oedipus_tex

I'm always surprised by what skilled players can make work. As is, I'd lean toward something that works well at range or that can close distance quickly. Although this set is mostly cones, there's only one cone that's critical, the Stun one. IMO the Sleep and Fear are just extras in case you get in over your head or miss a bunch with the other cones. The damage the Fear cone does is half of Mind Control's Terrify, so its not critical to spam this power. As is, the synergies I see are: Fire Assault, due to being able to stay mostly ranged, and having an okayish cone attack to follow up with after the Stun Savage Assault, because it has a decent cone attack, a Build Up style power to boost the Stun power's damage, and a teleport to quickly close range Energy/Earth/Icy/Dark and now Sonic all have a Power Boost style power that also provides some +damage, useful for doubling the Stun duration so it's safer to melee with stuff. Each of these has its benefits and detractions as well. Energy lacking a ranged AoE for example may or may not turn out to be an issue. Thorny may be the dark horse here. Altho I am not the hugest fan of it, it does have a wide cone attack (sadly with a somewhat short reach). If you can solve its range issues with Thorntrops and its cone attack it may be a decent contender as an AoE cannon, since it does get Build Up. The set I probably wouldn't prefer is Martial Assault, because Envenomed Blades does a lot less for a nuke style power than for other attacks. Someone could maybe make it work. Personally I think Hover and Combat Teleport are highly desirable for this set.

The damage is delivered as a DoT rather than instant damage, but it's a substantial amount. Om Dominators the Stun cone deals 145 damage on a 90 second recharge. The Defender version of the nuke power Nova deals 144 on damage a 145 second recharge. Modified for it's 90 recharge to a base of 145 recharge, the power would deal ~230 damage, only about 20 points shy of the Blaster version of Nova (250). Dominators (usually) don't have as many sources of +Damage, but several Assault sets have a version of Build Up. You have to wait 20 seconds for the full strength to come through, but unless you're already killing things faster than 20 seconds per pack that shouldn't be an issue.

Fire's nuke is PBAoE, so I would possibly consider going with something like Fire/Nature/Dark, and taking Soul Drain to vampire +Damage from enemies. You can use a combo of Oppressive Gloom (Mag 2 Stun) and Entangling Aura (chance for Mag 3 Hold) to keep things occupied. It used to be crucial to have mezz protection to really make these powers work, but recent changes to offensive toggles make it less so. It's not always safe to use Soul Drain, but if you get good at it, you can often damage cap yourself for long periods of time, made easier by Nature's big +Damage boost in its T9. I agree that Lifegiving Spores and the rezz are the most skippable powers in Nature. They are both good powers, but sometimes you need other stuff. I would try not to skip either if you plan on doing top tier Hardmode content like the updated ITF, though. In Carnifax's build above you can see a good use of the Sorcery pool to get part-time mezz protection. You can probably find a Fire Blast build on the forum somewhere. It's a very popular set, and very straight forward. A lot of people skip the cone. Keep in mind endurance is likely to be your biggest battle. Nature has some End Redux but it still hammers your bar when paired with a fast casting set like Fire. You also will want to get enough global Recharge to make the nuke come up quickly and make Nature's powers perma.

I want to expand a bit on the theme above about the stun cone ("Confounding Chant") and why I keep comparing it to a Hot Feet. Here's the two powers side by side at Level 50: Confounding Chant delivers 11 ticks of damage over a 20 second duration. This breaks down to one tick every ~2 seconds. It just so happens that Hot Feet pulses at a rate of 1 tick every 2 seconds, so these powers do more or less identical damage. Hitting an enemy with Confounding Chant is equivalent-ish to them standing in your Hot Feet for an equal duration. There's a bit more to this though, and this is why this powerset is so different from the existing sets. Confounding Chant follows rules that might be better thought of as a nuke. That's because Hot Feet recalculates its damage every tick, where Confounding Chant is front loaded. You want to hit every +Damage Strength ability you have prior to launching it, because that way you get 11 ticks of very high damage. So, if you have Build Up (+42% damage) and a Gaussian's proc (+68% damage) you'll deal +110% damage with your Chant. Hot Feet would only get the +Damage effect for half of those ticks. With 90 recharge, 20 duration, it's not possible to double stack the DoTs. (An earlier version of the power had 30 second duration, and it was possible.) You can still get pretty close to perma up-time though. 90 recharge at the absolute recharge limit recharges in 22 seconds. More realistically, end game builds probably have this power at around a 28 second recharge, which means 8 seconds of downtime. Not a huge loss IMO--Hot Feet can technically outplay you because it is always available, but Confounding Chant comes with the addendum that you can move or hover away and that damage keeps going, where with Hot Feet you're only getting that damage while you maintain close range.

