Meknomancer

I'm glad to see someone testing them that knows numbers. I have mercs running with every secondary except /emp /rad /kin /elec although the /sonic /pain /ta /poison pretty much never get touched. They work so well with /time and /cold /traps /bubs /dark benefitting massively from the extra defence or huge - to hit put out. M30 nade with an ff+rech/overwhelming kb/kd/annihilation proc in bumps secondary powers and hasten to the point where they are all perma with very little recharge needed. Not sure about the procs slotting. They need it for sure but the t2 pets can take so many and they do a ton of cc it makes me wonder if its worth it with them as they cycle through so many different attacks. T1 benefit the most by a mile so i usually toss in the soulbound bu and a lady grey but i can't find a way to drop any pet uniques, the slotting is super tight, which doesnt leave room for the t2/t3 to get any.

One of my favourite combos. I'd put mercs in no. 1 spot for damage since page 5 although saying that usually starts an argument between those running necro with the new soul extraction and old thugs toons running burnout and gangwar. 3rd rech io in serum is a wasted slot once you boost the first 2 to 50. Rech io in farsight is a wasted slot its always available when you need it. Put the call to arms back in. Mercs get great resists and with serum they become pretty godly but once you throw on farsight/manouvres/the def uniques. Take power boost if your going mace so you can pb your farsight. I like to take burst for gm/av's its much less end heavy than m30 nade which i save for mobs and to proc the ff+rech. They dont need slots they are just in the build to bump the damage of the pets. If you start spamming time crawl/time stop/time crawl/slowed response/time crawl your blue bar vanishes fast so i try to fit in 2 acc/end pieces and boost them and call it a day. I slot times juncture with the dark watcher and pacing of the turtle procs. Its amusing. You could drop the def/end piece from tactical upgrade. I like to heavily proc out slowed response with achilles/lady grey/shield breaker they fire off a lot in big mobs. Stealth is a useless power if you run TJ and only useful if you plan to keep toggling it on and off when needed/ghosting. Pet slotting....i carry a load of procs and unslotters and change my slotting on them regularly. I still havent found something i like that works best. Secondary is so important, if your chasing recharge which you do on /time it does leave you short of empty slots for damage procs in pets and mercs don't have that extra power to mule them in like demons hell on earth/necro soul extract/thugs gang war, its hard enough hitting max damage on them and if you do toss in procs they end up sucking wind in long fights.

I've played /poison mm's with envenom and weaken and skipped pretty much the entire set and not noticed and difference from the ones i played where i tried taking most of the powers which is why i rate it as the equivalent of the super strength set, 2-3 powers you really need and the rest junk/mules/skippable. The heal i just use as a mule for preventetive and treat it like i would with /storms O2 boost. Antidote just a mule for 4 pits of unbreakable or a steadfast/glad unique i think i tossed it on a team mate once. Just the once mind and it was probably a misclick. Both powers need to be given the aoe treatment if they are going to be made playable. Radius on both envenom and weaken is pathetic but i would keep them at 8 foot if they introduced venemous gas over noxious that way you have both a great st debuff chain for heavy hitters like gm/av's and a debuff aura for trash mobs.

@Nemu were you running that on an MC yesterday, 1 of the panda toons? If that was you that was 1 of the 2 good /poison mm's i've seen played well (along with Living Brains bots/poison) Pretty sure you were low lvl 40's and not dying every 2 seconds or summoning pets it was impressive. Just saw the name on the build download, definitely you 😛

I love that your having fun with it and that you got it to work for you. And that you got the worst secondary to work with the worst primary is quite impressive. But poison is still awful on mm's compared to any other AT (at least for me). You start out by saying that mm's aren't chained to melee because noxious is ranged but that 2 minute downtime makes it almost useless and your still going into melee for the poison trap anyway, you may as well be there all the time especially if your running melee pets. At that point a pbaoe -to hit/- def would make it so much more survivable. Otherwise you have to spend a lot of slots building up defences skipping out on recharge and all the pet uniques and all the procs that could otherwise be slotted in the pets but now aren't. Weaken, great power if your fighting single targets, useless vs mobs unless someones herded/fold spaced them into a nice tight 8 foot radius. Same goes for envenom. Which is where poison shines on other AT's. Venemous Gas has a 15 foot radius and does pretty much both jobs with no clicking. You don't need to be in the centre of the mob to make it work which lets you move around and stack the cones on top. I like your build and i'm happy you enjoy it and appreciate you wanting others to try it and feel the same but i'm into 5 /poison mm's from live and HC and i've only ever seen 2 good ones in all that time and at no point playing them did i think to myself this is a good power set compared to any of the other secondarys. It needs some help. Like a lot of help.

