oedipus_tex

Yeah, I'd be on board for the right proposal. I think the Chance to Knockdown in Overwhelming Force already behaves this way. It's just a straight chance to have that effect, no PPM involved. IMO the following procs really should not be PPM based: Lockdown: Chance for Mag 2 Hold and related family of Hold procs Coercive Persuasion: Chance for Contagious Confusion Gaussian's: Chance for Build Up Force Feedback: Chance for +100% Recharge (arguable) There's probably a few others I'm not thinking of right now. You could be more general and just say "Anything not an ATO that mezzes or casts an effect on the user." Probably some Controllers will yelp at Lockdown being removed from PPM but the reason for that is their AoE Hold is really weak and IMO needs addressing in a different way. Note that self-healing procs were already nerfed in their own way and probably don't need to be reined in a second time.

I think part of it is just recognizing that we may not be talking about a "change" and more of a "understood and shared philosophy as we continue down the path of development." It may not be the case that someone needs to go in and nerf the existing state of things. I do think it's the case though that there's a benefit to identifying which procs are problematic in order to avoid propogating them. For example, unless there was a change to how Control power work to accompany it, if I can ever get my hands on a +Chance for Mag 2 Stun slottable in a Stun power, I'd lose most reasons to roll a Gravity or Fire Dominator. There's a rogue's galleries of powers I'd replace Flashfire with right away on archetypes that have better damage or more utility, sometimes in powers that actually deliver damage. Also, laying all of my high art and scholarly approaches aside, the Gaussian's proc is ridiculous. Even if it doesn't get nerfed (despite reallllllly deserving it) for sure we don't need another proc like that in game. That's one proc that should not be on a PPM schedule.

To get us out of the realm of the theoretical for a second, here's an example of a build that I consider have benefitted a lot from the PPM system. In this case I don't think it's such a huge overperformer that it needs the army brought in, but it's still helpful to ground the discussion. I rolled this first as Fire Control/Trick Arrow, got tired of Hot Feet crashing my blue bar, so rerolled as Plant Control/Trick Arrow. Part of the equation that's always in my head with a Control character is "Can I avoid the low utility of a Dominator by rolling this as a Controller and still finding a way to get good damage?" In this case, the answer was "Mostly, yes." I'm not going to argue that some theoretical Dominator I could build would out damage it, but that Dominator wouldn't get Flash Arrow, -Damage, and so on. Now I know someone is going to nitpick the Accuracy or End Cost or what have you of some specific power. I've played lots of Dominators and Controllers and I can say that it works and there's interplay between the powers, particularly the combo of +ToHit procs and autohit -Defense (Oil Slick Arrow). Practically every power here is benefitting from PPM in some way, most egregiously Seeds of Confusion (its rolling to apply extra Confusion to enemies in the cone), Acid Arrow, and Ice Arrow. I actually benefitted from the debate previously about Seismic Smash and opted for the 5-purple 1-extra slot arrangement, which still netted two procs. I wish my Ranged defense was higher. Is this build going to rival a Blaster? No. Is it extremely competitive with Dominator level damage while still bringing the utility of a Controller? Yes, and that's where I think folks are missing what people are saying about procs. I happen to really enjoy this character and love the new Trick Arrow. If no change ever happens, that's fine, because most things don't change. I do think its important for everyone to be on the same page on these topics though. BTW if anyone could powergame the best slot for me to put the Controller ATO Chance for Psi Damage that would be great. I put it in Ice Arrow for now, it could go anywhere. EDIT: Just noticed Kismet is missing from this build for some reason. Must have removed it during a pass. Would add it back and drop a little Defense to bring overall ToHit stability up.

The problem in a nutshell is that PPM allows non-Control characters to grab enough extra control without the high cost of rolling an actual Control character in the form of the low damage of a Controller or midling low utility of a Dominator. Like all archetypes there are exceptions--Plant Control is an extreme outlier both by bringing high damage and extremely good control. It's true that control mostly fails against AVs and GMs, but that's not a big cost for characters grabbing control from the PPM buffet. It may also just be the case that Controls sets in general need a balance pass to determine what they are supposed to be capable of and how large their damage tradeoff should be.

IMO Control itself isn't bad, it's Control classes (at least some of iterations of them) that struggle. I just a built a Plant/Trick Arrow that is A-Tier, almost S-Tier, so I don't disrespect what Control can bring. However, directly related to the discussion about procs, it's hard to make myself play a midling average damage Dominator when I could throw a Hold proc on a Blaster and still get hold bosses. It's that exact reason above that I do not want to see a +Mag Stun proc. The Hold and Confuse ones step hard into Dominator turf already. Of course maybe Dominators just need a buff.

