Carnifax

It won't be difficult, both Illusion and Dark make things pretty safe overall with Invises, Confuses and -ToHit debuffs all over the place. Dark Affinity basically has good powers everywhere so it's not late blooming (you get excellent powers early and keep getting good things throughout). Early on "Darkest Night" pulling can be very effective for luring things into Tar Patches. What it will be is a bit "feast or famine" as PAs do a lot of your damage. You'll be amazing with PAs up and quite a bit slower without them, especially in terms of AoE. Well placed Confuses can help with that. As your build matures and your PA up/downtime ratio gets better so will your damage.

Howling Twilight. The SFX are so good and it does so many things all at once. Also the new, shortened Dual Pistols nuke, especially slotted up with the "Chance to knockdown" Winter IO. Pew-pew-pew-pew; all fall down.

Yup, this is what I do too and both the common recipes and the selling prices for the results seem reasonably stable. Occasionally some selling points for specific sets seem to drop but generally they perk up again (Kinetic Combats were the last ones I'd noticed, used to be 3-4 million, dropped to 2-3). Farmers are probably one reason, keeping demand up even if supply had also increased.

Not sure about cosmic rays. Seems to be if you transfer maps (Mish complete). Most pets will transfer with you but Spirit Tree has a habit of doing so and forgetting about the immob effect it gets. So it scuttles off after you. Weirdly I've never seen the same happen with Acid Mortar or Spectral Terror. Just Creepy Bush, multiple times

And that's the really sad thing about FF. It'll give you excellent defenses (except Psi) but it gives no protected against Def Debuffs at all. So even though your FF is giving excellent Def it's as easily stripped. Your only hope is that FF gives enough buffer to deal with that. I'd be happy to see any other "Shielder" over FF to be honest : Time, Cold, Darkness Affinity (Fade has a huge chunk of DDR). Thermal & Sonic are more useful for IOed out builds too I feel, because the +resists sit nicely behind the IOed def someone has for themselves. FF really needs DDR and some sort of Absorb minimum and realisically a proper revamp. At the moment it seems the question is "Why bring a bubbler", especially after level 30-35ish when builds mature.

+1 for this. Water would also work here, be all ranged and solve your "I haz no heal" issues. Both Geyser and Steam Spray do some Fire damage. Fire Blast is much better single target damage over Water but Water has good AoE and interesting slotting options.

I'm not 100% on what you have due to the formatting but Fire/Nature is a nice combo. Buff yourself and your team and just go to town. There's always the "Better as a Corruptor or Defender" argument to have but I went Corruptor and really enjoyed them. DP / Kinetics is my favourite Corruptor. Kin gives you lots of damage (obvs) but also lots of spare slots for a decent build. My DP/Kin/Dark has very good positional defenses, decent s/l resists and a nice amount of of PBAOEs / AOE-that-can-be-fired-point-blank.

Level 50 Common IO recipies also go for a nice chunk at a vendor btw. So if you're running level 50 missions don't forget to cash in on them every once in a while. Quite common for me to make 1-2 million from a chunk of those sitting in my inventory.

If we're talking "Interesting power picks from 1 through to 9" then Darkness Affinity for Controllers probably fits. The only "bad" power is at 35. Which is perfect since you can start your Epic Pool then.

This is a good point too. Rather than doing my Merits > Converters > Convert cheap crafted IOs to sell route you can use the merits for Boosters and just sell those. It's much quicker but less lucrative.

Run Task Forces, especially the Weekly Task force. Get merits at the end Exchange the merits for converters Buy a load of level 31 yellow travel recipes (ones which only need white and yellow salvage). Craft them Use the Converter. First convert them to another travel recipe, which will typically be an orange one. Then keep converting By Rarity until you get something worth 2-7 million on the auction house and sell it. Thats how I do it. Easily make enough with 40 mins crafting and selling to fund my builds (one 'run' of 30 travel io conversions usually yields 60+ million and takes me about 20 mins). Normally I do it in the Vanguard base in RWZ, which is accessible from Atlas. Takes a few days for things to fill and sell, but you can be playing while they do. And don't forget you can convert merits into Hero / Villian token thingies and back again, perfect for emailing between alts.

Hilariously this is actually a thing. Sometimes if you complete a mission and exit with Spirit Tree it can become mobile. Happened a few times when teaming with a friend a couple of times. It's creepy as hell.

