Demon/Nature (first MM)

[Fermi]

Ok, after a while I've decided to create my first MM and brave Praetoria.

 

Bio (backstory) ready, costume concept in my mind (still need to check if it's viable), time to choose powerset: Demon/Nature seems to fit the idea -- it's a villain to two of my alts.

 

Already got the binds and macros (I hope I can manage all that), and I'm about to launch the game, but first...

 

What a first timer MM should know? What traps should I avoid? What are the best practices? Some knowledge take for granted that I should be aware of?

 

EDIT: Another thing -- binding DIVIDE, MULTIPLY, SUBTRACT or ADD simply does nothing. The key is pressed, but it's not working (I know the key is pressed because I tried to bind DIVIDE to +forward on the Options>keybiding menu and it appeared there as "Numpad /", but even then it didn't work to walk forward.

Edited October 14, 2020 by Fermmoylle
Keybind issues

[TheSpiritFox]

Alright cool. 

 

First, I'm not sure what binds you are using. I'm going to share mine because they are suuuuper practical. 

 

The very first thing I do on a new character is expand my hotbar up to 3 bars 1, 2, and 3 at the top. Then I go into binds. I bind the middle hotbar (2) to 1-0. Damage skills go up front for 1-5 generally, big buffs past that. 

 

The bottom row (1) I assign q, e, ,r, f, mouse thumb 1, x, mouse thumb 2. 

 

Then on a new MM, I make the following macros. 

 

/Macro ATK "petcom_all aggressive$$petcom_all goto"

/Macro DEF "Petcom_all defensive$$petcom_all goto"

/Macro GRD "petcom_all defensive$$petcom_all follow"

/bind mbutton "petcom_all attack"

/bind shift+mbutton "petcom_all stay"

 

These macros are genuinely all you need in order to work pets through 99.9% of content unless you want to get fancy. I think the numpad MM controls are terrible. You have to train muscle memory to use them effectively and you will almost never need that split second control of specific minions. Every single MM I have uses these macros and only these macros for pet control and it works well. 

 

I put the three macros on q, e, and r or the first three slots of tray 1. 

 

Now, why is this literally all you need?

 

Because Homecoming modified pet AI and made it fucking awesome that's why. 

 

The goto command creates a location pin. Pets go to that location specified and attempt to stay within like 30 feet of the location indicated. This is generally superior to follow in that it leashes pets to a certain distance from a certain point. Pets will stay within 30 feet or so of the location in whatever stance (aggressive, defensive, passive) you set them in and act accordingly. 

 

This means that pets in goto aggressive will stay right in an area and not aggro other groups like they used to and you can just let them chew things down. 

 

This means that pets in goto defensive puts you in bodyguard mode if you are in supremacy range. Not only will you get bodyguard and split damage with your pets, but goto keeps them in range to continue splitting damage rather than allowing them to run off and aggro things, get killed away from you, or reduce the split for bodyguard damage reduction. 

 

You can use these as often as you want. There is no cooldown on pet commands. I mostly defensive goto my pets across a level, hitting R for follow when I move from group to group so that they don't stay because pets WILL stay at a goto spot until you get far enough away for them to TP to you. Aggressive goto means that if you're in a group and not getting attacked, thus your pets are standing there in the carnage doing nothing, a single button press and click and they start attacking anything around them until its all dead. 

 

The middle mouse bind allows you to specifically target enemies. Lets say you start on a group, aggro gets taken by the pets or someone else and nothing is attacking you. Well, bosses are the things to chew down and you can totally use the middle mouse to target a boss with all your pets and let smaller stuff die to AOE or die after the boss is down. 

 

The second bind, shift+middle mouse, is for damage patches. Some enemies drop damage patches on the ground like caltrops that your pets AI will attempt to run out of. The pet AI for fleeing damage patches is shit. They will often run as far away as they can before returning, all your pets suddenly sprinting 80 feet away can get you killed. Stay makes your pets fully stay. They will stand there and die no matter what is happening. Which as a /nature who can heal a group of pets through most sources of damage, that's EXACTLY what you want. 

 

Now, some basics about a demons/nature mm?

 

1) Take hell on earth and slot it with at least 3 pet uniques. There are 6 pet IO sets which each have a unique that adds defense in some way. 3 of them add a total of 35% resistance to all damage and a regen aura to all pets. The other 3 increase ranged and melee defense by 10% and AOE damage by 20%. You can fit the rest in your pets or slot 4 uniques in Hell on Earth and 2 recharge IOs or something. 

