So I'm playing a level 23 Gadget heavy character right now with munitions bots and support drones. I'm thinking of getting resurrection serum with the adv. to raise zombies in the next few levels as well. I'm Still not 100% sure on that one.

The main question I've got though is which of these two passives would be the best to take? I've been playing around with training dummies and have found that I get about 10% more pet damage with Majesty and about 10% more self damage with Ebon Destruction. Also there's all of the other benefits of Majesty boosting other stats and effecting healing on the drones. So is it worth skipping over that extra damage boost to myself in order to beef up pets and other stats?

I'm torn because I use heavy hitting abilities like orbital cannon and particle mine. So a 10% damage loss for me is about 130-ish damage off of my cannon vs a 2-3 damage per shot increase on my bots. Or if I get more pets down the line, would it be better to just ignore the personal damage loss and get the pets hitting as hard as possible.

I also have the 3rd option of getting medical nanites. I wasn't all that impressed with the healing from it on the testing I did, but maybe I'm just not high enough yet to really see the impact. Since a dead pet does 0 damage, maybe this is the best way to go?

Anyway, any advice would be fantastic!

Scrap the Medical Nanites. It's a trashy passive that only Archetype pre-builts use (with a few rare player exceptions). Every time your Medical Nanites heals ANY target, you can healing based aggro (which is a huge aggro gain in the CO system). Multiply this across a 5 man party or a bunch of pets and you're looking at permanent default aggro against the healer. As if that isn't bad enough, the Nanites don't even heal a spectacular amount.

If you want some kind of defensive passive, take Aura of Radiant Protection. The damage reduction value (for both personal and group use) will easily outweight the benefits of Medical Nanites. Once you can take Inertial Dampening Field (which is usually at 26th), then the value of AoRP becomes even more clear when compared to Medical Nanites. (For reference, AoRP doesn't gain aggro since damage prevention is aggro free in the CO system.)

Having said that, it's really a personal style question about whether to take a defensive Support Passive or an offensive Support Passive. I'll leave that decision up to you.

Powers are often evaluated in very strong terms on the forums, with one or two types of a given power routinely held well above the rest, and one or two getting dismissed in post after post. My own experience has been that most powers are adequate for their function, even and including many of the powers that are routinely dismissed as "utter crap" or "trash" or "worthless" or <insert derisive and derogatory comment here> on the forums.

How does that apply here? I have a counter-factual in the case of Medical Nanites, with a character at level 26 who is using that passive, with 5 to 8 pets out at once on a routine basis (support drones, munitions bots, and attack toys), while also doing damage with orbital cannon + the advantage. My character does get some aggro, but so do the pets. On that note, I often let the munitions bots handle alpha from over 50 feet away, in turret form, while the attack toy and its replicants run into battle, so that even with Orbital Cannon working its way through mobs, the pets tend to have aggro for at least a little while.

I'd layer in other methods of healing / damage reduction, such as inertial dampening field, bionic shielding, and so on, plus take an active defense (unbreakable, for the character in question); I wouldn't settle for just Medical Nanites. But, I wouldn't settle for "just" the passive when choosing any other passive, either, and Medical Nanites works OK for its intended function, in my experience.

I'd second the opinion about taking either AoRP or AoPM. Just make sure you superstat presence to get the full benefit for pets too. If you are terribly worried about your personal damage, then take AoPM and superstat PRE/STR and pick some way to build up and maintain enrage stacks. Evasive maneuvers + sleight of mind is one good option for dropping aggro from yourself to pets.

If a significant portion of your damage is from pets, AoPM is probably the best passive. Instead of buffing stats, pets from powers (item pets are not affected) get a % buff to health and damage. Additionally, the damage buff scaled with +dmg effects like Enrage last I checked. AoED provides about the same damage buff as AoPM (pets-wise) but not the health buff.

On the defensive side is AoRP or Medical Nanites. Personally, I see Medical Nanites as a really crappy regen for self and an even worse regen for your team that doesn't ramp up like the Regeneration passive. I *highly* recommend AoRP if you decide to be more defensive.

Inertial Dampening Field is recommended for any pet build, but works best with AoRP.

If you're really focused on pets, it's hard to go past AoRP + IDF.

Thanks a bunch for all the replies. I think i'll be going with AoPM. If that doesn't work out so hot, I'll drop back to the AoRP + IDF setup. Again, really appreciate the info!

Just a word of advice: don't get too intimate with AoPM.

The way this passive can make you a superhero to other superhero toons, it takes a lot of effort to push away the temptation to retcon every single one of your characters to AoPM.

With some fiddling/experimenting around with gears/stats, you will quickly notice how this passive makes you pay the "price" of being squishy with no specific protection, and yet the "prize" of having all stats pushed up to nearly SS levels more than compensates your weakness and pushes your character off the charts to make every single one of your characters not using AoPM become pale and faint in comparison.

With AoPM you will boost the performance of your two main SS stats to provide an extra 10%-ish damage output, it will also push your third and fourth choice of stats to over the 200 mark, and other stats within 100~160 range.

In Sentinel mode I can consistently outdamage my other guardian mode toons, have as much health, have unlimited energy, have shorter recharge time reduction and larger e-cost reduction than most other toons (with the exception of SS INT toons), larger e-pool, faster e-generation, a respectable crit chance despite not being a SS DEX toon, respectable crit severity despite not a SS EGO toon, can heal a lot more than most other toons (with the exception of SS PRE toons), and well... basically do everything at least as well as others or better.

The only weakness is against mega-ouchy spike damage which some lair bosses can dish out, but in most cases such damage is just as ouchy for most defensive passives anyway. With a bit of exaggeration, AoPM pushes your toon from "superhuman" to "demi-god" levels of performance, when built right.

In turn, falling for this passive basically makes all other building options 'just not fun', and homogenizes your preference.

Does AoRP work like Invulnerability? As far as blocking a base % of each attack% Never used it, just askin.

It works like Defiance but without the stacking, it's just damage resistance.