I think this set has given us a lot to talk about that's beyond the scope of the feedback thread. I started a thread in the Dominator forum here where we can flesh out our perceptions, strategies and ideas so that we don't fill the beta forum with our back and forth: Look forward to chatting with folks about this latest gift. Again thank you to the developers for blessing us with new digital toys to obsess over. 🙂

Hey all, the conversation in the beta feedback thread was veering toward comparison with other powersets and leaning into strategy, so I thought we might want to open a thread here to talk about things related to the new Symphony Control set. I can kick things off with my read on the set so far. 1. Many of these powers are best slotted as blasts. The damage potential of many of the powers in Symphony have high base damage that benefits from damage slotting. I think many builds will want to lean in on Ranged AOE enhancements, like Positron's Blast and Ragnarok. The fear cone power is a direct port of Mind Control's Terrify. Most players slot Terrify for damage and mostly ignore the Terrify/Fear duration. The stun cone power is in a league of its own in terms of damage output. It deals damage more or less on par with Hot Feet, although with a different delivery mechanism. Skimping on damage in this power seems criminal. You probably still want some Stun duration as well, but the damage is the ticket here. The single target Confuse I'm more on the fence about. On a Controller I definitely want this slotted for damage, and to rotate between the ST Hold and ST Confuse for the single target attack chain (I find Hold > Confuse > Arcane Bolt works well for example). It's harder to say on a Dominator. You really don't need the damage from the ST Confuse as much. OTOH it's somewhat handy to be able to hurl a Confuse and not lose much damage. 2. It's all about setting up and executing the Stun cone. In the same way that a significant portion of learning to play Fire Control is figuring out how to make use of Hot Feet to leverage the extra damage, a significant portion of Symphony Control seems to involve how you execute the Stun cone, both for its stun and its very high damage. Properly set up, this power deals damage on par with ~Defender nukes. It's so good you could take this, skip almost everything else in the set, and IMO still have an incredibly strong character. Hot Feet + Flashfire rolled into one power, essentially. Upsides: You can use the stun cone from a ranged (including a hover) position The size of the cone responds to +Range enhancements and boosts, allowing you to create a truly enormous area of effect Unlike a Controller, Dominator has no need to set up Containment prior to the stun--just go all in on them right away (Controller probably wants to Sleep them first) Downsides: Cones are always a little awkward to use in certain situations If you miss an enemy, you're not getting any damage on them at all until the next cycle Damage takes 20 seconds to fully apply (not that big a downside IMO) 3. This pet is weird. I'm having a really hard time evaluating the value of the pet on Dominators. It's going to come down to often you're hitting the Control powers from Symphony. If you do that a lot, he's great--he spams Confusion(!) powers and also Holds. On Controllers, who really don't have many other blast options, he smokes the control capacity of other pets, no competition. On Doms it's going to depend. 4. There are no pseudo pets or patch powers to blanket an area. This is actually fairly rare for a Control set. Most sets have at least one pseudo pet who's there to provide coverage-over-time to an area of the battlefield. Symphony has direct controls, and only direct controls. The upside to this is every single power in the set (except the T9 pet) Dominates. The downside is there a lesser window for error. Once you've expended your Stun cone, you still have the Terrify and Sleep cones, but circumstances can make those less than reliable. Solo, if played smartly you should not have many problems though. 5. This set is not Mind or Dark Control, it's something else. I think comparisons to Mind and Dark Control are somewhat inevitable, because the sets are similar in a lot of ways. I've heard Symphony called Dark Control with the -ToHit debuff traded away for damage, and that's partly correct. What really sets Symphony apart from either of these sets though are where it takes a page from something new and throws all of its weight behind the huge damage of the Stun cone. It really is all about that power, in a way neither Dark or Mind are designed. Symphony smokes the AoE damage of either of those sets. I can't stress the damage difference at play here enough. The Stun cone is a ranged Hot Feet, and comes with all of the advantages you'd associate with a player playing Hot Feet well. Basically I think it's fair to think of Symphony Control as a set where the goal is to line up and execute a nuke. You will love or hate this set depending on how good you get at doing that. All the usual rules of nukes apply--meaning you want to execute those moments with a Blaster mentality, hitting your equivalent of Aim/Build Up and leveraging any -Resist you dare to prior to firing the shot. 6. It's all cones except for the AoE Hold. The AoE Hold is the ranged variety, similar to Mind Control's Total Domination. It's the Get Out Of a Corner power for me in case I get stuck. Being an all-cone set, I find Hover strategies work especially well. I did get to play a Symphony/Fire/Leviathan on a highest challenge level ITF, hand selected because I perceived there would be synergies in that combo of sets. It was effective because Fire Assault can deliver such high damage from range. I'm less confident in how the set would perform with a heavy melee or PBAoE build.

