Machariel

i havent posted on this forum in like 2 years but i saw this cross posted to facebook and had to come back. huge news!! I never thought I'd see the day! incredible job

I think I misunderstand the assignment because when I hear “will work for RP” I just think of Pocket D 🤔

Carrion Creepers is not only excellent on its own but is also incredible with damage procs (slow, immob, ranged damage, targeted aoe damage) - the vines put out a ton of attacks and every attack has a chance to proc each damage proc so it really does absolutely monster damage. I stuff mine I think with 5 procs and a +5 acc/dam/rech to get the recharge down exactly to 120sec. 2nd best power in the set after seeds of confusion.

I usually don’t, but on some characters I’ll have a build that has nothing but travel powers (fly w/afterburner) and stealth to zoom around maps collecting exploration badges.

best power you can get at level 8 has to be Seeds of Confusion. what an absolutely ridiculous power

grav/elec might be the worst dominator you could build, it is certainly the worst one I’ve played.

Or make rise of the phoenix part of your attack chain 😎

I watched it right after seeing Black Widow in the theater. Suicide Squad was the better movie. Really liked John Cena's character (and John Cena in general, he's a funny guy), Harley was well-used and well-cast. Rats are cute so having a big pro-rat message was cool. I liked the doctor who controlled the BBEG guy too and thought that was one of the best scenes.

edit: re-recording for audio

edit: disregard, Mr. Vee beat me to it and reading is hard EDIT 2: my preferred way to run synapse is to solo it or run with no more than 3 players as this minimizes spawn size and especially avoids bosses spawning - this is important bc i spend a lot of time waiting for gears to spawn and with the abysmal AoE at low levels I get quite sick of killing them one at a time...

There's a lot of variance across the VEATs but IMO the best thing about them is that they bring a lot to the table just by showing up, especially Soldiers. Just standing around with stacked leadership and casting Venom Grenade on cooldown is an awful lot of very efficient buffing and debuffing. -Res, +Damage, +Tohit, +Def is 80% of what I want out of support ATs so phooey that they can't also buff your team's recharge as well 🤪 Fortunatas lose the -res and have weaker leadership but their access to psi damage and psi wail, and a suite of control powers, makes them situationally better at hard carrying. Cimeroran EBs for example, once they pop unstoppable the soldier can still debuff their resistance down from 90% to whatever, and that's great, whereas a Fortunata can go right through. Most VEAT builds are also great at exemplaring because they can build their attack chain early and their core support powers (leadership) early, so they're great at low level content and especially good at shepherding low-level TFs. Double leadership is a big deal for partially slotted (or unslotted) lowbies who might be fighting +3s or +4s on an XP run. Crabberminds are quite late blooming though and often skip many of the early attacks, but in return their absolute high-end output is far and away the strongest. 6 pets do a ton of damage if you're able to keep them alive (I'm not). My two VEATs are a melee Fortunata and a huntsman Bane. Both are durable damage dealers (Fort is tougher) with strong AoE (the Bane has more). The Fortunata is definitely more of a solo carry style and plays like a scrapper with Psi Wail and two SHTF emergency control powers. As @Project129 alluded to, Fortunatas can take both Follow Up and Aim (Night Widows must choose between Follow Up and Build Up), Aim w/Gaussian Proc -> Follow Up (from hide!) -> Psi Wail is pretty great. The huntsman I actually play exactly as they described - a rifle-toting fire support character. This is the character I most often bring when I just want to chill as all I have to do is stand in the middle of my team and get huge value by lobbing AoEs into melee.

the real question to me is why should it be normalized to begin with - what's wrong with saying "AoE attacks have a 50% crit chance out of hide, except for Burst" ? burst isn't a great power on its own - small radius, long cast time, pretty weak damage - so against small numbers of enemies KM is better off not using it and using its very fast attacks to cycle through targets one at a time. but the auto-crit + pbaoe means that when KM is surrounded it can go AS -> hide proc -> burst which is a super cool trick and sometimes very useful. stalker KM doesn't rely on burst to be competitive... it relies on having a tight attack chain that maximizes the number of times you can smash that [redacted] sec assassin's strike button. burst is really there for convenience and auto crit burst on low level x8 TFs is an absolute godsend. but at higher levels it starts being less relevant as other aoe is way better and you're probably using the hide proc to get a critical Zapp or Moonbeam instead of tying yourself up for 3 seconds making whoosh noises. honestly I don't think KM needs any help at all, it's good enough at level 50 and certainly not one of the lowest performers and the fact that it comes into its own with its good attacks by level 18 makes it a very smooth leveling experience.

😭 kinetic melee did nothing wrong

my favorite pick for underappreciated Steinman song and a truly ridiculous movie. RIP Jim, nobody wrote songs like he did. runner up is Life Is A Lemon And I Want My Money Back, which may not be the best song but is my pick for best song title ever written.

Easily capped fire resists + damage aura + Burn = fiery aura is king also fire mobs don’t come with any annoying side effects like knockback (energy) or slow (cold) or whatever

Not much to be done about the low Threat generation of Stalkers. You could try to keep them in range with things like Ice Slick, caltrops, chilling embrace, oppressive gloom etc but none of those are great answers. Ice slick is probably one of the better ones though and is a nice bonus to frost and frozen aura. i haven’t run the numbers or anything but I’d definitely consider looking at /rad for a farming build as it has two candidates for a proc bomb AoE and Ground Zero can hit up to a whopping 30 targets.

