MM Inf Farming Build

[Kiyro]

I know that a Rad or Spine/Fire brute is the go to for farming, however since playing this I've realized the only thing I'm interested in is Mastermind. I know that it will be slower than brute, but I'm having so much fun with mastermind that I don't mind the extra time. That said, what is a good mastermind build for farming? I would like to be able to do general AE farming or any other general inf farming. The idea with this build would be to fund any alts I want to play.

 

Thanks for any response you can give me!

[TheSpiritFox]

Thugs/time. A farming build needs to be a mixture of high damage and pretty safe with lots of incoming damage. Thugs/time is about the only build I can think of that can potentially manage to handle the incoming damage that fire farms create. It's buffs, debuffs, and heals combine to make a pretty solidly tough set and with bonfire for CC help and incarnates you should be able to farm +3 to +4 at x8 pretty effectively. The entire key is to keep your pets alive and that's difficult to do in a farming situation. As long as the pets are alive you're doing damage, and of all the possible builds you could make for farming I think that one has the best chance of keeping your pets alive without resummoning much. 

[Sovera]

3 hours ago, Kiyro said:

I know that a Rad or Spine/Fire brute is the go to for farming, however since playing this I've realized the only thing I'm interested in is Mastermind. I know that it will be slower than brute, but I'm having so much fun with mastermind that I don't mind the extra time. That said, what is a good mastermind build for farming? I would like to be able to do general AE farming or any other general inf farming. The idea with this build would be to fund any alts I want to play.

 

Thanks for any response you can give me!

Things like a comicon will just eat your pets alive. Doing a regular map with spawns scattered and taken down one at a time will work better since they are closest to regular play.

[Talionis]

I would check out X/Storm.  Storm puts out a lot of damage.  Bots, Thugs or Demons.  There is a thread just a little below this one for Thugs/Storm. 

[Crysis]

I _can_ farm with my min/max Thugs/Storm build.  But at 20-30 mins clear time, I can do 5 of the same map with my Spines/Fire cheap build so....why bother?

 

If you want to farm, build a farmer.  I actually PL’d my Spines/Fire with a Fire/Kin on the Battle Maiden map.  Took all of 8 hours. 

Edited January 26, 2020 by Crysis

[Kiyro]

or I could try something I'm actually interested in. I said I already know it won't be as efficient. I just want to try it. 

Edited January 26, 2020 by Kiyro

[Xandyr]

If I was making an MM for farming, I'd go one with one of the following:

Thugs/cold

Thugs/time

Demon/time

 

 I have a thugs/cold, and your pets' defenses are easily softcapped. Throw down bonfire, sleet,heat loss,  and it's pretty safe,effective,  and easy. I actually farmed BM a bit with mine.

 

Time is just a powerhouse. Heals,buffs,debuffs, and holds. As mentioned,  it would pair nicely with Thugs (stack defense with their defense and the enforcers buffs).

 I also threw demons in as the Prince has some controls, there's a mixture of damage types, T2 pets add resist and heals. Plus you can use HoE as a mule (like fang war) for the Pet Resist/Defense IOs. I had a Demon/Time on Live, and it was very fun and powerful.

 

Either way you go, just have fun and keep us updated!

[TheSpiritFox]

25 minutes ago, Xandyr said:

If I was making an MM for farming, I'd go one with one of the following:

Thugs/cold

Thugs/time

Demon/time

 

 I have a thugs/cold, and your pets' defenses are easily softcapped. Throw down bonfire, sleet,heat loss,  and it's pretty safe,effective,  and easy. I actually farmed BM a bit with mine.

 

Time is just a powerhouse. Heals,buffs,debuffs, and holds. As mentioned,  it would pair nicely with Thugs (stack defense with their defense and the enforcers buffs).

 I also threw demons in as the Prince has some controls, there's a mixture of damage types, T2 pets add resist and heals. Plus you can use HoE as a mule (like fang war) for the Pet Resist/Defense IOs. I had a Demon/Time on Live, and it was very fun and powerful.

 

Either way you go, just have fun and keep us updated!

In a farming with MMs environment cold is going to handicap you quite a bit because it has no healing at all. Your pets are going to take damage, and you have no way to handle that with /cold other than taking aid pool. Thugs/time has space for all the pet uniques and easily softcaps your pets. Demons aren't gonna get you to the defense softcap either. Bots/time could potentially get there but the lack of a pet unique mule like gang war hurts bots pretty badly. Traps is about the only other set you could build to farm as well as /time but it's a tighter build and a riskier playstyle thanks to the healing differences between /time and /traps. The AoE heal really makes the difference in keeping all your pets up. 

