Dark Servant Slotting

I have the same feeling about this statement as defenders do about people telling them blasts are in their secondary for a reason, stop the pew pew and act like a buff bot.

the truth is that Fluffy does heal A LOT. Healing may not be his primary function, but it is that which he is best at. His heals are huge, have a wide radius and they are fairly regular. No, it's not a button you can click, but you can rely on it most of the time. the harder thing is keeping the idiots in range of him.

Yes, once the pet gets down to 10%, you need to step in, but when it's at 50? Don't worry, let fluffy go off while you do your thing elsewhere to reduce incoming damage.

ahahaha, what is this I don't even

Well we would fill the threads will discussions of whether tohit debuff is better than heal, but I would point out some relevant facts: for a spawn to be 40' wide and cover 5025 sq ft, it would have to be 126 ft long. That's a hell of a spawn.

The OP talked about her level 39 Demon Summoning/Dark Miasma and her new Dark Servant. She has a minion capable of an AoE heal itself which will bring the 1st and 2nd tiers up in health with the 3rd going a significant way to 100%. Between the MM spamming twilight grasp and the ember demon that heals more frequently than Dark Servant, Healing on the Dark Servant would be less crucial.

When the battle is melee, often with demon summoning, I chose where MY mastermind will be. So, if I am tankerminding, drawing all the aggro I can with darkest night, fearsome stare, howling twilight and crack the whip, I position my mastermind next to the dark servant to reduce the damage I draw and share through bodyguard with the minions.

Gavin:

I am not clear on what you meant by the buff bot statement. In all the powers except the hold, dark servant does tohit debuffing. I certainly wouldn't want him to stop twilight grasp, but as you say, dark servant doesn't chase down injured allies, he doesn't fire off when I would activate the power necessarily, but I know Chill of the Night is on all the time along with the other powers cast with tohit debuff. On /dark masterminds, I spam twilight grasp in my mastermind's power activation rotation to debuff the hard targets.

Hard to ignore, but you wouldn't need the heal so much if he was doing a better job debuffing tohit.

The heal on the Servant is a bonus. He is best slotted for tohit debuff.

No. It's 25 feet.

Couldn't agree more.

In this post I have my ideal Fluffy slotting depending whether you're going for Damage or Tanking, but that's for level 50 and presuming you have Hasten, which was not the case for the OP.

sorry to say it, but please go to school and study some math.
surface area of a circle is S=pi * R^2
so 40 ^2 = 1600, 1600*3.14 = 5024
further discussion is pointless with a person who didn' learned to count well in the school.
ok, seems the skilldatabase i used as reference was a bit bugged. verified ingame, it is 25 feets.
BUT! it look closer to it, it can only affect 10 targets. 11th mob will do a full DPS, and ALL of them, even dubuffed, still doing the SAME damage per skill amount.
pets WILL be eating spike damage.
again, not true. -hit mean less hits, not weaker hits.
if a mob unleash a foot stomp or something even if you have a brute in team your meele pets WILL get hit. but where a brute can hold it your pets definitely can not. and this hit will be at full strength leaving the pets an "near to die" state (if not killing them with 1 shot).
regardless how much you will slot for debuff this damage spike WILL occur. and what can you do about it? only heal.

again, to emphasize all said:
1) -tohit reduce Damage per Second, but do not reduce Damage per Hit. -tohit only gives you _some_ time to heal back received damage. if you didn't healed your pets back to 100% life they will NOT survive the next hit.
this is 100% true for any tier 1 pets, with exception of may be demons with their around 50% innate resistance. but even with my demons/term toon i have sometimes problems to keep tier 1 alive, regardless their huge total resistance they still get strong spike damage.
and it also 80% true for any tier 2 pet. if you are a zombie/dark like mine toon you will be screwed of nearly all of your pets with one shot. zombies, knights and fluffy himself going in to meele and eating meele nukes. thats 6 pets you will need to heal back once they got hit, which lead us to next problem.
2) to heal you have two options, you own twilight grasp, which sucks like it is, with 10 feet reach you probably heal 2 meele pets or twilight grasp from fluffy, which is wider and most probably will cover your whole group. and last but not least with 2 healslots it heal _MORE_ then your own with 2 healslots. since i don't use sets i can tell correct numbers, its 384 for MM own and 438 for fluffy.
3) MM has enough skills to debuff, what MM can NOT is properly heal because of radius. because he ain't corrupter or defender. devs clearly crippled /dark proliferation.
/dark corrupter or dark/ defender are both healer and debuffer and their fluffy's too.
/dark MM is debuffer with crippled heal and his fluffy is crippled by recharge.
proliferation for MM clearly separated the roles of the player and his fluffy. while fluffy can heal player can not and while player can debuff fluffy need 2 slot for recharge to get perma.

Protip: Surface area is for 3-dimensional objects. A circle has area (πr2). A sphere has surface area. While our combat is in three dimensions, mobs are almost always on the same level, with stuff like fliers being an exception.

Momentarily setting aside the fact that Darkest Night also does damage debuff which will reduce the per-hit damage, reducing a mobs tohit does reduce the DPS they will do, because they will hit less often.

No, regardless of how much you slot for debuff this damage spike CAN occur. The more you slot for tohit debuff the less it WILL occur.

I'd much rather my pets or I get hit far fewer times for full damage, (again, not even strictly accurate because both TG and DN debuff damage), than get hit every time and spend all my time spamming heals like a bad Empath.

Healing is reactive protection, tohit debuffing is proactive. The more and better proactive protection you have, the less reactive protection you need.

Add into this the fact that the Fluffy doesn't know when the best time to heal is and just spams all of his powers as they recharge. Everything he does bar PG does tohit debuff.

Slotting him for heals is like slotting Broadsword and Katana melee attacks for defense debuff. His heal is a bonus, not his primary benefit.

unless you fighting mobs while flying it isn't a sphere we are talking about, its a circle. all other word are plain demagogic.
you just will not read what i wrote, isn't it?
WE TALKING ABOUT -HIT, YOU CANT ENHANCE -DAMAGE, WE DONT TALK ABOUT -DAMAGE.
again pure demagogic discussion.
less hit DOESN'T mean weaker hits.
but IT STILL OCCUR, THATS THE WHOLE POINT, gooood damn it.
again:
WE TALKING ABOUT -HIT, YOU CANT ENHANCE -DAMAGE, WE DON'T TALK ABOUT -DAMAGE.
"the better navigation you have the less mind you need to drive a car."
that's the way you think.
you CAN'T "proactive protect" the whole mob spawn, you CAN'T cap debuff the whole spawn, neither -tohit nor -damage.
that why /dark has fearsome stare, which IS indeed "proactive protection".
so what? its 10 sec recharge for heal while most nukes have at least 15, foot stomp for example 20 sec. fluffy always heal faster then they nuke.
and it looks like you never played with fluffy, he INDEED know when and where his heals are at the best.
no, it is not. primary benefit is heal, which is STRONGER and BETTER then mm himself can have.

oh well, i give up, its impossible to discuss with mindless selfloved demagogues.

My sentiments exactly. I'm done here.

You did say "a typical spawn is up to 40 feets wide". Which makes it sound like 40' is the diameter, not the radius.

-Morgan.

My point exactly, 40 ft wide is a DIAMETER.

Dude, that spawn needs to Jenny Craig.