First two replies pretty much covered it - if Domination is dropping it's because a) you were doing something else, b) got tagged by a -recharge debuff, provided you have enough recharge slotted. It's also worth noting that if your build doesn't have perma-Hasten, the displayed recharge of Domination will actually be a little longer in-game than it is in a Mid's build since your global recharge drops for a few seconds. That in combination with a recharge debuff could account for Domination dropping unexpectedly. My preference is to leave Hasten on auto and hit Domination manually. I like to have a good amount of overlap on Domination (5+ seconds- my main runs with permahasten which is like ~19s 😅) to make the most of its endurance refill. When your opening salvo of big control + epic aoe + other big aoe uses like 60 endurance being able to put off Domination for a few seconds is very nice to refill off of the alpha strike. There is a very good shortcut for building Domination in the Villain Alignment Power, Frenzy, which can give you a free bar every 6 minutes. The other much less sexy shortcut that I know of is to repeatedly start and interrupt a snipe power, preferably with Ageless (which is what I do). But if you're leveling up and you know you're going back into a hard fight you can also just stock up on blues at the Hospital. I find the Power Recharge Indicators to be useful as well as I don't have to guess when the powers will be recharged.

for this route I highly recommend gravity control as its AoE immob lacks knockback protection and wormhole and dimension shift are highly effective ways to pvp your (soon-to-be-former) teammates 😂

I haven't played around much with any of the Presence powers but I think broadly speaking combining fear and stun is kind of a nombo as the aggro from the stun aura will continuously break the fear, and ice patch is much stronger mitigation anyway. Come to think of it I'm not sure if slotting damage procs in fear - like in sleep - makes the power completely pointless. I also don't think the Placate proc in Frozen Aura will do much good for the same reason - oppressive gloom should break it quickly - and it's my understanding that you won't be able to get free crits from it (the Placate power from the Stalker primary puts you back into hidden and it's that attribute that gives you the crit, not the placated status.) Conceptually I like it but you may be better off with a primary that puts out stuns to stack with Oppressive Gloom. Finally you have missed something huge in the build which is that you don't have the Stalker Build Up ATO slotted anywhere and so I would highly recommend working in both that and the Gaussian Build Up proc into Build Up because +160% damage build ups are sick.

I share many of your concerns and have previously written about my distaste for rolling Judgement powers, and my belief that certain character utilities like say, tanking and aggro management and control powers are basically pointless - in the worst case literally a waste of animation time - when a decked out team runs into a +4x8 mob. It's worth pointing out that a lot of the team's AoE damage potential is also wasted if everyone dumps their powers at once as the mobs get way overkilled. There's a few obvious things you could do, like increase the difficulty (if not already running at +4x8) or running with a smaller team size (I think 4-6 is about the sweet spot), as well as some ideas that are historically unpopular like voluntarily unslotting your Incarnate powers, having everyone use a budget build, etc. I personally find these unsatisfying as I like to build the strongest character I can, usually. Assuming you're already running at +4x8 and have enough like-minded friends to fill a full team and don't want to exclude anyone, another thing you could do is simply split the team up into two groups of 4 and 4 and divide and conquer. This is actually one of my favorite things to do as it massively cuts down on overkill and slows down the fights long enough for things like control or tanking to matter. If you still want to play in a big blob, you could have one or two players running a spawn ahead to pre-group and pull the mobs in. Maybe the tanker doesn't need to be there to keep their teammates alive, but they're still better at herding and can operate safely on their own, and then when the team catches up the controller mezzes them causing their aggro to fall off and the tanker can move to the next group. I got this far before realizing that you're writing from the perspective of maybe a lower level character without IOs on a team where half the members clearly do not need the other half or, indeed, anyone else on the team at all. In that case... my best recommendation is to form a team yourself and advertise it as something like "All/Low Levels Welcome" or even "Preferred" as the gap between a level 25 character on SOs and a level 50 character w/IOs exemplared down to level 25 is really significant. Clear communication up front is probably the best way to handle something like this and if you've made this clear you're well within your rights to send someone a /tell along the lines of "hey, great build but there's not much left for the rest of the team to do." In that case you may also be best off letting the player go off and do their own thing while you lead the team a totally different path down the map. Following in their wake definitely is boring, but... you don't have to do it.

two main reasons: 1) Carrion Creepers puts in absolutely disgusting work as it spawns tons of pseudopets that each do tons of damage when they spawn and can proc up to 6 damage procs with their attacks 2) I'm not sure how much DPS a fire farm mob does but I am sure that Seeds of Confusion lets you take a big chunk of that DPS and make the mob use it on itself Fire Control does alright damage as hanging out in a bonfire is not fun but Carrion Creepers in a fully target saturated environment is really gross.

what, you have something against Stalkers without hide? 😤😤 (I do too) It would increase the average power level of the game in that it’s basically giving players an extra power pick to play with. Probably won’t change damage output at all but would leave more room for pool powers or one slot wonders.

It's buried somewhere in the "buff dominators?" thread in General Discussion but I think a change that would help pre-endgame Dominators a lot would be a endurance cost reduction and to hit buff that scales with the Fury bar. Low level play means constantly juggling controls and attacks and missing with a control power is both a waste of endurance and potentially very hazardous, and the lower enhancement values and scarcity of enhancement slots pre-level 25 or so, I think, turns a lot of people off of the archetype.

If I had to guess, and I do, I would guess that the first team leader didn't see you in the team view finder because you were in LFG queue when he looked, and then after you landed in zone you were out of queue and were able to be invited to the team. I would further speculate that the Team Finder may be a little delayed in updating, but I wouldn't know, because I've never used it 🤪

Ok. This thread isn't about what's unbalancing the game (if anything) but about what you consider your personal standard for rating sets. So I don't disagree with you but I'm not interested and I think it's off topic.