Any skippable powers in the Demon Summoning pool?

Since I won't get a chance to play my MM much until this weekend, I'm wondering if anyone wants to give their opinions on powers you can skip without gimping yourself too much.

The problem I am seeing is, all the personal attacks and Hell on Earth are looking very appealing, where generally those equivalent powers are easily skippable with other MMs. So unless you go with a light secondary like Force Fields, you will have to make some potentially painful tradeoffs.

Is Hell on Earth as nice as it appears to be? Also, if you were to use only one of the three personal attacks, which one would it be?

I think it really depends on your secondary. If you have something that's slower-paced (like traps, for example), then the whip powers will be especially appealing since they'll give you something else to do.

Otherwise, have you considered dual builds? One with attacks and HoE, the other without the attacks (maybe keep HoE, not sure) to free up some power spaces?

I wouldn't take all of the personal attacks - you will easily burn youself out of end and slots trying to make 3 attacks effective PLUS your pets and your secondary. Personally I suggest taking corruption for the resistance debuff since it has the best range and if you want another attack take the cone - it does great damage and will apply an AE debuff. The second attack, lash, is nice but it is very short range (20' vs 80' for the first attack) and the recharge is longer than the debuff duration so you won't even be able to keep up the debuff without some recharge slotting.

I would put hell on earth off a bit later - its a nice power, just like gang war and soul extraction, but has a long enough recharge that you won't have it up much without some good recharge slotting, which means waiting until you get SO's at least. So far most of the builds I have looked at for varous secondaries (storm, dark, pain and poison) can easily fit in corruption and hell on earth - Crack whip is a tougher fit and I personally would only take it with a secondary that doesn't have much resistance debuff. So if you are force field or poison it would make a good choice and it would probably be worth fitting earlier on at least for a pain or thermal, since they don't get any debuffs until the 30's.

well on test i went to lvl 25 ,lvl 10 on live, have a DS/Therm MM skipped the whips for the buffs,even so i have to have at least 2 end reducers in my heals and such til dos then can go down to 1 so at 22,but i play the quarterback type MM and buffer

The whip attacks are the only powers in DS that I'd call 'skippable'. However, unlike the attacks in other MM primaries, I wouldn't skip the whips out of hand; they're actually useful.

I'm keeping all 3 attacks for now on my Demon/Dark MM, makes me feel fancy ;p

I think in higher level play the attacks can be skipped tho they're hella cool. I mean, they do Defender's ice bolt / ice blast / frost breath damage (not exact, but similar, and that's without counting defender dmg boost when solo) and Lash has only a 20' range. They do -9% resist tho, less than a Blaster sonic attack (usualy -12% res iirc because Mids is bugged for blasters and trollers and shows 20% -res which is the defender number) and their end costs are HIGH.

I think in my DS/Pain I'll build eventually (got one to 20 on test with all three attacks, wasn't impressed except for the looks) I'll just get provoke and slot it with 4 perfect zingers and 2 mockings for reasonable accuracy and good recharge and taunt duration, plus 5% global rech from p. zingers and +maxend from 2 mockings. The attacks weren't enough for me to reliably steal aggro from my pets so they kept dying instead of losing a few hp when the aggro was on me on BG mode.