The age old question

[Frosty15]

The age old question: How do I keep my pets alive? Im new at masterminds and it seems some secondaries are better than others to keep pets alive. Im thinking /FF or /dark may be the best. Thoughts?

[PeregrineFalcon]

/FF, along with the Leadership pool and the Medicine pool, is very good at keeping MM pets alive.

 

/dark and /sonic are also good, but not as good as /FF.

[Frosty15]

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[DocMidknight]

  A few things to remember that the pet unique IO's go long way in helping your pets resist/defenses numbers as well as running them in defensive or BG state to mitigate some of the damage they take.  Have yet to try FF but I can speak very highly of dark with regards to masterminds.

[Ridiculous Girl]

some secondary synergize really well with certain MM primaries... trick arrow despite not having a heal is really good, i have a ninja/TA and a robots/TA because both sets have their own built in heals. thermal pairs well with demons, since the shields double up with the demon shields, so your pet get close to resistance cap really early.

[evetsleep]

56 minutes ago, Ridiculous Girl said:

some secondary synergize really well with certain MM primaries... trick arrow despite not having a heal is really good, i have a ninja/TA and a robots/TA because both sets have their own built in heals. thermal pairs well with demons, since the shields double up with the demon shields, so your pet get close to resistance cap really early.

 

My favorite part about trick arrow and MM's is that I don't need to re-apply shields to pets I have to resummon.  That gets really old for some tough battles.  It's also nice that TA works really well with fast moving teams.  This means that when I'm playing super aggressive with my thugs/ta I don't get too upset when the arsonist goes off to do arsonist things and pays the ultimate price.  I can just quickly resummon, toss upgrades, and carry on.

 

To the OP, there is some nuance to your question where the answer will greatly depend on the MM primary.  I'm pretty sure I have just about every MM primary/secondary combonat this point and the only one I really had a hard time with was poison.  So it is possible to take different strategies to keep your pets alive depending on what kind of pets you have.

 

BUT importantly not too long ago Homecoming made the pet summons recharge super fast and cost far less than they used to.  This made resummoning not being nearly as painful as it used to be.  I stress out far less when my pets die because of this. You have to keep in mind that your pet's, other than the boss, are lower level than you (generally speaking), so when they get hit, it'll hurt.  I think you should get comfortable with having to resummon every now and then, even if you max out defense.

 

Even with my ninja/force field mm, whose pets have ridiculous defense, will die from time to time.  It happens.