 

2) Take no more than 1 personal attack generally. Demons have the best and the personal attacks are still overall garbage and a waste of endurance, but they do help kill things moderately faster.  I do not take the primary attacks on any MM, other people do, personal preference there but I highly recommend you at least do not take more than 2 of them, you'll have enough to do with your support powers without trying to give yourself a damage chain that is effective. 

 

3) Demons/nature is a pet tanking set. Your goal is to have the pets taking the majority of the hits so you can buff and heal them through it. You have zero mez protection. Like, none. And you have not one, not two, but three active toggles in your set which can be shut off by mez. You've got your debuff that does -damage and -tohit, you've got your location buff that puts a patch on the ground that heals automatically if something is inside it that's friendly, and at the top end you've got your hold aura. All offensive toggles that get shut off by mez. 

 

In order to avoid this, my demons nature playstyle is basically this. You start casting your heal patch and sending the pets in, the heal patch doesn't aggro enemies. Then you cast your debuff on a boss, the pets should be getting aggro and a debuff shouldn't get you much attention, then drop a heal to keep them recovering through the alpha, then I walk in myself with my hold aura and shut the spawn all the way down basically and go from there. 

 

It works really well and I almost never lose pets. My Demons/nature has soloed the ITF at +1. Took about 90 minutes to do it. 

 

Demons and nature combined can hit really solid resist numbers. I stack maneuvers on top of the pet auras for just a little more defense and end up with pets with very high resists overall and moderately decent defenses, and with absorb and nature heals it is genuinely difficult to kill this character in most content so long as you do not get mezzed such that you start losing individual pets when the heals stop. Mez is the thing that will kill you 90% of the time

 

So the end point of 3 is take super speed as your first travel power, slot it with the celerity stealth IO, and start reducing the aggro and attention  you can get very early by just making yourself invisible. Enemies will absolutely not see you but see your pets and attack them instead of you, which is exactly what you want. 

 

4) Slot your endurance stuff as early as possible. As in, by the time you hit 17 you should at least have 2 slots in health and 2 in stamina for numina, miracle, and performance shifter procs and a performance shifter end mod. You have enough early toggles and such that you will want it. 

 

5) Your main early heal in nature is a cone. 90 degree angle 45 feet long. That's already a large area, but you can make it huger. I put 4 heal enhancements and 2 range in mine, from 45 to 67 feet. As the cone is 90 degrees, this about doubles the size of your heal area. It is absolutely worth it to put some range in your heal and allow you to just dump healing on an entire group even when they're scattered about, helps with positioning alot when you can just skirt around the edge of a battle and deluge those in melee with healing from safety. 

 

Demons/nature is a top performing mastermind set. I would go so far as to say that it is the tankiest of the debuff heavy secondaries, the only secondary that is even more tanky than demons/nature is demons/elect and demons/elec sacrifices alot of buff, debuff, and healing compared to nature to get it's ridiculous absorb power and better resistance buff than /nature has. 

 

Build some recharge into the build. Ideally you want your three primary nature buffs the resistance, the absorb, and the endurance/damage buff permanent. Resistance is easy af to get, absorb takes some serious recharge slotting, the last buff that gives you an end discount and damage is legit difficult to perma, mine is about 6 seconds shy of it myself. Nature also does not have a whole lot of spots for purple sets, no defensive powers for LOTG, etc so building it towards recharge is a bit of a challenge, but worth it. I put zero IO focus on developing my personal defenses. I built pretty much exclusively for recharge on mine and took whatever I got along the way towards building for it. 

 

When it comes to actually fully kitting out a build, ask again, people got suggestions for how to fully slot a demons/nature. 

 

Final tip: Epic and patron pools

 

People might well disagree with me on this, but I am of the opinion that for demons/nature specifically there is exactly one ideal epic pool and that's heat mastery for bonfire.  You don't need a shield, your goal is to not get attacked and to not be out of bodyguard if you do, otherwise you're probably dead shield or not. Building for personal defenses to tankermind gimps the fuck out of nature, so you don't want that either, nature needs all the recharge it can get. Power boost will boost your survival alot less than bonfire with sudden acceleration will. You can take attacks if you want, char procced out works as well as most in the MM pools. You don't really need an immobilize. Etc etc. 

 

Seriously, try bonfire. Even with its default slot and a sudden acceleration, drop it on the floor and more than half the mob group stops attacking. With it procced out it does a solid bit of aoe damage over time to anything that stays in it. Power boosting your resistance buff would not get you a tenth of the extra survivability that bonfire does. 

