oedipus_tex

That's a pretty nice build. The main thing that sticks out to me is that if you slotted Dominate with 6 procs instead of set bonuses, you'd have a power that recharges in about 3 seconds that deals more damage than the hammer powers, because of Dominate's very fast animation. You'd still need enough Accuracy to make it hit, but between everything else you have access to you could probably skip most of the attacks in Earth Assault and be fine. I'm a huge fan of Water Spout so keep it if you're in love with it. However, I do wonder if you'd be happier with Mu Mastery. That's not a suggestion I make often, but in this case, with Earth's heavy endurance costs and Mind's sneaky mezzes, I wonder if you would prefer to have Power Sink (for the end bar refill, not for reducing enemy blue bars). That would allow you to pick Barrier for your Destiny pick without worrying about the blue bar, and if you wanted to you could get Surge of Power for a third source of mitigation when Unleash Potential and Barrier are down.

Just to be thorough, remember Dark Control's Haunts don't actually Taunt enemies. What that power does is give the enemy a temporary power that taunts the Haunts to the target. This forces them to focus-fire that target. You are absolutely correct that Haunt is a really good power.

I use it mainly on an Elec/Psi Dominator. That character really benefits from being able to spam immobilizes (for the endurance crash effect) but still pull everything together tightly. Plus Fold Space comboed with Drain Psyche is a match made in capped Regen heaven.

I disagree that Mass Confusion is any more an "I win" button more than other controls. Mass Confusion is a Scale 20 mezz on a 240 recharge, which translates to an uptime ratio of 12. Stalagmites, to grab one random example, is a Scale 8 mezz on a 90 recharge, which translates to a nearly identical uptime ratio of 11.25. The only real difference is that Stalagmites will be up about every 20 seconds on an end game build, versus 60 for Mass Confusion. Mass Confusion would have an edge if other Dominators couldn't recast their 90 or 60 sec power when needed. What tends to happen to Mind characters is they end up leaping into fights with Terrify because Mass Confusion is still recharging, where a different Dominator would have just cast Stalagmites/Flashfire/etc.

Any Dominator should be able to do at least some AoE control. Here's what each set other than Mind is bringing on an every-fight basis when pushed to its performance limits: Earth: Stalagmites and Earthquake Ice: Arctic Air and Ice Slick Fire: Flashfire and Bonfire (and to a lesser extent Hot Feet) Gravity: Wormhole Plant: Seeds of Confusion and Carrion Creepers Electric: Static Field and Synaptic Overload (and arguably Conductive Aura) Dark Fearsome Stare and Heart of Darkness To every fight Mind Control brings: Terrify (and arguably Mass Hypnosis), and Mass Confusion to one half of fights It's possible Teleknesis is meant to be the every spawn AoE control. If so, it needs some rework. Elsewise, Mass Confusion's recharge is too long. I didn't list the AoE Hold because its not available every fight, and every control set can do it. When the point is literally to compare the sets, we don't get to list it for one of them as if the other seven don't also get the power. and in some cases, like Dark and Earth, a clearly superior version of it.

That's a really impressive use of Dark Assault. I'll be honest, I've always considered Dark Assault kind of a middling set, and may need to re-evaluate it. I didn't think it could kick out enough ranged damage to get past an AVs regen. The value of its ranged self heal really proves itself in an AV fight. I admit I did not expect it to deal as much damage as it does.

Yeah. Dark Control is S tier for me partly for that reason, and also partly because it provides huge debuffs that get you around the mezz binary that rules most Dominator builds. Unlike Controllers, Dominators are starved for debuff, armor or healing. The -ToHit in Dark Control goes much further for them. My Dark Control builds are usually unstoppable from around level 22 on. This is before we get into the kegger that is Dark Control comboed with a source of Power Boost, at which point the Dominator becomes one of the best ToHit debuffers in the game. Dark Control is S tier for Dominators. Well earned.

Total Domination is the same power as: Vines Paralyzing Blast Gravity Distortion Field If you have to mention Total Domination then you've illustrated the hole I am referring to. Mind Control having to use its AoE Hold to keep up with other sets is the hole.

