold all of the uniques while placing SA's buildup in the bruiser.

the -maxhp matters for all boss fights higher than +2 especially for the mm primaries with horrible single target damage like mercs and bots.