Erydanus

A 15% heal means this will be an ok option for electric melee characters who have a slot to spare and need some incidental mitigation.

As someone who played a dark/dark defender on live - and lead a dark/dark defender themed supergroup there - and then rolled a dark/dark controller I am 100% fine with these changes. The accuracy buff to Twilight Grasp is a nice perk, it will be especially helpful to low level players but won't significantly change how I slot or use the power. Making the affected powers conform to AT scales makes sense, I had this weird feeling something was overperforming but I chalked it up to the overwhelming awesomeness of the set in general. Basically, everything Oedipus_Tex said on page 2 goes for me.

I always slot my controller single target holds as blasts. I think they usually have sufficient hold power without enhancing it at low levels; later I might like a little more so I can stack it on bosses. But out of the box I just focus on maxing damage (both direct enhancement and procs as available).

Your speed is fantastic but the ping and outages are of course, nonfunctional. The question that needs to be solved if this is poor service on you provider's part, or an interruption in the path between you and the game's servers (which are located near Montreal I believe). You might want to try doing a traceroute (https://kb.intermedia.net/article/682) during your problem time, or you might want to try a VPN service (even a free service). Do you have a separate data plan for your cell phone which includes any tethering or hot spot data? You might try running your computer off the cell phone for a few minutes just for comparison. It's not like this game actually uses a lot of data - it worked fine when I had 1 MBps DSL.

The build up limitation that was assumed when this set was designed is out the window due to the Stalker ATO proc Chance to Reset Buildup. In theory you could probably fire off the sweep combo much more often than every 2 minutes or so, as Build Up will surely reset longer than its typical cooldown. In fact if you have the Stalker ATO proc Chance of Hide, then it should be in your Assassin's Strike power (Blades). Which means Build Up -> Assassin's Blade -> significant chance of hide reset -> Ablating Strike from Hide; but you may find it better to use a bigger hit instead if the combo, or one of your AoEs; and if you do an AoE the chance of the build up reset happening again is appreciable. Basically the combo system is crap for Stalkers.

That's not always important. There is a point where returns diminish. It's best to take everything into account. For instance you could have the biggest heal in the game but if you can prevent it from ever being needed, that's better. If it comes down to a choice of a medium chance of prevention (say by defense buffs) and a medium amount of recovery (direct healing) versus a greater chance of prevention and a smaller but still adequate heal, I'd pick that. In this case the numbers of both those things might look mechanically smaller but then you add in the extra tools and it all changes. For instance Group Invisibility + various thermal shields at controller scale. In any case the answer if you want to do a defender is still: dip into the appropriate pools.

Sure the list is here. Because they invoke build up and placate, and the way stalkers play has changed greatly since then, many people simply ignore the combos on stalkers. Well for that matter a lot of people ignore the combos on everyone and just go with optimized dps chains; I personally enjoy their flavor and still use combos (on my scrapper): https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Dual_Blades Here's the table, sorry I don't know how to clean up the color formatting but at least the text is readable. talker Power Level Effect Weaken Foe -ToHit -Def Empower Self +Damage +ToHit Attack Vitals Cone +DoT Sweep PBAoE +Knockdown Nimble Slash 1 Melee, Minor Damage (Lethal). Continue Power Slice 1 Melee, Moderate Damage(Lethal). Continue Begin Ablating Strike 2 Melee, Moderate Damage (Lethal), Foe -Defense. Finish Assassin's Blades 6 Melee, Moderate Damage +Special. Continue Continue Build Up 8 Self +Damage +To-Hit. Begin Begin Placate 12 Ranged, Foe Placate. Finish Vengeful Slice 18 Melee, Moderate Damage(Lethal), Foe Knockdown. Finish Sweeping Strike 26 Melee (Cone), Superior Damage (Lethal). Begin One Thousand Cuts 32 Melee (Cone), Superior Damage (Lethal). Finish

Wow I'm glad that was solved!!

Random thought, is there any possibility that the mainboard has an integrated graphics chip which isn't turned off in bios, and you're plugged into that instead of the actual Nvidia graphics card? (Or is this a laptop?)

