Dixa

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.

The fill rate you talk about here is basically just another dps measurement that so many ignore when it comes to this game and have ever since the very beginning. In a game where abilities are fully independent and there is no global cooldown, damage per second calculations must take animation time into consideration along with recast and actual damage done. Thugs does mostly smashing and lethal so their dps really should be poor like mercs. The damage of their abilities isn't significantly higher or lower than the other sets But like ninja, every damned ability has a stupidly short animation time. This is why I always laughed at people who said bots/yaddayadda was the best at dropping av's or packs. That was only true BEFORE we got thugs and has not been true after, no matter your secondary.

costumes are not the biggest change. the biggest, single biggest mm change is the hold command. you target one of your henchmen, hit hold and they are all immobilized and immune to knockback. no more ranged pets chasing things down. obviously this means they will die in a fire late game regularly if you are not paying attention, and will not move at all until you toggle it off, use goto or team teleport. and you can't pick which henchmen to do this on - it turns it on for all which makes keeping your enforcers, punks, arsonist in check while the bruiser goes ham requires just as much micro management as not having this command does. the second, more minor change is a toggle that turns all of your knockbacks into knockdowns, but debuffs your damage a tad. they did the merc changes to bots as well almost identical - tier 1 have a cone attack and they get it immediately. probots get dispersion bubble but it's bugged they don't keep it up. assault bot still has it's brawl but also can summon it's own drones. however even with those changes their damage is still not on par with demons or thugs who have not seen any changes yet. traps is...yeah. triage beacon is now a straight pbaoe heal every few seconds. web grenade is aoe. they combined caltrops and trip mine into one power that is insta cast. added turrets with a long cooldown for the capstone power. traps is basically an actual bunker set and you don't need a primary that heals itself or to grab medicine if you are like me and hate losing pets. other secondary's their heals got a minor aoe heal added to them like alkaloid in poison. nearly all of poisons debuffs are now aoe's. if the probots casting dispersion bubble was fixed, you could then take bots with any secondary and not give up cc protection. bots/poison would become the fastest killing mm combo in the history of the game - packs or single tough enemies. oh, and they moved all of the controller pets from 32 to level 1. controllers/doms are the true pet powerhouses there. they are here, too just a pain to level with for a while. honestly if pet classes are your thing, the other server is the place to play it however the AT is still one of the weakest when it comes to clear speeds and av kill times.

mm's are slow killers. even if you go demons or thugs you still won't approach the kill speed of that brute and what you do get, you will have to work harder for.

this is way off. a demons/thermal can resist cap their pets to many but most importantly to s/l. the level 1 heal in thermal is an aoe that can just be set to auto fire when Justin was first opened, I made many many MANY mm combos and ran them all through the maria Jenkins av arc at 4/8. the only combo that NEVER died was demons/thermal. fights with a lot of knockback are annoying as all hell and because of this the other server with their mm quality of life changes makes an even better demons/thermal however, you have no cc resists until incarnates. for solo, the best secondary is and continues to be traps. thre are many av's that will chew up /time because of cc and moderate to good regen even with daggers. but really it boils down to what you are wiling to deal with when solo. I hate losing pets - ever - and I hate being cc'd especially when you start to deal with malta and their 20s long stuns. the top primaries are thugs and demons, then mercs with tons of procs. bots is pretty far behind the dps department because it's abilities are not only lower in damage than thugs but animate slower and recharge slower. demons can have issues getting all on smaller targets as their best attacks are melee but they have massive models. thugs are mostly ranged except the bruiser, and no mm pet can dish out the single target damage like the bruiser especially on longer fights when it can build up fury. incarnate abilities fix a lot of issues with mm's, but you have to make it that far. still quite a lot of game to play before you get enough incarnate stuff to plug the holes and even THEN mm's fall far behind nearly every other AT when it comes to soloing.

the fact dark can pretty much cap all but toxic resists makes up for the cascading defense failure, which affects all but SR really.

nearly every defense set has a glaring hole of some kind that penalizes you against one or more specific enemy types. If you are looking for one character to effortlessly tackle every enemy group in the game, the closest you are going to get will be with anything using dark armor. however dark armor has issues with knockback and end management until you io it out.

this would nuke the hell out of the heal

the single toughest combo I ever made - and I made a ton when they made the Justin test server - was demons/thermal. there are too many mobs at endgame with +tohit buffs, which destroy any attempt to defcap your pets. too many. I don't want my characters to only be decent against some mob types, I want them good against ALL mob types. demons/thermal can cap most resists, you can auto fire warmth and keep them alive. they are mostly melee so no problem keeping them together and you have great -resists and -regen. what you don't have is cc protection for you and your pets but you can bandaid that with incarnates but no joke there are just a lot of enemies - especially villain side - with autohit powers and high +tohit buffs that just destroy attempts to make powerful /ff, /traps or /time builds. yes you will see people post how theirs is godly and it likely is against many enemy types. but against all? no, no mm build is but demons/thermal gave me the least stress (once I got them capped) against all enemy types.

Really? I don't see why that would be, since FF bubbles do. Pine's assumes it works, which is why I assumed it would... I'm not doubting you, I just think that it's just strange that the power that explicitly states it boosts defense buffs wouldn't boost those two defense buffs. deflection shield also has resists. i'm sure the reason had more to do with making sure that Ff had the edge in raw defense. It's because the cold shields have some resist baked in. It makes the entire power immune to power boost. I found it out the hard way and had to research why it didnt work.

the question you really need to ask is how does tropic thunder not apply to everything?

there is a thread out there with some data...on the scrapper forum I think..buried in another thread. the dots used to tick for upwards of 70 per tick pre shutdown. today they tickle.

it is true. it's dps deadtime. it was reported on the old forums pre shutdown as an issue for the set. it has not been addressed as of yet.

the only real change from the builds pre shut down and now is the i24 ppm changes. so when you see a crapton of damage procs in something like caltrops - that doesn't work like it used to and is a waste of slots now. that's about it. there are quite a few variations of traps builds out there and all are viable.