[Sovera]

As I said above -what- is being farmed will make the difference. The better maps are the Comic Cons since the map is small and the enemies wander to us, but that's the sort of thing that will simply -eat- the pets. They are uber squishy. A Demon/Thermal might manage better with a build that caps their resistance, but even so...

 

And then there's the fact that MM damage looks good on spreadsheets but not so much in actual gameplay making farming on a Defender nearly as fast but not having to fuss with constant resummoning. If you really want to, then go for it, but consider running TFs in groups instead. My gut, not backed by any math, tells me a Tinpex and double Hami a day (roughly 50 million in merits for an hour's work) is going to work out better.

 

I'm leveling a Bots/Dark atm and will post about it later once I get to 50 today and slot it properly but I can say I would never throw it into a farm map considering how anything looks at them and takes half their HP. If the pets were orbiting satellites I could try to keep them up with a spam of heals, but they scatter, they chase, and doing a Follow command makes -everything- stop as they sprint back to me which is just not conducive to DPS.

[Crysis]

11 hours ago, Kiyro said:

or I could try something I'm actually interested in. I said I already know it won't be as efficient. I just want to try it. 

Ok I get it.

 

You’ll do better on a S/L farm since it’s fairly easy to softcap defenses of your henchman for those two damage types.  And avoid spawns that dish out heavy AOE attacks.

 

You also will do better if you have an outdoor city map with spawns spaces a good distance apart.  And Id highly recommend an AOE immobilize from one of the epic/patron pools if you don’t have one already.  Aggro management is what will keep your T1’s alive longer.  
 

Taking at least one single target attack from your primary and proccing it out for damage is also a good tactic.

 

Really that’s all there is to it.  Choosing what spawns to farm and min/max your build for them and the map you’ll be using is same method used by all farmers.  The big difference is you want to throttle the pace of of incoming aggro whereas many other farmers would want to maximize the amount of aggro they can grab at once.  Your bodyguard mode will keep you mostly safe but you don’t want to resummon  your T1’s every spawn.

[Quindorrian]

On 1/25/2020 at 1:46 AM, TheSpiritFox said:

Thugs/time. A farming build needs to be a mixture of high damage and pretty safe with lots of incoming damage. Thugs/time is about the only build I can think of that can potentially manage to handle the incoming damage that fire farms create. It's buffs, debuffs, and heals combine to make a pretty solidly tough set and with bonfire for CC help and incarnates you should be able to farm +3 to +4 at x8 pretty effectively. The entire key is to keep your pets alive and that's difficult to do in a farming situation. As long as the pets are alive you're doing damage, and of all the possible builds you could make for farming I think that one has the best chance of keeping your pets alive without resummoning much. 

I am currently running fast farms with a Thugs/Poison build that evaporates enemies.  I would post the MIDS build, but I play on Mac and MIDS is goofy right now on Mac.  Poison is very underrated.  I slot with massive procs and debuffs.  You want to open with Weaken to lower the damage.  Otherwise, I hardly ever lose a pet to death and poison has a pet heal, as well.  I am having SO MUCH FUN with this build and just ran 8 people through an S/L farm at +4/8!  Please note that MM farming is more work intensive than Broot farming because you are managing resources instead of just spamming attacks.

 

EDIT: One more thing.  To do this, you will want to slot Field Mastery->Temp Invulnerability to achieve hard-capped S/L resist.  This is what I recommend.  Scorpion Shield gives defense but does not help with S/L resist.  

Edited December 28, 2020 by Quindorrian
Added one more note.

[Unknown Magi]

Bit of a thread rez here sorry, was out for a bit so I'm late to the party.

 

I actually played around with the idea of MM farming a fair bit in early 2020.  Of the various builds I tried, the best I came up with was bots/storm/heat running Comiccon fire farm.  Storm providing AoE defense and fire resist buff synergizes nicely with the IO auras, protbot bubbles, and leadership to get your pets to a very respectable level of survivability, with hurricane as an emergency measure.  Tornado and bonfire with kb-to-kd help keep things stuck in place and cuts down on incoming damage, and dovetail with assbot's burn patches for clumping things up and AoEing them.  Also, Storm is very nice in that it can mule some of the auras for you, which helps take some of the slotting pressure off the bots overall.  Back when I did the testing on this, the total inf/min was able to keep up with posted numbers for mid-range brute farmers, although it was much more hectic to manage; I'm not sure how this might have changed with the AI updates and such, if at all.