Still enjoying and playing the set. Have found a couple of small bugs in the past few days. Shivers (Dominator version): Base Recharge is set to 30, probably should be 40 (per patch notes and Controller version). Arctic Air (Dominator version): This power appear to still detoggle when the caster is mezzed, versus using the newer toggle logic. I haven't been able to test the Controller version yet.

I've recently been rethinking my Dominator builds and changing things up. Classically, I went the Punch/Tough/Weave route. It works well enough, but it was also old school thinking on my part, from back before we had a bunch of super armor click powers. But more recently I've been rethinking that, because really Dominators don't need armor all of the time, just at key moments. Lately I've been finding myself going Weaken Resolve/Mighty Leap/Unleash Potential on more builds, especially ones with a Power Up type power to double the defenses. In particular, Dark Assault lends itself to this because it covers HP recovery. Weaken Resolve isn't strictly the best power ever, but it does have a minor Resist debuff and its marginally better than Punch. On test recently I rolled an Electric/Sonic/Mu Dominator and grabbed Unleash Potential, Power Sink (for endurance), Destiny Barrier, and Surge of Power, the APP power that maxes out your Resists to all but Psi. It was pretty effective rotating between Barrer and Unleash, with Surge there as a backup in case HP started dropping. Sonic Assault doesn't have a sustain, so it does mean if HP start dropping it can get rough if you can't use inspirations, like some of the newer high difficulty task forces. I did a similar build with Elec/Dark/Mu that loses the -Resists from Sonic Assault but adds HP back to the mix.

I would not say no to lowering the cast time of the Confuse to make it a somewhat better attack. Lowering it to around 1.67 seconds would be about right. Or even copy the very fast animation from Spectral Wounds (1.1 seconds) if this is supposed to be an alternative to a blast. Right now on a Controller it's a must take for me, because it's a second blast. A rotation of Hold, Confuse, Arcane Bolt (or other tertiary blast) isn't huge damage, but it's a lot better than you're going to get out of a lot of other troller sets. The pet echoes the attacks and stacks Hold and Confuse pretty quickly. I did find the pet folds pretty easily at higher difficulties. Even playing a Symphony/Pain with the goal of keeping him alive I found it difficult, despite him having 800 Regen or whatever. The pet does have 90% resist to Psi, so he'll survive that easily enough. Other stuff's not easy for him though.

