Carnifax

AoE is good. Likes to be in melee. Can't compete with Fire or Ice in single (like most sets) but it's great fun.

I'd choose Domi Assault sets over pure melee but yes! I'd also make the most boring-yet-useful Pool Powerset : Slots. Every choice just gives you 2 or 3 extra enhancement slots to freely use elsewhere. If possible somehow the later ones would even allow you to go over 6 slots to a power.

It's been like that for days. I'd assumed everyone knew or something.

Procs are awful in Hotfeet. Really not worth it (trust me, I checked). Each slot is giving ~2.5 damage per second. That's not very much. Better off either slotting with Ice Mistrals or just a few Acc & Ends and spending the slots somewhere else.

A Dark / Dark controller will be laying on -Resists and -Regens so they definitely pull their weight on TFs and vs AVs. Plus pet damage from the doggie & haunts. And keeping the bugger in one place. I basically kept Rommie on his back (steady) yesterday on an ITF with my Fire / Marine. And was donating damage via the Imps ("free" damage with regards to animation times), +dam to the whole team and -resist on Rommie. Here's a side by side parse of that run vs a Dual Pistols / Kin corruptor I ran earlier this week. Definitely held my own.

Any Level 50 8 man team you could remove 2-3 of any AT (even the Tank) and happily still buzz through +4x8 without noticing they were AFK. That's just the limits of the game. Unless you're doing a 4 Star of some sort of course. Most folk run "brittle" Def builds. So while generally they'll be fine they'll quickly fall apart if Def Debuffs start coming in. -ToHit helps a lot there. As does the -Dam from Darkest Night and Fluffy. More importantly Fade is one of the few +Def powers which grants DDR (Defense Debuff Resists). The only Tank / Scrapper sets who won't LOVE extra DDR is Super Reflexes (cos they tend to cap naturally anyway). But they'll love your Heals instead. Blasters will like your immobs, slows and knockdowns, especially any patch based ones. AVs have a tendency to go running for example. I basically kept Rommie in one spot by the door and perma knocked down on a Fire / Marine last night (74 times according to parsing my logs). And then of course you debuff the hell out of them, knowing they can't escape your Tar Patch and you've floored their regen.

Binman is already taken I'm afraid (Savage / Shield stalker I made a few years back)

I think this would be my build if I was going Fire/Kin (from combining my Fire/Marine and DP/Kin). Not quite at s/l cap, although ingame it might be. That's mostly because I took Combat TP over Combat Leaping. It's pretty cheap though (relatively) This totally leans into my love of being in close with both the Fire/Marine and DP/Kin, hence Cross Punch instead of Arcane (netting some recharge, acc and s/l/m defense as set bonuses). I'd personally take Fire Cage over Cages but left Cages in here. Fully Fulcrumed and with Containment Seimic does 1022 damage, which is hilarious. Shame to miss RoP and/or Fold Space but can't make it all fit. _[Controller] (Fire Control - Kinetics).mbd

Shifting Tides slotted up for damage on an team will do ~twice the damage of Hotfeet. And apply buffs / debuffs as well. Slot it for Acc, Dam & End reduction. Chance for Build Up seems to go off a lot on it too, so lob that in there. Note it's hard for me to quantify the Chance to Build-up because it doesn't seem to be logged, but I've seen my damage raised by it a fair amount viewing Combat Attribs. As many procs as possible. Forced Feedback is also great in here. Brine and Soothing Wave look overslotted to me. I literally just have an Acc in Brine and 2 +5 Heal IOs in Soothing. That frees up slots. It'd be nice to have max -HP in Brine for AVs (although I haven't checked how much in numbers that affects an AV) but I just didn't have the space. Whitecap is my main "-Resist" power. Brine is just occasional if a Boss is being tough or an EB/AV is about. I'd definitely remove slots from them to get into Whitecap and Shifting Tides. This is my slotting for them (Just Acc, Dam and End in Shifting, whatever IOs you like + the Chance for Build-up). I also checked Panacea in Barrier Reef vs Health and in terms of applying the End to me Health seemed the better option overall. Here's a LGTF parse I ran on Thursday, green areas are the procs in Whitecap. It adds up!

On my Fire / Nature I slotted the End one into Blaze (not blazing bolt, the non-snipe). So 3 Scourging including the proc and 3 of some other set (Thunderstrike in my case cso it's cheap and cheerful). Not with any more logic than "Well I use this is my attack chain a lot, especially against AVs where the fight might be prolonged and I'll need the End". No idea if it's amazing although a quick parse of a Hami raid I did yesterday with him suggests it's surprisingly good. This is probably skewed towards "best scenario" though since you spend a lot of time single-target blasting on Hami. So this is from 271 Blazes, apparently. But remember it's a PBAoE so no idea how many folk that was shared with (I could probably fix Activations in the parser for it but it's an edge case and I'm not arsed). Damage one is in Fireball because that makes sense.

Honestly I've never used it. From reading CoD (https://cod.uberguy.net/html/entity.html?entity=pets_iceelemental) I can see it's a melee pet, and you'll be able to make it tough as nails with FF so I could see some worth as a tough Tank & extra damage. It's essentially "free" damage in terms of animation times once you have them out, they'll just attack things for you (but you have no control on what they attack). The most important thing is that it has a loooooong recharge so if you do want it you really want to slot it up to have it around as much as possible and as damaging as possible. Plus good set bonuses. I have Epic pets on a few chars. They tend to be on chars with a lot of Global recharge to make them perma (Illusion / Dark controller with the spider from Mace Mastery and a Time / Sonic / Soul Defender who has silly amounts of recharge from Chrono Shift & set bonuses so has a perma Fortuna). I do have the Mu pet on a Grav / Trick Arrow, not quite perma but still useful. Definitely not required or build defining but if you like it keep it. It'll be pretty unkillable with Forcefields buffing it.

Apex finale can be a but annoying for melee loving characters. Blue patches will burn you down quickly. Also you need to tell Controllers not to immob her (unlike pretty much every other AV where Immob = good). My Fire / Marine quite enjoyed the ITF I was on during the week. KB still works fairly well (and is downright broken for the Rommie fight once he rezzes. Also really good vs the Lobster Khelds).

One thing I'd suggest is getting Forced Feedbacks into Force Bomb and Electron Haze. You'll constantly be buffing yourself with little chunks of 100% recharge when lobbing them out. Really handy for getting your nuke back up.

Here's mine, pretty much along the same lines as yours and fairly cheap. I went for S/L/Ranged Def rather than resists but you might get some ideas from it. One thing I always recommend, split Scourging Blast 3 and 3 across 2 powers to get the 10% recharge twice. Absolutely fantastic on Tinplexs, they're my #1 for them. Corruptor - Fire - Nature - RoP.mbd

Yep. All my "secondary" holds I proc to the gills. For example I don't think I've ever slotted Trick Arrow > Ice Arrow for holds across the 3? 4? I have. It's a debuff which happens to take lots of procs from my PoV. On my Trick Arrow / Elec Blast Melee Defender (great fun, would recommend) I think the proc chances weren't as fantastic in Tesla Cage, because it can chain but haven't checked it recently and my build has it somewhat procced up still For Seismic it's expensive in terms of End but worth it. 550+ damage per hit and a Mag 4 hold (even if it's short) is fantastic. For example my proc happy Ice / Traps controller has a focused / I-want-the-set-bonuses single target hold but poison trap, fissure and Seismic are procced up.