Machariel

" aggro to be spread evenly among the blaster " is what really did it for me 😂

I've heard people sing the praises of Bile Spray because it's pure toxic damage and thereby takes advantage of the -40% res in Venom Grenade, but I'm skeptical that it's anywhere close to Mu Mastery. Mu seems to be hands-down the best for added AoE damage with its 2 good AoE attacks and the ball lightning from the pet. But, I'm not sure how much AoE you need. The VEATs are in an interesting place IMO in that all of their Patron Pools are pretty decent, but they have so many powers to choose from that you can skip the pools completely and be fine. Personally I'm hoping that Mace Mastery proves to be tolerable because I kind of wanted to go all Arachnobots pets for theme.

I for one really enjoy self-rez powers in powersets. I don't often have room for them, but sometimes I wind up looking at a build that's taken everything that I wanted and still has 1 or 2 powers left, and usually I'm more constrained by slots anyway. So from this perspective a self-rez is less of a wasted power pick and more of a power that requires no slots to have a concrete, if small, benefit to my gameplay. It definitely lets me play my main much more aggressively than I'd be able to otherwise.

Nope, shards are just a lot less common for some reason, but you can make alpha slot stuff with threads just as well (gotta scroll down in the "create" window to see the other recipes) 🙂

I hesitate to call any power truly useless but any power that does Phase Shifting on enemy targets is usually a bad bet... Especially since generally the archetypes that get these powers already have good ways to keep enemy groups at range (any AoE immobilize, slow patch, knockdown patch.) Though, Team Teleport might be a power that I've never seen anyone TRY to take. so that's probably my vote for most useless non-temporary power.

I thought Gravity was weird and had its KB to KD attached to its holds? Perhaps one of the advantages of bringing control archetypes is that they're good at turning knockback into knockdown for everyone, all the time, for free, in this way liberating humanity from the unending philosophical war of knockback vs no knockback. 🤔😅 as long as they can get to the mob before the KB and after its grouped up (and this is where a great tank can shine). I figure, everyone agrees that unmitigated, indiscriminate knockback is irritating. So if I were building a character that wanted to use a lot of KB, there are 2 solutions: either use KB to KD IOs, or use what I can collectively call "tactics" (hover from above, herd into wall, etc.), depending on your playstyle. I like to fight large groups and to me the idea of finding particular enemies to knock around and to spend time repositioning sounds tedious and potentially dangerous depending on what other mobs are around, so I'll slot KB to KD in almost all of my powers (and definitely in AoEs). This is the "slot tax." I could ALSO use the FF +rech proc in a bunch of my powers and be able to run at really high recharge, which would be fun, but I think you give up too much in opportunity cost (set bonuses & other procs). But, that would maximize the amount of knockdown you do, so maybe that's your thing. and if I wanted to really lean into knockback that's what I'd do. Actually, I think I just came up with a concept for an Earth/Energy dom, which can definitely benefit from the recharge.

My comfort pick for general content is a Plant/Fire Dominator. This is not because it's a do-anything build, but probably just because I've been playing it for so long and it solos really well. Seeds of Confusion is at its best, I think, on low-mid level TFs where mobs live long enough that turning them on each other en masse makes a big impact. If a curse befalls me and I can't play that and I have to pick a new main character, I'd probably settle on either my melee Widow or my hunts(wo)man Spider. Both are very flexible, have good damage, and support the team with control or debuff respectively.

Whether a comparison is "fair" or not is really a matter of opinion. It is certainly true that in a sustained DPS scenario, like attacking a pylon, concentrated strike is a net DPS loss, and it's not worth chaining build ups. However, most of the time you're not attacking pylons, and the degree to which you value sustained ST dps over an infinite time horizon is certainly a personal choice. Maybe you want the stun, maybe you want to play with the build up on demand mechanic for fun, maybe you want it as just a regular hard hitting attack and don't plan to use it right after AS - it actually does pretty OK. I like it when I'm soloing as it's an easy way to chunk down bosses and make 100% sure that build up is ALWAYS up for the next boss, and since when you're soloing you only have a 10% crit rate (out of hide), you're not losing very much for sustained damage. In team settings where things are moving faster and your crit rate spikes up to 30%, you'll obviously feel the drawback of the slow animation a lot more. Damage procs change the calculus a bit as well as they have a 47% chance, at best, of going off in Smashing Blow and a 90% chance of going off in Concentrated Strike and, of course, don't get doubled by critical hits. Not enough to make it worthwhile as part of a sustained DPS chain, of course, but having 3 damage procs go off in CS adds nearly as much damage as the critical hit does, which takes some of the edge off. CS isn't part of an optimal attack chain, thats for sure. But it does do a lot of damage and if you weren't planning on critting for those 2.83 seconds anyway - which you probably weren't, because you used Burst, a Snipe, or Smashing Blow from Hide - then you haven't actually lost anything from using the power.

