Necro/???

Hey folks, need to pick ya'lls brains here.

First off, I have very little experience with MMs. Just never got into them too much.

I tend to be very concept driven with my characters. I have an idea for a voodoo priest concept. So figured a Necro primary is a given. The problem is the secondary. I see most people go Dark as a secondary and I understand it synergizes very well. But for the sake of concept, I was thinking either Poison or Pain. Which of those two have better synergy with Necro? Which in your opinion is the more fun to play/use?

Any of those would work reasonably well, but I think between Poison or Pain I would go with Pain to pair with Necro as it will help you keep your zombies standing a bit easier with the heals and buffs. Pain will let you play about equally well whether you're mopping the floor or having a rough time and trying to rally in a tough battle.

Poison, on the flip side, has excellent debuffs but they are largely single-target. The healing power, Alkaloid, is also single-target and has a rather high endurance cost for what it does, so it's more difficult to support your minions in tough situations with Poison. Poison is very good against tough targets like AVs or other players, but not as good against large groups which is what you'll be facing most of the time in PvE. That's not to say Poison can't do well, just that it has to work harder when things turn from offensive to defensive.

Concepts aside, poison is arguably the weakest powerset of any AT in the game. They're going to buff poison but from what I see it'll go from "horrible" to "average".

Pain is said to be good but I have no direct experience with it.

Dark miasma is one of the top-tier MM sets. Necro/dark is a classic combo that's easy to get started with, and stays good right to 50.

summary - avoid poison on your first MM, you can go back to it for a challenge after you run out of other MMs to try

Melee pets which toss out self heals and attacks with debuffs. I would say Thermal for the added resistance buff and heals.

I have a Demon pain that is slotted at 48 which has a active regen of almost 700 for myself and about 500 for the pets / everyone else and I can tell you I survive but my pets just don't. I also do not have enough aggro to pull mobs off them.

Personally I really try to go for that 4/8 or 3/8 setting with toons I make. I don't know what your intentions are, but I notice your into tankish type toons by looking at your Sig. So with that as my gauge I'm think thermal would fit or if you can wait maybe sonic.

So you understand anything melee is going to die more often then range pets. I don't want to make it sound like your going to need to resummon every second. BUT, BUT, BUT there will be times where your pets will just keep getting wiped out on high end mission setting against certain groups because they are melee and getting hit with tons of AOEs mixed in with AV attacks. Since range ( robots ) are usually further away from the main fight they get hit with less AOE.

Again just some food for thought. But I do agree with what Anonymoose said if anything else I said might be useless to you.

I played a Necro/Poison all the way to 50. I had very little problems with him..who cares if a zombie dies..you have a power that turns a dead Zombie into a Phantom..to keep fighting.

Slotted up aklaloid isn't a bad heal.

The downside, fire and aoe's melt Zombies. But....I found using TP foe to take care of troublesome mobs (i.e Longbow Flamethrowers) more than helpful. Also when you get to the level where Zombies can heal themselves...hooray...that and take Life Drain and Gloom from your Necro primary. Most MM attacks aer terrible..but the Necro ones are worth it.

Zombie/Poison is very workable combo...poison can be not so great with other sets..but I found it really worked well with Necro. After it gets buffed, probably even more so.

nekro/dark/soul of course.
the best synergy of all possible combination to nekro.
think of /dark as of aggressive controller/dominator with more pets, which also are controller. as long as you have the initiative you will win.

1. fearsome stare + soul tentacles = fake AoE hold of a whole spawn. cooldown of 15 sec is something controller would kill you for, their AoE holds despite being "true" have cooldown of 240 sec.
1.5 +fearsome stare from lich gives you (roll this from the lips) magnitude 6 fear. elite boss will be having bad time against you.
2. you have always advantage to do first action, AoE stealth is quite useful for prowling and it gives also psi resistance.
3. all that debuffs from you and from pets will certainly get even a GM and AV to -tohit debuff cap, reducing his damage nearly to zero.
4. if you play your cards right you zombies will not be scratched at all. and if not you can bring all of them back to 100% life with 1 blast of twilight grasp.

i have killed solo deathsurge and ghost of scrapyard with my nekro. its quite good.

why not poison:
its single target debuffs. get a full +4x8 spawn and try to kill it with /poison. and then facepalm yourself for choosing that skillset.
poison is only in 1on1 pvp superb. in all other aspects it suck badly.
i had only 1 /poison and had deleted him, no regrets after. /dark debufs are just quite good in numbers, but are AoE.

why not thermal:
no initiatie, pets have to suck on alpha strikes, which they most likely not survive. only exception is on deamons since they primary protection method is also resistance and its stack for them. and even then it is hard sometimes to keep them alive.
zombies will get killed pretty fast even with better resistance. the key is to control the enemies, to deny them a chance to attack you in first place.

why neither poison nor thermal:
1. i said it already several times in the past and i will always say it again - twilight grasp is the best damn heal in game available. sure it can miss sometimes, which isn't going to happen more then 1-2%, given the fact you have slotted it well. but the pure heal output over time is much more then of that dedicated healer skillsets. of course its situational and sometimes don't work like on hamidon fight in lgtf since it is hard to hit there. but pure healers will be there not that much better because of healing debuff. thermal heals with 2 spell are weaker then the grasp, i know it, i have them both. and on the top of it the grasp even debuffs, which gives even more use of it.
2. fluffy aka dark servant is something very very valuable. and his heals are as strong as yours with only bit longer cooldown. if you get mezzed, knocked or anything else preventing you from fire up your own grasp - his grasp will save you and your other minions from being killed.

when this combo don't perform well:
1. heavy mezzing enemies. all except of /traps and /bubbles will have their problems with it. "break frees" are your friends.
2. several attack vectors. you can efficiently debuff only one group. again only traps or bubbles can counter it, but they are dedicated defenders.
3. heavy melee AV/GM can blast your whole team of pets with one stomp. that hurts a lot. you really need all pet related IO sets that gives your pets +res and +def. as long as they survive with 1% life you can heal them in no time. fortunately for you you can easily slot both +res sets because soul extraction is recharge intensive set.

Thank you for all of the suggestions in this matter. Much appreciated. After much hmmming and hawing I'll probably give necro/dark a spin with this concept at first and see how it goes.

I have to second Necro/Dark...

I love mine, the set, especially with the change in twilight grasp, makes it even better. The bag of tricks is wonderful to have and the tier 9... well, that is just one more pet to add to the fun, it makes a most impressive play experience.

One of my favorite MMs to play.

Necro/Dark is too cliche, so I rolled a necro/pain and used Provoke from the Presence pool to draw all the aggro to myself while taunting.

BG mode + World of Pain + Regen aura + auto nullify pain = awesome

I once saw some level 25 SOed thug/pain with provoke take on some mob of 29 or 30s for the fun of it.

They're very survivable, it's like a moving base.

With the buff on Force Field, go with Necro/FF. Your zombies will have enough defense to survive and your tohit debuffs stack nicely with your +defense.

My lvl 50 Necro is Necro/Pain. I like Necro/Pain for the stun aura (oppressive gloom) from Soul Mastery. I am not a big fan of taunt and bodyguard. If I want to taunt, I'll play a tanker.

Necro/Dark/Soul is a powerhouse.

Seriously, you can tank, control, debuff & heal. That and a ton of pets.


I have a low level necro/ff (heroic mm). I'm kind of thinking about dusting that toon off and giving it another try.