No IO budget: Which Pri/Sec combo benefits the most?

Edited for clarity: Fully IO'd out in your opinion which mm combo would scale the most and be the strongest/most effective?

Thanks in advance for your input!

Hey Stratos,

I read your post twice, and I can't seem to find WHAT the MM will be focused on in the game.

^^This is really important.

A PvP MM will be very different from an AV Soloer (to pick two examples).

But tbh, a MM is probably the least reliant on IOs among the ATs. Since your set bonuses don't affect your pets, and thus your damage output, you're really just looking at recharge to get your debuffs/controls up faster and regen/HP or Defense bonuses.

Well as of today, seeing that pets are running into melee regardless of what you do. I would go with a Melee pet set / Traps.

Simply with Traps alone you can get at S / L Defense cap and cycle through Poison Traps, Trip Mines, Caltrops to keep the mobs running and breaking combat. Thus they are hitting you less. Basically they start to run then turn back to attack, start to run and turn back. But they are doing it so slowly that they keep falling into your Trip mine.

Ranged Pets have little or NO melee attack powers, so why go nuts when your ranged pets end up in melee combat. Might as well have pets that will excel in melee.

Ninja or Demon Summoning. I would say Necro but I am just not feeling them. I think someone with more gusto in Necro could give you some good insight on them. I just never heard anything great about them. Just never seen a thread about a Necro / ? soloing an AV.

Storm is nice and all but has a learning curve to it. You just can't go into a group when your with a team and turn on hurricane. Further regardless of how good you are with Storm many teams do not want to hear it. Unless they are having troubles and figured they have not choice but try or quit the team. But Traps really has some nice things in it and Caltrops is that good just 1 slotted and it plays nice with others.

necro is purely fun/roleplay set.
against AV nearly whole team of zombies die in one single blow, 5 pets from 6 are meele and eating some serious damage. tier 1 or tier 2 pet against AV, you've got be be kidding.
ninja suffer the same issue.

i would recommend bot/traps, thug/traps, bot/dark, thug/dark combinations.
if you wanna be a real kickass then bot/storm or thug/storm.
all other primaries or secondaries have several "unhandy issues".

On thing to consider is that the Demon Prince from DS is almost trival to soft cap with FF or Traps (if in the force field generator range). A boss that focuses on melee with AoE's and is soft capped...something to consider.

I have both DS\FF and DS\Traps and so far both are a lot of fun...traps seems to perform better over all though, but with FF the demon prince is VERY hard to hit even outside of the force field bubble due to the targeted shields.