Hopestar

Skippable things are powers that you can ditch if you need the slot for something more important, not necessarily bad powers. Personally I skipped Time Stop because Spirit Shark Jaws is an overall better hold with less cast time, more duration, and high damage with better proc ability. I have to disagree with that, Entangling is a mag 1 hold that can only stack to a mag 2, and so will only hold Minions which generally aren't a threat anyway, it's really not worth the gigantic endurance cost or slots. The set doesn't have any other hold to stack with it so it's awful. You could argue that it pushes an EPP or PPP pick from 3 to 4/5 but it's also only a 15' PBAoE you have to camp next to the enemy to use increasing the threat to you. @TheSpiritFox Yeah you're right it does deserve more credit with the increased healing, with time being a defense set, healing the larger damage you take more and faster is welcome.

Electrical Affinity and Nature Affinity as, their naming convention suggests, are pretty similar and would go in the same tier along with Cold and Radiation. Electrical Affinity has -damage in 2 powers, 1 of which is AoE, stacking up to -33.75% damage (-damage being unresistable mind you), a revive, and it's buffs (+endurance, +damage, +absorb, +rech) and heals have no target cap, entirely dependent on how many stacks you have (~20 without substantial +recharge from teammates). Nature is similar with it's heal and absorb, -res with it's ST -damage, similar PBAoE resist + regen, +endurance over time, and massive +50%, -75% endurance cost AoE buff. Sonic and Empathy belong with Force Field in their effectiveness. Like FF, they excel at only one thing which isn't worth not having/having 1 debuff along side them. If I were to rank them in order of effectiveness (I rewrote some that I thought needed more clarification sorry): TIER 1 - a mixture of everything, with area heal + defence to help keep your pets alive Dark Miasma - While the initial area heal is the longest cast of all heals and requires a target, this belongs here because of: -30% res AND -fly -jump slow in Tar Patch, a -500% regen that also revives teammates, the largest -Damage AoE included with -tohit, +defense +res (E/N/P), a very long range cone with even more -tohit (22.5 combined unenhanced), AND a pet with those same -tohit powers for up to -45%. Skip Black Hole. Time Manipulation - AoE +Recharge, AoE -damage -tohit, AoE unresistable heal, AoE (you see the theme here) -recharge -speed mag 3(!) Hold, AoE +defense +tohit, and another AoE -damage with -res. This set has it all, so the only skippables would be Time Stop or Temporal Selection since it's a great teammate buff, but does nothing for your henchmen. TIER 2 - just missing one ingredient which doesn't put them in Tier 1, but still very effective Electrical Affinity - The fact that Faraday Cage gives you mag 10 protections from practically everything AND +resist to all but Toxic makes this set. The -damage in 2 powers, 1 of which is AoE, stacking up to -33.75% damage (-damage being unresistable mind you), a revive, and it's buffs (+endurance, +damage, +absorb, +rech) and heals have no target cap, entirely dependent on how many stacks you have (~20 without substantial +recharge from teammates) and ability to keep yourself, henchmen and team full on endurance is just a bonus. The numbers being too low just hold it back from being up there with Time and Dark. Nature Affinity - With +regen and healing over time strewn about everywhere in the set, the AoE: heals, +res, +50% damage, +tohit, +75% endurance cost reduction, absorb, -tohit, -damage, -res, this set has everything you want. Like Electrical Affinity, if the numbers in +res and -damage were higher, this set would be #1. I just wish the revive was AoE. Oh and skip Entangling, it's awful. Traps - Poison Trap's -1000% regen combined with mag 3 hold and special vomit debuff makes you an absolute nightmare to enemies. Caltrops is super strong with procs, Acid Mortar's -def -res and FFG's +def, and with Seeker and Trip being respectable damage, something most sets don't have, it's a decent jack of all trades. It has a heal, but it's long recharge and stationary meaning in a team you'll always outrun it. Skip Detonator. Cold Domination - While the fact the +Defense shields are only for allies hurts, they're still high amounts of defense and Benumb's gigantic -37.5% damage and -500% regen makes up for it, the +Max HP is nice for Absorb and Regen users like Bio and Radiation, but for you its only worth using on your T3 henchman. Heat Loss -res and -end are great, providing tons of END to keep you and your team going is just a bonus. Henchmen not running out of endurance is a buff in itself. TIER 3 - lacking in more than one ingredient but still worthy of attention Storm Summoning - the area debuff of Freezing Rain is great, as well as the area defence & resistance in Steamy Mist. This set is only behind because of its puny single target heal. BUT this set also harder to play well - please don't spam Gale or Hurricane in team play as it will annoy melee. The Overwhelming Force knockback to knockdown enhancement, or the Sudden Acceleration IO enhancement that does the same turns Tornado into being deadly power Kinetics - weee! Speed Boost your pets! Comes with an area heal, but it's centred around enemies. Insane damage and recharge buffs, but nothing much else to offer like defence, its resistance buff being unconventional and no significant debuff. BUT on a team, especially partnered with other players who buff defence, this becomes Tier 2 as your pets absolutely munch through enemies without taking much damage! Poison - It's better than Traps in the debuff department, but like Storm and Kinetics, it lacks survivability and it's buff and heal are both single target which is very bad for MM henchmen. Radiation Emission - again, this is mainly about debuff, with an area heal. The holds are meh, leave it to the controllers or dominators and AM is overvalued. Thermal Radiation - wow ok where to begin? Healing, single target damage buff, ressurect power, resistance buffs AND enemy debuffs? I just feel Melt Armor should be more potent for an ultimate power. The 2+ second cast times of most of the powers and low +damage for a single target Forge keep this from being up with Electric and Nature. TIER 4 - less than average Pain Domination - back on live this was the villain version of Empathy, so it's very similar with lots of healing. While Anguishing Cry is a decent debuff, its buffs are not as potent as Empathy's. Sonic Resonance - buffs resistance and the hula-hoop of doom is a great resistance debuff, but no healing is unfortunate. Liquefy is disappointing. Skip Sonic Repulsion unless you want aggro from your teammates Force Field - Unless you like to AFK, Cold is just this, but better. 😂 Empathy - prevention is better than cure, and while Fortitude and Adrenaline Boost are incredible buffs they are only single-target. The auras are not great, and there's no debuffs in the set TIER 5 - fun, but sadly not very efficient Trick Arrow - it's all debuffs and no heals. Other sets do debuffing better and have other things to offer Final thoughts: 2 common misconceptions that started in Live: that resistance isn't good for pets because bodyguard mode deals damage before resistances, but this is false (see Supremacy). Defense trumps Resist in that it stops potential debuffs and crowd control, but without resist your henchmen still take massive damage when they do get hit and some enemies even have autohit powers that ignore defense. that -end is useless because enemies with no endurance can still fire off attacks. Absolutely not true for almost all enemies except some AVs, but they will definitely tend to run away across the map if not taunted.