 

One interesting thought IMO, masterminds have a unique benefit to farming, if we can find a way to take advantage of it.  One of the biggest limitations for all other farmers is the aggro cap, which puts a ceiling on how many mobs they can keep aggroed and in AoE range at the same time.  Masterminds, on the other hand, are 7 (or more) distinct entities which all have their own aggro cap.  So, assuming you can both survive it and take advantage of it, in a densely populated map like Comiccon you can potentially have a lot more mobs engaged and clumped up at the same time.

[tidge]

On 1/25/2020 at 4:52 AM, Sovera said:

Things like a comicon will just eat your pets alive. Doing a regular map with spawns scattered and taken down one at a time will work better since they are closest to regular play.

HARD DISAGREE follows. Please note that I consider drops to be the farming end-game, since I can collect INF more efficiently using the market. This means I play farms at 0x8. 'Bots are much better at AoE, playing a farm against higher level targets would hurt the return/time ratio.

 

My Robots/Traps MM can farm the S/L Comic-con map with absolutely no problem. I haven't done this in a LONG time, but finishing the 5 missions at 0x8 would take less than 30 minutes. Incarnates are also in play for team resistances, pet buffing, and Lore pets.

 

The core strategy isn't particularly imaginative: Keep the bots together, near the MM and the traps, in aggressive mode. The AoE traps are slotted to debuff enemies.

 

My experience is that while "resisting" the damage types in the farm is important, it is at least as important that the enemies in the farm don't resist you.

 

What I may be doing differently than folks might expect from a MM:

• The Robot henchmen can all be slotted to Knockdown. This keeps the enemies in one spot (getting debuffed) and taking AoE damage.
• The MM himself has multiple attacks (including a couple of AoE) that also do knockdowns and debuffs. These attacks are also used to drawn more enemy groups towards an established 'kill zone'. As @Unknown Magiwrote, the MM can leverage the aggro cap to draw more mobs while the henchmen are occupied.

This requires a particularly active type of play that some folks may not associate with "AFK-farming", but it still gets mapped cleared.

 

From memory: I would occasionally have to resummon robotic henchmen which fell, but most of my farm play with this build was before the Homecoming changes to henchmen AI.  If  the henchmen wandered away from the Triage Beacon, the Protector Bots and the MM's FFG (and Def/Res IO auras on the MM) is what would occasionally lead them to defeat... which is why the AoE debuffs/knockdowns are particularly effective.

 

EDIT: I feel as if I should write something about the 'INF farming' aspect. If you really want to farm for Influence and absolutely don't want to get involved in the market, I would still recommend playing the (level 50) farms at 0x8 but using the P2W to 'turn off' all recipe drops except commons and very rare/PVPs. The level 50 common recipes average 100 KInf each at a vendor, and the very rare/PVP recipes are too valuable to pass up. The drop rates are the same for +0 content as they are for +4 content.

Edited January 8, 2021 by tidge

[Quindorrian]

16 hours ago, tidge said:

HARD DISAGREE follows. Please note that I consider drops to be the farming end-game, since I can collect INF more efficiently using the market. This means I play farms at 0x8. 'Bots are much better at AoE, playing a farm against higher level targets would hurt the return/time ratio.

 

My Robots/Traps MM can farm the S/L Comic-con map with absolutely no problem. I haven't done this in a LONG time, but finishing the 5 missions at 0x8 would take less than 30 minutes. Incarnates are also in play for team resistances, pet buffing, and Lore pets.

 

The core strategy isn't particularly imaginative: Keep the bots together, near the MM and the traps, in aggressive mode. The AoE traps are slotted to debuff enemies.

 

My experience is that while "resisting" the damage types in the farm is important, it is at least as important that the enemies in the farm don't resist you.

 

What I may be doing differently than folks might expect from a MM:

• The Robot henchmen can all be slotted to Knockdown. This keeps the enemies in one spot (getting debuffed) and taking AoE damage.
• The MM himself has multiple attacks (including a couple of AoE) that also do knockdowns and debuffs. These attacks are also used to drawn more enemy groups towards an established 'kill zone'. As @Unknown Magiwrote, the MM can leverage the aggro cap to draw more mobs while the henchmen are occupied.

This requires a particularly active type of play that some folks may not associate with "AFK-farming", but it still gets mapped cleared.

