Carnifax

Generally I flit from character to character, but if I log in and want to just murder things then The Binman, my Savage/Shield stalker, gets picked ahead of my scrapper, Brutes or tank.

That's true, but only if things stay packed below it. If they start scattering (for whatever reason) then you'll start spreading them even further. 3 Thunderstrike, a Forced Feedback proc, Sudden Acceleration and one IO of your choosing (I went with another proc but a Dam/End from some other set would work nicely too) is my own preferred slotting for Lightning Storm. For a Defender, with your lovely Vigilant Assault 3 set bonus (my Domi hates you by the way) maybe 3 of those instead. That way I can just drop them where ever I like without worrying too much. Your defenses are excellent here but your damage really looks like its suffering. Personally, since you're a hoverer anyway I'd consider sacrificing some of the S/L defense for damage. You're not a Tank so you really shouldn't need to be that tough. Also with that amount of toggles you're really going to suffer for End, even with your fully slotted Health & Stamina. Storm is incredibly End tight. Might be worth considering Power Sink at 49 rather than Snow Storm (you'll need to find the slots for it though). Or replace Shocking with it. Bitter Ice Blast does great DPA. On my Blaster I went with it over Bitter Freeze Ray, just because BFR is slooooooow to cast. Tornado is another good source of damage, and Freeze Ray is your highest DPA attack so I'd slot that for damage. The hold is a nice bonus but you're a defender so even slotted up the Hold duration isn't going to be great.

Frozen Aura is a beast of a thing and Frost is excellent too. AOE-wise Ice isn't that bad at all. Ice has two main issues : Two of the single target attacks are poopy (Fists and Greater Ice Sword). I ignored Fists and took Crosspunch instead of GIS. The other "issue" is that Ice doesn't feel too crunchy compared to something like War Mace.

Well call it a "Source" or something, make it look like a baby crystal and basically it's just a defeated corpse for you to (ab)use.

Fluffy seems to still have the suicidal AI which Phantasm also has, that is they'll try and close to melee range. This'll get them toasted very quickly. I do think Warshades should have a "spawn a corpse" power personally for AV fights. Although I've no idea what you'd call it, where you'd put it or what it should look like.

Missed this. My Sav/Shield Stalker thanks you for this, nice change.

Nope, but he answered our concerns in his thread saying "This is better". It's not. I tested it before wandering on here and being a grump about it. I understand his reasoning, I just don't agree with it (like I said visually a screen of "Energy Release" is so satisfying currently). Weirdly, with the upcoming issue my need for proc abuse is gonna go up (Whirling Hands and Acid Arrow). I don't think any of the changes to how specific melee powers work went down particularly well. Eagles Claw and Touch of Fear have also been changed and the same thread is awash with complaints about them too (I don't use either so had no useful feedback on them). No-one denies the current version is a bit much. Issue is rather than just changing the bonus damage to ~60% of what it was we now get a totally different mechanic. As a programmer that irks me too. If the mechanicism is "When you store Energy then the next time you cast one of these 3 powers it will do bonus damage" that's nice and consistent.

The way Whirling releases now has changed. From the really cool "screen full of NRG releases" and bonus damage to Water Blasts insta-recharge mechanic. Which domis don't particularly need. So an energy releasing Whirlings Dpa has been effectively halved (or, if you are right nearly halved). Animation time is God in this game, especially on a busy set like Dominator ones. So eating up more of it is a poor outcome for a domi. Plus it's gone back to looking miserable. Like I said visually a screen of Release messages made me feel powerful. Now it'll be just an "abuse procs" power.

Well yes. I could have. And i did. Word for word about 2 weeks ago. It's a total nerf. Aoe Dpa is much, much worse now on a set which struggles for aoe damage.