The reason I respectably disagree with you is most sets have sleep powers. However, most players skip the sleep powers because they are able to maintain control without taking that power. Mind Control's Sleep recharges faster than most others, which does make its sleep more attractive. However its key power, Mass Confusion, recharges much slower. At 240 Recharge Plant and Electric Control have x4 as much access. Terrify is the power that is up every fight. It's not bad, certainly better than nothing. Mind Control also lacks a knock patch power to match Ice Slick/Quake/Creepers/Bonfire/Gremlins (Jolting Chain)/Singularity (Repel). Mind Control has a big hole in it. I'm not sure if the power that's underperforming is Mass Confusion or Telekinesis. Thematically, I like it. It's obvious someone poured a lot of love into the design. However I can't in earnestness rank it higher than mid tier while also feeling like it needs a balance pass.

Here's the essence of our disagreement I think. Mind Control gets 4 AoE Controls, but due to the low uptime of Mass Confusion, it doesn't actually have those abilities available. What makes Plant, Earth, and Dark so ferocious is the very generous recharge on key control powers that makes them available every fight. It takes a lot of IOs to get Mass Confusion down to a 60 sec recharge. Every Dominator gets an AoE Hold. It's a class mainstay. I do tend to value the ranged Holds Gravity, Mind, Electric and Plant have over the PBAoE versions available to Ice and Fire. Dark and Earth have versions superior to any of these. Mind Control usually has to cycle between Mass Confusion and Total Domination. Most sets don't do that, their key controls are available on more reasonable recharge schedules. Most Dominators also have an AoE Sleep power. They skip them though. Mass Hypnosis does recharge faster than other AoE Sleeps and doesn't notify, so I consider it a better power than many of them. I don't personally consider Mass Hypnosis a game changer though. I will give you that specifically in regard to AVs, Mind Control has an edge. Some people may value that a lot higher than I do. For me, the set gives up a lot more than it earns back from the edgecase ability to stack mezz on an AV. RE: Controllers I'll stand by the D ranking I gave them. Even if Mind on Dominators deserves better than the rank I gave it, OP is right that Mind on Controllers has a lot of issues.

Clearly we disagree, probably because we value the ability to stack Confusion on AVs differently. So I will make the case that if you specifically care about soloing AVs Mind ranks higher. For most general play Mind Control sits at C rank for me. It's a set that's billed as "safe" but in practice leads to leaning hard on an AoE Hold that all other sets get but in most cases don't need to lean on. It lacks an AoE Immobilize to keep things from running, has no debuff to fall back on when its controls fail, and doesn't exemplar well. Mind and Gravity are the only sets I no longer have a IOed Dominator dedicated to. I like the theme, but Dark and Plant are just too much better at what Mind is trying to do, and the recharge on Mass Confusion makes what would otherwise be a safe set dangerous to keep the roll moving like other Dominators can.

I recently saw some videos for another game where folks ranked sets into tiers using Tier List, so I decided to do something similar with Homecoming's Dominator Control Sets. I arrived at this: Since the icons may not be clear on their own, my ranking goes: S Tier: Plant, Dark A Tier: Earth B Tier: Fire, Electric C Tier: Mind, Ice D Tier: Gravity Now, any time you are ranking things into tiers this way there's always some controversy. I think even Gravity, my lowest rated Dominator set, is still playable. There's also always going to be some questions about what sort of missions we are trying to do, and whether it matters how the set performs as challenge levels increase. Plant and Dark Control both feature a Confusion power, and both are top of the game IMO for various reasons. I consider either of them generally better than Mind Control in most situations. There are occasionally scenarios that might call for Mass Confusion, but in my experience they are rare. I put Electric in B tier, but not so much because of its Confusion power. Electric is *almost* Tier A, except for not being able to Dominate with Synaptic Overload. If this is ever fixed it would do a lot for the set IMO. On Dominators I put Mind Control on around the same tier as Ice Control. Playable, potentially fun, obviously designed with love. But in terms of performance, it falls behind sets that can chug out reliable hard hitting mezz that makes it safe to leap into the fray. Mind Control does tend to handle AVs better, to the extent that matters, and I can see why some people might slot it higher. In case you're wondering, here's how I'd rank the same sets on Controllers (Illusion isn't shown here because I didn't have its icon handy, but I'd put it in S tier). On Controllers, Mind Control falls a rank for me and is in the bottom tier. Plant still reins supreme. I can explain the rest of the rankings if you're curious.

