How can I play more effectively?

I've got a 50 (Bots/Dark MM), a 42 (Dark/Dark Brute) and a number of characters in the 20s and teens (mainly villains, but now that GR is out I've got a KM/WP Scrapper in the 30s).

I have fun (for a while, then I get bored and unsub for a while - this is my third time around), so I'm not _unsuccessful_, but I'm not really finding challenges that I overcome - it's either pretty easy or too hard.

With the new difficulties, I find my Bots/Dark plays at +0/x2 - I tried x3 and did fine until big groups mezzed me into nothingness. (Carnies, with the pets and multiple mezzing bosses particularly got me, but not them alone). My Dark/Dark Brute likewise plays +0/x2 - I tried bigger and found my HP bar dropped before I could do anything.

I play largely solo (teams are chaos for me) and haven't yet tried the Incarnate stuff - I'm trying to buff ME, not my character. Likewise I'm using basic IOs and no real set bonuses aside from franken-slotting. I play very little - maybe a few hours a week. I'm sure the long breaks mean that I don't really learn what does/doesn't work so well.

When I get in a fight I am largely scrambling to target the right person and fire off my powers. Usually I end up not getting an Inspiration off because I queued up a power before it triggered, or I end up popping 2-3 when I only needed one because I'm frantically pounding buttons. In big fights I'm at a loss as to what is happening - everything is flashing and booming and trying to move usually doesn't work too well.

I'm thinking my graphics may not be up to snuff - I'm already running at "performance" settings and my Fps is around 15-20 outside of combat, probably dropping at lot in combat. I don't play enough to justify buying hardware to change that though.

So - What should I be doing in a fight with many opponents? Aside from finding an attack chain that will put out constant DPS and buffs/debuffs without tanking my health/end, and making sure to use Inspirations at a reasonable rate, what should I be doing to be more effective.

(Again, this is ME, versus a specific toon, so don't get hung up on powersets or character stats. What are the things you see newbies do/not do that you know better than to do/not do but that aren't on-their-face stupid? I'm probably not doing/doing those and want someone to point it out.)

To start on the sometimes to easy sometimes to hard I would say that is generally true for every character.

Know what your character does (under the powers menu click "Combat Attributes" turn off the sources by right clicking and then look at the numbers (concentrate on defenses/resistances/protections but look at them all) and compare between characters.

Know your enemies by looking them up on a wiki or by play. If you have a weakness to a primary attack of an enemy you will not do well against them and will need to avoid them or run at lower difficulty when fighting them.

If you are truly having graphics problems the MM is probably not the best toon to play due to all the pets running around and attacking. Try something else where it is just you vs the enemies (tank, scrapper, brute, stalker for melee)

Depending on how you play the MM put all/some of your pets in defense/follow and they become bodyguards that will take some of the damage done to you to help keep you alive.

Targeting in combat is usually not a problem. Use the tab key prior to combat to select the most dangerous target for attack or to mezz then just use your attacks which auto target the closest enemy for targeting in battle. If you need a specific target use mouse or tab.

For inspirations I found using chains a good idea. Fill each slot with one of each type of inspiration you need in emergency (heal-green, resistance-orange, defense - purple, another heal or accuracy-yellow, etc) then you can just pound the appropriate key to eat the entire chain without worrying about wasting unneeded inspirations.

If you look at the master mind forum section there are very useful key binds there to turn your numeric keypad into a handy orders giver. Make sure you check that out it made playing my master mind much better.

Looking at your character list I would say your Kinetic Melee/WillPower toon will be your easiest character to play. WillPower coupled with inherent fitness now should have no problems with endurance or healing. Take Fast Healing, Rise to the challenge, and Quick Recovery as soon as they are available and you should be fine.

Your Dark/Dark Brute is potentially the most powerful character you have but Dark Armor is tricky. It is an endurance hog and has no knock-back protection but with some invention origin slotting and some sets you can get him running and still not spend to much money on him doing it. Collect villain merits (assuming he is one) to buy the sets you need (two knock-back protection recipies should be at the top of the list). Also need to take care of the endurance problems by slotting stamina take energy mastery epic (should be available to even villains now). Make sure you take Dark Regeneration when available and slot the Theft of Essence chance for endurance recovery in it, that is the best self heal power in the game and makes dark armor shine.