As a Fire/NRG domi I despise the nerf coming to Whirling Hands. I accept the NRG Stored WH damage is a bit much. I really hate the fact their solution is to change how it works completely. Why would a Dominator slotting for high recharge care that now it recharges instantly on NRG Release? That's like the least useful outcome for me. A screen full of NRG Release messages looks really excellent. This change... Doesn't. So no. I'm not looking forward to it. At all

Howling Twilight. Love the sound of it. Also love how versatile it is

Aoe is pretty good. Guarded Spin is great. Crazy-assed disco spin is great, especially with 3 Stacks, although the animation may irk you. Ankle biter is mediocre. Some of the modes aren't as good for Brutes (the +dam one is meh for you). The Endurance one is a godsend. Single target isn't great but the tier 9 with 3 Stacks is pretty decent. Constant redraw is a total pain, there's no "no draw" costume option and you really feel it.

I've tried Elec multiple times and would agree with this. I find it really lacking (my old Elec/NRG domi was changed to Fire/NRG which is much stronger, especially as a perma-dom).

It'll be like when Elec Affinity dropped. But less distractingly zappy, with any luck. When EA dropped I felt like I was being shot constantly for about 4 weeks til people moved on. I personally reserve the right to jump on this bandwagon since I was flying the flag for Grav/TA back in Issue 10. When the bandwagon was a plank on a pair of roller skates and we had to make do.

My Ice/Fire blapper drops it whenever it is up, but I'm built for up-close-and-personal anyway. I even treat Ice Storm and Blizzard as PBAOEs using powexec_location self. I guess it depends on your primary really. I could see it being a bit awkward on a Beam/Fire or Dark/Fire.

I've tried a small bit on Beta with my reborn Grav/TA. Acid Arrows new improved AOE and the fact it can take 6 procs makes it a bit of a monster and (with Bombardment and Posi's Blast procs) a decent Oil Slick lighter. So this is definitely worth proccing up if you take it (in fact without them I'd probably skip Acid altogether). Ice Arrow is like most holds, you can get a lot of procs in there if you want to. Oil Slick isn't really worth it since its a Placeable and it's on a long recharge so even the "Stick a Forced Feedback in there and it'll pop at every summon" trick which I use on Storm isn't as good here (you kind of want it in a patch / pet you invoke every ~30 seconds for a Forced Feedback 1/6th of the time). Targetted Damage set procs have always been a bit useless in Oil Slick because they'll only start once its lit and it counts as a placeable so big AOE coupled with a 10 second "recharge" for calculating the proc chance every 10 seconds = small chance overall. I skipped Glue personally on my planned Grav/TA. Has it been changed to a pure placeable (no target needed)? If so it actually loses slightly because it used to act like a single target power AND a placeable, and damage procs in wide area placeables aren't great overall (as above for Oil Slick) If you proc up Flash Arrow you run the danger of it notifying things. And it'll only take one damage one anyway (Cloud Senses). The "Chance for -Recharge" in Dark Watchers is a bit poop.

They'll also self stack. For Shield this is really useful because Active Defense has a fair chunk of Defense Debuff Resistance in there. Course if you die you'll have to wait for it to recharge rather than just retoggling.

To me it's the difference between someone with heals and a dedicated healer. Both will heal you but one will also do a load of other stuff, some of which you'll probably need less heals in the long run (such as AOE mezzing a bunch).

Depends. Are they "rocking the aura"? That's usually a giveaway.

This is really important. I've been on my Staff/NRG Brute leading a team and told the Empath not to worry about casting Fort on me because he's basically beyond capped anyway. Unless a load of Seers show up and I actually start struggling give it to someone else. Turn the team Domi into God if they haven't themselves yet. Pick a Blapper or Blaster and make a Tankmage. As for a dedicated empath for Ill/Emp, if you need two rezzes in your life something is definitely wrong there. Medicine is total overkill. Get your mezzes going, including things like Spectral Terror which has oodles of -toHit in it. Group Invis can be annoying for frontliners but the extra defense it gives squishies is helpful. Leadership will also go a long way. Deceive is an incredibly useful power for dealing with annoying lieuts or minions with horrible buffs or debuffs.

