Well I can't really help you with the PvP aspect but for PvE I'd say that demons works well with most MM secondaries except maybe Storm.
Thermal Radiation and Pain Domination are both nice because they provide additional resistances to supplement the Demons already high resistances.
Force Field and Traps are both good for Tankerminds of any type and the combination of Defense from you and Resistance/Healing from the Demons mean that your pets have good layered defenses.
Trick Arrow can stack it's control and slows with the control and slows provided by the Demon Prince (which is actually pretty good).
Dark Miasma is good with anything.
Posion and Storm I'm less sure about. Storm I can see having trouble, it tends to work best with a bit of chaos and keeping enemies out of melee. Unfortunately Demons work best when enemies are concentrated and in melee. It might work, but I'd recommend caution.
Well Demons / Thermal Rad go togother like bacon and eggs. The only thing is, there's loads of them, they are, as we British say 10 a Penny, or as the American bretherin say, Dime a dozen. But the power sets work so good together not to mention with thermal you get a few added bonuses...
Forge. That = a 30% damage bonus, plus naturally, as a mastermind you will be taking Assault from leadership anyway 
which will mean another 11%, plus if you keep pets in line of sight, your own mastermind boost, you can have well over 50% damage just from those alone.
Heat Exhaustion / Melt Armour the final lvl 35 and 38 powers in Thermal Rad, lets you cripple pretty much anything you point them at. Elite bosses and Archvillains or Heroes, will be a much nicer prospect as your Demons then efficiently tear them to pieces.
And the best part is, Demons and fire, you know it makes sense.
Pain Domination you can't go wrong with, just heal your pets through anything. Plus World of Pain is a nice little buff too.
Forcefields too will work well immaterial of what primary you roll.
But Im biased as I have a Demon / Thermal. I managed to solo Protean with her too. Which I thought was a good accomplishment, and I didn't have half my powers then.
I'm liking my Demon/Trap MM quite nicely, lv22 now
i would recommend /thermal. together you will have about average 80% resistance on pets, which helps a lot them to survive and making them to (nearly) unstoppable tanks. gm's and av's are mostly piece of cake.
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Demon/Storm works fine. As for Demon/Poison, I'd wait until Issue 21 and the /Poison buffs for that.
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Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood
Posion and Storm I'm less sure about. Storm I can see having trouble, it tends to work best with a bit of chaos and keeping enemies out of melee. Unfortunately Demons work best when enemies are concentrated and in melee. It might work, but I'd recommend caution.
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Arc #40529 : The Furies of the Earth
I would suggest demon/dark. Tar Patch lowers the damage resistance of all enemies in the aoe which is far better than a +damage buff that only affects one pet. Tar Patch and Freezing Rain are by far the two best powers for enhancing pet damage. It will also enhance the damage of your incarnate abilities.
Dark also has tons of -accuracy so you wont have to resummon your pets much, if at all. Fearsome Stare is just an all around awesome power and Black Hole is a great "Oh crap!" emergency power though I wouldn't waste any slots on it. Be sure to grab Howling too the -regen is has will be key in AV and GM fights.
The only thing that screws over Dark are high defense enemies. I'd suggest taking Tactics from the Leadership pool.
"The bird of Hermes is my name. Eating my wings to make me tame." -The Ripley Scroll
Check out my Deviant Art: http://darkauthor81.deviantart.com/
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eeehhhm, the thing is, "forge" can buff 3 targets if you cycle them. that's the big daemon and 2 middle daemons that get buffed. consider those three are responsible for roughly 90% of the damage your pets can produce its quite a buff you have at your disposal. and it is always with you, not like the tar patch that stay on the ground far behind the rolling strike force.
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Originally Posted by Mid_Boss
I would suggest demon/dark. Tar Patch lowers the damage resistance of all enemies in the aoe which is far better than a +damage buff that only affects one pet.
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-res debuff gives you more damage than a +damage debuff. +damage modifies your target's base damage -res increases your total damage. If your pet is enhanced to 95% damage from enhancements you'd need a +60% damage buff to equal the increased damage a -30% -resistance debuff gives. For 9 endurance you buff the damage of everyone and all your pets while to keep 3 team mates or pets Forged costs 39 endurance. Plus Forge wont enhance the damage of your Incarnate abilities while Tar will.|
Originally Posted by kalashnikow
eeehhhm, the thing is, "forge" can buff 3 targets if you cycle them. that's the big daemon and 2 middle daemons that get buffed. consider those three are responsible for roughly 90% of the damage your pets can produce its quite a buff you have at your disposal. and it is always with you, not like the tar patch that stay on the ground far behind the rolling strike force.
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If you're in a team that tar increases the damage of all your team mates. Not just the three you are cycling through. I wouldn't have the patience to Forge babysit 3 targets anyway.
If you're not on a team and you're rolling fast enough that Tar is not up every spawn then increase your difficulty you can handle a lot more than what you're fighting.
"The bird of Hermes is my name. Eating my wings to make me tame." -The Ripley Scroll
Check out my Deviant Art: http://darkauthor81.deviantart.com/
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All right, lets say you did enhance for 95% damage for all your henchmen and you cycle it on for 3 pets. Not being a major number cruncher myself, we will also say that those 3 pets deal 2/3rds your total damage, so thats 215% damage increase with the 3 forges. Throw in Melt Armor for 254.8% damage *IIRC melt armor gives -22.5% res* versus 253.5% with 195% and a -30% res debuff, and it is very likely those 3 pets that are buffed are dealing more than 2/3rds of your damage before the buff. On a team, youll be rolling those 3 forges on the strongest characters buffing their damage, and the total damage of everyone by 22.5% for each target hit by Melt Armor. Ill admit i'd rather rely on the -30% debuff on teams, since enemies will most likely stay in the debuff, which is also autohit |
Originally Posted by Mid_Boss
-res debuff gives you more damage than a +damage debuff. +damage modifies your target's base damage -res increases your total damage. If your pet is enhanced to 95% damage from enhancements you'd need a +60% damage buff to equal the increased damage a -30% -resistance debuff gives.