Master minds are tricky toons to play. They can be super easy or almost impossible depending on the enemy. AOE attacks from enemies chew your pets to little bits fast so watch out for enemies that have them and try to mitigate it or just lower the difficult for those missions. As I stated in my other post get the key binds they make them much easier to manage.

For all your toons read the appropriate forum for that arch type to get ideas for how to design and play your toon.

I would never, ever, use alignment merits to buy KB protection. You can get a defense sets -KB recipe for one or two million if you're a little patient, put it in combat jumping, and you're golden.

I haven't tried bots/dark, I play bots/traps which works pretty well.

Biggest thing is: Yeah, some enemies will be easier or tougher. Learn the enemy groups. Also, look into teaming. One of the best things I've done is get into a couple of circles-of-friends that provide me with a handful of options for joining a team and Doing Stuff. This is nearly always fun. Turns out not to matter a whole lot what specifically I'm doing; any group of people that aren't jerks will be fun to play with, whether we're steamrolling or having a really hard time of it.

I don't have a lot of "playstyle" advice in this post. There are a couple things that might help, though.

Zeroth: I am somewhat surprised by your performance. I suspect there's a problem with your build[s] because even if you are bad at the mechanics, +0/x2 on any Brute should not be a problem. I trust we can do better.

First: Dark Everything is notoriously hard on video cards. Check your particle count- see if you get better results cutting it way down [5,000 maybe?] If you're playing in a maze of darkness AND at a ridiculously low framerate, it's going to be extra-hard to do anything clever. You might be a person who gets overwhelmed by the sensory input, but I think a lot of your problem is that your computer's not GIVING you any useful sensory input. Slideshow, dead, "what happened?"

Second: I'm going to give suggestions on the Dark/Dark brute. I know a few things about Dark Armor [and almost nothing about Masterminds or Dark Melee]. So I'm not saying the brute is better, I'm saying I know Dark Armor. You do, as mentioned, need KB protection or you'll spend 2/3 of every fight on your keester, unable to do anything useful. Most of everything falls into the "one KB protection is fine" category. Two would be better, but it's like "95% vs. 99%" better. Yeah, you'll get knocked back 1/5 as often with two, but even with one you'll have a huge, huge advantage over zero. Your basic layers of protection on a Dark Armor, outside in, are "aoe mez", followed by "resistance", followed by "The best heal in the game."

In order:

Aoe Mez. I used two toggles- Oppressive Gloom and Death Shroud- and decided that the fear was worthless. Other people have said "pick two". I don't know if I'm right and they're wrong. But Opp. Gloom made a huge difference in the number of people attacking me and how hard they hit. So that's your AOE mez, every two seconds, with an AOE attack on top. (Death Shroud doesn't LOOK like it's doing a lot but over time it's about like having a regular AOE attack on auto, going off every ten seconds, on top of everything else.) Death Shroud need six slots and clever invention use- you want 95% damage, 80-95% end reduction and some accuracy, or it will drain your blue bar dry.

Resistance. Pretty simple. Three resist SO's and one end SO or the equivalent. If you're short on slots you probably don't need a lot of psi resistance, so Oppressive Gloom can get away with the basic slot for endred.

Heal- Dark Regeneration: Another complete, total, utter end hog that does nothing for you except bring you back to full health. No matter where you started. If there are four-five people around you, and you only need to hit three at most to heal yourself up from 1 HP to 100% health, you barely even need accuracy [well, not as much as you need end reduction.] I don't know if you even need Siphon Life, really, but I'll leave that to the dark melee experts.

I'd suggest investing in a single set (crushing impact or something) that gives you a +Accuracy bonus, because it's nice to have a little more free accuracy.

Tactics are: run in and hit bosses and lieutenants. Your health will drop alarmingly in the first two seconds, then much more slowly, so you can hit the heal. There shouldn't be that much more to it.