I've been looking closer at the publicly available CoX code and am reasonably sure it would be possible to allow players to command enemies to perform emotes. Game Devs can force an enemy to do to it, Masterminds I believe can already do it for their pets. It would require some configuring for the appropriate checks, but would be very on-theme to force a squad of enemies to perform jumping jacks. That probably isn't an update to Mass Confusion, but to Mass Hypnosis instead, which currently can be used without enemies noticing you, so if you set an animation bit on them they'd continuously do that animation. It's not a practical change but would make Mind Control feel a lot more "psychic" to me. Plus the LOLs.

I'm gonna start diving into procs. Some of these aren't unique to Dominators, but are useful and relevant to them. I'm going to try to tackle Contagious Confusion first since that one (pun intended) tends to leave people confused, including me. Please chime in with corrections or observations. Coercive Persuasion > Contagious Confusion The famous Contagious Confusion proc has the following characteristics: 4.5 PPM, rolled per target hit When it fires it: Always cast from the location of your victim, not the caster Sphere radius: 20, max targets hit: 5 33% chance for Scale 10 Confusion, Mag 3 (ignores defense/accuracy) Other notes: Does not appear to function in PVP Explicitly checks to be certain the potential target is not a pet--so it's possible but not confirmed that it will not affect enemy pets, like pets summoned by Master Illusionists In practice, Contagious Confusion operates with Dominator powers in the following ways: Mind>Confuse, Dark>Possess: If it triggers, 5 enemies within 20ft of the target each have a 33% chance to be Confused Plant>Seeds of Confusion, Mind>Mass Confusion: Each enemy in the cone/sphere rolls to see if the effect triggers Electric>Synaptic Overload: Rolls on first enemy cast (high chance due to long recharge on base power) then on each chain (low chance due to short recharge on the power the pet technically uses) Ice>Arctic Air: Rolls on every enemy in range every pulse of Arctic Air As far as I can see there is no lock out timer on how frequently the caster can trigger this proc. An individual enemy appears to be capable of only triggering it twice within 5 seconds. Most likely this would only come into play in a situation where you are teamed with someone who also has the proc.

The reason I don't like Hurricane is any situation dangerous enough to need, it it's likely you'll just get detoggled and wind up vulnerable. By the time you've built mezz protection in, you don't really need Hurricane anymore. If you just need to reposition something, you're already stuck with Gale, might as well just use that. Not that Grav/Storm should have many issues positioning things.

That's extremely impressive and makes me rethink some of my opinion of Martial. You made great use of these powers. I have a Fire/Ice Dominator who is lingering at level 50 and has no sets slotted. He chews through his blue bar so fast at times and its frustrating. Watching this makes me think I may need to revisit him. Icy Assault has single target damage close to martial, and a second damage aura. With some grit I'm wondering if I could make it work. I didn't see Caltrops in your build. Do you have a reason for skipping that power or did I just miss it?

BTW if you are interested in killing AVs, you should check out this thread:

Plant/Savage is more of an AoE character. You could possibly beat an AV if you worked really hard, and used Lore pets, but it's not a particular strength of the combo. I've not spent a lot of time AV hunting with Dominators, but the two sets that are potentially good at it are Dark and Mind Control. While in Domination mode, their Confusion power can be stacked high enough to Confuse the AV. It takes 51 Magnitude I believe to Confuse an AV. Each cast of Confusion/Possess adds 6 Magnitude. You'd need to stack the power 9 times to get the effect, and all of the previous stacks would need to still be in place. This is slightly easier for Mind because it can also throw Mass Confusion in there, although only once every 60 seconds at top form. Stacking the mezz is much easier vs a +0 AV than a +3. I don't know at what level it becomes unfeasible to keep the mezz active. Dark/Energy specifically seems like a combo to me with some possible potential to tackle AVs while still being very strong at handling general combat. Power Up'ed Fearsome Stare does almost -20 ToHit even before adding IOs, fantastic debuff numbers for an archetype that in most circumstances is denied debuffs. That -ToHit mostly won't work on the AV but it will keep you very safe in general combat. or when dealing with AVs who call in minions. What I'm still unclear on is whether Bone Smasher's -Special effect increases the duration enemies experience a mezz. At level 50, it applies -37% Confusion strength to the target. I am not sure if this also decreases the enemy's actual resistance. It does apply a very minor amount of -Resist(-50).

This game allows you to have nearly unlimited characters, so don't feel locked into once decision or the other. As a first time player I do recommend starting your first character as a hero. The starting zone is easier to traverse and there are more people around to guide you through joining teams and task forces. You can switch to villain at any point. The zone where you do that (Pocket D) is easy to get to, and there's no cost to do it. Once you feel comfortable then I'd look more into the villain stuff.

