oedipus_tex

I've tried three pairings of Sonic Assault so far on the test server, the (new) Ice Control, with Electric Control, and with Fire Control. IMO it's a solid set. I agree I wouldn't pair it with Symphony Control, although there aren't a lot of Dominator secondaries I'd pair with Symphony right now other than Fire Assault. Sonic Assault itself hits hard, and gets a Power Up like power. The resist debuff it brings is no joke, Only real downside is no self sustain type powers. Still, I'd rank it among the top tier Dominator sets. Am thinking I may reroll my Electric/Psi and/or Elec/Dark builds to Elec/Sonic.

I really appreciate the work that went into this change. This is a big topic, and I know a lot of work went into making this adjustment. I am generally among those who think 8 seconds of suppression is too long. Is it not possible for the suppression to last the duration of the mezz? I don't know the specifics behind how the mechanics work, only that that is how I would have expected it to work, based on how suppression works for buff toggles. The meta behind this is that builds that rely heavily on these sorts of powers normally seek mezz protection already. So, I wouldn't worry too much about a huge gameplay shift from making them reactive immediately once the mezz is over. People who rely heavily on the toggle are already seeking mezz protection, what this change is (hopefully) doing is reducing the pressure on them to seek out mezz protection just to make the power function. With that in mind, I think would you be warranted to have no extra lock out period at all. In any case, thanks for your work on this.

Thank you again for your hard work and dedication bringing us a new Control set. Overall: It's obvious that a great deal of creativity went into this set. It's truly a strange set in a lot of ways, but uniquely its own. What I'd keep: Most of it, really. This is primarily a Stun-based set that has Damage as its secondary effect. I've seen a few posts requesting that the single target Confusion should not aggro enemies. I personally disagree and like that this Confusion is different. It has a different purpose than other Confuses, especially because casting it results in the pet echoing a Confusion power, which even on a Controller can result in pretty fast Confusion of a boss. The pet is daring and interesting. I'm going to go out on a limb and say I'm not completely sold on it yet, just because experience with other control sets has taught me that pets fall apart at higher difficulties. It's definitely an interesting mechanic though. The way the pet echoes attacks, from a sound design perspective, is super creepy and atmospheric. Good job. The note particle themselves are really cool looking. Love the sheet music. Damage is more or less on par with other control sets except where noted below. What I'd think about: The pet: As much as I like the pet, I think he's a bit too reined in. I understand why you are scared of making him amazing, but Control set pets barely factor into end game play. They are 99% likely to fold against anything that presents a severe challenge, so you might as well make them very strong. In this case, I'd consider removing most of the internal timers that prevent the pet from quickly stacking Confusion and Hold. Or at least allow the pet to have some ability it can use frequently, so he doesn't stand around doing nothing. Mainly this is an issue on Dominators, because they use Assault sets for attacks, and the pet won't echo those. Altho I think a target cap of 5 on the echoed stun is possibly warranted, the sleep, terrorize, and immobilize should probably hit 10 targets. Cones: So, cones are this set's thing, and that is fine. Thing is, Dominators as a whole don't play great with cones. Right now I'd consider playing a Symphony/Fire Dominator over most others, just because that set happens to lend itself to a ranged style. It's not a total no-go. However, widening some of these cones would help Dominators a ton, and since this is a set that specializes in cone attacks, I think at least having the Sleep and Immobilize be very, very wide would be interesting without being overpowered. 135 degrees on each of these would do a lot. I know that's a big area, but since everything in this set is a cone, the set is still scrambling for positioning. Being helped out in a few of the minor controls would help with that. Damage in the Stun power: This power does a LOT of damage. Like, significantly more than any Control. I've estimated it to deal as much damage over its duration as an enemy standing in Hot Feet for the same duration. That's fine, of course. It's also way more damage than any Control I can think of, on par more with a Blast power. I'm not exactly asking you to nerf it--obviously Fire Control deals that amount of damage--but it's an awful lot of the set's capability contained with a single power. The Stun is absolutely the keystone of this set at the moment, even more than other control sets.