It really depends how you're playing the TF, and are people running it for merits (speed!) or xp/inf. Efficiently completing a task force requires some mix of the following and there's many, many ways to get these. step 1: get to the objective Stealth & Travel Powers - including teleportation. Task Forces can be quite long and in some of them, just getting around the map can take quite a long time by itself, on the order of the time spent actually inside the missions. Pretty much any AT can (and does) do this with IOs (super speed + Stealth IO in sprint) and temporary/pool/incarnate powers (Assemble the Team / Mission Transporter, Recall Friend, Incandescence Destiny, respectively. However, at lower levels and with more casual playgroups you'll normally look towards the "stealth" ATs for this (Stalker, VEATs, Warshades) step 2: clear the trash Most task forces heavily reward AoE damage as they will usually be played on x8 and heavily feature defeat alls, so even if speedrunning some amount of AoE is useful. The higher the difficulty and the closer the group tilts to "kill-all" vs. "speedrun", the more useful AoE damage will be to your task force. In my opinion, the closer you get to level 50 the more you can take "having enough AoE" for granted. Of course, there are many, many, many ways to build a character for strong AoE damage, and once you hit incarnate territory everyone gets judgement anyway. Usually burst damage is more useful than sustained damage for AoE since there aren't many times in task forces where you have to deal with an unending stream of enemies. step 3: defeat hard targets Of course, almost all task forces feature multiple fights against single hard targets, usually taken one at a time. This is generally the AV at the end but this can apply to EBs and bosses in regular mobs depending on team makeup. (Even when a very high powered team gathers entire rooms in the ITF together and blows its collective AoE wad, there's still a bunch of half-HP bosses grouped up). This, of course, is where single target damage and debuffs (especially -regen for AVs and -res) come into play. The team will also need some way of managing the hard target in question, which might be tanking it conventionally, neutering it with debuffs, or simply by having a very survivable team (IOs, shared defense buffs, stacking holds through purple triangles, whatever). As with step 1 and step 2, there are many many ways to be able to do this. Any AT than can contribute to these goals in a way that lines up with the way the leader wants to run the task force (nothing complex, just simply "kill most" or "speed") will be valuable and as other people have said pretty much anything is welcome. There are a handful of TFs that do require specific utilities though. For example, the Lady Grey TF requires a mix of ranged damage, melee damage, and control to handle the mini-Hamidon. Now, this isn't to say that you NEED a controller/dominator on the team - perhaps all the melee ATs took a single target hold in their ancillary powers - but this is an example of the (relatively rare) case where a specific type of AT is helpful 🙂

This is a really excellent guide (and I love the style haha). Only thing I would add is that I think Dual Blades actually has pretty good min/max performance if you're willing to just ignore the combo system, which may or may not be someone's taste. But I think either way if you want to do cool combos you're better off with Street Justice. 👍

It is truly remarkable that we are able to observe the 7th anniversary of the game's shutdown with a vibrant community, supported by an incredible staff, playing a game we all love in a way we never thought would be possible. Perhaps I will keep November 30th as a personal holiday.

Plain and simple, /Psi is popular for Drain Psyche. Completely solves Dominators 2 big issues with hard targets: lack of access to -regen, and lack of sustainability. DP does both (heh heh) and once you're at permadom levels of recharge its not too much further to get drain psyche to be perma as well.

I've heard good things about Kinetic Melee on Stalkers. Body Blow and Smashing Blow are both very fast and KM has the fastest Assassin's Strike at a mere 0.67 seconds. Stalkers get Build Up instead of Power Siphon which I think is an improvement since you can reliably start double and maybe even triple stacking Build Ups with concentrated strike. I thought Concentrated Strike would be kind of meh given the long animation and the inability to crit but its DPA is actually in line with Body & Smashing. KM only gets one AoE attack, in Burst, which has a slow animation but at least it's a PBAoE which puts the set in the middle of the pack for Stalker AoE. I would imagine that Burst with double Build Up is pretty good. All of your attacks have some CC in them as well, either disorient or knockdown, which is kind of cool both for its own sake and because it increases the number of procs you can slot (although the Stun procs are very meh). I'm now looking at pairing it with /Rad Armor, though Shield is as always an excellent choice. When I was looking through the secondaries nothing jumped out at me as being particularly good or bad with KM. Hope this helps 🙂

Pretty solidly built, I agree. A few thoughts: Dominating Grasp and Positron's Blast are both pretty meh sets in my opinion. You could slot Coercive Persuasion into Seeds of Confusion instead, which gives you another 10% recharge, which lets you swap stuff around and/or break up one of the existing purple sets. Sleet can probably just be slotted with the Achilles Chance for -Res and let your global recharge do the rest. You're also set up to exploit both Dominator ATO procs since so many of them can go into /Earth attacks. I also swapped Hurl Boulder for Roots because I wanted to keep the regular Ascendancy of the Dominator set (IMO you don't need it, at low levels you still have insane recharge for Strangler/Spears/Mallet) and made a bunch of other little changes in order to stuff Creepers and Seismic Smash full of damage procs. I'm sure there's more optimization that can be done with proc fu and stuff but this is the direction I'd go in 🙂 Here's the Build:

