A New MM

[DocMidknight]

  So I'm thinking of rolling a new MM to play, I've remade several of my older toons to play with again but it feels like I'm missing out on new and exciting. So my dilemma is what to play and then I came up with a bots/rad MM just trying to get any incite on this combo as I've only played rad once on a troller and I never really worked a bots MM. So, how does this combo stack up to others?

[Rikmach]

Considering that Bots is considered one of the "Best" mastermind sets, and Radiation Emission is considered one of the "Best" support sets, pretty well, I'd say.

[Justisaur]

Rad is good on other ATs.  I'm not sure it's very good on MMs.  Two of the powers require faceplanted PCs, they don't work on pets.  AM's +rech doesn't affect MM pets (while it works well with Controller's since they're recharge intensive.)   With bots especially, as they'll be knocking back things, or the toggled target itself and scattering so they aren't all covered by the debuffs, then they kill the pets.   Yes illusion pets do that, but they're invulnerable so don't die when things attacking them aren't in the toggle area.

 

Thematically it makes the most sense with Robots, sometimes that's all you need.  I'd recommend /dark as being similar to /rad, but probably working far better with bots (bots/dark is a well known extremely good combo) - you could always color it green.

[kelly Rocket]

That's why you slot your Bots with Sudden Acceleration.

[Justisaur]

You can do that, but Bots are already extremely tight on slots, and one of the lowest damage MM pets, you'll be sacrificing 3 slots for that, which could be used for other things.  It's probably the only way to make the sets work well together though.  Of course /dark has location powers, which also suffer from things being tossed out of them. 

 

FF might be the only secondary that doesn't care if you knock enemies away?

Edited August 30, 2019 by Justisaur

[Planerunner]

It also really depends on what your goals are for the character. I hate saying that, but there's no getting around it. If you just want something that's fun, yes, Bot/Rad will more than do. If you're looking to powergame, you'll want something like good ol' Bot/traps to take on AV/GM's. It can do it all. Then there's some of the more recent builds that have come out, like Thugs/Storm for massive AoE damage. Not that great for AV/GM's, but great for farming +4/x8. And if you're really sadistic you can go for petless, whip only MM's for the challenge.

 

Really, it depends on watcha wanna du. Thankfully, MM is a pretty interesting AT. 

[kelly Rocket]

4 hours ago, Justisaur said:

You can do that, but Bots are already extremely tight on slots, and one of the lowest damage MM pets, you'll be sacrificing 3 slots for that, which could be used for other things.  It's probably the only way to make the sets work well together though.  Of course /dark has location powers, which also suffer from things being tossed out of them. 

 

FF might be the only secondary that doesn't care if you knock enemies away?

FF kind of cares, if the enemies get scattered the bots will end up following, and that can take them out of your Dispersion Bubble which is bad news. Also makes it harder to refresh the click bubbles.

 

Also Bots aren't really low damage once you get the level 32 upgrade. At that point their damage scales to the number of enemies you're fighting, and the Assault Bot's damage with the Burn patches can be absolutely jaw-dropping. Not just in terms of how much you're doing across the whole, but even to each individual target, because the patches stack with each other if you can keep the enemies grouped together.

 

So the Knockback->Knockdown conversion IOs are just kind of required IMO, because you get a bigger damage boost from keeping the enemies gathered tightly than you would from more damage enhancements on the pets.

 

And only Mu Mastery's AoE immob has any -knockback effect, so even when you get your APP/PPP you're probably still going to need the converter IOs.

 

TL;DR: Bots' damage isn't low, it's more that it scaled based on how many enemies you can keep in a tight group. Controlling knockback is crucial for maximizing DPS.