Heal or No Heal?

[OdinAZ]

Do you regularly heal your henchmen? Or is it better to just resummon?

 

  And if you heal, is it targetted or PBAOE?

 

I am new to MM and am looking at secondary.  Thugs/?

[Meknomancer]

11 minutes ago, OdinAZ said:

Do you regularly heal your henchmen? Or is it better to just resummon?

 

  And if you heal, is it targetted or PBAOE?

 

I am new to MM and am looking at secondary.  Thugs/?

 

Don't resummon unless they go splat, nothing will happen.

 

Heal them , yes, if you have a secondary with a heal. Dark/thermal/pain/empathy/time/elec/nature, kin if pets are close enough to target, rad has a puny aoe if pets are close enough to you, traps if you dropped triage beacon and you command pets to stand on it. Poison has a puny single target.

 

Secondary will determine if its targeted or aoe. Or both in some cases. Some secondaries like thermal/pain/empathy have both.

 

Thugs work great with the best secondaries which are: Dark/Cold/Traps/Elec/Time/FF/Nature- but thats just my opinion. Worst mm secondaries Poison/Pain/Empathy. The others are middling. You can make anything work in this game, nothing is truly awful and everyone has different opinions on what is best/worst/most fun/team friendly.

[tidge]

While leveling up, I often make sure I am healing henchmen because they are precious at lower levels.

 

At 50+ I don't go out of my way to heal them. If there is some sort of AoE effect (e.g. Twilight Grasp) that will heal them, or some sort of relatively mindless method (e.g. Maintenance Drone) excellent! Generally I find it better to make them more resistant (or give them better defenses) and to concentrate on debuffing their targets.

[Uun]

I recently did Thugs/Elec. Elec is unique in that all its buffs are chains, and the more you use them the more targets they can hit. In addition to a heal, it also has an absorb buff and a dmg/tohit buff, both on fairly short (30s & 60s) durations. Keeping your henchman buffed and healed can be a full time job. 

[Maelwys]

22 hours ago, OdinAZ said:

Do you regularly heal your henchmen? Or is it better to just resummon?

And if you heal, is it targetted or PBAOE?

I am new to MM and am looking at secondary.  Thugs/?

By all means heal your pets when they're damaged. The trick is to ensure that they only take damage very occasionally (which is where defence-capping comes in) and that they don't get one-shot before you can heal them (which is where resistance buffs come in)

Personally I'd probably go /Time with Thugs. Chrono Shift helps with Gang War uptime; and Power Boost + Radial Clarion + Farsight will get you most of the way to the softcap (~28.4%) by itself - stacked with Enforcer Maneuvers you'll be golden.
 

Edited April 12 by Maelwys

[OdinAZ]

I ended up going Thugs/Nature.  The "not-quite-heals" are interesting.

[TheSpiritFox]

Yes, heal. Like, I have two /traps characters. My bots/traps which in fact comes with the maintenance drone and protector bot heals. I do not always need the heal, in easier content it doesn't matter. 

 

On the other hand, when I go out to solo a GM being able to heal 2/3 to 3/4 of my assault bots health depending on if I press field medic or not can literally save my life because if his big ass goes down, I'm probably next. So yes I vote healing, I tend to either combine primaries and secondaries that go well together, or take something with a heal, or both. Especially any set which both has no real powers to protect the MM himself, and no heal? I know /cold is a great set, but not for my purposes where I wanna go solo +4x8 whenever I want, or solo a GM. Its dogshit for that with all primaries, cold just does not offer enough mitigation to pets and especially to the master to make the kinda MMs I enjoy playing. Sonic is better, but not great. Thermal at least has a self heal in its PBAOE but even so like cold its too vulnerable to crowd control and theres not enough protection on the MM himself for me to actually like those sets. Theyre really strong in teams, maybe even good in 4 star content on teams, but the second you wanna solo something serious you're up shit creek without a paddle, and I dont like that kinda fragility. 

[Force Redux]

Dont skip the healing drone. It's fantastic healing virtually on demand, unlike protector bots. It makes combos like cold and FF very tough. 

[ScarySai]

Since the minion recharge changes I consider them more expendable now than ever.

 

If I can heal them without risk, sure, but I don't try to keep them topped off ever. Just cap their defense and send them out.

[WumpusRat]

Absolutely heal your minions. They're your damage as well as your defense.

At very low levels (1-5) losing your minion isn't a huge deal, you can just summon another one.

Once you get past 6, you have to summon and re-buff them. Which can take some time, depending on the secondary (and even primary) you use.

 

For instance, re-summoning a tier-1 zombie takes 3.3 seconds. Then you have to upgrade it, which uses another 2.2 seconds. That's 5.5 seconds where all you're doing is re-summoning and re-upgrading. And if you're at 26+ level, you'll need to apply the second upgrade as well, which is another 2.2 seconds. 7.7 seconds of getting that one minion back into the fight. And even longer if you have to re-apply bubbles, cold buffs, resist buffs, etc, from your secondary.

Is it better to spend those 7.7 (or possibly 10+) seconds, during which another minion (or more) could die, or spend 2 seconds to use a healing ability?

 

It's almost always better to heal them rather than let them die and re-summon. There are only VERY niche cases where it's better to just let them die.

[Crysis]

Healing in general becomes less valuable/needed as you progress in levels, unless you are purely a solo MM.   If you have an AOE heal, by all means feel free to use it as you and your teammates both benefit from it as needed.  But I’d never take a single target heal just for my henchmen.  They are doing as much damage with 10% health remaining as they do at 100% health.  I’ve read mixed things about whether a henchman at 10% remaining health still takes “equal parts” damage when in bodyguard mode, but I don’t think even that matters that much given a MM’s native END penalty for even using a healing power.  Just resummon as needed.  They are cannon fodder for a reason.

[TheMoncrief]

I don't have any direct healing powers as a Robotics/Traps MM, but I got good mileage from Triage Beacon at lower levels, and found Maintenance Drone to be a complete game changer when I took it.

[Force Redux]

1 hour ago, TheMoncrief said:

I don't have any direct healing powers as a Robotics/Traps MM, but I got good mileage from Triage Beacon at lower levels, and found Maintenance Drone to be a complete game changer when I took it.

 

Yes, indeed, I love Maint. Drone, too. Bots become a lot more hands off, I can focus on other things when breakthrough damage occurs. 

[WumpusRat]

2 hours ago, TheMoncrief said:

I don't have any direct healing powers as a Robotics/Traps MM, but I got good mileage from Triage Beacon at lower levels, and found Maintenance Drone to be a complete game changer when I took it.

The maintenance drone was such a huge improvement. I was able to drop the medicine pool entirely on my /FF, /Traps, and /Sonic Robotics MMs and just let it do the work. Just have to get the recharge down enough that you can summon another one as needed, since it burns its own health bar to heal the other bots.