IMO Thermal is rarely given the credit it deserves. It's a monster set that only comes together late, but it can deliver. It's probably not strictly the better soloist, but it's still really impressive. The main thing about Thermal is it's a healing set that still gets a Benumb-like power (Heat Exhaustion). Thermal can self heal, but more importantly Thermal can support a Lore pet and potentially a bonus Patron pet probably better than any other Buff set can while still retaining a strong source of -Regen. This is partly why Thermal is a popular set for Masterminds. Cold is still good. It's helped by easy access to defense powers to slot Luck of the Gamblers in. Cold pumps out more -Resist than Thermal does. Cold also effectively has bottomless endurance after securing enough IOs, and that counts for a lot. Dark Affinity is also good and fits the theme you mentioned.

Storm is a damage support set that doesn't get Scourge damage in its powers, but does get the Defender global damage bonus, so IMO it favors Defenders.

IIRC Taunt on players is mostly an effect on the player's GUI. The logic appears to be something like this: if player tries to execute a power on a creature, and that player is currently Taunted by something else, the power does not execute, and the selection reticle is re-centered on the creature who performed the Taunt. There's a floating orange text pop up over your head when this happens that says "Taunt!" Like folks mentioned you can eliminate a Taunt effect by killing the Taunter. Also you can still cast AoE attacks, and powers that affect a location like Rain of Fire aren't affected at all, so you can still hit other stuff.

Correct. Specifically, Cold's shields provide enhanceable Resistance. There are some powers that do provide Resistance, but it isn't enhanceable. An example of that is Force Field's Personal Force Field. Unenhanceable attributes don't benefit from STR, so its not necessary to flag the power to ignore it.

Here's a quick and dirty version of it: There are three numbers you want to memorize: 32.5%, 40%, and 45%. Each represents a specific Defense threshold: 32.5% is one purple inspiration away from soft cap 40% is one Destiny Barrier lowest-ebb away from soft cap 45% is the actual soft cap In general when selecting set bonuses you want to cover at least a few Defense vectors. How realistic that is depends a lot on the class you're playing. But there is almost no build that can't at least get to 32.5% Ranged defense. If you do that and for the most part slot your other powers intelligently, you're fairly well on your way to understanding how builds work. Once you've gotten used to that concept, thats when you can start to branch out more and look for other set bonuses. You get these bonuses by putting a bunch of slots in powers. You can get some initial ideas by looking at other people's builds. (You are also going to get some people telling you the numbers I provided aren't realistic for X Y Z reason. They're right; in more advanced builds there's more to consider. But those thresholds are a good starting place for making it less overwhelming to learn.) There's also a holy bible of sorts that's worth noting: If you have a power that can be slotted for Defense, put a Luck of the Gambler +Recharge there. You can do this up to five times per build. If you have open power pool picks its often worth taking a Defense power just for this proc. In fact Defense and Recharge are intimately linked. This is why I suggest starting with Defense builds and learning from there. Learning how to stack bonuses to build Defense teaches you the skills you need to branch out. It's pretty much biblical truth at this point that every build slots Steadfast Protection and Gladiator's Armor procs in a Resistance power. These two procs together provide +6 Defense to all. Starting out learning builds, find your Resistance power and put these slots in first. Your first builds won't be epic. That's fine. When you respec you get your enhancements back, and there are enhancement unslotters you can spend merits on. Dont worry too much about nailing it on the first try. Some of my toons have been respecced upwards of 10 times, and still I spot things I can change from time to time.

