Clankety Clank
by Captain Spud

I almost deleted my Bots/Traps MM, a diminutive 8-year-old Freakshow mechanic named t3h n00bz0rz, at level 18. He was So. Freaking. Boring. To play. See mob, hit "kill" button. Pause. Mob fall down? Target new mob. Kill button! Pause.

*retching noises*

Playing a Mastermind in the pre-20s stage is as close to running on autopilot as you'll ever come in City of Heroes. I was bored out of my skull and only played the character because my main villain was stalled at 40, waiting for I7 to arrive. The traps secondary seemed really pointless-- laying down acid mortars and poison traps and all that junk sped up kills by maybe 10%, in exchange for five or six times as much work. Hardly worth the effort.

Fast forward four or five levels. I don't know exactly what it was, whether it was new powers, or new slots, or SOs, but my MM went from a snoozer to being more fun than any other character I had going. He's now in his low 40s, and I'm still having a blast with him. He rips AVs apart with his high damage and powerful debuffs, and has yet to encounter an EB he can't solo (eventually... :) ). Seeing how there still hasn't been a comprehensive Bots/Traps guide written, I figured I'd throw one together to educate the curious masses.

Off we go!

Inherent Powers

Supremacy

Supremacy is a very simple power-- if you're within about 15-20 feet of your bots, they're in Supremacy range. Any pet within Supremacy range gets a bonus of 25% to damage and 15% to accuracy. Now, for Masterminds with a melee-oriented primary, such as Ninjas and Zombies, this can be a pain to maintain-- you're encouraged to stay with your goons, but staying that close to the swirling melee is a bad idea for the smallest HP class in the game. However, for ranged guys, this is just free extra damage. You want to be at range, they want to be at range, everybody's happy.

Bodyguard

Bodyguard is a new addition to I7. It's a little complicated. The way you turn it on is to have one or more bots on Follow orders, Defensive tactics, and within Supremacy range. Once it's on, any affected bots will share damage you yourself take.

The damage split is basic algebra: you take 2 parts, each Bodyguard takes 1 part. With one bodyguard, if you get hit with an attack for 60 damage, you'll take 40, and the bodyguard will take 20. With four bodyguards, you'll take 20, and each bot will take 10. 60 points is always going to be inflicted, but the more bodyguards you have active, the smaller the dent it makes on each person.

The limitation of Bodyguard comes from AoE powers. Let's say you have those same 4 bodyguards, but get hit with a 60-damage AoE. Your hit will be split apart for the same 20-10-10-10-10 thing as before. But then, on top of it, your bots will take ANOTHER 60 damage. So while you've saved yourself some damage, you've wrecked your bots. AoEs generally tend to be weaker than direct attacks, so you can take those hits better than your bots. If you expect AoEs, DO NOT use Bodyguard.

I spent a couple hours trying to figure out ways to use this power, and my conclusion is that it's basically useless in PvE. IN THEORY, you can pull all your bots in on you as a shield, and then YOU fire the opening volley of an attack, so that you take the aggro. You'll get shot, your bots will share some damage, and then they'll kill what killed you. In practice, though, the rather large DEF bonus you get from Bots/Traps means that you often stand there while they miss, miss, miss, miss their shots. Until the enemy successfully hits you, your bots will stand around like lumps. So, this is a bad setup for Bots/Traps.

It DOES have some uses in PvP. Basically, you set up your bots in Bodyguard and wait for Stalkers to run at you. A Stalker hitting a Bodyguarded MM will do less than half damage, at which point your bots and traps will rip him apart. Another option is to take Challenge and force your PvP enemies to target you for the split damage. Both strategies work, though they're a little boring and passive if you ask me. And as always, anybody with AoEs or the common sense to target your bots first will still wreck you.

So, in summary: You'll never use Bodyguard.

Primary Power Set: Robotics

Battle Drones – Level 1
Summon Battle Drones (1 to 3 Minion pets)

Your meat and potatoes. You get one bot at level 1, two at level 6, and three at 18. The drones start off with two little laser blasts; Equip gives them a strong laser blast, and Upgrade gives them a rapid fire AoE. They're extremely mez resistant, and have some resistance to smashing, lethal, and psy damage. Take these from level 1.

Suggested Slotting: 3 Accuracy, 3 Damage

Pulse Rifle Blast – Level 1
Ranged (moderate Energy)

I find I only really need one direct attack, and even then, it's more to give me something to do than to actually kill things. I took the heavier Burst because it does some Knockback... but really, take whichever you like. Their damage output over time is pretty much the same. Only slot it once your other powers are taken care of-- I didn't slot my blast until level 39.

Suggested Slotting: 2 Accuracy, 3 Damage

Pulse Rifle Burst – Level 2
Ranged (moderate Energy), Knockback

Moving on...

