Carnifax

For an Ice controller (actually most of them) the AoE Hold is your least important / panic button AoE control. Dropping Ice Patch is your 1st move. Although letting the meleers eat the alpha is fine as you do. That's what those brainless slabs of gristle are for. In fact letting them cosy up for a heartbeat or two is almost always better. Let them get all close in and snuggly. THEN AoE Control time. The meleers will probably survive. Don't fall into the noob trap of spamming your AoE Immob immediately and then wondering why the bad men shot you and why the Willpower Tank is sobbing gently to himself.

I'm guessing if animations are a draw then Street Justice hands down. Fire Melee is old school : elemental swords + vague hand gestures. Street Justice is newer and like DP and Staff got proper animation tlc as part of development.

Ice is possibly the Controller set most calling out for a bit of a revamp. That's not to say it can't be fun but Ice has a lot of "soft control" and lacks the "main AoE hard mez" things like Fire (Flashfire), Plant (Seeds), Gravity (Wormhole) and Dark (Heart of Darkness + Fearsome Stare) have. And that's not mentioning Earth, which has silly amounts of AoE control at the cost of damage (hell it's "Fall down" patch has the side effect of debuffing the enemies ToHit so even if they do get a shot off it's more likely to miss). Ice you get Ice Patch (which is great but things are going to get shots off), Shiver (AoE slow which everyone rightfully skips) and Arctic (sporadic confuses + Run-aways in a PBAoE aura, so it's risky). In many ways it reminds me of Elec Control where it's not "total aoe lockdown" but more "lots of different soft controls causing chaos". You really want to know how to leverage it while also staying alive. I think if I was going to pick one Control set for someone new to controllers I'd probably recommend Dark control. Good spread of controls, decent pets (Barkley lives up to his name though), nice secondary effect. No really weird powers. One way I handle AoE controls when levelling is frankenslotting Acc/[Mez]/Recharge IOs. For AoE holds you can easily slot 3 of these reasonably cheaply pre-sets. Top off with common IOs / SOs. *Edit, just to add : Don't forget Ices AoE Hold is actually PBAoE. In other words if you're standing a way back and triggering it it's likely you're hitting nothing. I always forget this 1st time when I take my Ice/Traps out for a spin.

Polar Lights most of the time. Because they aren't giant, noisy annoyances. If I wanted those I'd play Demons. My DP/Kin and my Plant/Nature both use these. Carni has Phantoms because she's Illusion and they fit her theme of "summoned spirits". My Time/Sonic Troll DJ went with buff romans because he likes buff romans. Although after passing through Pocket D and seeing the dancing carnies I think I'll switch him up to Carnies instead (he also likes the buff ladies). Thugs / Traps and Ice / Traps (I went through a Traps phase) are both planning Drones to fit the theme. My Bio/Spines DID go with Pantheon because, like him, they look like giant sea invertebrates. Until we get Chicken lore pets my Fire/Claws tank defaulted to Bromans as well just for the lack of annoyance + decent single target DPS.

Not a clue. I don't really bother with incarnates, I feel they unbalance the game. I strongly dislike the fact they exist in all content at 50.

War Mace is fun. Mace/Rad is chonky.

If Mez is really bothering you go down the Sorcery route for Rune of Protection. Never felt the need personally on any Blaster but you may. If you can't live without Mez prot Sentinels and Forts both cover "Mez prot with ranged". As do Dominators to some extent too. There are tradeoffs (to avoid Tankmaging) but all 3 ATs give some combination of ranged (and some melee if you want) and Mez prot.

I think they mean that Elecs ranged single target damage isn't great and since you're a hover blaster shoring it up with melees from the secondary isn't an option.

What Hyperstrike says is totally true as well. Not only is building Resists building to your strengths but also as you approach 90% each point of extra resist becomes more valuable. For example my Rad was at 80% smashing/lethal resists. I respecced them and used Bombardment sets and doctored wounds and preventitive med pairs to eke out 10% more. So where before if someone hit me for 1000 damage I'd take 200. Now I take 100. In other words I doubled how much smashing / lethal damage I can take, all by slotting 2 pairs of doctored wounds and 2 pairs of preventative and replacing my Positrons Blasts with Bombardments. Def works the same, as you approach 45% a 1% increase becomes very valuable. The difference is of course that one Ring Mistress can strip that right back down on you, or a lucky gun shot can do the same, because you've no DDR. One shot can fall you back from being hit 1 time in 10 or 20 to being hit half the time. Since high resistance always gives you high resist debuff resistance the same thing won't happen on a high Res build.

