Dixa

unless you are married to super jump, the ideal way to do this is to get within 40 of the pack then teleport yourself in while in bodyguard. your pets will follow quickly but will usually stop and unload before they actually get to you due to bodyguard being triggered. bring break frees. your pets should be on defensive follow or goto follow and within supremacy range for bodyguard unless you are doing content that you find trivial. if yoru pets are in any other combination you do not get bodyguard. all pets do have better and more consistent attack chains I've noticed (noticed, not analyzed) if left on aggressive. but you are also a wet noodle in this state. watched a few vids of a beasts/ff recently. pets always in aggressive. he was trying to show off his build in DA. he died 3 times because he was not in bodyguard. he died. his pets were still alive. that's shameful and wastes your time running back and having to resummon everything.

you can fire defib without a dead target right? the aoe sleep would be nice I should think.

being bots trying to get ALL of those uniques in without gimping your damage in some way is practically impossible. this is why thugs and demons reign supreme - all 6 auras can go into gang war/hell on earth. remember you can see your pets attributes by right clicking on them. it's at the bottom of that menu. bots have horrible single target damage. bosses die very slow even with the -regen from the assault bot. the only reason to take any attacks at all outside of demons is if you are bored and i'm sorry but EA is too busy for that, or because you want to slot the FF chance for recharge procs.

maybe. weave is a good spot for another lotg or defensive set. tough is a good spot for the resist based unique io's. but honestly the only time I die is when the pets die.

all teammates are minions imo.

the duration on shock and discharge is greater than their recharge and I have yet to see any evidence they self-stack.

do you mean if you cast empowering circuit then do insulating, they won't get the absorb shield? that would be a set-breaking bug. anyone can confirm?

i'm starting a two box thugs setup. I was going to go thugs/time and thugs/ff (2nd thugs is on a completely different machine and it needs to not require much interaction - and the dispersion bubble would plug the cc protection hold in time which is the only thing that kills thugs/time usually before you get incarnates) then I decided I would go /kin and /ff for the juicy, JUICY damage cap on enforcers and the bruiser. god im' getting moist right now just thinking about it. I am now considering replacing the kin with ela, but maybe not after reading the entire thread. some of the powers don't stack, it's not much +damage at all sure as hell nowhere near what a maxed fulcrum shift will do, /kin also solves yours and your pets endurance problems and the /kin heal is much, much larger and will heal every target for that amount, the t9 seems like it's useless. if it actually gave a damage proc or damage aura to your tier 3 pet that would rock but nobody has even talked about that so it must either be negligible or non existent entirely. the only thing that intrigues me is that absorb on such a short cooldown and the cage preventing knockback, but would the absorb hit all 12 pets? can I buld up enough static to make it always hit all 12 pets with regularity? I always move around with team teleport so keeping them all in might not be a big issue but it is a much smaller radius than dispersion bubble and ffg which sometimes don't cover the entire breadth of an x8 pack either. killing fast is a form of defense, and I I don't know at this point if a thugs/kin+thugs/ff with that fat fulcrum shift (and increase density) or a thugs/ea+thugs/ff with the absorb (taking a bite out of the autohit aoe's in the game) would be better or worse when it comes to taking on ALL game content. although having faraday cage and dispersion bubble may actually make it impossible for 3 gunslinger bosses to hold you, and faraday stacks with the resist aura io's to give your tier 1's a bit more survivability. thoughts? oh and I also downloaded the new mids reborn listed in this thread and tried to update to show the power. it says no updated required, does not show the powerset on any AT and I don't feel like paying for winzip to use the extended version. why couldn't they just use .zip it's bloody built into windows 10.

faraday only has a 10s recharge right? and do the ea powers really cap out at 5 targets? that seems stupid as all hell given we have SIX pets.

ff, sonic and traps offer cc mag protection. mag 5.19 immob/hold/stun protection, not resist. the only one that won't be detoggled by 3 gunslingers is traps.

if you can live with purely single target damage it's great. you will need to lock down your mobs as melee pets have a helluva time hitting anything that runs. their built in mechanic that stacks that gives them 20% more damage doesn't really function very well until 6, but they aren't self capped that way. if you use fortify pack you lose all that extra damage and the ability for them to crit entirely for 60s. Truthfully I would build to softcap WITHOUT relying on fortify pack. and I seriously doubt it will have the same damage thugs/kin would. besides the stacked assault/tactics/maneuvers, the bruiser having fury and getting seriously buffed by fulcrum shift and most of the sets damage being in the tier 2 and tier 3 vs. the tier 1 for beasts, gang war being a way to park 4 or even all 6 MM unique io's means you can slot your best damage dealers for more procs. trying to slot all 6 for any set except demons and thugs means you are giving up something somewhere to make that happen.

