MM or Crab pets?

So I have a lvl50 crab that I love, but I love her only for the pets. I desided recently to tryout a MM (Demon/DM) and try my luckout at them. I am now 23 and I love doing missions around my lvl but it seems like when I go on missions with 50's, my pets die in a single hit. At 50 will MM pet's be anywheres as good as my crab's bot's in dmg and survivability? (I always have Shadow Fall and Manuvers on and have 150mil worth of IO's on to help.)

At 23, you have yet to get your final henchman (at L26) and your final upgrade (at L32) which for a Demon Summoning MM, will add the following attacks/powers...

Fiery Demonling: Fire Breath
Cold Demonling: Frost Breath
Hellfire Demonling: Hellfire Breath
Ember Demon: Fire Ball, Abyssal Reconstruction
Hellfire Gargoyle: Hellfire Smash, Hellfire Burst
Demon Prince: Ice Blast, Shiver, Ice Sword, Block of Ice, Chilling Embrace, Ice Slash, Frozen Aura

... I expect this will beef up your henches survivability somewhat. AoE heal, a large number of slow powers, cone attacks, holds and sleeps.

All Masterminds feel a little underwhelming just prior to an upgrade or a new henchman. Stick with it - great things are on their way.

In the meantime, have a read of my guide to see if there is anything new you can learn about MM's - since you've come from uncontrollable pets you may be surprised what MM's henchmen can do!

Level 50 content is highly biased against masterminds. Level 50 tip missions still work, but the TFs, and upper level missions are designed with bosses and AVs that wipe out all the pets within 10 seconds.

I second Zaprobo. I've ran both Tin Mage and Apex on my mastermind and i hardly ever lost pets, even during battle maiden. Most well formed TFs will have more than enough bufff/debuff to go mitigate any incoming damage to the pets, and your own secondaries also contribute to this. Sure i might occasionally lose 1 or two, but i would never see all my pets get taken out in one sweep.

I think if you're pets are having trouble staying alive then the team might have a few issue with aggro management.

According to Zaprobo's guide

"Henchman resistance and defense scales with level, to a high point over what 2 Single-Origin enhancements would grant (henchman summons can not be slotted for additional Resistance or Defense). "

I wonder if the res/def scaling doesn't work as well or at all if SK'd as it does from actual leveling? This would explain why when being SK'd your pets dying much worse than those that are actually 50.

I have mixed experiences with the high level TFs.

My bots/traps has done most of the high level TFs, and in fact has more MO badges then any of my other toons.

On "kill all" or "kill most" TFs she excels. Big groups to debuff while the pets spam aoes, hooray!

On speedruns she's not much use until the boss fights, i.e. can't stealth worth beans with the pets up, even FFG draws aggro.

My first STF was a good example. The first mish is tailor-made for a trapper, a big crowd of enemies spawn in a predictable location, and we rolled over them.

The next mishes were OK, but when we got to Cap the others guys were stealthing from security chief to security chief and me and the pets couldn't keep up. One of the ambushes spawned right on top of me, and ISTR that was a MO run and the heroes were freaking out, but I got to show off a little and demonstrate how masterminds treat Arachnos ambushes . So I wasn't dying constantly, but the team's tactics didn't make use of my mastermind, I might as well have doorsat until the last fight and had someone 'port me in.

I haven't run Apex and Tin Man since the first week they came out, the minelayers and BM were annoying and I was mostly useless. I'll have to try it again, hopefully people have figured out some tricks.

The Task Force issue seems to be an ongoing debate, but I will say that in general, henchmen are somewhat weaker than "pets", as of a Dominator or SoA. They make up for this with their greater precision of control. In general I would say a Tier 3 henchman is the equivalent of a normal pet. So in a sense you have a pet, two half-pets, and three one-third pets.

The Tier 1s are like Underlings, they can fall pretty fast.

(If you'd actually like the numbers, an average pet at level 50 has 1070.9 HP. A Tier 3 has 963.3, a Tier 2 771, and a Tier 1 578.3. (A Minion would have 430.8 HP) The pet at level 50 would do scale 1.0 damage, while Tier 3 is 0.65, Tier 2 is 0.55, and Tier 1 0.45. And that's not adjusted for level difference between the Tier 1 and a foe at your level, which would both reduce damage dealt and increase damage taken, as well as being less HP)

Be patient and wait until later. MM pets are universally squishy at lower levels. As you get higher and start stacking defense and resistance onto them, they do get tougher. Well some do at least. Ninja pets and Mercs are still squishy at higher levels. Anyways, just make sure you get all 4 of the +pet res/def IOs as a starter. After that, it's about using DM to stack as much -tohit as possible. Of course the effective use of IO sets and global recharge is the best way to go about that, which for most people comes after levels 27/32/37/47. Also keep in the mind that you're comparing pre-25 MM pets to post-35 Crab pets. With such a big level gap, it is natural that there will be major performance differences between them.

Weakened Hammy, this was my experience. Go over the cliff, defeat the pylons. Then, AoE attack from the Hammy himself wipes me and the robots, resummon by the cliff, AoE die, repeat five, six, seven times, so I stayed dead until the mission ended. Yay MMs.

Another point to be made is that pets die easily when alone - a wandering tier 1 or 2 pet is going to get greased very rapidly, usually as the result of aggroing away from your desired target and chasing a runner into another mob. And suddenly you find yourself up to your neck in aggro that is now on you, specifically. Re: Hami AoE wipes, that's been the case virtually every time this has happened - a pet has decided to attack a mito rather than the more boring pylon, and when said pet dies, Hami vents his spleen on me.

My usual avoidance method is to target my desired target directly, spam attack/defensive until it dies, then pulling back away from Hami and mitos, spamming follow/passive until I'm certain none of them still have a burr up the a** about something I don't want them attacking.

In large groups of enemies, I just retarget when the current one dies, and press on with more attack/defensive. Pets are dumb. It's my job to keep them focused.