6. You want either 3 or 6 Artillery / Thunderstrikes for the Ranged Def bonuses. The bonus at 6 is more than at 3, so 1 power 6 slotted is better than 2 3 slotted.

This is why I always also rename some random placeholder character after I've transferred the original. Keeps the name "safe" for you while you're out visiting other shards.

No, thank you. Now respeccing my lingering Brute to this new build 🙂

I revamped my Mace / Rad build (so thank you for that. got me +10% s/l resists to the cap) and then palette swapped Mace to Stone to give this. Not sure you actually want Hurl Boulder 6 slotted like that but adjust as you see fit. Obviously if you wanted to go "full bore" slotting some Winters in would give you better s/l defense, better Fire/Cold resists and (probably more importantly) decent -Recharge resistence.

Elec/Poison/Stone is surprisingly fun as well. Lots of layers of soft-ish control and likes being in close debuffing and draining stuff while you drop Poison Traps and smack them with Seismic / Fissure. (Plant/Storm is immense fun. My favourite controller)

Honestly I've never been good with "Purpled out mega builds". It's just not in my wheelhouse to do them. I'm sure there must be proper "there was no budget" builds for Water out there but I tend to always build things way more modestly. I mean the PvP IO Heal set in Temporal Healing gives you a tiny % extra while costing LOTS more than Doctored Wounds. And you could purple out Water Jet. I would like to squeeze Forced Feedbacks in there as they can be very effective in improving recharge in bursts (my DP/Kin and Plant/Stormie both do this).

My hover-blaster is a Water / Temporal / Cold (head canoned as "Time Blast / Temporal" as water has a 'wibby-wobbly-timey-wimey' feel to it). Reasonably cheap too with 1 purple, no Winters and 3 PvP IOs (two are procs which actually looking at it again could be replaced by Shield Breaker or Impeded Swiftness procs for much less Inf). Capped ranged def, decent s/l def and the combo of Temporal Healings + Dehydrate + Hoarfrost makes you reasonably tough. Could do with more recharge but like I said I made them on the cheap(ish).

Yup, they do indeed. I'm just selfish 🙂

2 of them, you want to max the recharge out on this for the stacking DDR. Grant Covers DDR isn't enhancable so I go with 1 LOTG.

Frost breath on cast. Ice Storm is a patch power, so once every 10 seconds starting at 0. However because it is a patch the calculated proc rate would be poor (patches use "10 seconds" both for the check time and the recharge time for figuring out the proc % chance)

Earth is fab for "I like to be close up" controllers. So there's some synergy there between Earths attacks and Natures PBAOE toggles. Nature HATES being mezzed so Psi is another option. Edit : Here's proc-heavy Plant / Nature / Stone version. Getting a Forced Feedback into Fissure will make Nature happy too 🙂 Scorp would be too except for the stupid redraw on the attacks. If you can handle that it's not a bad option (Disruptor blast needs a KB2KD but can also take Forced Feedback).

I do "macros row 1, actual power above it in row 2" for this, it's the best I can manage. It does mean twice the icons (or thrice in the case of my Ice/Fire blaster because Row 1 uses "powexeclocation self" to turn things into PBAOEs and "powexeclocation target" in Row 3 for "I is scared of that spawn and want to soften them with Blizzard before jumping in")

You want Creepers frankenslotted. 2-3 IOs which boost Recharge, Damage and Acc and 3-4 damage procs. 3 of those procs should be from Ranged AOE Damage (Targeted AoE Damage). 4th should be the Immob one if you're using it. Nature likes recharge generally, so Haste is very good for it. Getting Overgrowth perma is difficult. Still nothing wrong with getting up as much as possible. Epic is up to you. I like Ice as it's vaguely thematic, has Def armour and Ice Storm will do some containment damage. Hibernate is nice as "combat rest" / panic button. Here's my Plant/Storm reworked to Nature instead. Rebirth, Entangling Aura, Spore Cloud and Lifegiving Spores are potentially optional (in that order, Rebirth is well skippable. Entangling & Spore Cloud really depends on how often you find yourself in close. Lifegiving is very useful in prolonged fights).

It's not just the extra damage Fire does, it's the quick animations. Ice is similarly quick but doesn't get the DoTs and is lacking Fireball and a snipe. Fire Melee also does extra DoT damage but the animations aren't quicker than other sets, so Fire Melee isn't generally counted as "top tier" as Fire blast is.

I'm half-plotting an Earth/Fire. Gotta be better than Dark/MA

I've never gutted an alt either but I'm conscious how much a pair of underwhelming domis cost to Io out and am considering it. Strongly.