If it's just your graphics card that needs updating and the rest of your rig is up to snuff, you can probably get a graphics card that will handle CoX for a hundred bucks or less these days. It won't be super fast and fancy, but it'll get the job done. I got one for $150 two years ago and I run with shadows turned on and rarely have graphics lag.

However, as others have mentioned, dark armor causes ridiculous amounts of graphics lag. It was so bad that I made some binds to turn off the display of effects when playing my dark/dark scrapper. There's a slash command for toggling the personal effects distance -- check out the Paragon Wiki for details.

I had much the same problems you did when I first started playing the game. There was so much going on it was hard to decide what to do, and I'd get killed due to indecision. After a while you learn what to do and you can survive just about anything if you see that bad stuff coming and take preemptive action -- which often involves using inspirations before you're dying.

My first suggestion is to set up a bunch of key binds that are consistent for all your characters. Put all time critical actions on keys that you can press. Don't use the mouse to click powers in combat -- you'll lose the cursor and will be unable to respond in time.

I keep one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse at all times. I can find all attacks, healing powers, buffs, etc., without having to take my eyes off the action. I use the mouse look functionality to constantly look around me so that I'm not surprised. Being aware of everything going around you is extremely important.

When in combat, don't rush. Because most powers have 1-3 second activation times, you really have a lot of time to figure out what you should do next. Some people have an attack chain that they grind through relentlessly, but I watch what's happening and often use an attack or power for a specific purpose rather following the sequence of the cast-in-concrete attack chain.

This is especially important when you're playing defenders, masterminds, controllers, etc. You have to see and react to conditions to protect team mates, not just pound on enemies in the same relentless sequence to maximize DPS.

I put my healing inspirations in the first and second columns so that I can quickly press F1 or F2 when I start taking damage. Being able to do this quickly will save your life over and over.

Finally, don't be afraid to use inspirations. You'll get them back quickly, especially if you're soloing at difficulties of x4 and above. If your brute is squishy, use a purple before you charge in. You'll likely get another to replace it quickly.

Manage your inspirations to make sure that you have the ones you need for that character. Everyone needs greens. Squishies need break frees (I always keep 3-4 on hand after level 20 or so). Everyone needs purples, especially squishies that are attacking bosses and EBs. I rarely use other kinds, converting them to greens and purples when I run low on those, but if you have a robust tanker or brute you may be able to use reds instead. You only occasionally need yellows, and oranges just don't make enough of a difference to help most characters.

Over time you'll learn what enemies cause you problems and solutions to those problems. Generally the answer is to eliminate the problematic enemy first. For example, Tsoo sorcerers can be a total nightmare. Solution: whack or mez them right off the bat. Or: Lost Anathemas will hold your squishies. Solution: carry 3-4 break frees when fighing Lost and use one the instant you get held.

I use this:


$25 in store or cheaper if you look for deals. All buttons are programmable so you can attach them to whatever you want. Thumb sticks used for moving and turning - clicking them activates my sprint and travel power. 1-4 buttons on right used for primary attacks. Directional pad (up, down, right, left) used for 4 secondary attacks. Unseen are the 4 front buttons (2 left and right) that I use for target, jump, follow, and one is the F1 inspiration tray for heals. The little buttons in the middle near the logitech logo are used for less used powers.

Makes the game fairly easy to play as I only occasionally need to use the mouse or keyboard.

Can be used for almost any game you play not just COH.

With your Mastermind I would suggest a tankermind build setup. If done right it can become quite a monster at soloing large groups of mobs, AVs and GMs (Nemesis and Malta are a bit of a handful for pets with their nasty AoEs, but are doable).

There are a few tankermind builds in the MM forums that you might find helpful

First of all, I would suggest biting the bullet and upgrading your hardware. Yes, it's expensive to do that for just a single game that you don't play that much. But you don't have to go full out, you can probably find a relatively cheap (maybe even used) graphics card that is stronger than what you have. In the end, it will make it easier to play, and probably improve your other programs on the computer as well.

Alternatively, pick yourself up a good laptop. They can go pretty cheap these days, and usually come with strong enough hardware to play this game at the Performance level without lag.