I can see you have strong feelings about this, so hopefully I won't come across as unsympathetic to your POV. I do respectfully disagree about this particular power. It's true other sets don't have Damage in their Confuses, but also true that variation is the rule in Control sets. I like that this is a remixed edition of an old classic. In Symphony's case, this is the first time a pet can echo what the caster is doing and help out by stacking the control power. I don't know what the recharge on the pet's Confuse is, but it's quick enough that it stacks noticeably. The pet isn't always the brightest about picking an ideal target, but if you can isolate an Elite Boss you can very quickly stack magnitude, and since the power deals damage too--from you and the pet--it's actually maintains a respectable damage chain. You have to factor in that the pet is echoing what the player is doing and otherwise just standing around. The pet has much better controls than other pets, with the downside that it only uses them if you use them first. What that means is each cast of a single target Symphony power is actually worth twice what its stated values are. Of course there are elements of this that favor some builds over others, because you do actually need to keep the pet alive. Also, Dominators probably favor Assault powers over Controls for attacks. Controllers meanwhile can game this to stack Confusion or Hold on an Elite Boss quicker than other Trollers can, and do it while actually dealing some damage. On the whole, I don't think it's totally fair to compare Symphony's Confusion to other set's Confuses. It's not the same power. The Confusion power is better compared to some of the one-off powers each set has that are custom designed for them. Jolting Chain, Spirit Tree, Haunt, Smoke, that kind of thing. Compared to those I think it's fine, especially since the rest of the set is so strong. This set is not Mind or Dark Control, those sets are their own thing.

My apologies for posting multiple times on this topic, but you are correct and this is something I want to highlight. Right now if you get toggled out of one of Radiation Infection by a Hold that lasts 6 seconds, if you had no Recharge in the power at all or Global Recharge, the power would be available to re-toggle 8 seconds after the initial mezz. That's because powers start Recharging the moment the mezz starts, not the moment the mezz ends. Powers continue to recharge while you are mezzed, and when you pop out of the mezz, you're often able to almost immediately toggle bacj uo. With this new system, if you were mezzed for 6 seconds, the timer doesn't start until the mezz ends. So you have the 6 seconds the mezz lasts, plus the 8 second penalty period. Since the penalty period begins at the end of the mezz, you're paying a total downtime of 14 seconds where before, in most cases, you paid only for the duration of the mezz. You do gain the small advantage of not losing the animation time, of course. Given the other downsides of toggle powers, I think the 8 second penalty should be eliminated. If it's very important to game balance to keep the concept of 8 seconds, an alternative would be to make the 8 seconds apply the moment the mezz activates, and not the moment it ends. In that configuration, if you were mezzed for 6 seconds, you get 8 seconds of lockout, not 14.

Possibly worth noting RE: Psionic Assault. On beta right now, Psychic Shockwave now takes the Dom +Damage ATO. That's a game changer for Psi since it normally struggles to find a good attack for that proc. Not anymore. 🙂

Here's a screenshot of how I slotted Symphony/Fire for the ITF run if its helpful to figuring out how these powers function. Several slots unslotted or slotted weird because I was rushing to complete the build by hand whle the team was forming. For the pet I was just fooling around to see how procs would work (modestly well). Everything seems to work basically as you would expect it to. There are no huge outliers in this set, other than the way the pet works, and the very large amount of damage the Stun (Confounding Chant) does. In real life I'd want more Stun duration in Enfeebling Chant, to actually add a few of the missing damage procs, and correctly slot a few powers I screwed up here (LOL Dreadful Discord--that should be slotted similar to Terrify, basically like a Blast). Even with this not really complete build tho I can deal reasonably well with Cimerorans. They are very control resistant but you can't argue with the huge damage from Confounding Chant.