 

From memory: I would occasionally have to resummon robotic henchmen which fell, but most of my farm play with this build was before the Homecoming changes to henchmen AI.  If  the henchmen wandered away from the Triage Beacon, the Protector Bots and the MM's FFG (and Def/Res IO auras on the MM) is what would occasionally lead them to defeat... which is why the AoE debuffs/knockdowns are particularly effective.

 

EDIT: I feel as if I should write something about the 'INF farming' aspect. If you really want to farm for Influence and absolutely don't want to get involved in the market, I would still recommend playing the (level 50) farms at 0x8 but using the P2W to 'turn off' all recipe drops except commons and very rare/PVPs. The level 50 common recipes average 100 KInf each at a vendor, and the very rare/PVP recipes are too valuable to pass up. The drop rates are the same for +0 content as they are for +4 content.

Yeah, Comic-con is a not a problem, itself.  The issue with Masterminds (and this is an issue with all non-tank farmers) is runners.  In all maps, you'll get runners.  Problem with many of the Comic-con maps is the runners will aggro neighboring groups and it starts becoming too much to handle.  For my farming, I run a special outdoor map (Boomtown).  It has fencing and a little more meaty city terrain.  What this does, is it gives runners something to run into.  Fencing and such helps contain them.  If you play on the Everlasting server, please check out my farm map (just type in Crime Boss).  It is about a 30 min clear for my MM and that is with EB's and set to hard at +4/8. 

 

Once again, to reiterate, Comic-con?  Nah.  My pets eat mobs alive.  Especially, if you bunch them up like that.  It's like you are handing me a gift, bwhahahaha.

[tidge]

10 hours ago, Quindorrian said:

Yeah, Comic-con is a not a problem, itself.  The issue with Masterminds (and this is an issue with all non-tank farmers) is runners. 

I did get runners from Comic-con, but not so much that I would consider it a problem. Often it was a single runner. Robotics/Traps has  MANY ways to address runners, including:

• Knockdown, from both Henchmen and clever IO slotting of MM primaries (Photon Grenade, Pulse Rifle Burst) and secondaries (Acid Mortar)
• Epic/Patron pools, including both hard controls (e.g. Immobilize) or soft controls (e.g. Knockdown in powers like Bonfire or Mace Beam Volley)
• Caltrops, a placed AoE slow
• Poison Trap, a placed PBAoE hold
• Seeker Drones (although I don't use these after the lvl 50 respec)
• There is also (my personally detested) mandatory secondary T1 single-target immobilize Web Grenade.

With so many henchman and pseudo-pets applying soft controls (Knockdown, Slows) and hard controls (Holds) I see far few runners than I do with my other AT builds that actually focus on hard controls (Dominator) or a mix of hard and soft controls (Fortunata).

 

 

[TheSpiritFox]

4 hours ago, tidge said:

I did get runners from Comic-con, but not so much that I would consider it a problem. Often it was a single runner. Robotics/Traps has  MANY ways to address runners, including:

• Knockdown, from both Henchmen and clever IO slotting of MM primaries (Photon Grenade, Pulse Rifle Burst) and secondaries (Acid Mortar)
• Epic/Patron pools, including both hard controls (e.g. Immobilize) or soft controls (e.g. Knockdown in powers like Bonfire or Mace Beam Volley)
• Caltrops, a placed AoE slow
• Poison Trap, a placed PBAoE hold
• Seeker Drones (although I don't use these after the lvl 50 respec)
• There is also (my personally detested) mandatory secondary T1 single-target immobilize Web Grenade.

With so many henchman and pseudo-pets applying soft controls (Knockdown, Slows) and hard controls (Holds) I see far few runners than I do with my other AT builds that actually focus on hard controls (Dominator) or a mix of hard and soft controls (Fortunata).

 

 

Bind web grenade to your mouse. Like, mine is bound to shift+lmb. And slotted with 2 +5 immob duration IOs and an acc IO. Its a 40 second long single target immobilize that fires fast and recharges fast. Super spammable, capable of locking down runners pretty easily. Its not an amazing power, but it fires fast enough that you can cast it in between traps and just keep shit where its standing. Adds to micromanagement, but webbing the bosses in place so they can't run can shorten kill times considerably if you don't take mu with bots for the additional -kb.  A significant number of AVs can be immobilized permanently with 2 stacks of web grenade. 

Edited January 9, 2021 by TheSpiritFox

[Unknown Magi]

Personally, when I'm MM farming, I rely on the runners to bring new friends to me so I have to move as little possible. As long as you can increase survivability sufficiently, it ends up speeding up your farm runs.