Suggested Slotting: 2 Accuracy, 3 Damage

Equip Robot – Level 6
Ranged (Buff pets)

This power gives your goons a new attack, and gives your Protectors the ability to heal your other goons. Mandatory.

Suggested Slotting: 1 Recharge

Photon Grenade – Level 8
Ranged AoE (minor Energy), Disorient (30% chance, mag 2)

I never took this, but the Protector drones pick it up later on. It seems decent-- good for a couple stuns and some AoE damage. I may take it eventually.

Suggested Slotting: Not sure. Accuracy? Stun duration? Recharge?

Protector Bots – Level 12
Summon Protector Bots (1-2 Lieutenant pets)

Your Lieutenant pet, and yet another mandatory power. You get one at level 12 and a second at 24. They have decent attack power, but their primary use is their defenses. They cast a special Bubble (combination of Insulation and Deflection bubble-- Defense against all but Psy) on you, your Henchmen, and other players' henchmen, though not other players. When Equipped, they gain the ability to heal; Protector heals are fairly random and infrequent, but they're often enough to be noticeable. At 32, with the Upgrade buff, they gain Seeker drones and Photon grenades-- AoE damage and stuns. At this point you'll notice them burning through their Endurance pretty often, so give them a rest between fights when they run dry.

Suggested Slotting: 3 Defense Buff, 2 Accuracy, 1 Damage

Repair– Level 18
Ranged Heal

Repair is a full heal of any bot, and uninterruptable. That said, I still went with Aid Other instead. Why? Well, Aid Other recharges faster (much, MUCH faster), and more importantly, can heal other players instead of just your goons.

Repair is handy in tough boss fights where you're struggling to keep your bots alive, but the massive recharge makes it pretty useless as a general-use power. I leave it up to you if you want to take it just for boss fights.

Suggested Slotting: 3 Recharge

Assault Bot – Level 26
Summon Assault Bot (1 Boss pet)

Your tank. The Assault bot can take a serious beating, and has some really nasty attacks as well. Equip gives him a Flamethrower, and Upgrade gives him rockets. He's your damage absorber AND your damage dealer. Keep him healed and ready to rock.

Suggested Slotting: 2 Accuracy, 3 Damage. I gave him 1 Knockback just for giggles... the sixth slot is optional.

Upgrade Robot – Level 32
Ranged (Buff pets)

Yummy. Upgrade is like Equip, giving your bots more powers. Specifically, it gives them AoE powers. Once you hit 32, your bots become an AoE wrecking crew-- a mob of yellow minions will wither in like five seconds.

Suggested Slotting: 3 Recharge. I also slotted 3 EndRedux so that I could Summon, Equip, and Upgrade all six bots in one burst without resting. If you're more patient than me, you can skip the blues.

Secondary Power Set: Traps

Web Grenade – Level 1
Ranged Immobilize (100% chance, mag 2)

You have to take it. It's handy for grounding annoying fliers, and as a Slow debuff on bosses. Nothing fantastic, but not useless like some starting powers.

Suggested Slotting: 1 Accuracy

Caltrops– Level 2
Drop patch (Slow, -Jump)

Your options at level 4 are between Caltrops and Triage Beacon. I've had Triage for most of my career, and hated it. So in my I7 Freespec, I dropped Triage and picked up Caltrops. It's.... somewhat better. The primary use for it is in keeping targets in range of your static traps (Acid Mortar, poison mines), and stopping them from running in to melee your guys. Unfortunately, your guys do so much knockback, they tend to just blow the target straight off the 'Trops.

It's a great PvP power, but the patch is just too small to be effective in PvE.

Suggested Slotting: 2 Recharge

Triage Beacon – Level 4
Drop beacon (AoE +Regen)

Ugh. If only there was another option at 4. The Triage Beacon is absolutely useless-- the regen bonus is roughly the same as unslotted Health. Even with three heal SOs it's barely noticeable.

Your choice at 4 is between Triage and Caltrops. Both are pretty useless. In the race between a bad slow and a bad heal, I'll take the bad heal. I won't USE it, but I'll take it.

Suggested Slotting: Personally I'd go with "nothing". If you must slot it, 3 heals and 1+ recharges.

Acid Mortar – Level 10
Summon Acid Mortar - Ranged DoT (minor Toxic), -Def, -Res

Lots of people talk about how they set this down constantly for all mobs, but I don't see it being that helpful for minions. Where it shines is in Boss, Elite Boss, and AV fights, where the relatively large -Def and -Res components will speed up the kill quite a bit. Definitely take it, but it's up to you how often you want to use it.