The ITF is one of my favorite Task Forces so I am excited to see it get this makeover. So far I have played through this Task Force three times. 2-star run: Ice/Dark Dominator (success, lasted about an hour 30) 4-star run: Symphony/Fire Dominator (success, lasted 3 hours, 20 min) 2-star run: Ice/Radiation Dominator (failure, mainly due to losing three team members at the start of the final mission) Overall I have mostly positive feedback. My favorite new thing are the soul-stealing Elite Bosses. They are scary enough to keep the team together, and there's something very comical about being the person who gets cloned and proceeds to beat the team's behinds once killed. The one area of improvement I wouldn't mind comes in the fight with the two giant robots at the end of Mission #3. The robots themselves are very cool, and I love that you took what was originally a background detail and incorporated it into the mission (there were a lot of "whoahs!" in that chat when they first came to life). The fight itself went on for a very long time though. It didn't feel like there was a lot for me to do besides keep hitting attack buttons, and the size of the monsters made the fight feel a little awkward. Maybe give us a way to optionally make this fight faster but forfeit a badge? Alternatively, you could make the robots extremely vulnerable to some common mezz... perhaps Sleep... and have that shut off any Resists they have after each hit, so there is some way to game them. Other item on the wish list: I love the clones. Love love love fighting them. I wish there was a segment in here where no matter how well you play, the team is forced to fight a huge ambush of their own clones. Right now, if you play well enough, you could go the whole TF without getting to battle them. There are a lot of places in the TF where I can picture a big group of them showing up. Again many thanks for the updates. Looking forward to running this TF a lot more often in the future.

You might want to try Symphony/Fire on a Dominator. I think that's the current standout pairing, due to Fire Assault being able to get away with being played like a ranged hoverblaster. You can just hover up there and shoot things with your cones, including the Fire cone attack power. Might be able to get some of the other sets with decent cone and ranged attacks to work too, like Savage, Icy, etc. I would personally avoid this with a melee heavy set, altho someone will probably make it work. I did do a recent run of 4-star ITF with a Symphony/Fire/Leviathan Dominator and it was pretty good. One thing to note is that the stun cone does HUGE damage. Like so much damage that you should slot it as a blast that happens to stun, and not a standard control power. The power does more damage than casting the Fear cone (identical to Mind Control's Terrify) about 5 times. On a Controller, you want to lead with a power that establishes Containment (the sleep works well for this since it's autohit). On a Dominator, you want to hit whatever you have that multiplies damage. The damage takes 20 seconds to fully apply, but it's a huge chunk. Basically, Hot Feet level damage you can cast from ranged and that keeps ticking regardless of where the enemy stands. Symphony is definitely in the top tier for AoE damage.

Lots of good feedback. Part of the reason I'm not super stoked about the 8 second lockout is that I have lots of characters who have been dealing with the detoggle logic for a long time. For most of these characters, I have "solved for it" by pursuing reliable mezz protection. The amount of pressure to do that on certain builds, e.g. Ice Control, was very high. With an 8 second lockout, that pressure is still high. It's not really trading up and away from the reason the suppression is desirable. Keep in mind that most top end characters probably won't be dealing with the 8 second lockout that much, because that is long and punishing enough that they I'll continue to build to avoid it. I think what we're really seeking is a balance point where you can say "I'm going to risk not running mezz protection." To me, just the fact that the toggle shuts down at all while you are mezzed is pretty intense on its own. There being an extra duration on top of that I think puts us back where we were. Also let's keep in mind this timer is 8 seconds plus the time you are mezzed. Powers begin to recharge the second they detoggle. If you are mezzed for 6 seconds, you are actually locked out of the power for 6 + 8 = 14 seconds. An 8 second timer on top of the mezz duration is a very long lockout, longer in most instances than the recharge of most toggle powers.

It might also help you to know that Gravity is one of the harder Dominators to play successfully, at least in my opinion. You really only have Wormhole as an aoe control, and while it's a good power, it's not going to provide the same mitigation other sets get. You can make up for some of it with the pet, but it's always going to be a struggle compared to some of the sets that are heavier on control. Struggling with Gravity is par for the course. The somewhat good news is at least Psi is a pretty good pairing for Gravity Control. Wormhole bunches enemies into tight groups, which you can then drain and use the Regen for that to power through encounters. Psi also happens to have poor ranged damage, which Gravity's Lift, in particular, can help fill. Overall I consider Gravity perfectly "playable" but also am not surprised to see it feel weaker to your Dark and Plant--those two are usually considered the S Tier sets.