/macroimage is a command, I'm pretty sure me:15 isn't valid. Try /macro_image "Robotics_ConstructProtectorBot" "T2" "powexec_location forward:15 Protector Bot"

Mind you it's perfectly viable to use T2 Primary > Swarm > Unkindness > Hawk, it's a pretty optimal ranged rotation if you want to play Mind, melee rotation will do more damage though.

Dark is more useful in a team and does more damage while Mind is much safer when solo.

Eh, the slotting in your shields kinda makes it necessary to have eclipse and if you're going to depend on eclipse you don't need those shields, so you can turn them off to save tons of endurance. You're pretty overly accurate, like 225% chance to hit +4 bosses with EE, so you probably don't need Tactics either. Defense is honestly whatever for a WS with 85% resistance. FF has a less than 10% chance to proc in that, but it should still be OK. Turn one of those purple enhancements in Gravitic into the Chance for Fire Damage proc (least resisted among them all), you're at 6/5 on 10% global recharge sets. Or FF if you want, much higher chance to proc than Detonation. I'd put End/Rech + Heal/Rech in Stygian Circle because well, you use ~7 end/s with your attack chain and toggles and only have like 3.5 end/s. Reactive Radial is arguably better because -res gets resisted and it's the best DoT of all Interfaces, but either one helps.

I noticed that too, but I don't even know what it's supposed to look like so I ignored it.

Nova Emanation and Ebon Eye are the highest damage attacks the Nova has, so that slotting is kind of wasting it. I'd take the slots out of Bolt because EE will replace it in your chain.

Are you sure it's not working after turning on Orbiting Death once per map? That's the typical bug for IO procs like this, you must use the power once for it to turn on.

That's an excellent menu @qwy, I love it!

They have a limit but it's a large one, I made a "volcano" area entirely of various sizes of Island Rocks. The way they're lit is dictated by the way they're rotated, so you can try to get them lit the way you want by rotating them. Hope this helps.

I have a build for it as well, but I don't think me putting this into words would do it justice, so here's some pretty pictures. To answer your question, Soul Extraction mules exclusively because your henchmen dying is a bad thing and it's not so easy to make specifically the Lich die to get the most out of Soul Extraction. Zombies get most of their damage out of your lvl 6 Enchant Undead so they perform well at low levels, probably better than most other primaries. Grave Knights do like 50% of the damage of the whole set, so once your zombies start decaying in effectiveness, GK steps up. Normally the 30s and up would start to be not so great, but with Insulating Circuit at 35, nothing should die. Energizing will keep you and your team topped up on endurance, but early without enhancements its a long cooldown and not enough to keep you full on end with how much MMs use endurance (Careful not to spam Faraday Cage). Note: Currently Mids doesn't calculate Incarnates for Electrical Affinity at all. MM - NecroElec.mxd

The image is wrong, it needs to be "Teleport_LongRangeTeleport". See more information here.

Definite no on using the remaining converters to convert ATOs. There's far, far too many in the pool for you to ever get the ATO you want. I spent over 300 converters trying to get one that wasn't on the market and it never happened. I tried this several times before deciding RNG is too unforgiving for this to be worth it (probably wasted 100mil in the process).