On live, when Electric powersets for Brutes were new, and Electric didn't have any self-heal, I tried sticking Call of the Sandman chance for self-heal in every single melee attack that would take it. It was my way of trying to avoid taking Aid Self and going off-concept. It didn't work well enough to be helpful. Once in a great while one of the 5 or so procs would fire once. Pretty much anything done to it would be an improvement.

Well … I think you're forgetting about pool powers. They exist for a reason: to fill holes in your capacity. Want to rez someone? Medicine: Resuscitate; also, there's a day job temp power to do this. Want to break someone's mez? Medicine: Injection. Want to buff the team's defense? Leadership: Maneuvers Want to debuff a foe? Medicine: Injection (yes it's dual function) and also Willpower: Weaken Resolve and there's debuffs in the upcoming Experimentation pool too. Also it sounds like you only want attacks in as much as they'll contribute to foe debuffs/team protection. Have you considered playing a controller with a defensive focus instead (a Deftroller). In that situation you prioritize the secondary and select from the primary for the buffs and debuffs and very universal controls. It's not my personal cup of tea but it works for a lot of people as long as you're clear what your goals are. You do receive weaker effects to your secondary (which in this case is your main focus) but you normally can offset that via the overall benefits. For instance if you were to roll an Illusion/Thermal controller you'd have: - a single target attack that holds 1 foe (Blind) - a single target confuse great for shutting down 1 foe, and actually benefitting the team if you use it on an enemy buffer (Deceive) - group invisibility, which is also a teamwide defense buff - various pets you don't have to manage which will just run around taking hits for the team and dealing supplemental damage - an aoe Fear pet that will lock foes down very well You'd probably be skipping Spectral Wounds, Flash, and maybe Superior Invisibility which leaves a lot of spots for pool picks.

Already suggested.

I deal with customers who have to login to an online portal and a frequent problem is people using variations of their emails. For instance Dr. Aeon signs up using [email protected] and then comes back and tries to login with [email protected]. As mail servers generally ignore periods in user names and extra wikkety wack like engeineering and med in front of domain suffixes the server will still dump all the email where it needs to go, but the emails as account names are unique and distinctive and you need to match them. (By the way Dr. Aeon, your peer review of Dr. Keyes's latest paper is 13 days overdue. My new editorial assistants are Rikti traditionalists and they CAN deliver late notices into your locked office.)

Why didn't you just undo the flung candle?

Procs work completely differently now. Instead of a flat chance like 10% to fire, they have a "per minute" rate and it goes into a complex formula to determine the chance of triggering. The longer the recharge, the higher the chance, to a cap of 90%. Area effect is also a factor. Consequently all the very low damage very fast recharging powers that became great mules for damage procs are pretty trash again. Rains also got nerfed hard and only check 1 time when they're first used instead of like on every single damage packet. On the other hand a power that's like a 20 second recharge single target stun that does 5 damage will probably fire every proc in it (90% chance ish) every time you use it. I'm finding Suppressive Fire in Pistols is suddenly doing about 140 psionic damage thanks to 2 procs I stuck in it... And speaking of Procs for Darkness, there's a lovely proc you can put in Dark Servant called Cloud Senses: Chance of Negative Energy Damage. All of the Dark Servant's powers except for Petrifying Gaze but including Chill of the Night can potentially fire that baby off.