Traps is littered with powers like this though. Web Grenade (if not forced into it), Seekers, Caltrops & Triage are skippable. Time Bomb isn't even remotely close to takable. FFG, Acid Mortar, Poison Trap and Time Bomb are both good and fun though. Like you said it gives you options elsewhere though, my Ice/Traps got to take a lot out of Sorcery, Teleport and my epic to make a pretty fun character.

I've lots of fun chars but I think the DP/Kinetics/Dark corruptor probably wins in terms of just being so much "Turned up to 11" fun. Lots of things to click but running around with capped damage and lots of PBAOEs makes for fun times.

I' m also running one of these, mostly soloing mission arcs. 40-ish now and chugging along nicely. Here's my "No winters and no purps" build. Which is exactly like the planned final build other than I'll lob 3 purple procs into various places instead of the Mako's, Eradication & Cloud Senses ones I have here. Went with Moonbeam and I do find myself praying for Dark Consumption to come back sometimes, so I might change that. I'm also unsure if the Crits proc should be in Maul or somewhere else. Feels like I'm wasting half the buff whiffing at the enemies.

I have it on my Thugs / Traps cos it's better than nothing. But the recharge on it is really silly for what it is. My Ice/Traps didn't bother and has never missed it. It's a very meh power. Lowering the recharge and lifespan of it would go a long way to making it more available. Ticks of Absorb a la Temporal Healing could be an interesting addition to it either (at least you could see it doing something then). As-is on teams it pretty much becomes another "drop it, oh we've moved on" thing. Or just giving Traps some sort of inherent "redeploy" power which acted like an Assemble the Team just for your Traps pseudopets would be interesting too.

This is a really good point (and one I used for my Grav/TA respec). If Ranged is capped and covering most incoming attacks anyway then the Def from Scorp or Ice armour isn't really needed and the Resist shields can be an excellent next line of defense.

If you look at your Mids build you can see how "badly" the proc rate is affected by checking the damage breakdown in the power description (hover over the damage). For example my Grav/TAs Hold which has the 6 Superior Will of the Controller IOs in it. Because the Recharge is enhanced to 95% the proc rate is 49%. If I rearrange things so there's only the recharge from the SWOTC proc itself (23% recharge) that number goes up to 67%. But I don't mind because I want the set bonuses more. Acid Arrow IS my Proc Monster power so that is slotted with 1 Acc and 4 procs (1 Achilles Heel and 3 "normal" damage procs). And actually because Acid is reasonable quick to recharge anyway the % for any one of those procs to go off is 47%, which is good enough for me. So it may not be as bad as you think.

The chance for a proc to go off is based off the PPM (Proc Per min) along with the Enhanced Recharge + Animation time of the power and the Area of Effect. It's a reasonably complex formula but it means quick recharging powers have a lower % to go off each time than slower ones. Larger AOE powers also have a smaller chance to go off (but should hit more targets so it should balance out). "Enhanced Recharge" means how much recharge is slotted into the power, not Global recharge bonuses from IO sets, Hasten or other powers like Chronoshift. Alpha slots count as enhancements too (hence the "% of this ignores ED") so an Alpha which boosts recharge will reduce the % chance of a proc going off on an enemy. So most "proc monster" builds will avoid slotting Recharge Enhancements in powers with procs and also avoid an Alpha which boosts recharge. Instead quite often they'll try and make up the difference with global recharge bonuses (which aren't counted in the PPM calculations), Hasten etc. Note this is how it works NOW. There's been talk of Captain Powerhouse having a look at the whole PPM system and "adjusting" it (ie nerfing it somehow). Nothing concrete yet as far as I'm aware (to be honest given ever-falling player numbers and how the game has gone City of DPS with Blaster and Tank changes I think nerfing procs which Controllers and Defenders rely on to close the gap would be a huge step in the wrong direction but hey, I'm not a Dev).