Do you have a procced out build Microcosm? I'm not sure where I'd fit the procs into mine - i have so few attack powers and I feel like I need to keep them slotted with sets to get the global recharge bonuses. I'll play around with it though. . . Also would be cool to see that build Striker! just to make sure I'm on the same page 😄

I really like the Decimation proc in, specifically, Dominator snipes. Good writeup overall! I should also point out that the status resistance IOs are pretty meh due to the way status resistance works - 100% resistance will cut the duration of a mez in half, so a 20% resistance is. . .. pretty meh and IMO not worth the slot.

I have no idea what most of the Dual Blade combos do, which is fine, because I don't have the powers to execute them anyway. However, I will second Moka that DB owns. "Attack Vitals" is less a combo so much as just a Stalker's job description. Stuff enough recharge in the build and your attack chain is Ablating -> Sweeping -> Ablating -> AS, repeat. It's a scary fast attack chain of the three highest DPA powers and you can stuff a purple proc and a -res proc into each of the non-AS attacks. (The procs can't stack with themselves but they stack with each other so but at least they'll both be up as much as they can). AoE? well great news every time your build up recharges (which is constantly, because you're a stalker with ultra fast attacks), you get to do the sweep combo which starts with Build Up (enjoy your free gaussian proc). You even have a good "AoE crit from hide power" in Thousand Cuts, but sweeping strike on cooldown does pretty solid AoE. Pair it with a low-maintenance secondary, preferably one with some +recharge built in, and go to town. I picked Ninjitsu because I cleverly disregarded my own device advice. EDIT: fixed typos. i should point out that my enthusiasm for the set shouldn’t be taken as my disagreement with everyone else’s thoughts: the combo system is kind of meh and awkward with the stalker mechanics. It does suck that placate is required for the combo and if you want to play the set on a stalker to use the combo mechanics, varying your attacks by the situation, you’ll probably have a bad time and be rightfully disappointed. Having to take all the attacks in the set to get access to all the combos feels pretty bad. But if you’re willing to build for that sweet sweet global recharge....

Pictured: Lumina. Lumina is about 11 years old and has the loudest purr of any cat I've ever met. Lumina woke me up at 6am today and sat still just long enough for me to take this picture. Also pictured: Homecoming discord, this forum thread, my pants

I periodically go through the rare recipes that I've accumulated, craft them, convert them into the handful of valuable enhancements, and then sell them on the market. Sometimes I'll pick a character and a zone and work on getting all the exploration badges in that zone on that character.

Mine are pretty much exactly the same.

i have no idea what you're talking about >__________> good catch

I run: Leaping: for combat jumping (defense, LoTG mule). SJ is fine too I guess. Combat Jumping is one of the best utility powers in the game - it's an OK amount of defense, it holds LoTG +7.5% recharge, and the extra jump control is really useful for moving around maps. Speed: for Hasten & super speed. Hasten makes getting permadom a LOT easier and it's one of the most useful powers in the game. Not everyone needs it, probably, but you should definitely know what you're doing if you skip it. Leadership: Maneuvers, Tactics, and Vengeance - 3 very useful powers, and 2 of them hold the critical LoTG +7.5% recharge IOs. Tactics is also the only place I can slot the Gaussian's chance for build up proc, because my Dominator is /fiery assault, which means I can't put it into my "build up" power (Fiery Embrace) since it doesn't give +tohit. Fighting: for Tough and Weave. Tough is where I slot the 2 unique +3% defense IOs (because I don't take the epic / patron power shield) and Weave adds a good chunk of defense and also gives you another LoTG +7.5% recharge. The Flying power pool is also pretty good for dominators if you have 3 power slots to spend on a travel power. Hover and Afterburner can both slot the LoTG +7.5% defense IO. You don't really need the Stealth pool, but if you don't like Leadership for some reason, Stealth is also a good source of pool powers to slot LoTG +7.5% defense recharge.

Learn something every day, thanksss 🤓

It's a LOT faster for me in practice to just hit Q or E than to bother with putting the power on my tray and then starting to use the pop-up trays. I actually wish I could disable the pop-up trays, to be honest.

Yes and no - it depends what the base recharge of the power is. As mentioned above powers with very long recharges can accept a lot of recharge enhancements ( IOs, SOs, etc ) before the proc rate starts to come down. But, of course, they’ll still have a very long recharge (much too long to be part of anything considered an attack chain). in general you are correct - the more recharge you slot in a power the lower the proc rate. Therefore you want to not slot recharge, therefore you want to build for global recharge, therefore you will usually split the purple procs off from the rest of the sets. 🙂