You'll have end issues with enforcers and bruiser unless your running ageless. No idea about how the bu proc will work in gang war i'd assume it has a chance to fire off on you when you pop them but i'd want it elsewhere. I don't know how i feel about spiritual on an mm especially a non healer. Traps i'd probably go agility if i cant fit musc. and chasing recharge. 1 slotted hasten is usually a bad idea unless the plan is to never play it below incarnate levels. Defence is very low for having ffg+weave+man+cj but not hitting ranged/e/ne/aoe/f/c. You went after recharge at the expense of a lot of your defense. You have 0 kb protection. The mark of supremacy set is the best way to get 3 bonuses of 10% recharge on an mm but you only used 2 of them in your t1. Brusier slotting needs work. 6 bits of level 30 set call to arms for 6.25% when 2 pieces of supremacy would get you 10% has me confused when it looks like you built for pure incarnate play. 4 pieces of supremacy gets you more defense too. Not a lot of traps builds on the forums and all my play has been with bots and mercs trappers buts its not hard to build a perma hasten trapper running with agility that will hit incarnate level s/l/e defence and at least 45% f/c just with scorp shield before you even hit power boost and close to 40% s/l resist. The build looks fun but it really needs some tweaking. You shouldn't need any other procs in the pets other than the soulbound chance for build up in t1 or t3 and the gaussian in t2 and i don't think you even need those. Traps puts out massive debuffs and ffg puts out massive buffs. I feel like its better to just build for acc+dmg+end red in a traps mm especially since page 5 when pets seem to be very end hungry and just proc out the traps instead of the pets. Example with stuff pretty much tossed in at random in all 3 pets/caltrops/acid mortar/poison trap all of which you can shuffle about any way you like but it does mean swapping ice out for mace just to show you def+res numbers+recharge:

I don't remember brutes ever having a specific role tbh. A little dps/tank/alpha taker jack of all melee trades. When red came in we were tanking with mm's pets, brutes not much more than a scrapper. How would more AT sets fix the buffs tanks got and the nerfs brutes got? That would have be answered by someone who understands the code better than me, i just suggest it as the simplest solution. An AT piece that drastically bumps damage on the brute or bumps aoe radius when it fires off or gives them something close to scrappers critical strikes or...or...or..... I'm betting theres a lot of ideas out there that could bring the brute back to what it was simply by chucking an enhance at it. And i'll repeat what i said initially: I don't have a problem with brutes damage, its more the constant buffing the tanker AT gets.

I don't have a problem with brutes damage, its more the constant buffing that the tanker AT gets. And the simplest fix and probably the most difficult to implement is to make more AT sets, only this time make ones that are good for the brute instead of the useless ones they currently have available. Makes me wonder how difficult it would be to proliferate current At sets to other AT's. How would a brute fare with a stackable resist and an absorb.

Screen 3-pets and minions will still be affected by those powers.

I love illusion on domi's, so what if PA isn't massive damage or taunting, your entire secondary is dps and there's just enough controls in the primary with gleam and flash and spectral to let you pummel everything. Its a fantastic set right from the beginning all the way up to 50 and into incarnate levels. And good as it is low levels its a totally different beast at high levels. Like every toon once its 50 and kitted out its a different experience.

