Which MM is for me?

Let me start off by saying I don't like MMs. I am not crazy about playing with them and I haven't really enjoyed playing them much (I've had a Thugs/Pain to 38, Thugs/Poison to 34, Thugs/Dark to 42, Robot/Traps and Robot/FF to 40, and a few others that didn't get to 30).

Part of this is lag - my computer is old. When there's more than one MM on a team I generally start to lag. When I have one MM and they're Demon/anything I end up lagging and getting severely annoyed with the pets' audio.

Now that I've probably tweaked a few nerves - though that wasn't my intent - to lay some of the background on why I'm not crazy about MMs, I do realize they are effective for pretty much any team make-up and can fill several different roles. One of my friends tells me that her MM is the most fun character she's ever played and is going to make it her main. She also says I'm really missing out.

I've never been all that keen on 'pet classes' but I've recently overcome my detest of fire imps on my Fire/Rad 'troller and maybe it's time I give MMs another go.

My playstyle solo is generally to kill from range and try to stay 'safe' but have a difficulty setting that's challenging but not faceplant-city. I love buff/debuff powers but not ones I'm going to have to put on all the pets and the whole team every few minutes. I will probably not explore incarnate material with the MM since it'd be a side project on a different server than my main ones (though I may delete a character on Freedom to make it there if I get sufficiently enthused to do so, if for no other reason than it would be easier to get to 22 there).

The primaries I'm considering are Thugs, Mercs, and Necromancy. I have concepts in mind for both Mercs & Necromancy, depending on the secondary.

For secondaries I'm considering Poison & Pain. I have played Pain corruptors and liked them okay but I am leaning much more heavily towards 'Poison' because I just love debuffs a lot.

What type of mastermind would you recommend to someone that doesn't particularly like masterminds, and why?

Edit: I forgot to mention that I was kinda leaning towards Necro/Poison and Mercs/Poison, but not really sure which. I've heard bad things about Mercs and heard that Necro was very, very weak to lethal damage. My playtime with either has been minimal at best, which is one reason I'm intrigued by them.

I once did what you're intending to do. That is, I made a MM I had no long-term ambitions for on a previously unused (by me at least) server. Actually I've done that twice - once for Demons/Storm and another for Thugs/Poison.

The Thugs/Poison was certainly viable as a soloing build. It scales up (higher difficulty) not out (increased mob size), due entirely to Poison. Thugs can scale up and/or out, but Poison needs a small number of mobs. I think this pairing satisfies the criteria you gave for your preferred playstyle, such as no buffing and the ability to debuff from range.

I do want to say that I don't like Poison in its current state and that's why I can't even tell you what server he's on, it's been so long since I played him. That's not to say I regret leveling up that guy, far from it, I like seeing firsthand what various powersets do and you'll get to do Poison with a MM.

As for choosing among those 3 primaries, I'd say Mercs is only for someone determined to play a military/mercenary concept. Necro is fine and the ghost pet (utility power) is neat. I do think the performance of Thugs is a notch above either of those. Thugs also is, to me, the best pairing for Poison because the top tier pet naturally goes to melee, which is good for that T9 debuff from Poison (forgot the name).

I would have tried to recommend a pairing for someone that doesn't like MMs, but I wasn't certain why you didn't like them.

You're right, I only got into one facet of it since my main dislike just goes with 'pet class' types altogether. I hate having to manage extra things like that, it drives me nuts eventually. That's why I didn't like my imps at first, they were always attacking the wrong things or going off on some goofy trek uphill to the west when to follow me all they had to do is freaking follow me when I was going downill to the north.

My friend said the pathing is not as bad now as it used to be and I'm inclined to agree since on my Fire/Rad my imps aren't nearly as .... impaired ... as they used to be.

Nonetheless, managing pets can get on my nerves more than stacking buffs.

I have a Fire/Pain corr on Freedom I was just on to move things from storage and I remembered all the fun I had on that character... /Pain doesn't seem so bad for MMs, either, and people say it goes well with Mercs since the last pet is an endurance hog. I'm still not sure what I'll go with, I want some more opinions from the master(minds)s.

For /Poison, Thugs is the best primary followed by Necro. Mercenaries doesn't go well with it at all. You want something you can send into melee with the Tier 9 active /Poison power on it, and the higher the tier of the pet, the stronger the debuff is. So Thugs is perfect for that, with the Bruiser; plus you have a guy you can send in every fight to eat the alpha, and heal with your single target heal. Leveling up to the Bruiser is fairly painful though; at least it won't be as bad as it was pre-Inherent Fitness.

Necro/Pain is fairly effective for close-range. Basically if you do all your fighting in point-blank range next to your henchmen the AoE healing and your Regen boosting Aura will go a long way in boosting their survivability. Thugs/Poison can be pretty effective as well, but typically isn't so up close. You basically have to rely on Empty Clips, N. Breath, and your (P/A)PP for AoE contributions, which can still be pretty effective against groups. Either way, I'd highly recommend Provoke so you can keep the heat off your henchmen and control the mob to a certain extent.

I deleted my Demons/Poison, cuz the whip rocks but the pets are so large, noisy and annoying that when in teams they block the melee set, and well...the screaming. Oh my gosh SCREAMING!!!!

But I love poison

I have decided to roll a Zombies/Poison, because poison is great, and Zombies are quiet. Dark powers debuff well and also compliment poisons debuffing.

Dark Miasma would be my second choice, however I like having different damage types or in the case of the secondary different types of debuffing options. Plus the pets in zombies already debuff to hit, so I can focus on other realms of attacks.

Well, I went with Zombie/Pain for now. I'll see how I feel about it after I level it up a bit, but with the +res/+dmg buff, aoe regen buff, aoe heals, etc, I hope that it will end up doing okay. I don't want to go with /Dark, I just don't like playing Dark Miasma. I'm not saying it's not a good set, I just know that it doesn't fit my personal playstyle.