Ancillary Pool Attacks

I'm a complete mastermind newb, but I bought Beast Mastery and am having fun so far with my level 27 Beast/FF. I am looking at my future picks and thinking about what to take and was wondering if these powers are considered powerful enough to spend picks and slots on. I haven't settled on any particular ancillary pool because none are particularly thematic.

As a little background I am a scrapper/brute at heart so I'm not good at standing back and watching without contributing some damage. I have taken all of the attacks from my primary as I have read they are useful in building pack mentality. I would prefer to stay hero only instead of switching to villain for the patron pools. I also play strictly solo PvE if it makes a difference.

So are any of the ancillary pool attacks worth taking and if so is one preferable to others?

Thanks in advance.

I don't consider any of the attacks really worth it except for the ones that provide secondary effects. MMs have such a low damage modifier that even the fire blasts do a bit less than 30 damage at level 50.

That said, Chill Mastery is nice. It is the only one with a defense based shield, which should help greatly towards reaching the soft cap on a FF MM. Flash Freeze, though, is worthless, which means you are stuck with taking a single target blast. You also get a nice heal and +max health in Hoarfrost. Hibernate is still a good panic button, but not so much on MMs as other ATs- all your pets will still die, and the instant it goes off everything will kill you. Anyhow, you already have Personal Force Field as a panic button.

Fire gets you a resist shield. Bonfire is great fun, keeps enemies off their feet. You get a self rez, which again is rather useless on an MM. You do get Char though, which is a single target hold.

Field gives you the best resist shield for s/l, Force of Nature, and three attacks that have knockback, making them actually useful.

Charge- you get a resist shield, a single target hold... and EM Pulse, which is an epic PBAoE disorientate. Widely regarded as one of the three best hard controls in the game. The other two being EMP Arrow and Volcanic Gasses. Also you get Thunderstrike, which is a PBAoE damaging (hah) knockdown and disorientate.

So unless you really want that heal and shield, I'd go Charge.

Depending on your playstyle, you might actually be able to get some mileage out of bonfire as well - stuff like /pain with no solid controls can make very good use of it. /ff has some solid positioning stuff already so this may not be applicable to you.

Other than that, what Grim said.

(FYI: The single target blasts in the epics & patrons tend to be worse than your t2 attack and the aoes are generally close to your primary aoe damage wise, but on double the timer - or worse. )

Oh wow, coulda sworn it gave a shield. Huh. Well, good reason to not take Heat- only one with no shield at all.

And yes, I'd recommend Mace if you didn't mind going villain.