Maxzero

One combo you might want to consider amongst your choices there is Ill/Storm. Starts off pretty decently and just gets stronger and stronger. Storm gives the AoE (and damage in general) that Controller often lacks while Ill gives you an option (Phantom Army) against mez resistant enemies that you will eventually come across. Then reason I noted these two points because its probably the two most common things that cause Controllers trouble.

Envenomed dagger helps with -regen. 30 use temp power from P2W vendor. Unfortunately the Bollas Immobilize from the Utility belt power pool has some missing animations that might cause some issues. Would be so good with Illusion.

Sorta touches on my feelings as well. Melee probably has the highest baseline of all archetypes but thats on the proviso that everything goes according to plan. Assuming enemies are tightly grouped up and debuffed then things are great but when something goes wrong you basically run or die. You can't really don't do anything different. Add to that when something does go wrong it tends to go wrong extremely fast. I remember a thread before shutdown where melee were complaining about the Mask of Vitalization from Dark Ring Mistresses. Basically if they got hit they would just die with no counter play and the best option was to complain on the forum.

Plants only work on target near the ground. The trade is that the AoE Immo does 2x damage and they get AoE Confuse and 2 pets.

Its funny how Doms and MMs have the same concerns at 50. About the only one who don't are Brute and Scrappers. Pity I don't like melee. Basically you can go two routes: support through being a ghetto Defender running Kinetics or go damage running Storm and such. Honestly if I wanted to play a Defender I would just play a Corrupter (Defenders feel insecure at 50 too). I have always liked control/CC based characters so Controller for me.

I would say that a Fire/Storm SHOULD take RoF for use against AVs... but if they don't, it's not a great deal. The reason is that they do far less direct damage that benefits from Containment, than pet damage that does not benefit. You will have 3 Imps, 2 Tornados, and 1.5 Storms out on the average, and that puts out significantly more damage than the Controller's direct attack cycle. Not to mention that all of these powers plus Freezing Rain suck up endurance, and that if you are soloing the AV, you need to run defensive toggles in addition to having some IO set bonuses, since Fire/Storm has no taunting pets. So... due to Endurance problems, I don't think that a max-damage personal attack cycle will be that useful, compared to the much more End-efficient summons. You may still want RoF to help with a bit of damage, and to keep the AV in one spot. Otherwise you have to run Hover to stay away from melee AVs. Yeah and how are you going to keep that AV in Tornados, Freezing Rain, Bonfire and Thunder Storm? If anything RoF is even more important that usual for Plant/Storm since it relies so much on damage over time effects. Your taunting pets makes me wonder about the viability of a Dark/Storm. You get the Immo and the taunting pets plus the damage. Plus Dark Has better access to IO sets then Fire.

Most debuffs are total garbage for AVs except for -regen, -resist and -dam. Level 54 AV have 87% resist to most debuffs. -dam and -resist are not one of them and -regen values are often high enough (500+) that even 87% resist leaves you with -65% regen.

How do you setup containment on without RoF on any AV level target (purple triangles)? You are basically losing half your damage. I would argue a 'RoF, Fire Blast, RoF, Char Fireball on Cooldown' rotation is just about the best single target rotation a Controller can have. Maybe Grav might be comparable though. Bad AoE though.