Sometimes all it takes is the right name, a good costume and a respec and a toon goes from sitting untouched for a couple of years to being your current main. Sadly thats never been the case with mine. I made one of these back in 2020 i think it was. Love the costume you posted btw, especially the glowing yakuza shoulders, pale skin and the way you got the thorny stuff the right colours. I have a lot of dark blasters and this ones been played the least i'm not sure exactly why, its been pretty much unkillable since the last respec and it only runs about 34-5% ranged. I originally had double tentacles and vines which was nice but i found i wasn't using either much. The melee attacks got skipped every time, not because i hate melee'ing but because i hate both the animations the cast times and the puny dps. There's a reason you only see a few spines scraps/brutes/tanks outside of ae. Build still feels a bit odd, theres pieces in that don't make sense even when i look at it now but purely down to the secondary being just as odd. Absorb secondary's on blasters arent as good as the others, you only have to look at /fire and its massive recovery rates and even a single heal io in it giving your hp constant green tics. There was a few older respecs when i had endurance issues which is why i think i tossed a theft in life drain. So i end up with just the usual minimal picks, entangle is a force pick, strangler to stack with abyssal, spore cloud to stack with all the - to hit and its one of the few powers giving - regen to blasters. Not much to say about the primary, i never felt like it was one of the 'weaker' sets and i run life drain as part of the st attack chain as i do on all my dark blast toons. And you have Umbral torrent. Knock a mob down. Does it look like your going to get hit by something? Umbral torrent. Mob getting back up? Umbral torrent. Tied second best cone in the game, possibly the best. Range is ridiculous. I lost track of how many times i fired it off and aggroed 2-3 mobs behind the one i was aiming for. It recharges super fast. Slots an ff+rech. Perfect mob control. Umbral, Tentacles, Nightfall still one of my favourite combos and i try to fit them all in on every dark blaster i play. Problem with the combo for me has been having an ice/plant which i prefer and a dark/ninja, dark/devices and dark/time that all feel like a smoother play. I'd build in minimal defences if i were you, just enough so when you open up with nukes/cones all the - to hit stacks up and your pretty much untouchable. And i'd take life drain, even the small heal keeps you up. Current build (testing hammis to try match umbrals range or at least close enough so that i dont have to reposition constantly) :

Very old build not updated to page 5, when i get round to it i' ll definitely be putting more slots in howling its just too good and has too many uses and i hate running agility so i'll try to find a way to proc an ff+rech maybe in psi nado or sorcery's arcane bolt (not in current build) so i can switch in intuition radial:

I have a fire/rad that never gets played and a rad/rad i quite like but didn't go the usual route of psi mastery its more of a themed toon and i had to drop a lot of procs to bump melee defence and i wanted mace to try the co-ordinated targeting and the pet. Not fantastic but i do have fun playing it:

Stop doing them? Why lol. As i said earlier i was the fastest player on the team, pets were set up and buffed and i was first to the mobs and already attacking before anyone else even arrived and needed a tp. I've been doing speed runs for as long as its been possible. Never had any issues with mm's on them til players started slotting incandes. Used to set records on live and when we got HC back i was teaching players how to speed tinpex for quick reward tables. 10-15 seconds means you only miss 1-2 mobs and that only matters on kill alls.

Masterminds slot aoe sets, Controllers/fenders/corrs slot single target so i assume last time you were running an mm. And this time your not.

This may already have been suggested (and probably has) . Theres a ton of work and effort put in by many players writing and creating story arcs in AE and some of them are exceptional. I know the devs have set up a reward system for the best posted but when AE came in on the live servers i always looked at is as a way to expand the game by players creating new content that fit with the games lore/canon/storylines that the devs could then rate and put directly into appropriate zones. We know its possible to put in new content, we've seen it with the last few pages from the Graveyard Shift arc to Aeon sf and the new cim arcs. Having played some of the AE arcs i wondered why its not possible to fit those in. At least one of them reminded me of the original red arcs starting in the mercy base that i would prefer as an option when i make a new villain. They are great fun but trawling through the AE to find them if you don't have a specific ID to search with makes me wonder how many arcs are in there that are hidden gems that could be placed in game as content.

I'd agree is the speed run was being run by other players who can speed, if i'm the first there on an mm and my pets arrive before any other player is close thats clearly not the case as i frequently find you have to wait anything up to 60 seconds or longer for slower pets like mercs/necro to catch up to you as they don't always 'port' in. In some cases i had to go back and look for them only to find they walked into some scenery and all i can see is the upper torso.

You have no choice but to descend to ground level if you need to apply the upgrades after re-summoning regardless of having group fly on, fastest thing to do is turn it off and then upgrade and turn it back on but that can put you in a difficult position. Either that or take a secondary that makes pets unkillable 😛

Never heard of anyone soloing the MS but i do remember a couple corrs duo'ing it regularly on defiant way back when. Fire/cold and an ice/kin corrs. I remember @River running the fire/cold but i forget who the other player was (i want to say @Linea but my memory is terrible and it was so long ago it may just have been a global that started with L)

Looks a bit iffy endurance wise with assault and tactics running, i usually try to find ways to stack up damage bonuses and toss in assault on top. Almost no resists but theres not a lot of reasons to go in melee i just toss in any old epic melee for a blistering set to hit roughly 45% s/l/e/ne defence and hope not to get hit. Just noticed theres 6 luck of the gamblers slotted, big mistake. Take 1 out of weave for extra f/c res. Edited. And realised its an out of date mids-terra firma can take to hit sets.