To better understand why Power Boost and powers like it have specific restrictions, it might be helpful to take a step back and talk about how Attributes work in this game in general. An Attribute is any statistic on your character that is tracked. Examples of Attributes are: ToHit Melee Defense (and each additional elemental/positional variation of Defense) Perception Recovery Regeneration Healing etc Each Attribute also has what are called "Aspects." Aspects further specify the "what" portion of the Attribute. This is a lot easier to envision if you picture rows in a table, where the Attribute is the name of the row, and each Aspect is a column in the table capable of holding a value. For example: CUR ABS STR MAX RES ToHit Perception Recovery Regeneration CUR and ABS stand for Current and Absolute, respectively. Current generally provides you with a percent of the current value, Absolute provides you with the exact value. Max is Maximum, RES is Resistance. STR is where power boost comes in. STR stands for Strength. The value in STR multiplies the effect of any other values being written to the table. So if you have +50% STR, anything written into the table will be 50% stronger. The "unless" attached to this is some powers are specifically coded not to accept to STR buffs. So, why would a power not accept STR buffs? Partly its because of how Damage is tracked. I'll use Fire and Energy damage as an example: ABS STR RES Fire How much damage you do with Fire Multiplier to how much damage you do with Fire How much you resist in-coming Fire damage Energy How much damage you do with Energy Multiplier to how much damage you do with Energy How much you resist in-coming Energy damage Remember, STR multiplies any value written into the tables. So, STR is how powers like Aim and Build Up work--they multiply your Fire and Energy etc numbers. That works fine. However, its not appropriate for STR from Aim or Build Up to also multiply Resistance. This is where the origin of the rule that "powers that have enhanceable resistance cannot benefit from Power Boost" originates. It's not even Power Boost itself that's the culprit, its Aim, Build Up, and other powers that enhance the STR Aspect of a damage type. One other gotcha with Power Boost--it matters when you read the detailed power description which specific Attribs are listed. For example, both Regeneration and Healing can take take Healing enhancement sets. However, Power Boost only boosts Healing, not Regen. The developers are perfectly capable of making a Power Boost-type power that benefits from a Power Boost effect, but so far mostly haven't. As a huge aside, it's from this Attribute/Aspect system that any Attribute that exists theoretically can have Strength and Resistance. This leads to some potentially weird scenarios. For example I'm not sure if there are any powers in game that actually provide -Regeneration Resistance, but given that any Attribute is capable of having Aspects, it definitely could exist. Same with seemingly strange stuff like -Stealth Resistance or STR effects multiplying -Perception or Global Recharge. STR is even occasionally used in places you wouldn't expect, like with the Rage stat that fills the Domination bar, by making it easier to fill the bar quickly when on a team.

IMO it's not really worth proccing Gale. The math might prove me wrong on a troller with extremely slow animating AoE immobilizes, but as a Storm player you'll likely have a lot more going on. Mids says procs have a 21% chance of firing. Overall with 3 procs it works out to a DPA around 22. For reference, Fire Cages slotted for damage, without Containment is around 20 DPA and with containment is around 40 DPA.

I have one of these at 50. TBH the endurance drain was such a large issue that I ended up shelving him. I didn't get to the incarnate levels though. You're probably going to want mezz protection for this to work. Otherwise, Hot Feet and Venomous Gas are hard to keep active. Probably the cleanest path there is the Psi APP for Indom Will, so that you can take the Destiny that provides endurance bar refills (instead of the mezz protection one). That way you can still pick an alpha slot that provides Damage.