Also, you're having trouble with your graphics keeping up, and selecting x2 and x3 difficulty? Try +1/x1 and +2/x1 instead. Smaller spawns will produce less lag, even though it may not do much to help your boredom.

Second, I would work on playing around with your keybinds and control mapping. It sounds like you're doing a lot of reaching and scrambling to juggle your various options. Keep your most common attacks in keys 1-5, and your heal or some other defensive toggle you have to click all the time in 0, or some similar key you can reach easily and instinctively. Use the same pattern for all characters so your fingers get "trained" to reach for the right keys in an emergency. Likewise, you can use certain keys to trigger travel powers, like "F" for "Fly". (Although that's normally "Follow", you might want to try another letter)

If you have Tab bound to target_enemy_next, try changing it to target_enemy_near and bind some other key to cycle through targets. That way, one press of Tab is ALWAYS target the most immediate threat, the one closest to you. You can also quickly select foes by rotating and positioning yourself so the target you want is the closest. You do still want the cycle key, though, I bind it to Q so it's right next to Tab, but you may prefer another location. (One thing you shouldn't do is bind it to Alt-Tab, that switches you out of the game. I found that out the hard way. )

You should also try and find an effective balance between mouse use and keyboard use. For instance, I use keys for powers, but my mouse is always positioned over the Inspiration box for fast Inspiration selection. You may prefer to bind Inspirations to keys. The mouse can then be used for something else. I also like to use the mouse to click on the powers from 7 to 9, so I can keep pressing the 1-5 keys with my left hand. (So for instance Build Up - attack is usually initiated with a mouse click on the Build Up icon)

Another thing that can come in very handy is powexec_auto. Or, manually hold down the Ctrl key and click on the power. This will cause it to be set to autofire. This is useful for Hasten, Practiced Brawler, Dull Pain, or any similar power you want to trigger automatically every time it recharges. Setting up a keybind to set that power to auto can be very useful. (and if you want to cancel the autofire, say for Taunt or some other attack you wouldn't want to go off just because you targetted a foe, Z should be mapped to that)

If you've played a Mastermind, you probably already know about keybinds, but in case you don't, check the Guides forum. There should be plenty of guides on the subject. Finally, setting up common keybinds for special actions, like Shift + mouse click to drop Caltrops or some other dropped power, can speed that up, and make it easier to make the action consistent across multiple characters. You might check out the movement/auto Hasten keybinds, or Teleport keybinds.

Another "practice mode": go get 20 small purple insps. Take four, attack a group, see what happens. When those run out, take four, attack another group, see what happens. This is a lab and those are your safety equipment. When you can't put on your safety equipment, leave the lab.

I have found that binding all of my main attacks/heals/buffs to the number pad really helps. I personally have a very severe case of scrapper lock, so when i wade my Dual Blade/Dark Armor scrapper into a fight the last thing I want to do is hold on to the mouse. I gotta pound buttons! once in the fight just tab to the next victim, hit "f" pummel, rinse, repeat. Before they changed it so that defensive toggles no longer dropped when mezzed I had all of my toggles (usually got 9 running when fighting) in the second power tray & had them bound to the 1-9 keys. but now the defensive toggles don't drop so its not as important.

I want to thank all of you for the comments. It will take me some time to put them into practice due to my limited free time, but I'm very much looking forward to it and you've given me some great feedback here. I welcome any more suggestions, either focused on my toons or my own playing.

To try and keep this sane I've replied to many posts here:

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Originally Posted by Flower Make sure you take Dark Regeneration when available and slot the Theft of Essence chance for endurance recovery in it, that is the best self heal power in the game and makes dark armor shine.

Many of the suggestions involve using IO Sets, which can certainly help (It's also a lot easier to get them now, versus when I last played - my chars had maybe 5Mil between them before, and I'm now sitting at roughly 300 mil total without doing much. Though I did have 3 purps drop over 3 tips missions, so perhaps I shouldn't get used to it).