The basic command to bind some set of commands to a key is just this: /bind keyname "stuff that you want it to do" If you want to put 2 commands back to back in there or even more you can separate them by 2 dollar signs; so "do something for me$$do something else for me" The game will try to perform the commands in right to left order The syntax for a bind that turns on a power is "powexec_name powername"* or if you want to specifically toggle something on like fly you could also use "powexec_toggleon powername" (underscores in this are optional and just visual spacers) The catch is you can only activate 1 thing at a time with a bind, but you can still do more than one thing if only one of them is firing off a power. For instance you could use a tray swap command and toggle on a Kheldian's bright nova form. Now, what some people are saying they're doing is making a keybind that tries to use a Dominator primary/secondary power AND also fires off Domination. That way if they hit say the 1 on their keyboard it will try to fire Domination, and if Domination is up it will do that then stop; but if it's not up, then it'll use the other power on the keybind like Crush or whatever they have on 1. You could get really complex with this if you wanted to. People probably have Very Intricate Setups planned. You could actually use the macro image command to create custom macros that look exactly like the standard powers in your Dominator's powerset but are actually "turn on domination or else use gravity distortion if it's not up" commands. You could go deep down the rabbit hole here. However there are simpler options too. I just heard of has someone who bound the tab key to be "target next foe" (like it is by default) BUT ALSO $$ "activate practiced brawler" so that literally every time they target a new foe with tab, if Practiced Brawler has reset, they'll use it. And in this case since there's only 1 power activation command along with a targeting command, it will do both things. So! you could also do that for domination: /bind Tab "target_enemy_next$$powexec_name Domination" If I haven't had a bind fu brainfade, that should make it so everytime you hit tab it'll try to fire off domination if it's up as well as tab to the next enemy to squish with your powers. Now the catch is, you'd only want to do that if you actually have Domination up about permanently. If you're not to perma dom of course you don't want it firing off until you're ready for it. But if you are, it's an easy option. Likewise you could have put Hasten on tab and then just put Domination on autofire - whatever works for you. __________________ * list of all slash commands and their options: https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/List_of_Slash_Commands

I hope this doesn't come across as too salty but if I can be extremely blunt here, Dominators were not designed very well. Circa the City of Villains open beta test I took one look at them and thought the devs had just bungled the whole AT, but they were not going to rework them that late. The concept they had was something along the lines of the Spider Man villain electro, kind of a blaster with a bit more blapper feel, along with some electric control type powers. But the problem is that Dominators suffered from a jack of all trades master of none setup. Dominators had to get buffed pretty strongly and eventually Domination got totally reworked in order for the AT to truly be playable. That's why literally almost everyone builds for perma-domination. If you don't have Domination up, your experience really sucks. If you aren't a perma-dom Dominator, your character really needs to be on a team and relying on just contributing a portion of the damage. So the point I am trying to make here is you feel confused about best use of the mix of powers you haven, and have struggled to play it without heavily investing in IOs, this is why. The AT needs heavy investment and it has to be shored up to the point it's minmaxed and pretty much brokenly powerful to "work". And that is the "normal" most people who play dominators exist in.

I'm not disagreeing there. I am saying that psychic = mutant isn't a rock solid argument ender.

In this comic-book universe, some natural psychic power exists in some humans. We had a discussion about this in a Widow thread and 1) someone pulled up a quote from Sister Psyche in the Origin of Power arc where she stated (simplified) she thinks that she is maybe not a mutant at all but a human psychic; and 2) the original cannon origin for all Arachnos widows was Natural - even though they're hella psychic.

I actually did a quick & dirty respec last night at 40 because I just could not take not having knockback protection and had to put in combat jumping and a karma to deal with that and fiddled a lot of slots around to do some live experimenting. It was pretty monstery tbh. Even just thrown together with a lot of cheap filler. I ended up with an extra slot in Pistols and just shoved in a Lady Grey I had for now. It actually fired more than I thought it would but I'm still not sure if it's more bang for the buck than just slotting a generic damage IO would. (The only recharge in it is the 1/2 recharge from Vigilant Asault recharge/absorb proc). I just find I don't use pistols until "bigger" attacks have been used, at least while teaming. In other words instead of using pistol as a filler attack I'm more likely to use it on the 1 guy smart enough to run away when everything else is dead and even then only if executioner's is not up. The character is 40 and it was actually my first chance to use his nuke, now fully slotted with Defender's Bastion. I was playing with 2 friends who are quite casual and honestly I was shredding everything. You know when I put this build together it was based on a pun and a concept. I had been playing a MM with Nature and I thought the set was so powerful I wanted to see the full horror of a defender using it. So I think I had been looking over the pools and I lit up on the name Field Medic, because the guy is literally healing people with a field of grass. From the there the concept was obvious: an army medic using special equipment. Bam! That means he's probably using guns. I had been wanting to play DP again and it seemed like I could fire and forget a lot of the nature powers and then entertain myself enjoying the gunkata-inspired animations of dual pistols. (I did consider the other gun sets for like 0.5 seconds.) So, uh, I totally did not clock to the synergistic elements of this combo! I thought it might be a little discordant since the buffs are PBAOE and the direct heal is a cone but actually the mix of aoe and cone in both sets meshes well. Nature's Entangling Aura is insane now that I have a lockdown proc in it. The minion lockdown rate was good before but I swear every few seconds I'm surrounded by mobs in electric cages from the proc stacking. I also have 2 psionic damage procs in it which I assume are shredding things but I haven't looked at the combat log in detail. But it's quite easy to wade in to melee and drop my buffs point blank on the melee if they need them, and my nuke is PBAOE as well but it's pretty safe for me to just jump in and do Hail of Bullets. As far as direct damage, well overgrowth + power build up + I put the Gaussian's proc in power build up, so I'm dropping the nuke at 272% damage enhancement, it's just utterly rude. I'll have to do a few tip missions to get a feel for how he's doing now; I suspect it's a combo of slots being increased plus a few more procs added in.

