i been going against my own advice and i been hating the archetype

[kelika2]

merc/traps

ninja/traps

beast/traps

ninja/sonic

anything poison

 

fragility of pets if your secondary does not sync with the primary

the constant resummoning and dying of pets before any animation is done animating

autohit enemy powers not being friendly to any

 

pets that can maybe get to 40% defense srtill getting plowed down

pets with super high resists but can still be knocked down with a mild gust of wind and overreliance on pets self healing sometsimes atdoes nota cust it

 

its hard to pretend that masterminds outside of a handful of primary/secondary combos are worth a damn

i dont even nknow how to suggest fixes or patches or anything without treading that fine line of useless ragdolls to unstoppable killing machines on autopilot that masterminds can be

 

you can take two weakass sets like katana and radiationarmor for a scrapper and still come out with a mid-tier character but masterminds have no middle ground.  you are either spending all your time just resummoning like with a necro/cold or you are just billowing through missions with a thug/cold or bot/traps or or or

im going to start stripping some of these characters in a few days.  forcing the bad is starting to have a cascading feeling of hating CoX as a whole and making me think of some other failed characters that i ended up deleting like my energy/psi blaster because slotting for KB2KD caused me to miss out on way too much ranged defense from thunderstrike/artillery or that one time I made a MA/Nin stalker and lived 30ish levels without AoE and just smashing damage

[Maelwys]

On 11/1/2025 at 6:11 AM, kelika2 said:

its hard to pretend that masterminds outside of a handful of primary/secondary combos are worth a damn

TBH the only MM Secondary I consider utterly irredeemable is Poison.
And if MMs got Venomous Gas instead of Noxious Gas then even that might become workable.

Some combos are definitely weaker than others; but I'd play most of them and at worst I'd consider them "poor" rather than "utterly useless".

Beast/ anything is pretty meh and you couldn't pay me to play a Beast/Poison.

Sonic Resonance is a bit iffy on anything other than Bots (because you don't need +Def from your secondary when Protector Bots + Radial Clarion exists) or Thugs (as Enforcer Maneuvers help and the Bruiser is tailor made for the ally-anchored -res debuff)... but I'm pretty sure I could make a Ninja/Sonic work with a bit of effort (although it'd likely need to lean heavily into Incarnates...). 

Traps is great with anything; except perhaps Bots (it's great with SOs; but a decent IO'ed build will typically end up with a lot of superfluous +Def and -Regen).
Mercs/Traps and Ninja/Traps are both perfectly fine IMO.

I've heard people complain that Kinetics is bad on Ranged Primaries; which just plain isn't true.
My Bots/Kin MM is my most effective Kinetics toon by a country mile.

As for the others... Marine is top tier on everything and Time is close behind. Electrical, Dark, Pain and Nature are all very solid. Cold and Thermal are fine too (if rather reliant on Global +Recharge to really shine). FF (Powerboosted with Procbombed Forcebomb) is fine. 
That leaves Radiation Emission, Storm Summoning, Trick Arrow and Empathy. The first three of which probably work best with specific primaries like Bots, Necro and Demons... but IMO they're still perfectly playable on the rest with a bit of care (and full IOed builds with specific Epic/Incarnate power selections)... Empathy though? Empathy is awful... but it's awful on every AT; and at least on Masterminds when you're soloing you can stack enough +recharge to keep a Fortitude up on most of your henchmen simultaneously. Meh.

Necro/Cold, incidentally; wasn't half bad whenever I tried it. The Bubbles plus the Aura IOs plus Maneuvers is about ~32% defense to all. Arctic Fog is another ~6%; for ~38% Total. I found I didn't even need to run Barrier since the pets churn out rather a lot of -ToHit (and between a Panacea proc in Dark Empowerment plus their own Siphons/Lifedrains they reliably self-heal...). Sure; whilst levelling up it got rough a few times, but if I kept a few team +Def insps on hand it was perfectly fine; and at endgame it was a powerhouse.

[Neiska]

Really agree with the points Maelwys made.

 

MMs (and their pets) can be made to be EXTREMELY tanky, but you have to build/plan for them that way. You can't just mix and match any pairing and expect to steamroll. They have the same caps as Tankers - 45% DEF and 90% RES. Now its very difficult to get these values to those levels by yourself with a single character. Some can get close though, if you mix both DEF and RES primary and secondaries. And I have found its easier to boost DEF than RES on pets in most circumstances as well, which is how something like Demons/EA can get fantastically tough, because the T2 pets have resist buffs, that stacks with your Farcage effect, on top of your -dam debuffs to enemies, means that your foes are doing way less damage than they normally do, thats assuming they hit you in the first place.

 

Marine is borderline OP right now, goes with any primary.