Really basic tips on the sets are good things (For example, I intend to immediately follow your Theft suggestion). Back when I last played there were guides for most things. Now when I look...I see the same guides, usually very out of date. I can't even find a KM/WP Scrapper guide of any sort. When I do find Guides, they tend to be more about high-end set slotting and less about power choice and leveling. This is sad. I even see a Stickied guide about which IOs are broken, but it's 2 years old. Are there any "commonly known" things about IO slotting that I should know? Places not to stick a Numina's, for example, or LOTG, or what's the "normal" slotting for Stamina?

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Master minds are tricky toons to play.

For my MM, I've got keybinds, but I'm a bit lost on what to do with them. I basically Tankermind, so I've got Provoke, I keep my bots in bodyguard, and I use Provoke and my various controls to try and keep aggro at me...none of which involves keybinds. I'll occasionally try to get my pets to goto one spot or stay when I try to pull, but they seem to be a bit weak on obedience and ignore the command until they do whatever they were trying anyway. What orders should I be giving that the keybinds would help with? Basically I want my bots to stay in BG, so attack is rarely given. I tell them to move out of fire patches, but that's not really using the full flexibility.

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With your Dark/Bots MM in particular, a x3 group of any composition short of an EB or AV really shouldn't defeat you unless you are getting multiple spawns.

Normally x3 for the MM is fine. Mezzers kill me (Break Frees just don't last long enough, so a few battles can run me out.) I had one Tip with two Carnie Red bosses that helped me finish off a debt badge in the 10 tries before I gave up and dropped my settings. Maps where my guys scatter (Cave maps with multiple levels, for example) are also chaos.

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First of all, I would suggest biting the bullet and upgrading your hardware.

This may be required - I dropped down to "Minimum" settings last night and felt notably more in-control, and ran around outside of combat at 30-40 fps. (still at x2 though, and no idea of fps in combat). There was a bit of a cumulative effect - less slideshow meant I zoomed out more meant I had a better feel for what was going on. Of course I made some play changes too, and it was a bit distracting fight Longbow with half-faces (odd clipping)

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Second, I would work on playing around with your keybinds and control mapping. It sounds like you're doing a lot of reaching and scrambling to juggle your various options.

More like I'm clear on what I want to do, but it won't do it. Seems like slideshow is a big part of the issue. I also turned off the auto-attack Boxing on my Brute (left over from my last time around to build up Fury) and found my control much improved. I'm still having issues targeting. I already had target nearest enemy bound, but sometimes you want to target the next priority, and I seem to have a delay between hitting the button and having the targetting change, so I usually flip past the target by key, and the mouse seems to get caught on the targeting boxes of other enemies. Again, I think you're right and hardware will fix this.

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However, as others have mentioned, dark armor causes ridiculous amounts of graphics lag. It was so bad that I made some binds to turn off the display of effects when playing my dark/dark scrapper. There's a slash command for toggling the personal effects distance -- check out the Paragon Wiki for details.

I will look into this, thanks.

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When in combat, don't rush. Because most powers have 1-3 second activation times, you really have a lot of time to figure out what you should do next. Some people have an attack chain that they grind through relentlessly, but I watch what's happening and often use an attack or power for a specific purpose rather following the sequence of the cast-in-concrete attack chain.

Very helpful advice - I went from Boxing (auto), Air Superiority, Shadow Punch, Smite, Shadow Maul plus the odd Midnight Grasp and assorted situational powers to just the base 3 plus the situational and I feel much more in control.

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You do, as mentioned, need KB protection or you'll spend 2/3 of every fight on your keester,

I'm currently using Acrobatics for that, but it seems with the new accessibility it's silly to give up a power slot to that instead of an IO or two. I'll keep that in mind when I respec, though I don't want to do that until I have a better idea of what to do (and planning a respec with sets uses the same limited time as playing )

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I used two toggles- Oppressive Gloom and Death Shroud- and decided that the fear was worthless.

I've currently got Cloak of Fear - though it appears to be working at a lower mag than some guides report, was it nerfed? I have an appreciation for Fear from my /Dark MM. Previously I wasn't using it, saving it only for when I knew I'd be dealing with multiple spawns (after all, fear means less fury, right?) but I tried it with it on all fights last night and it seemed to do a decent job of reducing incoming damage. With the new Fury curve I'm content (currently running about 130% damage bonus average at x2, without any set bonuses). CoF will be less useful, I assume, with Death Shroud. I'm leery of OG's health Drain + disorient though - I hate wandering enemies that won't melee. Given that I have CJ + Weave, I might try to squeeze Maneuvers and Cloak of Darkness into my build in place of OG and have some decent Defense -- But then I've never been able to translate Arcanaville numbers into reality - does 10-20% defense give any benefit?