I see a lot of people still using Pines and well, it's far far behind what HC is. The closest thing you should be using now is: That said, I just wanted to drop my own build that breezes through content and capitalizes on minion procs. It sits at 40% defense to most, just about 45% to melee, and with Time's Juncture and Enforcers, you're way over that. I prefer Leviathan Mastery myself as it's some nice damage for an MM, but Mu works too; In my opinion Power Boost is really wasted on a MM as you don't have a primary to boost. No Temporal Selection because it does nothing supportive besides boost the regen for your henchmen, so you don't have to worry about another thing to click. Just worry about Farsight, Chrono, Hasten, and Mending and the rest will take care of itself. Stuns and Knockbacks are annoying sure, but with all the Defense and -ToHit /Time has, you don't worry about it, because unless your entire henchmen army is stunned, you have nothing to worry about. MM_ThugsTime_NoTempSelec.mxd

Yeah Perf Shift, Panacea, and Miracle should cover you enough. That adds 0.675 end per second for the cost of 1 slot. For the cost of 4 slots, you get less than half of that additionally (about 0.4). You can decide how much those 3 additional slots are worth. As I wrote in Discord: so I figured it out and Ebon Eye should show as 112.24 in Mids in Nova form, and 44.48 in Human Meanwhile, Dark Nova Blast does 96.76.

Mhm, Bonfire is only 6.23 KB so it goes down to 0.62 knockback.

Didn't write it down of course. Anyway, looks like that's how it is in Mids and I'm just thinking here, but putting it to 99% could make low KB numbers turn into 0 knockback if the system rounds under 5 to 0 so 90% might be intentional. iirc the new Knockback system is supposed to fix these problems by just making it turn into knockdown regardless the number.

From an earlier time I made this note for myself: I believe the other KBtoKD works, but my memory isn't worth a damn so don't take my word for it.

I just want to point out that classic Latin hasn't changed in over 1000 years. 😜

But what if you're the sole "defender" in a PUG type party and the party goes on without you after you retreat? Do you: A) summon to keep up your pets or B) do you keep going and try to keep the party alive? You definitely don't have time to type "Wait I need to resummon my pets" and chances are even if you do, they won't wait. This is the situation we as a Defender-alternative have to deal with thanks to our secondary powersets. I understand that it isn't an ideal party, but this is a common situation when your pets decide to chase an enemy they shouldn't have while you're unable to command them because you're using a combination of 2-3 second cast time powers to support your team. If you went with A, then after you waited instead of following the party and successfully resummoned all your pets, now you lack the endurance to save your team and they might have wiped. If you go with B, you can still function as part of the team, just without DPS to support it. Endurance costs are a big problem for MMs and something that should be top priority on fixing.

As a supporting argument to this, the ability to have disposable minions/shield minions and not completely tank your end would greatly benefit secondaries with no real defensive capabilities like /Kin and /Storm. Of course the huge culprits of this problem are long recharge times and the ridiculous endurance costs where summoning minions still cost at max Endurance ED, around 10 endurance per power.

For most of the sets though, T1 Henchmen's combined damage is the most of your DPS, so muling them is a terrible idea. If that was the original devs intention, MMs were doomed to fail at the start.

The waste of slots is large enough that the smallest issue is you're down an entire IO set compared to any other AT. You also lose on stats like, accuracy, damage, endurance, and recharge for your pet powers. You could also use those slots to make an actual damaging attack from Epic or Patron pools (hey look you can do damage). You can even do what you dreamed of, finally putting stats on Gang War 😲. I don't understand the correlation between slots and recharge-intensive pets or bodyguard mode; but bodyguard mode also has big detriments against Attacking first, Supremacy's Line of Sight, AoE damage, and taunting, of which the taunt problem was covered in the first post and recharge-intensive pets aren't exclusive to MMs.

I propose that the +Defense/Resist pet IOs should be removed for MMs and the stats should just be inherent to the henchmen as leveling and having to wait for more pets while you depend on your absolutely worthless MM attacks makes leveling not so easy alone. I will tell anyone that wants to disagree that pet IOs are currently a huge waste of slots they have clearly never played an MM before. And allowing us to be dumping them all into a MM attack is a terrible idea as you are now wasting 5 slots AND a power choice. Having to spend a 6 Slot tax in addition to the other taxes everyone else pays (+defense in resists, +resist in defense, LotG) is just unbalanced. I agree that MM's also definitely need a large boost on the damage of their Primary attack powers as in their current state, you're crippling yourself by taking them (except for Demons AoE knockdown -res whip being an outlier). This in effect turns us not into a Mastermind, but a Primary-less Corruptor with lots of pets and worse Healing, Debuffs, etc.. Pets that currently get much worse in Incarnate content than normal pets. I agree with the changes to the Mastermind Pet proc IOs, but I think we have to pacify everyone else and agree not to change the non-MM pet IOs for sake of every non-MM that uses them even if they don't help most pets much.