A Dark / X / Dark scrapper? Dark Melee has tentacles in its tier 9 and Dark Mastery has Tentacles in there as well. But you'll need to take 2 other powers in the Epic 1st (procced up Petrifying Gaze & Dark Blast I guess since Torrent and Nightfall are pretty poop although Torrent with an Acc, Forced Feedback and KB2KD might be alright). What X is is up to you. Dark would be the obvious choice but Shield is excellent with Dark Melee and Bio might be thematic as well.

I find my Mace/Rad Brute to be a total monster. I am heavily IOd but not at Resist caps (I went for layering defense on top of 80% S/L resists) and not a billion inf build at all. He ended up tanking for an ITF over the weekend after our tank / team leader had to drop for RL stuff. We managed it quite easily and I was rarely in trouble. Only downside was that I don't have Taunt which made it a little trickier to pull things off people. Came close to dying from massed Bright Nova / Dark Nova spam at one point (-Def coupled with -Recharge and lots of Neg NRG damage is nasty) but being able to heal right back up from 10% to 100% saved my ass. So to answer the OP I'd personally edge towards Brute just because I like my Mace/Rad Brute and the 75% resist limit on scrappers irks me.

My Fire/NRG domi will lock down the whole spawn. Even if the tank hasn't got there yet (I have a 4 second rule, if the tank isn't in within 4 seconds they're getting AOE Mezzed anyway). Yesterday on a PuG he held Antimatter to a standstill after all the tanks etc had fallen (AM is nasty). While they rezzed and stagger-ran for cover to heal & toggle up I kept him busy with a combo of kiting and mezzes. I'll admit the timings helped, Purple Triangles were down long enough to stack a lot of PBed holds on him and distract him with Imps but it worked, team reassembled and we took him down. My Illusion / Dark will open the combat, floor everythings ToHit, buff your defenses, make everyone on the team hit harder (Tar Patch), stop you running out of End and if we meet an AV they'll die an awful lot quicker. Oh, and I might heal you or rez you too if things really go south. This. On an 8 man team chances you could replace ANYONE on the team with a stick with a smilie face and you wouldn't really notice. I know on that PuG yesterday the Tanky team leader started jumping ahead to start rounding up the next spawn because he knew that myself and the two controllers would very swiftly have his back (proved when he accidently split and died because we went into another room). This. It's very hard to quantify how effective a knockdown patch or a mass of writhing tentacles is in terms of dealing with incoming damage. Or how easy it is to miss the fact that everything is missing you and you're killing things really quickly. A lot of the time all that control isn't needed if you're just doing +4 PI radios but +4 PI Radios are the shallow end of the pool.

If you're talking Dark Blast personally I like the blaster version. Tentacles is pretty much the same across all ATs but blasters get Umbral Torrent instead of Nightfall and Torrent and it's excellent with a knockback to knockdown IO in it (a Forced Feedback also works nicely in there). Dark Pit also gets dumped for a damaging hold. Secondary is up to you. Mine is Tactical Arrow which was very controlly. Current beta is changing Tac Arrow a lot, probably could be considered a nerf overall. Plant is meant to be good too. Temporal might work too. NRG manipulation gets Boost Range, and NRG being buffed in the current beta to get the NRG store / release mechanic which is quite fun. If you wanted Support a Storm / Dark defender would be your classic "Annoying Tsoo sorcerer" build. Or Dark / Cold corruptor. Trick Arrow is getting majorly buffed too so Trick Arrow / Dark or Dark / Trick Arrow would be interesting (tech or magic origin to make it easier to light Oil Slicks). Not sure if defender or corruptor would be best. I'd probably edge towards corruptor. All flavours of Dark Blast kinda trade damage for safety and control though, it'll never be a top tier damage set. You do get a snipe early though and Snipes are excellent now with their in-combat quick animation mode.

Power boost doesn't affect resist buffs or debuffs. Def buffs and debuffs, ToHit buffs and debuffs, Slow debuffs (but not recharge), Heals and mezzes are affected. Definitely not Resist (anything with a Resist buff should be coded to totally ignore +Special) or my Time/Sonic would be totally nuts. I'm not sure about Absorb, regen and recovery.