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. I prefer Melt Armor solo however, since if it does hit, i dont have to worry about the enemies escaping the debuff, in particular av's and gm's, who will most likely try to escape Hellfire Gargoyle's damage Aura.
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except the tar patch has a long cd, which means that it will be available only ca. half of the average fight time. aside of the long stationary AV fights, for that thermal has melt armor. |
Originally Posted by Mid_Boss
If your pet is enhanced to 95% damage from enhancements you'd need a +60% damage buff to equal the increased damage a -30% -resistance debuff gives.
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many weak mobs - tar patch slows. demons don't neet slow, they have slow aura. no reason to debuff resistance too, mobs will die anyway. but more damage is always there to buff the nukers.
strong AV - some baddies just run out of the patch, like deathsurge or scrappy. melt armor gives only a bit weaker debuff and it can not be outrun. and pets being underlevel have problems to hit stuff. forge is not only +30% damage, its also +15% to hit.
final calculation may show that forge+melt armor is better then tar patch.
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Originally Posted by Mid_Boss
For 9 endurance you buff the damage of everyone and all your pets while to keep 3 team mates or pets Forged costs 39 endurance.
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Originally Posted by Mid_Boss
If you're in a team that tar increases the damage of all your team mates. Not just the three you are cycling through. I wouldn't have the patience to Forge babysit 3 targets anyway.
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and since there are many -res powers around and most AV have debuff resistance, which renders debuff somewhat unuseful, not to forget that demons already have a lot of -res.
but only few ATs have +damage, none can resist the buffs, they are always with you and you can effectively put them on dedicated damage dealers makes this choice at least on the par with tar patch if not somewhat better.
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Originally Posted by Mid_Boss
If you're not on a team and you're rolling fast enough that Tar is not up every spawn then increase your difficulty you can handle a lot more than what you're fighting.
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don't get me wrong, my main is zombie/dark, i know how good dark can be, but its also not flawless. the great advantage of demons/thermal is the superior mobility and overall effectiveness with no design holes.
i've tried to kill scrappy with both zombie/dark and demon/thermal, pre incarnate. zombie/dark ended in a draw, i couldn't kill him, he couldn't kill me too. demons/thermal have killed him without any trouble.
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For saying things like "-Resistance isn't needed" and "Thermal is a healing set" and other such blatantly bad and wrong pieces of individual advice.|
Originally Posted by kalashnikow
I have no idea what I'm talking about.
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You're fired.
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This, sir, fail. He never said once that -Resistance isn't needed. (not that it IS needed, its just very useful |
Originally Posted by Reppu
For saying things like "-Resistance isn't needed" and "Thermal is a healing set" and other such blatantly bad and wrong pieces of individual advice.
You're fired. |
.) He said that the Demon Summoning power set provides -resistance to counter the whole tar patch provides -resistance for the team.Also, Kalashnikow, triple forge + melt armor does surpasses tar patch. Look at my previous post, if the demons and prince did simply 2/3rd's of your damage, thermal comes out on top, and those 3 demons do more than that.
Not to mention since hellfire gargoyle has a damage aura, it makes tar patch even more useless against avs solo, simply because the avs try to run away then. When i solo'ed Hequat, she would not stand still, neither would Silver Mantis unless the Hellfire Gargoyle was running away or dead.
To answer the OP, i'd recommend thermal. The +resistance on top of what demons have makes them that much stronger, and the heals are always there, not as strong, but you dont have to worry about missing either. And the two debuffs you get will give -dmg, -regen, -max end, -rec, -def, and -res through Heat Exaustion and Melt Armor.
Demons tend to work with most combos due to their well-rounded nature. I've tried a few combos myself but personally I find my Demon/Traps to just be beastly. The demons' -res, slow and -rech stacks nicely with the similar debuffs found in Traps. With a good build they reach great survivability that rivals most /FF builds while providing some pretty beastly damage. They are great for soloing on x8, they handle large groups like a champ. Basically Traps gives the best of both worlds, great defense along with some great debuffs.
Here's my take on the rest
Demon/FF is just as good too, though I've only played this to level 20. the Defense works a treat especially since demons like to get up close an personal. This is a good survivability combo, however your dps will suffer a bit from it.
Thermal will cap your fire resistance once stacked with the inherent resistances with demons which is nothing to snort at, especially since you'll easily be able to keep on top of your pets healing wise. If your highly proactive with your healing then you can easily survive as long as a FF in addition to getting some nice debuffs.
Trick Arrow I've had very little experience in, but I could still see that being quite a nasty piece of work, pretty nice debuffs and dps however you won't have much in the realms of making your pets a little more bullet-proof.
Pain Dom is probably a little too healing-focused. Since your ember demon has both an AoE and ST heal, it doesn't really give a lot to stop your demons from just being oneshotted outright. Be careful here.
Storm is a bit counter-productive to demons since they like having things in nice tight bunches for their AoEs, where as storm tends to toss mobs every which way.
Poison IMO is too single-target oriented to be a great match.
Hey
I just started back after a 2-3 year break and want to make the new deamon MM.
I was going to teke Deamon/Forcefeilds but not sure if that would be the right choise, is there a better combo, E.g. Pain Domination, so I can self heal, heal others, Rez, Etc?
Any info you can provide me with would be great...
Thanks
P.s. I'll mostly PvE untill Im a higher level then PvP if this helps.
Thanks again - Steve