Time is also fantastic, especially if you do the trick of taking Power Boost from Mace Mastery. Using Boost and Farsight is a nice chunky 24% DEF before anything else like your Pet uniques and so on.

Electrical is also fantastically durable. Demons/EA is still one of the most durable MMs (or characters) to date.

Cold is solid. FF is as well, but FF is very passive.

 

Traps is good, but takes a bit of recharge to get there, and it does take skill to really play well. Its "plant the flag" kind of play, meaning you make a kill-zone where everything is at a big disadvantage when fighting you. Outside of that area, things are tougher to take out.

 

Poison is pretty much bottom barrel pick, especially for MMs.

 

Never played Sonic, so I have to abstain from that one.

 

Some other tricks are taking things like Group Fly with Robots or Mercs and range things down with an all flying team. But for maps with low ceilings like Cave maps, the many options for immobilize works just as well. You just anchor everything down, and they just simply don't really get to engage.

 

Another thing to consider is that MM pets can "over-aggro." Basically each pet has their own threat table, and can aggro between 8-10 mobs each. With 6 pets, plus the 12 mobs for the MM themselves, you can aggro a LOT of mobs at a time, far more than anyone else. Which is both a good thing, and a bad thing. Its fantastic for MM farming, but for normal play and situations its very easy to "bite off more than you can chew" and get overwhelmed. You can aggro things you don't mean to, even on accident such as runners and patrols. This is why MM control is very important. Very few MMs can be played like a Brute, just going spawn to spawn to spawn without stopping, at least not without a lot of planning and the right setup.

 

But yea, if you are looking for durable/tough pets, you picked some BAD pairings for that. Pretty much the worst ones honestly. 

Edited 11 hours ago by Neiska

[Maelwys]

11 minutes ago, Neiska said:

Never played Sonic, so I have to abstain from that one.

Back on Live I mained a Sonic Defender for yonks, so I'm rather comfortable with its toolset.
(And henchmen are considerably better behaved than those old-school PUGs ever were....)

Its most oft-overlooked big trick these days is Liquefy. It used to be extremely long recharge; but HC quietly tweaked it some years back and you can now get it to a ~45s or less recharge time pretty easily. it lasts for 30s, so that's a decent uptime. Aside from a 25ft-radius "Knockdown" patch; it applies an autohit -21.4% base debuff to both Defense and ToHit (e.g. about -34% ToHit with enhancements) and has a capped (90%) activation rate for damage procs in the first "tick".

Naturally it also boasts hefty +DamageResistance buffs (~42% with slotting - throw in the +35% from MM Aura IOs and that's only 13% shy of the hardcap!) and -DamageResistance debuffs (-22.5% AoE from Disruption Field; plus another -22.5% non-stacking Single target from Sonic Siphon) and it has a 90s "become immune to CC effects" button in Clarity (which to be fair can be annoying to keep up on 6 henchmen if you're not used to oldschool single-target bubbling). The ally-anchored AoE -res debuff ("Disruption Field") very much benefits from you being familiar with GOTO commands on ranged henchmen; but it's cruise-control on melee henchmen.

Sonic Cage is useless. Sonic Repulsion is useless. Certain Primaries will benefit from taking Aid Other. 

It's not a top-tier set; but it's passable. IMO if you've got lots of +Rech and are leveraging Liquefy properly then it's better than Thermal and DEPENDING ON YOUR PRIMARY can be better than Elec Affinity. No -Regen debuffs and poor performance versus incoming Psi-typed damage (outside of Liquefy!) is the real headache IMO.

[Neiska]

Yea, I have looked at it a few times. Mostly when I was toying with a necromancer/sonic Banshee kind of theme. On paper it looked kind of "Meh." Not terrible and had a few tricks but decided wasn't worth the effort. Just wasn't feeling it with that one. 

[Riverdusk]

On 10/31/2025 at 11:11 PM, kelika2 said:

 you are either spending all your time just resummoning like with a necro/cold or you are just billowing through missions with a thug/cold

 

This part I scratched my head at.  I found necro/cold MORE sturdy than thug/cold.   If nothing else everything in necro can heal themselves (including yourself if you take life drain) so they and you are less prone to getting taken out by those auto hit powers mentioned (or very high accuracy mobs).  

 

As mentioned you can get their defenses close to soft cap, plenty of -tohit to quickly fill the gap, fog helps fill in some of their resistance holes (energy and fire), and you can flood the zone with the sheer number of pets (soul extraction is up WAY more often than gang war and you have specters also out there actually taunting even more heat off you and your other pets).

 

Necro/cold was one of the stronger combos I've tried.  Honestly I even liked it better than the classic necro/dark that is so popular (also good though for sure).