Your power picks, minus dark blast, hover is flight control and you have more than enough st stuff ( why would you not go intuition radial if you want range and holds? )

I've seen a ton of blasters lately with 0 defence murdering mobs in high end content and its possible they build this way so i'm not going to say 'Don't slot like that' or 'don't take that power' as i have no experience building blasters this way. My lazy builds take mace for scorp shield and just aim for 45% smashing and lethal. If i take a resist shield i usually aim for around 32.5% ranged and smashing and lethal or just go for 45% ranged defence although that usually means skipping out on some damage procs. You have literally thrown in every proc available in every power so i'll assume its just gonna be 1 of those kill first before the mob aggroes and murders me builds because as soon as they aggro on you, your gonna die without amplifiers and base boosts and insps. I don't have one so i can't give much advice, you'd need someone who played the combo and can make better builds than me if you want to keep flame mastery. I just threw it in my earthx2 blaster build and its a super lazy mace build i doubt it would put out 2/3 damage that yours would. You'd still have to boost all the def pieces to get to 45% s/l

My thoughts are pretty simple. You will have fun with it. Dark blast is one of those sets that rarely if ever gets boring. I ran a dark/time a couple years back and i built it pretty much the way i imagine your looking at doing now. It was great. It was slow. Playing dark/nin and dark/dev made me re-evaluate the slotting. The attacks stack up the - to hit debuffs to the point where 45+ ranged is irrelevant. Torrent ensures the mobs aren't able to attack anyway. Open with that and the tentacles and even if the odd one to the side hits you , life drain is there. Your about to build your dps toon as a tanker. When you build your tanks do you build them as dps?

If its a tank i usually go 2 builds, 1 will be for proper tanking and built to survive and the other for soloing and built for damage. But even the tankiest build can slot procs and should because it'll hep the teams dps. I get that @WumpusRatyou might want to make it the most survivable you can but how long are you prepared to sit in a mob and wait for attacks to recharge then click them and watch that attack hit for almost no damage. Having played a bunch of tanky tankers where you can hop in a mob and throw an attack on auto and go off and make dinner and come back and find the mobs still there and you haven't even taken out the minions i wonder at the fun factor. Isn't it more fun to have a tanky tanker that also puts out damage? I'm not saying go mad and slot 4 procs/attack, but even 1 in each makes a massive difference and generally the 6th set bonus is junk. Its the reason i dislike invul so much, you almost have to 6 slot everything, taking that junk slot in order to get to the point where its survivable where any other tanker primary gives you far more slotting flexibility. Why 6 slot avalanche/blistering cold for f/c/aoe def when you could use it for a damage proc. Why be force picked into an epic power or 2 just so you can use 5-6 winters bites and 5-6 entomb for e/ne def. None of the other tanker primaries force this on you, they let you go for the fun stuff like soul/mu. Your right i do have an opinion on what slow is same as everyone else and a tanker that takes 7-8 minutes to plow through a +4 mob isn't fun its just boring especially if i can do it in less than 2 minutes and have near the same survivability to the point where its not even noticeable. Watching a tanker team mate running his invul/? just waiting for the recharge on the 1 pbaoe attack they have to come back up and then clicking it and watching the mob laugh at the puny damage compared to the other team mate running a ?/? murder half the mob in 1 chain of aoe and then hop ahead of the team leaving the rest to mop up is what a tanker should be. They should be crushing half the mob and moving on it keeps things interesting and makes sure that the tank is doing their job of taking the alpha. Theres 0 reason on HC for a tanker to have low dps considering they got a bump every new page that came out and have what may be considered the best AT sets unless that tank is specifically built for hardmode content. If you build it just for survivability and don't run hard content then whats the point of it? You could of built in way more damage and be just as survivable as you are now.

Doesn't look quite right and the rech seems a little off but who doesn't want fold space on their tank (especially that dark tank for a tight soul drain) I couldn't give up superspeed so i ended up dropping cloak of fear: