Tankermind: Thinking Backwards

[JusticeBowler]

h/t Redlynne again

 

So I was going to roll a Mastermind up to play with my wife in a small duo. And I was fiddling with the sets and realized my original thematic pairing of Beast and Nature wasn't going to work because... well, Nature is too good at what it does. With her playing a controller we need DPS so I need Poison (which is all well and good and I'm happy). So with that decision made, I decided to hypothesize about what someone might do with Nature.

 

But it occurs to me that Nature is insanely good at health/regen/aborb and in Defensive mode you share all that pool with your pets. So which set of pets is the best to try to truly Tank-by-healthgen with?

 

It would seem to be whoever has the best total HP, but it might not be that simple since the bots can heal each other. Resistances and such don't matter because for the pets they take this damage directly. It would also matter how much damage the pets themselves are taking from other sources and how the whole lot of you spreads out aggro.

 

Protecting yourself is another matter (outside what you can get from Nature) there's no status protection though with pets around that might not be much of a problem. Combat Jumping, Acrobatics, Weave, Maneuvers ... do add up. Maybe hover to avoid melee damage? I think you'd certainly want Provoke to hold as much of the aggro as you can without it overwhelming you.

 

Thoughts about the storm in my brain?

 

 

[Adeon Hawkwood]

It's probably Robots or Demons for two reasons. First pet defense/resistance do matter for Tankerminds, yes the ideal is to take the damage yourself and split it with bodyguard but Masterminds in general are very vulnerable to AoE damage so having pets with extra defense/resist makes you less likely to suffer a bunch of pet deaths when some mob tosses out an AoE.

 

Secondly both of those sets give you additional defense or resist as well which means that when you do take damage you're taking less so the pets take less.

[Redlynne]

I hear that someone has taken my name in vain again.  Now who would be so-

 

h/t Redlynne again

 

Oh.

Sorry.

 

So I was going to roll a Mastermind up to play with my wife in a small duo. And I was fiddling with the sets and realized my original thematic pairing of Beast and Nature wasn't going to work because... well, Nature is too good at what it does. With her playing a controller we need DPS so I need Poison (which is all well and good and I'm happy). So with that decision made, I decided to hypothesize about what someone might do with Nature.

 

But it occurs to me that Nature is insanely good at health/regen/aborb and in Defensive mode you share all that pool with your pets. So which set of pets is the best to try to truly Tank-by-healthgen with?

 

The biggest thing that will determine your performance is going to be HOW you engage, tactically, and in a broader sense the toolkit of strategies you use to engage.  How you maneuver and position yourself relative to your Foes and your own allies (and Pets) will make a huge difference in the outcomes you can produce.

 

After a cursory examination of */Nature for Masterminds (I'm not steeped in history with the powerset), I'm thinking that Nature is a slightly better "fit" for a Mastermind Primary that wants to be attacking from range rather than melee as a matter of simple positioning.  Which leads me to a really odd choice of primary ... Mercenaries ... slotted with Achilles' Heel for increasing the amount of Resistance debuffing and therefore the damage throughput you're able to inflict from your Pets and team.  That turns you into a force multiplier of Resistance debuffing, and you stack that with the Resistance debuffing available from */Nature.

 

I think you'd certainly want Provoke to hold as much of the aggro as you can without it overwhelming you.

 

Agreed.  If you can heal your Pets en masse, via either Cone or PBAoE or Target AoE, you want to be using Bodyguard to your advantage in which your Pets help your Mastermind "soak" incoming damage and in effect multiply the effectiveness of your healing in a way that favors you ... particularly if you're able to soak the alpha strike (even if there's Mez in it) so your Pets and your spousal overunit Controller ally are free to counterattack with your own debuffing and controls to "ruin the day" of whoever opposes you.

 

 

 

Anyway, that's what I'm thinking might work well for you.

[Nyghtmaire]

Never in my life did I think I would see a recommendation for Mercs in this game.

 

(But it makes sense...)

 

[Redlynne]

 

 

 

Oh and +1 Inf for that gloriously appropriate reply.  *^_^*

[Dixa]

what are you tankerminding?

 

before live went down, the most powerful tankermind I ever saw was a bots/time setup that tanked the av's in the incarnate trials.

 

for general tankerminding it tends to be bots/traps, but honestly ANYTHING with provoke and cc immunity is a tankermind imo. find a way to wrestle your end use issues that nearly all mm secondaries have, grab clarion and provoke in any mm powerset combination and have at it.

[Ringo]

Your main heal, Regrowth, is a ranged facing cone.  Which for me means that I want my pets to be in front of me and that suggests using Melee pets of some sort

[JusticeBowler]

Your main heal, Regrowth, is a ranged facing cone.  Which for me means that I want my pets to be in front of me and that suggests using Melee pets of some sort

 

I think the play here would be to "turn around" which I already do as a tank in most team play because I like to see the team tactically. I can get a lot of information from the audio in smaller teams, but big ones are just audio noise so I have to see what's going on. I also tend to use target_enemy_near on my tanks (for all sorts of reasons) so one usual experience is target_enemy_near... run "through" the group slightly and hit "taunt" which forced your toon to do an about-face faster than you could rotate yourself and more importantly "precisely" backwards.

 

So that's what I'd do with this cone probably. Tag my own pet, run forward through the mobs, click the heal and about-face hard throwing out a cone of heals across the "team" of pets. At least that's how I'm seeing the mechanic work.