Suggested Slotting: 3 Recharge

Force Field Generator – Level 16
Summon Force Field Generator - AoE +Def, +Res (status)

Absolutely fantastic. It's the Dispersion Bubble power from Force Field, except it doesn't cost you any endurance to run. Sure, it can in theory be killed, but it rarely happens, and if it does you just drop another one. The bubble gives you a beefy +Def (All) bonus, and also gives you Mag 3 resistance to most mezzes (Hold, Sleep, Stun, etc), which is effectively "immune to common mezzes". Definitely take this at 16, it's arguably the best Traps power.

Suggested Slotting: 3 Defense Buff

Poison Trap – Level 20
Drop Poison Trap - DoT (minor Toxic), Hold (unresistable), -Regen

Another handy power. It gives a substantial -Regen debuff, useful for boss fights and almost mandatory for AV fights, and also gives a very brief, but unresistable, small-radius AoE Hold. Fully slotted with Holds it only lasts maybe eight seconds, but every little bit counts.

Suggested Slotting: 1 Recharge, 3 Hold Duration

Seeker Drones – Level 28
Summon Seekers - AoE (Energy, minor), Disorient (30% chance, mag 2), -Acc, -Dam

I originally hated Seeker Drones. You summon them, and they then follow you around, waiting for you to be attacked. When an enemy is near, they Kamikaze onto the target, doing some damage, possibly causing a stun, and giving a -Acc and -Damage debuff. Sounds great, but they have a pretty small aggro range, and simply weren't exploding often enough to matter.

It took me a while to realize I had been using them wrong. Instead of treating them as a normal summon, use them as an attack. They have a pretty decent range (JUST farther than standard aggro range... barely), so summon them directly on top of a spawn as your combat opener. The Drones will become the first target of the entire spawn, letting you then send in your bots without fear of a painful Alpha strike. As an added bonus, summoning them on top of a mob ensures that they'll explode where you want them to, putting that debuff on targets that actually matter.

Suggested Slotting: 2 AccDeBuff, 1 Range

Trip Mine – Level 35
Drop Mine - AoE (extreme Fire), Knockback

A soloing tool-- PLEASE don't be that annoying jerk who stops the party before every fight to lay thirty mines. You can stack about 10-15 mines before they start to explode, which is enough to put a serious dent in a boss. More commonly, you'll lay down 2 or 3, which is enough to kill a white or yellow minion. They're just handy for evening the odds against large numbers of bad guys. Don't bother with them against an AV-- I laid down over 20 against Johnny Sonata (I was Speed Boosted) and they didn't even scratch him.

Suggested Slotting: 3 Damage, 2 Accuracy, 1 Recharge

Detonator– Level 38
Ranged (nuke pet) - Extreme Fire

Detonator fills in for your nuke. You target a henchman and click Detonator, and that minion will kamikaze itself against the nearest enemy for decent damage. Thing is, you won't want to do this-- once you've Equipped and Upgraded and bubbled a bot, you've got enough of a time investment in it that you won't want to waste it on a crappy nuke.

Suggested Slotting: 1 Recharge? No idea actually. Just don't take the power and you won't have to worry about slotting. :)

Pool Powers

Here’s a rundown of the various pools, concentrating on the reasons most people take them.

Fitness: I don't have Stamina, and I do just fine. Laying down my usual array of Traps powers and firing off heals, I'll usually burn out my Endurance every five minutes or so. Once I do, I just spend one fight not doing anything and I'm back to full.

Speed: I took Hasten in a recent respec. It has two main uses-- speeding up summoning, and helping me spam out mines faster when I want to trap an EB. And in both those areas, it performs as expected. Definitely not required, but nice to have.

Medicine: Aid Other is much more useful than Repair. Aid Self is just gravy.

Leaping: You don't need the status protection from the toggles, since you'll always have a Bubble following you around.

Flight: Using Group Fly looks really neat with the bot swarm (they have boot jets! :D), but it's not super practical. Take it if you like.

Leadership: Definitely useful. Assault and Tactics are awesome... Maneuvers is kinda lame. I had Vengeance for a while, but as I tend to solo mostly and it can't target pets, only players, I didn't use it much. Still, if you do group a lot, the Vengeance buff is pretty enormous. I'll be taking it at 49 to help with Recluse Strike Force runs.

Concealment: Ehh. I can't think of any reason to take this unless it fits your concept.

Teleportation: My travel pool of choice, mostly for concept reasons. You'll need Recall Friend to pull your bots out of map snags (their pathfinding always seems to get them stuck), and TP Foe is great for dropping an LT onto eight or nine Mines.

Fighting: Pointless. You're so squishy anyway, that the defenses afforded by the toggles won't be noticeable. You'll die in six hits instead of five-- not worth your time.

Patron Pools: Meh. The Mastermind pools are all pretty much the same, and all fairly lame. Nothing much of interest unless you really, REALLY want a single-target hold.

Build Overview

Almost the entire Robotics tree is mandatory-- there's just no reason to skip any of the summoning powers. Of the three direct attacks, I'd suggest picking one of the blasts and only taking the other one and the grenades if you have a free power slot.