Mind Control is rated poorly on Controllers because Mind is designed as a Blast set but because of the rules for Containment it ends up delivering poor damage. Even on Dominators, long cooldowns on key powers and lack of access to hard mezzes, and no debuff effect to fall back on when controls fails hold it back in my opinion, at least in comparison to the set that comes closest to it, Dark Control. Keep in mind though that rating sets this way is a little misleading, and some additional context is needed. A Mind Dominator is the better soloist and (possibly) better for 8-man Task Forces, but if the task is an iTrial I'd rather have almost any Controller on the team than a Dominator. The Controller's support set is (usually) a lot more useful than a Dominator's abilities in that setting. So the game does offer some varied challenges, and it can be difficult to pin down which character type is truly the "best." All of that said, if you're going to be doing a lot of exemplaring to lower levels, be aware that when exemp'ed below the level where Mass Confusion is available, Mind Control struggles. It's rare for me to give an "F" rating to a set, but specifically in a team setting at low levels Mind Control probably deserves it. You can find yourself stuck with powers like Mass Hypnosis (a Sleep) and Total Domination (the standard AoE Hold any Controller gets) while your teammates are hurling fantastic controls like Flashfire, Stalagmites, Seeds of Confusion, etc. Only Gravity Control is similarly backloaded. Part of the reason I don't play Mind Control characters anymore is that even though they do eventually perform okay, it's a long wait for key powers, and even once you have them, certain Task Forces will always be unideal for you.

Based on what you listed as your priorities, I'd go probably go with either Dark/Psi or Dark/Energy. Dark/Savage is also good, but since you're trying to grab the Teleport Pool, Combat Teleport will probably be in the build, making the charge attack in Savage Leap not as vital to have. Dark/Psi is a defensive powerhouse who is very, very difficult for enemies to kill, due to strong mezz, lots of -ToHit, and excellent Regen. Also, this combo is very easy on your endurance bar. However, it does require IOing to get Drain Psyche's recharge down to where it becomes an every battle power. Dark/Energy is a high damage character. It has Power Up, which doubles the effectiveness of -ToHit in your powers. It's a much earlier bloomer that doesn't require as much IOing to start to see the value. But, it also doesn't easily self heal or have very good endurance management.

While I agree that PFF can be a "panic button" on a non-IOed build or if you get it from an APP in a non-Force Field set, in effect its only as good as soft capping and giving yourself 40% resistance. If you've ever been soft capped with 40% Resistance you're probably aware that tough enemies can easily kill you through that. For some clarity, as a Force Field player, you get a hefty Defense bonus from Dispersion Bubble that makes it possible with relatively low effort to soft cap to most positions that matter and then can run around in what is essentially PFF al the time. Here's a Force Field Defender's base Defense given minimal effort with Dispersion Bubble, Tough, and Weave: With this slotting you can be effectively capped to Slash, Lethal, Energy, Negative, Melee, and Ranged and still have 43 slots still left to go. A lot of Force Fielders will elect to go with Soul Mastery, in order to pick up Power Boost. For 15 seconds after clicking Power Boost their Defense looks like this: PFF isn't worthless on a Force Field character. The Defense stacks with the Defense above so it can help you survive Defense Debuff, and it can also cover you with some added exotic resistance. However while you are inside it your pets/teammates won't get Dispersion Bubble or (in this build) Maneuvers. Its incredibly easy and cheap to IO yourself to the point where you're basically PFF'ed all the time without using actual PFF, and that's why it's a situational power.

Clones are pretty interesting opponents. Back in the OG game, before Trick Arrow was buffed, a dirty trick was to join a Posi 1 Task Force and not mention that your clone was for sure going to have Flash Arrow. What made this so hilarious is that Trick Arrow itself had *no* capability of protecting the team but the clone could single handedly destroy the team by blinding them. That still kinda happens, but at least now TA is a good set. If you end up teaming with one on Posi 1 tho be sure to take out their clone first.

There are insightful posts above about this power. A lot of the conversation dovetails with a classic complaint about PFF. Ducking into it cuts your allies/pets off from the benefits of Dispersion Bubble. That's why in the IO era it's usually considered more effective to IO for Defense. Once you're soft capped, unless you need the extra Resistance or experience a -Defense effect, using PFF sets your pets/team back. Of course not every Force Fielder is IO'ed, so you might occasionally use PFF and just leave the team to be picked off by the Karens. Blasters and such who pick it up as an APP power don't need to worry about this as much so it can be an okay power for them.