You actually covered that in the No Escape build too. I'm not going to mess with a build up proc in pistols though, I don't see it being useful when I actually have a 1 minute long build up type buff (Overgrowth) and Power Build up. Lots of force feedback tho? mwahahaha. I would slot pistols with like a toxic or dark proc if I thought they'd fire much, and had extra slots left over. Which I might.

That's a really good point because there was a website lore article about Giovanna Scaldi and how she was born in medieval times with mind control powers and would be considered a mutant in today's standards. (I don't want to say more but if you don't know who I'm talking about she's Vanessa DeVore's "ancestor"...). ANYway calling someone like that a mutant in cannon, on the website material, did kind of directly conflict the definition that later started getting used of mutants being born just since the first atom bomb was used. So good hand wave here in the Sister Psyche material.

I'm working on my Nature/Dual Pistols defender's build and I'm at the point of musing about how I want to slot some of the attacks, including whether I want to use Defender ATOs and if I want to go down the Proc Monster path which is a steep path indeed. I have looked at Redlynne's No Escape builds for soul & time already for some inspiration. I'm kind of surprised there aren't more topics in this forum about dual pistols - it's not the highest damage set but it's pretty fun, and the numbers from the devs have shown a lot of people take it. I even went looking in the blaster forums and did not see much talk there, much less a proc monster topic (that seems weird, my search fu may be weak today) but the No Escape thread had a lot of great proc discussion. Currently I'm still deciding how I want to approach this overall. And one thing that didn't come up in the No Escape build was discussion of straight up damage procs for some of these powers because Redlynne was theorycrafting more of a leveraging build. The weird thing about pistols that I discovered this week when I went onto the beta server is that apparently all the procs that are eligible to be slotted into the attacks are eligible to fire regardless of if swap ammo is used, and that I just did not expect. I was literally seeing Lady Grey's chance for negative energy damage firing off and thought, "Oh I meant to test the slow damage proc first with cold rounds … wait I am using chemical rounds right now..." and yeah I was seeing procs from knockback, defense debuff, and slow sets all firing with chemical rounds on, or off, or with other elements selected. So I'm just assuming everything valid actually does function. I guess my assumption was that the pistol powers would work like pets where procs only function when the pet uses the appropriate power; but in this case it seems like swap ammo is just selectively activating bonus perks and the procs are going off the base powers all the time. Anyway the upshot of this is that there are so many procs eligible for these powers it's nuts. My general sense is that the faster, low tier powers probably will not proc often enough that replacing damage enhancement value with procs would be a good idea, but filling in extra slots with procs will still add damage. And that sort of was borne out by my testing, I was shooting some random Freakshow for just a couple minutes and unslotted even the damage procs were firing off every 4 or 5 attacks and doing a big hit but divided over time was less damage gain than just sticking a damage IO in (Tier 1 defender power after all.) The bigger question is the mid and upper tier powers. Again, my gut feeling not backed up by Doing The Actual Math yet is that the high damage powers probably are on the other side and do enough damage on their own they'd outperform damage procs. That means the powers in the middle with the 10-15 second cooldowns are the sweet spot and competing for attention. Also, if the damage generated by a proc is roughly equivalent to the damage generated by about 32% damage enhancement, I'd still consider it valuable if it's a less common damage type. I.E., if a damage IO increases lethal damage by 30 and a proc grants on average 30 points of toxic damage, I'd consider the proc superior. The ancillary issue too is that I want to stick both Defender ATO sets into my build. I've been using parts already and I'm super underwhelmed with the absorb proc and assume the