Bots/Sonic or Bots/Thermal

I've been wanting to try a bots resistance intensive build, but I can't decide which resistance secondary to use.

Some things I'm wondering if I go /sonic:

1) - Since the pets rarely engage in melee, will Disruption Field be of any use to me? I'd hate to sink all that end into it and then have the enemies never stand close enough to get affected anyway.

2) - How well do the defender bots back me up on healing? Would it be worth taking Repair to augment my healing, or would medicine be sufficient?

If I go /Thermal:

1) - People say the bots do a fairly decent amount of -Regen on their own. Would that make it a waste for me to take Heat Exhaustion?

Mostly I'm just trying to weigh the two against each other. /Thermal can make for an awesome tankermind build with the new AOE defense proc (easy to get the pets' AOE defense up near softcap now.) But /Sonic would be just plain fun, and definitely higher damage. Anyone have any good advice? Has anyone tried either of these?

I have cool names reserved, whichever way I go.

My instincts scream at me to say don't do either because you'll be disappointed. The resistance won't be enough to match what bots perform like with softcapped defense.

However, if you are intent on one of these two choices then I'd say Thermal. It does everything Sonic does, plus it heals and doesn't have as many useless powers for you (Disruption Field would do nothing but suck your endurance). Heat Exhaustion is far from a waste, it's a great debuff to much more than just regen. Also, you can never have too much -regen. It's very unlikely that outside of an iTrial you'll actually be with enough other people that have -regen for it to become useless. Even on trials it often seems to be in short supply. With Thermal, Repair becomes almost useless. It could have situational uses when a bot takes a huge hit or for restoring endurance to a bot at a critical moment.

I'd suggest going Demons or Beast Mastery for these sets though. Aesthetically I like Demons/Thermal and Beast/Sonic but really it'd probably work either way.

@Rorn ---- Blue Baron ---- Guardian

I've never played a Bots/Sonic or Bots/Thermal mastermind, but I've played Bots/Traps, Bots/Storm, Thugs/Thermal, and Sonic/Sonic.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Berzerker_NA So, you mean enemies probably wouldn't be standing near enough? Is it still a good power to take with sets that have melee pets?

In my experience, Disruption Field would be a waste on Bots/, since none of the bots reliably go into melee. It would be more useful on something like Thugs/, where the Bruiser loves to go into melee range (but also loves knocking things *out* of melee range. Oh well...)

Quote:

That's good to know. It's one of the major deciding points. I didn't want Heat Exhaustion to feel like it was going to waste if I took it.

On my Thugs/Thermal, Heat Exhaustion is at least as valuable for the 37.5% damage debuff as it is for the regen debuff.

Quote:

2) - How well do the defender bots back me up on healing? Would it be worth taking Repair to augment my healing, or would medicine be sufficient?

My experience is that the Protector Bots tend to do single large heals on an infrequent basis. The heals are great if one bot is taking occasional heavy hits, but not so great if the damage is frequent or is being spread out across all your bots.

Thermal does NOT do everything Sonic does. Sonic offers more resistance (therm doesn't have the big bubble buff), and Liquefy is simply epic.

Oh and beasts actually have close to 25% resist, not 15%. You can get them up to 80% with Sonic, so long as you have the resist unique. With thermal, I suspect around 62%. Beasts have their own heal built in, and Fortify Pack helps them regenerate what health they do lose.

Beasts would be my fourth choice of /Sonic. My first three would be Bots, Demons, or Undead. Not necessarily in that order.

Or well, they would have been, but I don't want Disruption Field to go to waste in Single Player so Bots is out. The main trouble I see with beasts is they only have 3 damage resistance types (except the Dire Wolf, which has 4). Also I'm just not familiar with them yet. It's a risky move at this point.

I like the sound of their self heals. Also I think sometimes I could skip the tier 1 pet to make them more manageable (since 2 of the tier one's don't self heal.)


While we're on this topic, I've been wondering: Does Fortify pack affect you the MM also, or just your pets?

I have a 50 Robot/Sonic Mastermind on Justice and have been generally pleased with his performance. See previous thread.

Disruption Field will not get much use unless you are fighting opponents with a strong preference for melee combat. However, if you find that you really require more debuff on a target than Sonic Siphon can provide, you can always tell your pet to go stand right on top of the target.

Aid Other is problematic because it has a very short range and you must be stationary when using it. Repair is a far more powerful tool if you can spare the slot for it.

When I'm soloing, I let my pets handle their own repairs and they generally keep up pretty well. I try to save Repair for my Protector Bots. Since they don't heal themselves, Protector Bots have to wait twice as long for a heal, which may be too long. Protector Bots can often use a shot of endurance too. On teams, it's usually the Assault Bot that gets into trouble and needs a timely Repair to keep it from being dragged down.

While it's true that Repair is far more potent, it is also far less versatile. If you're on a team, Repair is only good for your robots, and only if you're getting attacked. Aid Other can be used on teammates in addition to your goons, and its interruptibility shouldn't be too much of an issue, since enemies should mostly be swinging at your goons and not you.

But I would suggest Thermal over Sonic, anyway, which renders this mostly irrelevant. It's true that Sonic will offer more resist, but I don't think the extra mitigation provided by the big bubble is as much as the extra mitigation provided by being able to patch your bleeding goons back together. (How does Cauterize work on robots, anyway? Spot welding?)

It's also true that Sonic has more -resist in the form of Disruption Field and Sonic Siphon, and the very nice Liquefy, but Disruption Field is horribly expensive, and Liquefy's recharge is entirely too long for what it does. On top of that, Disruption Field requires, as has been noted, the person wearing it to actually get in there and mix it up in melee range, which I feel does not go with robotics very well. On top of that, Sonic has two major stinker powers in the form of Sonic Cage (which may stop sucking if all cage powers get the kind of love Dimension Shift did) and Sonic Repulsion, and the niche but largely redundant Clarity.

Sonic does have the advantage over Thermal in that you have a mez protection power that directly benefits you, but I think that's about all Sonic has over Thermal these days.