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Death Shroud need six slots and clever invention use- you want 95% damage, 80-95% end reduction and some accuracy, or it will drain your blue bar dry.

So you recommend frankenslotting for effect over trying to set bonuses on this one?

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I don't know if you even need Siphon Life, really, but I'll leave that to the dark melee experts.

I currently do, if only because it recharges a lot faster and spares the end bill (and Dark Consumption takes even longer to recharge).

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I'd suggest investing in a single set (crushing impact or something) that gives you a +Accuracy bonus, because it's nice to have a little more free accuracy.

uh...my back of the envelope says that 5 Crushing Impact plus a frankenslot gives a pretty nice Acc/Dmg/End/Rchg plus set bonuses...does that sound right? I can fill a couple of my melee attacks that way and be quite content.

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Tactics are: run in and hit bosses and lieutenants.

Should I bounce around targets to spread the -to-hit, or is it better just to pile it on the boss that would do the biggest hits? (This is often my key issue aside from graphics - KNOWING what tactics are good is a prerequisite to DOING such tactics).

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Your health will drop alarmingly in the first two seconds, then much more slowly, so you can hit the heal.

It certainly feels quicker than two seconds, but this is showing to be true. I do recall when I last played enjoying the feeling that the DM/DA Brute required some level of skill - I had to manage the Green, the Blue, and the Recharge times. I just want to have the requisite skill to play at a more difficult level.

I will say first off, it sounds like you are having CPU or network problems in addition to graphics, if you're having that much hesitation in activating powers. It might help to do a quick once over on your Internet connection -- make sure it's good quality and not some trashy signal from the provider to start with, then make sure you've got good connections and your firewall configured correctly. The Technical Issues and Bugs forum might be a good place to ask for advice, scope around and find out how to do a hijackthis or otherwise collect your network information, and post a request for help there.

If it's the CPU, again, which that may take an investment, it will make your computer perform better overall. Don't just assume the graphics card is the source of all the problems, although that most commonly is. Improving your graphics performance can take the load off the network, though, which can help reduce lag.

Now on to this:

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Originally Posted by SwiftOneSpeaks For my MM, I've got keybinds, but I'm a bit lost on what to do with them. I basically Tankermind, so I've got Provoke, I keep my bots in bodyguard, and I use Provoke and my various controls to try and keep aggro at me...none of which involves keybinds. I'll occasionally try to get my pets to goto one spot or stay when I try to pull, but they seem to be a bit weak on obedience and ignore the command until they do whatever they were trying anyway. What orders should I be giving that the keybinds would help with? Basically I want my bots to stay in BG, so attack is rarely given. I tell them to move out of fire patches, but that's not really using the full flexibility.

The keybinds posted here, while they are very useful, do tend to be a little TOO complete. You have such fine, precise control that it can be wasted. Particularly if you are using the Tankermind strategy, you are right, you don't really need to control your pets with fine detail. Just letting yourself initiate combat and letting the henchmen follow up on your attacks at their own pace works fine.

On the other hand, one thing to remember about Bodyguard is that it works with Stay, Goto, and Follow. Only Attack overrides it, and even then, if you order a henchman to Defensive Attack, he will finish off the indicated target, then go back into Bodyguard mode. Since often when you are taking on AoE oriented foes you don't want your pets near you, it can be helpful to tell them to Stay or Goto a spot outside of AoE range of your target. This assumes, of course, they are ranged henchmen, this is pretty much useless for Ninjas or Necro.

I believe the only complication is that setting a henchman to Defensive will cause him to stop attacking for ten seconds. (It may be Follow, but the main reason for this is so the henchman has a chance to lose aggro and return to you) What this really means is that it is more effective to set Goto or Stay separately, not linked to Defensive or Aggressive. The recommended keybinds set them separately, and I do this too.