I don't PVP but I always did kind of wish heroes and villains could enter zones "owned" by the opposite side, and thereby tacitly consent to PVP. They could be attacked but not launch the first strike. Before I ever played this game, when I just knew there was something called City of Heroes and City of Villains, that's how I assumed it would work. Even if it was just a few zones, like hazard zones. People more familiar with PVP in MMOs may have more experience with whether that sort of system ends up working out or is abusable/annoying.

Have you found a way to slot it that makes it worthwhile? I'd be willing to revisit the power if its any good these days. I've always gotten stuck on its ratio of 300 recharge to 30 second duration. The floor on the lowest possible recharge is 75 seconds, which doesn't bring it to even 50% up time. If the duration were longer or the recharge were shorter I'd feel differently. Have you found a way to use the power effectively even with its ow availability?

This is a good point. In this list IMO Steadfast and Gladiator's Armor are definite overperformers. If we were starting fresh with CoX 2 or a "challenge server" both of those I would recommend reducing to either +1% Defense to all (still really good) or have them provide Defense to only a couple of vectors. Even just getting +3 Ranged or Melee defense alone for a single slot is good slotting, the fact that these procs provide +3 Defense to 12 Vectors has a really significant impact on the game. When you combine that with Destiny Barrier providing a steady state +5 to all, the defense needed to softcap to a position is reduced from 45 to 34, doable for even many squishy archetypes to Slash, Lethal, Ranged and Melee at the same time. I wouldn't dare touch it on a live server because of the chaos of everyone having to rebuild. It's really incredible how almost everyone's build hinges on the availability of those two specific procs though. If there's a lesson to be learned here, it's that it's important that we don't get any new IOs or abilities that provide Defense to all 12 vectors at once. If you think of Defense like painting a room, each extra vector lets you stretch your resources further. At a tipping point, it becomes possible for archetypes you didn't intend to to paint the room entirely.

Have a look at that screenshot again. Acid Arrow slotted with Damage procs costs 9.75 endurance. Fireball slotted with Ragnarok costs 14 endurance. This is fairly standard slotting for Fireball and other AoE blasts on Dominators. On Acid, I have two slots left over to decide what to do with Accuracy etc. I can make Fireball more competitive by remembering the proc game and adding damage procs to it. This example used Dominators specifically; it's always hard to grab procs on Dominators because you're chasing so many things at once, but Posi's Blast has both a damage proc and a Recharge bonus, so it's realistic. A different archetype could more easily justy proccing out. Still going to cost you 12.85 endurance though. It's also true, of course, that by using those 4 slots on Acid Arrow vs the 5 Ragnarok's in Fireball I'm not getting +10 Recharge, which is the real draw of Ragnarok. I'm not mad about it. Trick Arrow's been through a long journey so if it's great now I'm cool with it. I just want to keep us all on the same page about what procs can do for builds. They probably aren't going to turn a build into a lawnmower instantly, but the info going around that they don't have significant impact is not correct.

What arcane and thoughtgun mentioned is my understanding as well. Another thing to note about the Dominator Fireball to Controller Acid Arrow comparison is that it was showing the two powers in a vacuum. Acid Arrow didn't have any recharge applied to it, but Fireball did, which is why it looked like they were closer in damage. But when you add Global recharge to the build you can get Acid Arrow up really quickly without affecting its proc rate. Here it is on a what I consider relatively easy to achieve +70 global recharge with Hasten: If you need something to fill in those gaps in your attack you can go with this: That has a 90% chance to Hold a boss in one shot too, because of PPM. I'm not whining about Trick Arrow being powerful, I'm excited for it. This is all just for situational awareness. The folks who say procs raise some eyebrows about intent aren't completely out of touch. I'll leave it up to the decision makers on whether this is in bounds.

Can you explain what you mean by the numbers not being reliable? Not trolling, but I am not sure if you just mean that Mids itself miscalculates the proc damage. From past experience I've known to be somewhat offbase when you get into the extremes, but this isn't an extreme case. If it's true then the reported number is significantly off I'd like to revise my glance methods. But just glancing at it, with each proc dealing 71.75 damage, if they go off about half the time, that's about an average of 36 extra damage per added proc, or 143 damage total, which looks basically correct. Also if we're talking about the chance of stuff not firing, we have to consider the reverse case: there's a chance all four procs could go off at once. If they do, each one does 71.75 damage, for a total of 287 damage from procs. It might seem like this wouldn't happen often, but I believe each proc roll independently for every enemy struck in this power. If you are blasting 16 enemies every 18 or so seconds then you're likely to see a number of situations where both none of the procs and all of the procs fire.