 

 

Edited October 14, 2020 by TheSpiritFox

[Fermi]

Wow, that's a very comprehensive answer! Thanks a lot!

 

I'll consider all tips here, except for one: for RP reasons, I'll take Mystic Flight instead Super Speed. I believe I'm gimping myself, but RP is RP.

 

So far, I'm level 3, so I'm still learning the ropes, and controlling a single pet is not that difficult. Let's see what the fates have to say about this.

[TheSpiritFox]

5 minutes ago, Fermmoylle said:

Wow, that's a very comprehensive answer! Thanks a lot!

 

I'll consider all tips here, except for one: for RP reasons, I'll take Mystic Flight instead Super Speed. I believe I'm gimping myself, but RP is RP.

 

So far, I'm level 3, so I'm still learning the ropes, and controlling a single pet is not that difficult. Let's see what the fates have to say about this.

My demons/nature actually took flight, hover, and afterburner to mule LOTGs and the universal travel knockback IO. Nature benefits from flight as you can re angle your heal and sometimes healing the entire team is easiest looking down  not to the side lol. You can fit both if you want, and if you don't want to take super speed then putting the celerity stealth IO in sprint and leaving sprint on will do half the job for none of the power choices while you fly around. 

 

I built my demons nature to fly around with super speed on lmao but you can do it however you like. 

[Force Redux]

That's a great breakdown @TheSpiritFox! 

[Fermi]

After months, I've finally focused on this build, following most of the suggestions here. As I've mentioned earlier, the choice of Mystic Flight was more due to RP purposes, but I believe that didn't hurt me so much.

 

Here's the current build, open to critique. Please tell me what I could improve here.

 

http://www.cohplanner.com/mids/download.php?uc=1622&c=745&a=1490&f=HEX&dc=78DA6594C94F137114C77FD3C5DAD2D242C1B2B4D096D5A19456C1E522413635D4A02CEA89D4328549684BDA92C8D1A34B628289C61895AB178F4ABCBAFF0B7AF3242A6A22B81C487DCCFBDA99A493B49F37EFF796EFEFCD6F267165C4F964FCEAA0903CC34BC942612E912C14957C46CDCE5B13C905356516425427D44231AF140AC1A1CC65256F2357488F9B9B5AC96472D9E88842FFB851B30BAD8688932BE974F46CB2B89257E686D26935AB1657857332975B8A4EE5F22925BFEAE09B654599776BE684929C57F2854575D9A5DD8FA90B8B452AEB1F5D56535143ED4432A540F56A03298BD3EF9E47E02A59C54BDA42DC264CAFC0D74CCB1BF02D73DF3BE6FBB672AE103D7B05EDE203F924D4933E217E93B9FF0BF895E99039E73FAF51AE59E25CB38F8C804D5407C00149CBF11CE25C4F1FB3F62FF33EEDC30A2D5668B9DD21848DEB09DB2EE75FA71E768E33DB9F9AB8C63366DD06F89CF9806A56612F55D316CD7760069C65365C002F329B2E31C3F4E85DDC5B72414F13788334B851D78D19F93123FF67660B66D58259B56C311F92A61AE4D66C12BA6C2238CC7A833B82F9D1A4CD2CB4CDFE10FADEA4BE5EE47ACFF13C42E7996D53E03438C36C9F65D6D07EEA793FE6FA7AACFD644DED757CDFE961AED1DC7DDCC7E28BB086CE5E30CAEC8A8171E623DA5723B4358E606D9479700C1C074F31E5D34C2F696BC6736E7ECC3E897C019C8740892EB14E1D5AE1690DF144CC1415E64C53789B7723EF807F98B7686A1DC8EBC0242D94D78D6974631A114C21822944BCCC0D2AD38353DD83D8DE6AD0015631FB5CA09B79871A4731C928F4F5415FFC17F81B84DE5AD216C33462D8A7DF627853B569C8159E5885275EE1395CE1E9AFF04C547812BAA73469297F1F84146475767A3266AC6F39681DEAA55E5EFFAEFB24E9047F0F9C6724EDEC7F33C67773FC0F63FC5D3E0FCE3566BFAC6B1930D8470CF651B9FCDE978E19ECE372F98C9606E9458A738F52639D6E8FF9747BB75DB7D7BDFCBDDDB35F8475FF3F54AB0FA5