Hmm... I'm not really experienced with necromancy much, but my experience so far with pain domination has been that it's far from boring. In fact, it's really kept me on my toes. However, if you find that at the upper levels your guys are just not keeping you busy enough, my suggestion is just to up the difficulty. For example, my 46 bots/dark MM runs at lvl -1/x6, and I can do x8 at -1 lvl pretty effectively when my bots aren't pulling 3 groups at a time. I do turn down the difficulty a tad for EB fights, but that's mostly because I've met too many EB's that love to run all over the place, and even then it ends up being overly easy, and thus boring.
So, if your problem with it being too boring is that it's too slow or easy, I'd suggest just turning up the difficulty a few notches.
As for moderate cost builds, I just suggest toying around with Mid's Hero and Villain Designer for a while. I'd give more advice, but I'm fairly new to pain dom and I've never gotten into necromancy much. At this point, I'm not even sure that my usual strategy of taking assault, tactics, and vengeance is a viable one, what with the high end cost of pain domination. What I do know is that ninjas/pain never leaves you with a dull moment lol.
So, my search-fu is fairly weak today for some reason.
I've got a Necro/Pain that's sitting at 50 that I leveled FOREVER ago and never play outside of logging him in to move his day job location and maybe a minimal RP session. I love the character, his story, role playing with him, all of that stuff. The problem? Actually playing him is the most boring experience I've had in game, EVER. He was my third Mastermind taken to 50, so I'm not lacking experience there, but I have to say the entire time I was playing him I was bored out of my skull. I only went through with it because I wanted to have him at 50 because he's the praetorian version of my Emp/Rad Defender, so I needed him there for story reasons.
I think the problem that I've got is that I have it in my head he's a buffer/healer like the Defender he mirrors, but I just can't seem to get my mind out of that niche for the character, even when I work on a respec for him I end up in the same spot.
I really REALLY want to love playing this character as much as I love the character himself, I just can't seem to do it. What I'm looking for is some playstyle advice and maybe a few moderate cost builds to toy with and tweak into something my own. I have somewhere between 750m and 1b or so to spend on a good build once I find one that plays like I think he should.
I have Masterminds of all flavors, a well rounded Bots/Dark, a Thugs/Storm damage machine, and a Bots/FF Tankermind. I'm well aware of the varying playstyles with Masterminds. I'm just at a loss when it comes to this Necro/Pain and were he fits.
Thanks for any advice/info you can provide!