Most hearty minions, or focus on secondary choice?

I am still having a hard time keeping my minions alive on my 33 Necro/Poison MM, even decked out with IO's, personal minion commands for each minion, and slotted out leadership abilities. I love the aspects of playing a MM, so I thought I would try again by rolling a new MM toon (Not deleting the 33 Necro/Poison).

What I am looking for most are minions that have a chance to survive, and won't be killed in one shot so easily. I know the T1 are basically meant for fodder, but I would at least like to pretend I have a chance to save them before they are wiped out. I am not sure if I should be focusing on a certain minion set (Is one of the minion sets more hearty?), or if I should be focusing more on my secondary to keep them alive.

I've read through all the MM guides (sadly 10+ issues old) on this site. Though some offer some good ideas, and synergy, I would greatly appreciate any suggestions or opinions from you, the more experienced.

Not the most popular choice these days but on my Bots/FF MM I am actually surprised when i lose even one robot. With the (relatively recent) change that makes Force Field application a targeted AoE and the Protector Bots deploying their own [Force Shield] each robot becomes like a Tank in and of itself.

Before you try that, have you gotten the defensive IO's? Edict of the master and sovereign right both give defensive bonus's, and you can also slot your Soul Extraction with the Call to Arms and Expedient reinforcements defensive bonus's as well. Also, it might help to put a healing IO on your zombies at least, to get a bit more mileage out of their life drain, but ONLY if you have the spare slot from taking the to hit aura in Leadership.

Small Edit, that is to say that each duo of sets has one defense and one resistence bonus apiece, at five percent defense and ten percent resistence apiece. So ten defense and twenty resistence, which should help quite a bit.

I would say that Demons and Robots are the most resistant pets. Demons get res buffs, Robots get def buffs.

My 50 Demon/Dark is a beast. My lowie Bots/Traps also looks promising

For survivability on their own, I would place them;

Demons - High innate +Res to S/L/F/C/T (numbers vary), +Res shielding from T2, AoE & ST heal from T2, -Dmg aura from T3

Robotics - Decent innate +Res to L/C/P, overlapping +Def buffs from T2 (but no overlap on the T2s themselves), 2x ST heal from T2

Necromancy - High innate +res to S/L/C/N/T/P (type varies), -ToHit in some attacks, all pets get a self heal, control heavy T3

Thugs - Decent innate +Res to S/L/F/C/T (Bruiser), weak innate +Res to L (Enforcers) & F (Arsonist), stacking +Def auras from T2

Mercs - Decent innate +Res to S/L/F/C/T (type varies), ST heal from T1

Ninjas - Decent innate +Res to S/L/F (Oni only), innate M/R/A +Def (all except Oni)

Personally I've found FF, Time and Traps to be the most help at keeping my pets alive, in that order. However, reverse the order if you want to defeat things faster. I've had decent results with both Thermal and Storm but they were both used with Demons, so that may have skewed my perspecrive somewhat. Heard/read good things about Dark (very good, in fact) but I've not tried it for myself just yet.

I also have a Necro/Poison and since the Poison changes, have found him much more enjoyable. The uniques have really helped. Now if only we could get the Corruptor & Controller version of the T9...

Both power sets matter, but I think that your choice of secondary is the biggest factor in pet survival. Active damage mitigation in the form of debuffs is fine if you are solo and you are controlling every pull. You can debuff your foes before they can put the smack down on your pets, and you will take their initial aggro. But a set like Poison really falls down when you're on a big team, your pets are running around like preschoolers and there are far too many targets to debuff. On teams you want more passive defenses like those in Force Field, Thermal Radiation or Sonic Resonance, and/or solid heals.

Still, having said that, I think that primaries with a recharge intensive pet (like Thungs' Gang War or Necromancy's Soul Extraction) do have a little edge in pet survival because you can slot all the resist and defense IOs.

My own Necromancer is /Dark Miasma. Although Dark Miasma relies on a lot of active mitigation (debuffs and crowd control) your zombies can take a fair amount of punishment as long as you don't mind duking it out in melee by their side, running Shadow Fall and spamming Twilight Grasp as fast as you can.

I've been playing a thugs/sonic. Since around level 30~35 with some clever frankenslotting and all of the res/def aura IOs my pets, including my tier 1 minions, have been pretty much untouchable. +2 bosses will occasionally bring a minion to below 50%. The reason for this is my weakest pets have 35% defense to all and 61% res to all but psy. Thats one of my punks. My bruiser is much tougher. This guy is still at 42. I also have an "I want you to die now" combo with a burnout enabled double gang war.

Post a build

Are you talking to me or the OP?

Sorry I misunderstood. I thought the OP was asking what minions or secondaries were more survivable because he is rolling a new MM so I told him my experiences with my current set combo which has very survivable everything. Some people have been trying to help make his necro/poison better and others have been giving advice on primaries and secondaries.

I was looking for help with my necro/poison mm in my previous post, about two weeks ago. This post I was looking for suggestions on primary and secondary for survivable minions. I ended up going thug/ff, and it seems to be going well. Minions seem to survive (lvl 20 @ +1/0) without taking much damage. If nothing else, personal ff has made it impossible to faceplant. Survived 3 wipes in Posi 1 last night by popping it at blaster overpulls.