Thanks again for the updates to Ice Control. Overall: These changes are solid. Adding Terrify to Shiver is a significant bump in survivability, while mostly retaining Ice's identity as a softer control set. What I'd keep: Arctic Air Dominating means that power is finally competitive with similar controls used by other archetypes. While a lot of people will likely focus on it now affecting bosses, the real lift is the extra duration against minions and lieutenants, where previously Dominators using this power were heavily penalized. It's a noticeable, significant bump in usefulness. The basic idea of Terrify in Shivers is solid. I wouldn't have guessed we'd ever get that effect, but it's a nice addition. The reduction of recharge in Flash Freeze from 90 to 45 seconds is a very welcome change. I'm not against the addition of damage to Ice Slick, but have a few comments about it below. The lower cast time to summon the slick is a very welcome change, What I'd still consider changing: RE: the scale of Terrify in Shivers and its arc. I think given the power's lower Terrify duration that you would be justified widening the cone to 90 degrees or even the full arc of 135 degrees. The slow portion of this power is mostly ignored by players, because Ice Control has so many other ways to slow run speeds, and has an immobilize in any case. Other Fear cones also have secondary effects (damage or -tohit) that is generally superior to Shivers. If it needs to stay a 45 degree cone, giving it full scale Terrorize is probably warranted. Size of the cone matters with Ice Control since so much of its control comes from hanging on top of enemies with Arctic Air running, making a narrow cone a bit less useful than it might otherwise be. RE: Nature and amount of damage in Ice Slick. The damage is very, very low, not enough that I'd actually slot it for damage. I know you raised it a bit during closed beta, but it's still small. I still wish this power did damage as part of a linked effect to the knockdown. It's hard to say whether it should do more damage overall, but if the intent was that folks slot it for damage, for now I probably wouldn't. It would need to do damage more comparable to Caltrops, and the slick itself might need to recharge a bit faster. Bonfire for example recharges in 60 seconds and lasts 45.

Hi fellow Dominator enthusiasts. 🙂 With the public release of information about Homecoming Page 4, there are some exciting developments for Dominators that it would likely be very helpful for some of the experienced people who post here to check out and offer feedback on. It's may also helpful to the dev team if we can have some discussions among ourselves here in the Dominator forums as well. The changes/new sets are: New Assault set: Sonic Assault: New Control powerset: Symphony Control: Revamped: Ice Control As always, thanks to our developer teams for these changes and new sets. I'm sure there will be a lot of discussion and hopefully people are excited to try these new things out. 🙂

I have nothing but love for the updated Trick Arrow, but I agree that it has one major weakness, and that is lacking buffs except for its T9. Debuff is very useful, but it also usually requires application per mob... in Trick Arrow's case all of the powers are clicks. Flash Arrow in particular is vulnerable to new waves of enemies arriving, requiring a re-click. It's a great package overall, but not as reliable as being able to buff folks when things get insane, like they do in some of the AE challenge arcs. OTOH Trick Arrow, particularly on Controllers, deals a lot more damage than most other buff sets. So even if it's not a top contender for the buff role, it's still going to be modestly a contributor in direct damage, which is always useful.

This. The new version of the AoE Sleeps are fantastic one slot wonders. Put the self heal proc in them. It will almost always fire, and can't miss. Even without recharge in the Sleep power itself, with just Hasten running the Recharge is very reasonable.

It's not.

IMO the safest early Dominator is Electric Control. Sleep patch the enemies, run in and kill them. Or wait til their endurance is gone, then kill them. At higher levels it still works, but falls off a lot in efficiency. IMO nothing beats Electric Dominators solo prior to level 20 or so, though. Maybe worth mentioning, the sleep from Static Fields stacks, both with itself and from multiple fields. You'll want to get in the habit of dropping the power everywhere. Shame it doesn't Dominate in some way, though.

Mind and Dark are sufficiently different that you could play both and they feel different. I would say if you are at all on the fence that Dark is the way to go. It's a lot more forgiving for a first time character, with powers that unlock in a much friendlier order. Dark/Psi specifically is good for self leveling up since you can use Drain Psyche to keep your blue bar afloat easier. Dark gets its key powers by level 12, where Mind Control has to wait til 26 and 32.

That's not a starter bad build at all @foosbabaganoosh. Personally I think Mind Control is one of the harder Dominator powersets to get used to. It's very good at very difficult challenges, but in most of the content you're going to fight, most of the time, I think it lags significantly versus some of the other sets. Dark Control in contrast I feel handles well versus difficult single targets and large groups. If you're committed to going with Mind in order to play something different or for concept reasons of course that's valid. FWIW if you were to combine the differences and go with Dark/Psi you'd have a powerball of a Dominator. Quite different from a Dark/Dark, not as much of an AV fighter, but it covers your endurance bar, which can be very useful on this class. If you stick with the Psi APP, I wouldn't bother taking World of Confusion. You probably do want some kind of AoE blast though. Psionic Tornado isn't the heaviest hitting AoE blast, but its serviceable, and more importantly, the only ranged AoE blast you'll get with that APP, so may as well take it. RE slotting in some specific powers if you stay with Mind Control: The sleep portion on Mesmerize is autohit. Probably want damage here if you slot it at all, tho that may depend on your build. Dominate should probably be procced out for damage. It casts very fast and with solid procs in it can take the place of one of your ranged Blasts. You'll want to think about where you want that Dominator +Damage ATO proc. You want it somewhere you can trigger it constantly. For Mind/Psi that's possibly Subdue. It cant (currently) go in Psionic Shockwave tho I have heard that's been added to the list of items to fix, so if that changes you might want to jump on it. That ATO doesn't provide damage to the power its slotted in so may just want to single slot. You'll lose the ranged def bonus but do a lot more damage. OTOH if you prefer to just keep it in Mass Hypnosis, you can do that. Just make sure to cast Mass Hyp often. You won't be able to proc it as frequently as in a faster recharge power, but if you're consistent you can at least keep one to two stacks up most times.