This right here is why the melee pet sets will never perform in the real world as well as they do on the pylons if you are not locking everything down somehow. Just roll up a level 1 beast or ninja mm something without any ranged attack and watch as they chase down a fleeing minion and never once attack it. they can't attack anything on the move fer squat. Your choice in thugs was the right choice. The choice in thugs is always the right choice. Two boxing thugs is the god level choice.

it's fantastic on TS as it's an aoe 100% heal (still has the long cooldown though). here not so much.

except it's not safe. none of the mm's are. they are the most vulnerable AT to endgame mechanics in the entire game. you will dramatically increase your safety by killing stuff faster.

just a heads up when talking about increased density - the mez protection is only applied to your target, the resistances is applied to target and everyone around it. it's possible to keep it up on all of your pets to keep them from being knocked around, but that's a lot of very frequent recasts.

NEVER slot heal into protector bots. it bugs out their heal script and they will stop firing it. no more than 3 slots in the shields, maneuvers, weave unless you have a specific io set in mind for them. do not slot assault. don't slot tactics unless you plan to put a tohit buff in there. if you have end problems, 3 slot stamina with perf shifter chance for end, perf shifter end, io end and three slot health with numinas, miracle's and panacea's procs.

it's also one of the slowest killing mm options, 2nd only to mercs/anything.

you are not doing anything wrong. mm's are not a very team friendly at, and are not as straightforward as brutes/scrappers/stalkers. they are one of most handicapped vs. +4's even in incarnate content, and the most handicapped at in the game vs. autohit aoe's. that doesn't make them any less fun though.

they give your group 17% def all if enhanced for defense, 10% def all if not, however their resists are very low and the t1's have zero resists at all. autohit aoes, ground patches and anything that gets passed your defenses will kill them all fast. go with time and bring break frees. lets you slot extra procs in them instead.

the question of secondary always comes down to: is playing to the defensive strengths of your primary more important than kill speed or vice-versa? do you want a secondary that will require you to grab an incarnate for cc protection, meaning you are being stunned for 40 seconds at a time fighting malta while leveling or do you want cc protection built in? do you care if your secondary is good on teams or not? are you more interested in POWER, or FUN? The best overall is thermal, as it has resist shields to cap your demons to most things (except the prince), hefty resist, defense and regen debuffs and a pbaoe heal that can just be set to autofire once you can manage the end and a good single target heal for the prince. however you won't have cc protection until you start doing incarnates - bring break frees. it's also far weaker pre-standard io's than some of the other options. time can work, but I don't think it's possible to soft cap your pets defensively as only the prince has any defense to start with. it has the superior pbaoe heal and lots of debuffs and even a hold and both it and thermal work great on teams, but again no cc protection and malta...yes I really f'ng hate malta. they are the cheapest group in the game. three gunslingers will stack enough holds if you aren't a super fast killer to drop 12 mags of protection very fast. only like 2 sets in the entire game offer protection to sappers. for some at's a single sapper means instant death if you cant one shot it or immediately hold it. even being softcapped is no guarantee of survival. of the sets that offer cc protection - ff, traps, sonic - the only one that really works is ff. between traps and ff it's easier to fit medicine pool into ff as you only need three powers from the entire secondary. sonic is just a total crap secondary for mm's unless you exclusively team. of the two, only sonic and ff are good for teaming. traps pretty much begs that take team teleport. all others can work in some way, but this is why it's hard to recommend powersets for this at. some people are ok with replacing pets. some people kick the cat when a single t1 minion dies. some want POWER above all else, others want FUN above all else. some team, some only solo. Figure out what your goals are, then it becomes easier (kinda..sorta...but not really) to pick a secondary.

bots are a rather low damage mm set. lots of aoe, but it's not very high damage aoe and their boss killing speed is very slow. pick a secondary that will help to increase your kill speed through debuffs or powers that do damage on their own.

it's in their discord, which you're not obligated to take part of to enjoy the server or if you do, nobody forces you click on that channel.

it is doubled. look at it closely.

don't understand the 4chan bit. the server has become quite busy given recent changes here and even I decided to try it out, but the global chat channels are TAME compared to homecoming. there is a single discord channel for 4chan type posting, that's about it.

none of the other primaries can touch thugs and demons - at least on HC - because of gang war and hell on earth. these two abilities give you a place to park the pet io auras without sacrificing anything in your pets damage or proc wise. on the other server, mercs have a place for those aura's now and traps was modified so a power in it can take the pet recharge intensive sets which makes life a little better for nearly all of the mm primaries. my first mm when cov launched was necro/dark, but once thugs came out I never looked back. the bruiser is the most damaging t3 especially as the fight drags on and it builds fury, and the enforcers are second only to grave knights but aren't melee.