I think some folks are thinking we're talking about soloing pylons and not just basic archetype-to-archetype comparisons. Procs probably aren't turning builds into top end performers. I think it's missing the big picture tho to say they aren't a real consideration in archetype to archetype comparisons. For example, here is a Controller's non-damaging Acid Arrow compared to a Dominator's Fireball. It's just one power comparison, and not an entirely fair on. Still I think there is some room for questioning how procs are making a power that does very little damage on its own come so close to one of an archetype's best ranged blasts. I appreciate that Trick Arrow was recently buffed and don't want to see it nerfed, but I also have to recognize what's happening. I also appreciate that Fire Ball is an APP power, but it's the case that that is where the ranged Dominator AoEs are located. There are ways I could even the score somewhat, of course. I could have taken a set with a damage proc in Fireball, or use the sixth slot for a damage proc. It may even be the case that Controller damage is too low and needs a buff, but if that's true, I feel like Dominators need a lift too, somewhere.

From a strict standpoint, there's a feature built into the dev tools that allows a user with sufficient access rights to assign an unlimited number of powers from any powerset. So, if it were purely a test server thing, it might be interesting if they lowered the level of access required to unlock those commands.

For me the ITF wins by a clear margin for me over most of the other content. In fact I think it's one of the best MMO dungeons I've ever played. What specifically makes it great to me: Allows level 50 builds, don't feel like I have to escape the game's own combat and level system to play it Relatively few enemies with mezz, but mezz protection still occasionally useful Thoughtfully placed encounters with mixes of cannon fodder, all bosses, elite bosses, and a DPS check Fun to play at +0 or +4 Good rewards, so its both fun and you feel like you're progressing Enemies with -Defense turn out to be among the fair approaches to balancing IO versus non-IO builds Rewards strategy, but you don't need to memorize a script. Very easy to pick up what the team is doing The only sort of criticism I can bring about it is I think it was more fun before incarnates became a huge part of the picture, because control and support were more useful.

I'm pinging this Suggestion thread again a few years later rather than start a new discussion. Now that the Sorcery > Enflame has proven that a toggle can be placed on friend or foe, can we think about @Puma's suggestion to update Disruption Field so that you can put the toggle on an ally or an enemy? Putting it on an enemy isn't ideal, but it's useful for Defender and Corruptors who don't have a pet. Also LIquefy has a really cool looking geometry object special built for it, but the power is disappointing, so we rarely see it. An update to it would be great. Maybe something involving the new "pull" mechanic in Singularity. Sonic has a similar toggle power that could benefit.

Hi, yes all of these buff work. Sonic Repulsion is kind of redundant though, unless you want to keep it as a Knockback power and slot Singularity with KB to KD.

It's hard to say what's best, but I'd probably pick one of these: Fire: Pro: Good single target ranged damage. Very good self damage buff. Only Assault set that can mostly stay out of melee to deal damage. Good endurance management. Con: No built in HP management. Savage: Pro: Good all around as a melee/ranged hybrid. Small self heal for tight pinches. Some minor endurance management. Con: Theme can be offputting for some people (birds, bees, and claws). HP/End management not as strong as Fire or Psi. Energy: Pro: Good mix of ranged and melee damage. Has access to Power Up and good damage. Con: No built in HP or endurance management. Arguably the best option of the sets that offer Power Up. Psi: Pro: Incredible endurance and HP management if you IO the build. Con: Not great before IOs. Psi damage is highly resisted by some enemies. Requires willingness to melee because the ranged blasts are weak. The other sets that would still be decent but not make my initial recommendation list are: Earth Pro: Access to Power Up. Strong extra Hold in Seismic Smash. More AoEs than a typical Dom. Has a damage aura which some people value on toons. Con: no built in HP management. Costs a ton of endurance to make work. Dark Pro: -ToHit is a useful secondary effect. Some HP management. Access to Power Up type power. Con: Not particularly good at ranged, melee or AoE damage. HP management still much weaker than a buff archetype or a Blaster. Ice Pro: Access to Power Up. Has a damage aura which some people value on toons. Con: No HP management. Overall a very vanilla set with very little to set it apart. The remaining sets you could still pick, here's my summarized take. None of these has access to HP Management, Power Up, or Endurance tools, and generally weak utility. Electric Pro: Access to Build Up. Con: Endurance drain in a set like this is meaningless without being paired with other sources of end drain. Overall a strange mishmash of attacks that don't pair well. Martial Pro: Damage isn't bad. Pretty good AoE for a Dom. Con: Explosive Shuriken I think was supposed to feel awesome, but doesn't. Set feels like it's missing utility power somewhere to make it survivable or make endurance management comfortable. Radiation Pro & Con: Overall just a not great mix of abilities Thorny: Pro: Access to Build Up. Damage isn't terrible. Con: Redraw on the thorns powers stops many people from using this.

A subtle difference between these powers is the Defense in Group Invis won't suppress if you get mezzed. That, and the fact that if you run your blue bar to the bottom it still remains, are a benefit of clickable Defense powers that toggle powers don't have.