heal proc is likewise mere sprinkles on the glazed donut, so I'm only slotting those pieces for set bonuses. I'm doing Defender's Bastion 6 part for its recharge bonus, but I want to split Vigilant Assault in half to reap two recharge bonuses which means some powers are gonna get really messy slotting. The enhancement values for those sets are way overkill for low tier powers but I could see shoving them into low tier powers just to get them out of the way. Though, more likely, since I often don't love the enhancement mix in PBAOE sets, it's more likely I'd split Vigilant Assault into Bullet Rain and Piercing Rounds and franken around them. Anyway, looking at Executioner's Shot it can actually take: (red damage, purple debuff, green self-buff) Decimation - Chance of Buildup (1 PPM) Gladiator's Javelin - Chance of Toxic Damage (3.5 PPM) Impeded Swiftness - Chance of Smashing Damage (3.5 PPM) Pacing of the Turtle - Chance of -Recharge (not seeing PPM in Mids Reborn) Achilles Heel - Chance of -Resistance (not seeing PPM) Touch of Lady Gray - Chance of Negative Energy damage (3.5 PPM) Explosive Strike - Chance for Smashing Damage (3.5 PPM) Force Feedback - Chance for Recharge bonus (not seeing PPM) Shield Breaker - Chance for Lethal Damage (3.5 PPM) Analyze Weakness - Chance for +ToHit bonus (2 PPM) Not including the ATOs, Winter, extra rare or purple sets. I mean holy crap that list is nuts. And that power is typical for the set. The AoEs get Positron's energy proc and Annhilation's resist debuff proc, for instance. I think there's at least 3 damage procs that can go into every power. So at this point I'm trying to figure out which power to just shove all pieces of Defender's Bastion in for its set bonus and I'm thinking it's Hail of Bullets but I'm not set on that; my next priority is getting 2 copies of Force Feedback into my build because I think that would be a nice amount of bonus recharge. I'm thinking Empty Clips and Bullet Rain seemed good in the No Escape build so I was working from there. Overall … and this feels weird … I have slots available in this build. I've got my nature affinity powers taken care of already and I put about 4 slots in all the attacks other than Hail and got them slotted with adequate accuracy and close to 90% damage and as little recharge as I could, and currently still have a whopping 10 slots available. So that means 1-2 procs in almost every attack if they'll be worth it. The other factor adding tension to the build is it's concept limited. Sorcery will not be available, so I've tentatively got Acrobatics in this build at the cost of most of the Leadership pool. (Holds have been a problem and the character is 38 right now so Incarnate powers and Clarion are a long way off.) The epic power pool is dead locked as Power Mastery and I took Power Build-Up at 35. And I put a Gaussian proc there. Which means if I use Overgrowth and then follow it up with Power Build-Up and I'm solo, I hit 272% damage buff briefly and then drop down to 82% for the rest of the minute that Overgrowth lasts for. So my gut feeling is my 2nd priority is actually upping my damage resistance (and I'm not ignoring Corrosive Enzymes from my primary either!) But after that then my next thought would be to top up every power I can with non-lethal procs with a preference for the toxic and negative procs as space and cash allow. It just all feels like a lot to ask to gel all at once. Oh and if you were wondering I have procced the hell out of Entangling Aura and Suppressive Fire in this build. I have never seen the Lockdown proc fire as much as it does with Entangling aura I'm constantly surrounded by minions in lightning balls. Anyway that's my theorycraft dump for today. Allez cuisine.

Wait, for single target why aren't you opening with deceive? It generates no aggro and it will leave the foe unresisting. In fact if the foe is a buffer type character it might even buff you as your phantom army appears and rips it to shreds.

They're nice powers but my primary has nice powers too. In order to take all these Leadership powers one often has to sacrifice attacks and I'm not interested in being a walking leadership beacon. My attacks may not be nearly as powerful as damage focused teammates but they typically have valuable incremental buffs. Also, more importantly, I like to shoot bad guys. I think they are definitely valid options and in different play situations have greater or lesser value.