One nice thing about City of Heroes is that it works as a casual game or as a deep dive into mechanics. I think that's why it still has such a big following this many years later. As such, I think there's a difficult answer to your question, and then there's a much easier answer. The difficult answer is "As much time as you want to spend figuring it out." For some players this is extremely enjoyable, like a puzzle to figure out. Part of what keeps them going is that CoX is complex enough that they may never find a final answer, or at least may find new ways to solve the puzzle in the future. For the more casual player, the answer is to slot powers so that they are "good enough." For me, that usually means slotting a damage proc here and there. There are a few powers where damage procs are far superior to other options... most single target holds for example. But that is rare enough that it doesn't break the system. If you want something more concrete, you can follow these basic rubriks: In ranged AoEs, slot Positron's blast +1 proc from another set In snipes, slot Sting of the Manticore +1 proc from another set In PBAoEs, slot Obliteration, one proc from another set optional In holds, just proc them out, add some accuracy if you need it. In single target ranged attacks and single target punches, slot whatever Don't bother putting procs in rain powers or auras These configs will probably not result in absolute top tier results. But they will be "good enough." You can dive deeper into the puzzle if you find that aspect of the game fun.

Wormhole works similarly to other AoE stuns, like Stalagmites, Flashfire, etc. There are three major differences: Wormhole does not notify enemies. So unless you do something else to let them know you're around, they won't respond to the power itself. Wormhole teleports enemies it hits to the location of your choosing. Minions and lts are (mostly) always teleported if the power hits them, Bosses are teleported if they are +3 to you or less (so no teleportiing +4 bosses sadly). You aim the location where they will land the same way you position any power where you'd summon a pet or pseudopet. Specifically, to use Wormhole, select an enemy with the reticle, click the power, then select the place on the ground where you want enemies to be teleported to. The enemy selected by the reticle is the center point of the effect. Enemies will all be teleported to as close as their model can hit to the location you clicked. After the teleport, enemies are knocked back. You can mitigate this knockback with a kb to kd IO, if you want (personally, I always do). As Grav/Psi, what you probably want to do is Wormhole enemies into a tight pack, then use Drain Psyche to vampire +Regen/+Recovery from them. If you want, you can put a KB to KD IO (use the one that doesn't also provide damage) and Wormhole them on top of Singularity, whose Repel effect will now be a knockdown.

Mainly I was thinking that you would place Triage Beacon near the entrance, then it would basically boost your Regen for the entirety of the level, without you needing to replace them too often or worry about the range.

I always wished Triage Beacon had an absolutely huge area of effect. And that somehow if you died, you teleported back to where you placed it.

As usual this is a well designed proposal. Dimension Veil is probably the most controversial power here, due to the intangibility. Might work better to have the power provide a temporary power that must be clicked to activate the spacial ability. Alternatively, you could make this a mobile version of Dimension Shift.

In my experience usually those flags refer to toggle powers that suppress rather than detoggle. For example, the defenses in Super Reflexes cancel out if the caster is mezzed. Of course that happens only rarely since most SR players are mezzed protected most of the time. It does impact armors on squishies quite a bit, though. What's more rare is powers where an active effect gets cancelled after the fact. The only examples I can think of are click Stealth powers, with the exception of one Blaster power where a Hold can get cancelled by the target receiving damage. There may be a handful more I haven't thought of, but debuff powers generally last their stated duration... and I can't think of a situation offhand where a debuff cancels itself because of something happening to the caster. Most of the time, if there is a cancellation, it because something happens to the target. Death being, of course, the ultimate debuff canceller. 😄

Thanks for that clarification. 🙂 I'm in favor of dropping the 8 seconds of suppression entirely. You're already losing the capabilities of the power for the entirety of the mezz duration. I don't feel like most of these powers are strong enough to warrant them not immediately re-activating as soon as you're released. Other debuffs don't cancel just because the caster got mezzed; enemies don't suddenly lose their -ToHit debuffs from Fearsome Stare if the caster gets mezzed + 8 seconds. Losing the debuff just for the moments of the mezz is already punishment enough IMO. Thanks again to the team for the opportunity to comment and their attention to this system. I look forward to seeing where this mechanic ends up.

If that's the case I'd prefer no extra lockout time at all. 8 seconds is an eternity and folks are correct, that would keep you perma-detoggled in a lot of situations.