In the Traps pool, the only thing that's absolutely necessary is the Force Field Generator-- just think of it as your 7th henchman. You also have a powerful "Archvillain Kit" of various debuffs (Web Grenade, Acid Mortar, Poison Trap, and the Seekers) which are very important, giving you the ability to quickly knock down hard targets. The remaining powers (Caltrops, Detonator, Triage Beacon, and Trip Mine) are all completely optional. Take them if they suit your playstyle, otherwise don't worry about them.

The only "mandatory" pool is Leadership.

My Build

Here's how I built t3h n00bz0rz. The slotting column is for any pool powers or anywhere I diverged from my above suggestions. Highlighted levels are speculative-- I'm not there yet.

Tactics

My Mastermind is both the easiest toon I've ever had, and the most complicated. Once you're set up and fighting, it's just a matter of:

• Target Enemy
• "Attack" macro
• Wait for enemy to die
• Repeat

Keep the heals flowing and replace any bots who die; other than that, it's a very low-involvement build.

That said, it's only that easy once you've gone to the enormous pain of building dozens of binds and are utterly familiar with the mechanics of controlling your army. I'll attempt to level the learning curve a bit by sharing my experience with you:

Be Precise: Don't just give your goons a "goto" command near the enemy and let them kill whatever they want. ALWAYS direct their fire. Concentration of fire is the most important thing to remember about running a MM-- an enemy with 1HP hits exactly as hard as an enemy with full health. If you do 95% damage to seven guys, you haven't accomplished a damned thing-- you still have seven guys trying to kill you. Target an enemy, attack, wait until it dies, target something else.

Stay Back, Stay Clustered: Your ideal battle position is to have your robots shooting away from at least ten or fifteen feet away from the enemy, with you standing just behind them. Keeping close to your bots has several advantages. First, the inherent Supremacy ability will significantly up their damage and accuracy when you're near. Second, if you followed my advice and took Aid Other instead of Repair as your main heal, you need to be pretty close to use it. Third, your Force Field Generator always follows you, not your goons, so you need to stay close to them to give them its benefits.

Be Mindful of Aggro: Your bots are generally pretty good about keeping to themselves between fights, but every once in a while one will get overly aggressive and you'll get a whole pile of aggro you didn't want. Save yourself the trouble and add a Heel bind to your keyboard or tray:

/bind f petcom_all follow passive

Using this will become a reflex; every time you finish a mob, hit the Heel command and your goons will go passive. Use this any time you're in a room with multiple spawns, or when you're moving from room to room-- any time your bots might find something shiny they want to kill.

Don't Get Too Bindy: There's a set of MM commands floating around which garnered a lot of attention right when I6 launched. The idea is to have an attack, follow, and goto command for each of your summon types, so that they can be issued individual orders for greater control. In my experience, these binds are useless. There will be times when you'll want to control one single bot to pull or to... um... actually I can't even think of a second reason you'd split your bots' attention. But anyway, my suggestion is to do up all of your binds as petcom_all and then, if you really think you'll need the precise control, have a second bind on a chord key with just plain petcom. So for example:

/bind numpad1 petcom_all attack aggressive
/bind ctrl+numpad1 petcom attack aggressive

So if you really desperately need to attack with just one guy, you just select that one guy and use your normal binds while holding Ctrl. But again, I feel I should stress that in my 40+ levels of playing t3h n00bz0rz, I might've issued a dozen individual commands, most of which were to line my bots up for screenshots. Your bots simply function at their best if treated as one entity.

Binds and Macros You'll Actually Need:

The macro labels and places to bind to are just how I have them, you can of course modify them to your own tastes.

Basic yellow attack macro - This is your basic attack macro. It comes pre-loaded into your tray. Hit it and your bots all attack your target. Easy-peasy.

/bind f petcom_all follow passive - Covered this one above... keep this bound to something within very easy reach, as it's your primary method of stopping your bots from shooting things they should be leaving alone. Turn it on any time you're moving around, or if you're near an un-aggroed squad within your bots' aggro range.

Those are the only commands I use 99% of the time. I have tons of binds for activating powers, but the only other bind for pet orders I use is this:

/bind v "powexec_name Aid Other$$petcom follow passive" - Aid Other has a fairly restrictive range on it, so if you need to heal a bot in a large melee and just can't find the little bugger, spam on this bind-- he'll stop fighting and run toward you, and as soon as he's in range, you'll heal him. Make sure to give the attack command again afterward, or he'll sit around like a lump in passive mode.

Other than that, "Kill my target" and "stop shooting" are the only commands you need to be giving your bots. MM binds give you tons of control over your bots' behaviour, but honestly, you just don't need it.

And that's about all I have to say about that.

If you have any suggestions to improve this guide or if you've spotted an error, please e-mail me to let me know.