Hello and welcome. Like the other archetypes, there are a lot of types of Dominators. Some are going to be more newbie friendly than others. Some are very strange configurations that are unique to themselves. IMO an ideal starter primary for a newbie is Dark Control. Dark Control will give you -ToHit to pad the times when your Domination is down, and has generous recharge times on its Fear cone that will never lead to you starting a fight without a power ready. It also has a non-alerting single target confuse for easytown fights versus Elite Bosses. If Dark doesn't work conceptually, Earth or Plant Control are other good starters. Good starter secondaries are Fire, Dark, or possibly Savage. If you're okay with spending a lot of money and like the mechanism of Drain Psyche, Psi Assault is also a good option. All four of these sets offer some form of hit point and or endurance management that will make easing into the class easier. RE: When to click Domination. At lower levels I would just wait til a moment when your blue bar is close to empty. Click it for a refill. Once/if you hit permadom levels of recharge just click it each time it recharges to continue its benefits.

Thanks for pointing that out. You're correct that the damage formula for PVP vs PVE is slightly different. In the first attempt to explain this power, I grabbed the PVP formula by accident. There are two formulas for critters. The first one is for powers without an activation period (non-toggles). Magnitude Expression: 8.759*(0.16*minmax(power.base>rechargetime, 0, 20) + 0.36)/power.base>areafactor So, unlike what I said above, the area factor does not count against you for PVP. It does for PVE, though. Overall this formula is going to produce numbers that are close to the PVP formula, with some small degree of variation because of including area factor and excluding animation time. The second formula is for pulsing powers: Magnitude Expression: 0.11*8.759*minmax(power.base>activateperiod, 0, 2)/power.base>areafactor The upshot of all of this is the formula for Envenomed Blades is hard to evaluate and doesn't produce a tremendous amount of damage to make it worth trying to parse in detail. 😄 Carnifax's logs probably come closest to explaining the expected, fairly narrow range of damage.

As an Electric/Energy you'll probably find that you have some key synergies and a few places where there are holes. Synergies include: Power Up magnifies the effects of your endurance drains. This will allow you to drain endurance about twice as fast during the 10 seconds it is active. This also applies to your PBAoE aura, so can set up to some effective drains. Energy Assault gets a Snipe. Always welcome on a Dominator set. Energy Assault is mostly burst damage with few DOTs, which works well with Electric's sleep patch power when solo. There is some synergy between Energy Assault's core mechanic (using Total Focus at close range to trigger the Energized self proc) and your aura power. Power Up is always just a generally nice thing to have for added safety and control duration Total Focus is a guaranteed Mag 6 Stun in Domination mode. Although you don't have a second Stun to stack on top of that to handle Elite Bosses, it's still a positive, because it lets you get around having to use Electric Control's slow animating single target Hold to deal with most bosses. (You can still use the Hold from range if you need to, obviously). Energy Assault can be somewhat endurance heavy; Electric Control gets a Recovery bonus from its aura when surrounded by enemies. The potential challenges include: Many powers in Electric Control don't benefit from Domination. This isn't unique to Elec/Energy, but its worth being aware of. It means your Assault set and APP will need to help carry the set a bit more. Energy Assault has no mitigation of any kind other than the magnifying effects of Power Up, unless you count the knocks and stuns it has--which I don't, because they are mostly single target. You are going to need to find a way to balance your endurance use. As mentioned above, the aura will help, but only when surrounded by enemies, and it still likely won't be enough. More importantly, you have no source of healing. While that's not that unusual for Dominators, Electric Control characters in my experience tend to eat a lot of damage. Anyway, lately with Electric Control I've been rethinking my personal strategy. For a long time, I built these characters with Punch/Tough/Weave. Lately I've been leaning into taking the Force of Will pool instead, and taking Weaken Resolve/Mighty Leap/Unleash Potential. Unleash Potential is a Defense power that benefits from Power Up. You can't perma it, but it's significant Defense for 60 seconds. For the APP power, I would consider taking the Mu pool. Mu offers Power Sink, an autohit power that refills your endurance bar and crashes the enemy's. With your endurance costs now basically covered, you can take Barrier Destiny instead of Ageless. By cycling between Unleash Potential and Barrier Destiny, you can maintain good defense much of the time. If you want a third source of mitigation, you can also take Surge of Power from this pool--it's not quite as effective as either of the other two powers, and has a crash at the end, but looks kind of cool, and it does cap most of your Resistances for a period of time.