However, I have a special keybind arrangement that I find much simpler than the "official" version. Basically, I have an "offensive" team and a "defensive" team, and my Aggressive key is bound to only set the offensive team to Aggressive. Likewise, Attack will only make them attack. This may be the way to handle it for your keybinds, set a key that sets Attack for some of your henchmen, using a unique common character in their name. That way you've got some henchmen attacking your target, but others stay in Bodyguard to protect you.

Since you use the Tankermind strategy you probably won't use this as often as someone who would have those henchmen initiate combat, but it can be helpful to concentrate fire once you have aggro. Since you will likely be taking less damage after you take the alpha strike, you can turn off some of your Bodyguard and still survive it. That's my first suggestion. If you want to get really complex, you can define other keys to split off your offensive team even more, dividing them between two targets as well as concentrating fire on one. (so for example you would bind a key to "petcomname y attack", with all the henchmen you want to attack having a "y" in their name)

If you feel you want to try out the "henchmen lead" strategy, the best way I've found to do this is to set the offense team to Aggressive. Then you can either tell them to attack your target, or just plain move them into range with Goto. I find this the best way to play a /Dark, as then I don't get mezzed as much. Basically instead of tanking yourself, your offense team is tanking, so your Tier 3 (Assault Bot) is the best choice for doing this, as he has the most HP. You'll want to back him up with Twilight Grasp, though, and perhaps hit the spawn with Fearsome Stare or Darkest Night just as he gets into aggro range. If you're Necro or Ninjas, you can send your Tier 2s in and hope they split the aggro between them.

Note that there's two reasons you set your henchmen lead team to Aggressive. One is that they'll initiate combat even if you don't use Attack, and will continue to seek out targets if you do. The other and more important one, though, is that you don't want a henchman that is tanking for you to be taking Bodyguard damage too. Your Bodyguard should stay well behind you and your offensive henchmen, so they don't take AoE damage. (And again, ranged henchmen will be better for this than melee)

I also find that the best way to use Goto is to bind it to a ctrl-click or shift-click configuration. For example, when I shift-click, it calls "petcomname y Goto", with "y" being whatever letter or sequence of letters I've chosen to identify my offense team.

In your case, being a Tankermind, you might want to go ahead and use the petcomall, since you'll want your henchmen to group up outside of AoE range. It's very easy to use, though, just hold down shift and click where you want to henchmen to stand. Then move in and begin your attack. It's a little more difficult to move your henchmen after they've started fighting, as when they are aggroed they will hesitate to move away from whatever they're attacking. But you can keep clicking it to gradually move them back out of melee range, or even move from one spot in melee to another.

The only other thing to remember, of course, is that after you have set a Goto, you need a key to recall them into Follow. Otherwise they won't follow you.

The way my keybinds are set up, U is Attack (offense team only), I is Stay, O is Follow, J is Aggressive (offense) K is Defensive (all) and L is Passive (all). I don't really need any more than that, I hit O-K to make sure everyone is in Bodyguard, and then J to put my offense team into Aggressive if I want to. O-L is the Heel command, it'll bring everyone back no matter what they're attacking. And I-K is the Passive Stay for pulling. (I'll go pull something, retreat into the henchmen, and hit K as the spawn comes around the corner. This loses Bodyguard for the pull, but keeps the henchmen from just charging in and retaliating the moment I'm hit)

Are you a button masher or a mouse clicker?

There are two common ways of firing off your powers - some people find one works better than the other so it is worth trying both options to find out which works better for you.

Personally I prefer using the keyboard to fire my powers. To help with this I put all those in my attack chain and any others I may want to use quickly in power tray 1 with the attack chain grouped together in the order I normally fire them.
Open up the other main trays and set them to trays 2 and 3 and put my utility powers in them.
I also remove all powers I never use from the trays.
I also open extra trays to hold things like travel toggles or long duration buffs - these don't tend to get used in combat so are generally somewhere out of the way on the screen.

Also set up your screen windows how you like it - which may not be the default - mine certaily isn't and use that same layout for all toons.