Few MM questions

Im going to roll up a thugs MM and had a few questions. Now Ive played an MM a few times but never really just set out to do it and had some questions I was wondering about.

1. Set bonuses: Do these only apply to the MM? for example if there is a set bonus of +2% damage is that only for the MM?

2. If the above question is true, does this mean that the best course of action is frankenslotting?

3. I want decent survivability with the build for soloing but i want those thugs hitting hard, what would be a good second for that? What would I slot for?

4. Leadership Toggles seem to be a must for Thugs as it adds to the ones stacked from the MM inherant and the Enforcer leadership. Are these abilities worth slotting or should they stay as one slot?

5. What pools are standard for a thugs MM? Tough/Weave? Fitness?

6. Any of the Duel Pistol abilities worth slotting up or taking or should i ignore them completly?

Pretty much what Obscure said.

Most IO bonuses are useless for MM's, so I go with frankenslotting.
Pain Domination especially is insanely powerful in the hands of a Mastermind. Boosting damage, pretty decent healing etc.

And those Leadership-skills are very useful. Especially when you have a lot of secondary skills to take, considering most attack powers aren't that necessary for a MM.
If I remember correctly, I slotted Leadership skills with 3-5 enhances each. Some IO sets you get for those are interesting.

I played in a team of 3 MM's. Thugs/Pain, Mercs/Pain, Robots/Bubbles. All of us had full Leadership. Add to that the area bonuses that Pain gives, and we had our area heal on autofire.
We just ran thru missions with no trouble. Once we had a random player helping us, and he just commented "wow, we're immortal!", when we hit all of our toggles and boosts on

Sure, we were just "totems" for our pets, which is not everybodys cup of tea.
But we had lots of fun. The most fun I've had with CoX in a while.

One IO bonus which can be handy is +Recovery. A few +Recovery bonuses can let you get away without Stamina altogether.

And you can get a lot of +Recovery bonuses with just 2 IOs from sets a lot of the time so you can Frankenslot and still get the +Recovery bonus.

Personally my Thugs/Traps does have 2 of the shooty attacks, Duel Wield and Empty Clips. Mostly to give him something to do. It doesn't add massive amounts to your damage output but he's got all the other powers he wanted, it looks good and it suits his concept so no reason not to really.

All very valid cases put forth so far....

However I have always felt that the secret to good gameplay with a toon is to do the unexpected!!!!!

Thus, I have a Thugs/Trick Arrow mastermind as part of an undercover Longbow concept group I play with the Echelon. In order to make the toon new and refreshing to play I decided that the pets were utterly unnecessary and surplus to requirements.

If this is the road you would like to take also and try and level your MM to level 50 sans pets, then I have some useful tips.

The trick arrow powerset is great when you are a Longbow inspired toon and you get a real kick out of standing on boxes or containers and shouting 'TWANG!' at the top of your lungs everytime you fire an arrow off. It's a great feeling deep down until your girlfriend comes to investigate what the devil you're doing.

Also take all the dual pistols powers because they look awesomely cool. Remember to always jump around alot during combat whilst toting your pistols. Sure it makes no difference to your defensive stats but again it looks very cool. The best thing about this is that you max out all the powers you can take from your primary pool by about level 12!!!! So you can now concentrate on picking up Power Pool powers! Bonus!!!

Thus far I've taken the Concealment pool, and made great use of the 'Grant Invisibility' power. Another fave is to take the Speed pool. Flurry is fabulous and has a minor disorient which will be almost totally useless at higher levels, and just wait till you get to level 20 and you can get whirlwind.

Yes yes yes you now have some fancy cossie change emotes, but why settle for those when you can use a complex keybind to tie cossie changes to the whirlwind power? Wonder Woman eat your heart out!!!!

Leadership pool is a must. Especially Vengeance.... although I've not mastered the art of triggering it on myself after I've died...... still working on that tricky conundrum and I'll let you know when I've figured it out.

Now some people scoff and say 'Pah! A Mastermind without pets, why that's like a Tanker without shields.'

To be honest they're probably right, but the last team I played with could not deny my usefulness in dispensing Grant Invisibility to get past the Scrapyarder mobs at the door. No ordinary MasterMind could have done that!!!

One word of note. PUG's don't really understand the beauty of the petless MM, so you may have to do a smidgen of re-education.

Hope that helps!

*sigh*

As usual, someone will extol the virtues of a petless mastermind. Sadly, some people get confused about the difference between a mastermind and a corrupter. A petless mastermind is barely playable, and cannot complete most of the high end story arcs( which all have EBs) without teaming or resorting to heavy use of temp powers. With damage output worse than a Defender's secondary and buff/debuff abilities that are worse than a corrupters, petless masterminds are very weak and do not bring much to a team.

As has been mentioned before: If you want to play without pets, don't make a mastermind.

If you want a challenge when playing the game, wait until Issue 16 comes out and you can raise the difficulty settings to near insane levels. I'm itching to try soloing 8-man spawns at +4 levels with a few characters I have.


And Nightingale, I respect your opinion on petless masterminds, but the reason why PUGs don't "understand the beauty of the petless MM" is because most players have an appreciation for what each of the ATs are capable of. A mastermind with pets is quite capable of taking down EBs with SOs only. A petless mastermind's best quality is mooching xp from a team, and is best used( until Issue 16 ) to bump up the spawn size.

Grizz

@Knight: I thought about doing a Ninja/Trick MM and taking some of the arrow attacks from the MM set to go along with the Trick arrows just as a concept character (natural mm) but sadly that seems more trouble than its worth even though I can PL him through AE I would feel like Im just dead weight to a team.

As for petless MM Ive seen some /healer type mms that do well in groups without pets but thats mostly for groups. In some cases pets are a hinderence, but most times they are just damn handy to have provided they are not causeing your choosen tank to have to run all over the place trying to catch the mobs.

I think I might go Thugs/Pain. I would like to go with zombies but melee pets seem really suicidal in the AI department.

One combination I've been wanting to try is Thugs/Pain for the damage boosting possibilities. While you don't have a whole lot of team oriented boosts, there are a couple, and a few Res debuffs as well. Overall it should be somewhat better damage than Dark's Tar Patch.

Other possibilities are Trick Arrow, and Poison. Both will keep you very busy, though, and Poison's really more suited for soloing since it's so single target oriented. The advantage of Dark, though, is that your allies are really so well protected they don't need the extra damage.

For the attacks, I really recommend Empty Clips, as it's a great knockback as well as an AoE attack. However, whether you will want to take that and try to make it through the early levels with it, or take that and a single target attack, and respec out later is up to you. I really think the personal attacks shouldn't be ignored prior to the 20s, from around 18-22 all MMs go through a low point in their damage, and those attacks can help. I think too many people look at them only from a post-32 standpoint.

The damage is low, though. (And with Pain having so many dmg buffs that only effect you it's kind of a waste, although the damage could help if you want to be more active) As for petless Masterminds, while I agree it can be fun as a challenge, it's usually better to pick one of the tiers and have "a couple of friends" along with you. Since you have the option of having dual builds now, it's perfectly reasonable for you to try going petless or partially petless if you want to, and have your second build with all three tiers for teaming.