The only difference would be the animation times, Fire is the fastest followed by Mind. Ice actually is towards the back of the animation times (Elec & Plant are the slowest). I don't think Cold affects an opponents resistence to Holds either (Benumb debuffs the duration of THEIR holds on you, but not the other way around I think, I don't have it to check but did test Ice Arrow which has the same sort of "X% Heal Dmg, Absorb, Endurance, RunningSpeed, FlyingSpeed, Confused, Terrorized, Held, Immobilized, Stunned, Sleep Strength for 60s (all affected targets) for 60s" effect using a Power Analyser). One area of debuffage we don't see much / any of actually. Debuffs to enemy Mez resistence which would make mezzes last longer. One thing it may be is the fact that not all EBs are equal. Some get The Purple Triangles of Doom AVs get (54 Mag Mez protection) and those that have ot toggle it on / off. so maybe you ran into a Purple Triangle EB or the cycle of On / Off is to blame.

Happened to me 2 days ago. Decided to see if doing my Freak hunt by running another Freaks arc mish would work. Yes and no. Hunt finished but I ended up with a mission with no door to go to (and Mission TP didn't work either). Used "Complete Mission" to auto-complete it and moved on.

Skipping Disruption Arrow is an odd decision. That's your -Res right there. -30% resist is pretty much the same as a +60% damage buff for yours PAs (more if they trigger Build up on themselves via Soul Alliegence proc, which you should slot too). Ditto with boosting flaming Oil Slick damage. Skipping Blind & Deceive is also a little strange (Decieve can take Malaises Illusion or the Purple set for a decent chunk of recharge & ranged def). Personally I like having two holds on my Grav/TA Your epic also looks underslotted. Not sure it's even worth taking the blasts if your not going to slot them. Here's a rejigged Carni with TA merged in from my Grav/TA. You do have the classic Domi problem here, going for Recharge AND trying to cap ranged Def at the same time. Personally I'd probably replace Spectral / Ball Lightning or Oil Slick with a set of purples to gain a bit more recharge at the cost of ranged def. Dumping Sorcery for Fighting will get you closer to ranged cap too (if you can wrangle the slots). I went Mu for the "Set my slicks on fire" but it has a +End power and Charged Armour gives resistence against the 3 most common damage types.

Slotting with Artillery is how I slot it too. Any proc from ranged AoE damage won't check til Oil Slick actually goes on fire, as far as I could tell. Acid is your proc monster power (although it's recharge is a little quick to be a true beast). Bombardment and Posi are good in it since either of those can light Oil Slick for you. As for Chance for Build Up > Oil Slick I'm in the "you probably won't notice too much" camp too. If you had Aim of Build up & a chance for build up possibly but that version only lasts 5 secs.

I don't use Purples or Winters usually so most of my builds end up reasonably cheap. Certainly within the "I can earn this with 2-3 20 minute Marketeering sessions" range I like. Somewhere around 200-250 million. My Water/Temporal Blaster was possibly my cheapest just because the Ranged Def IO sets (Artillery and Thunderstrikes) are cheaper than things like Obliteration, Kinetic Combats or the Resist set that gives a nice chunk of melee def. Only has the one purple converted from the one you get from completing the Market Crash TF and no Winters. My most expensive is undoubtly my Fire/Claws tank because of the Winters sets used. Although technically those were 8-10 million a pop rather than 20+ because I bought a glut of them during the Winter Event. I wanted him to be heavily resistant to Slows after the +4 Lobster Party on ITF 1 ground him to a crawl one time. Even he just uses 3 purples though. I think the only time I've actually slotted a full set of Purples is for Confuse powers because the bonuses are excellent as is the proc (but Malaises Illusions isn't far off set bonus-wise)

So there's no alternative to permanent PA? You're right, having played the other sets as a dominator, I wouldn't find other controllers tedious. So once I find the right secondary, I'll aim for permanent PA. *Perma* PAs aren't needed. But having PAs up as much as possible is a great thing, so striving towards perma-PA is a good idea. But the fact that they aren't perma isn't as bad as just being off Perma-dom. Just means you'll need to debuff / control the enemies while it's down. Spectral Terror isn't the best control power available to controllers but it is a huge -ToHit debuff so goes a long way towards making you unhittable. One set not mentioned is Dark. Dark Affinity gives you Tar Patch nice and early for sticking -Resist on things for your pets. Controller Dark also replaces Fearsome Stare & the Hold with a team +Def power in Fade and a Regen/Recovery tool in Soul thingy. Fade's not Power Boostable like Times Farsight is but it provides the team with a huge chunk of DDR (31%). This is my current Live build. I wouldn't recommend Poison Ray / Disruptor Blast to everyone thanks to the stupid redraw issues but once you've dropped PA + Tar Patch generally you have time to use them chained.