Picking the "ultimate" support set is hard, because this game is in transition, so I'd have to base any recommendations off my predictions of where it is likely to go and what will come next. Based on that parameter, the set that stands out to me right now (and which may be a bit surprising) is Thermal Radiation. Thermal's suite of powers fall into a zone where it would be extremely hard to invalidate them without large changes to the core game. It's not a set for everyone, and not even the best option for hammering down easy content (the game is flexible enough that there are many variations of "best," which is a good thing). For the kinds of content we've seen previewed so far--in particular content where the team is shut off from using inspirations--it's a fantastic choice. It would take a long post to explain why I rate it so highly, but the nutshell is Thermal has a big debuff for AVs, resistance shields for exotic damage types that are difficult for most players to IO against, reliable heals for situations that call for it (more important when players can't heal with IOs), and +ToHit/-Defense for the increasing number of situations where enemies have above average Defense. If it has any weaknesses, the only thing I can think of is in some ways it's not the best option for content the team would have dominated anyway. That's fine in my mind it's a great set for very hard encounters. The set Thermal is paired with isn't as critical, but some strong support options are Dark, Sonic, or Beam Rilfe on the Blast side, or Plant or Dark Control on the Control side. Alternatively you can go for pure damage hybrid with a primary like Fire Blast. You can even trigger Gaussian procs by casting Forge on teammates and follow that with a blast if you want to contribute to bringing down big targets.

For individual creeper vines to receive the damage buff they have to be "alive" the moment the buff is cast. The main Creeper pet itself, the invisible part that follows you around, is immune to buffs. The vine children it spawns receive the buff though. That's hard to achieve for Nature Affinity. A lot easier for Kinetics because of Fulcrum Shift's faster recharge.

I think a lot of people who are used to soloing as melees aren't familiar with the 16 target cap and the fact that it's contributing to their survival. Or especially the fact that once you've reached that cap, by pulling more groups, you're dumping aggro onto players who aren't built to withstand it. Some teams can withstand that, others can't. If it's causing deaths and scatters rather than organizing things it's probably not helpful behavior in either case.

I am not familiar with this movie, but from what I can see in the clip he's got some fire conjuring abilities and possibly some psychic powers. Makes me think possibly a Fire/Psi or Mind/Fire Dominator.

A lot of people do slot Fire Control for damage. The basic formula: Damage procs in Char (with enough global Accuracy to cover the deficit) Hot Feet slotted with something that provides Dam/Acc/End Redux Damage set in Fire Cages Pets slotted for dam/acc Optional: Damage procs in Flashfire. You'll still need your secondary set, but doing that will contribute a lot of damage.

RE: Radiation Assault, I think it's likely to perform best with a set like Earth or Plant Control where you're able to be a lot faster on the hard mezzes. It hits pretty hard and the self heal is potentially useful. I do think this set plays more cleanly on armored archetypes, where an occasional heal works a bit better than on a blink and you die Dominator.

I usually go with x4 Expedient Reinforcement or Call to Arms x1 Sudden Acceleration KB to KD. You can throw the purple proc in there too if you want, but it's not critical. x6 Exped Reinforcement is fine if you don't mind his knockback and need Ranged Defense.

Thanks for the clarification. So, ignore what I said about Fulcrum Shift. 🙂 RE: Jolting Chain, @Carnifax is correct that it procs per jump. What @Area Man may be remembering is that Jolting Chain doesn't drain endurance on the jumps. I have no idea why. Nice to see you back again by the way @Area Man/Local Man.

This. The patch uses the same mechanics as powers like Ice Storm, Blizzard, Static Field, Ice Slick, etc. It just happens to have an AI profile that allows it to move. What's kinda funny is giving those other powers the Creepers AI would make them follow the player and chase down enemies too.

Rad Assault definitely has some stuff going for it. It's the only of two sets with a self heal and a place to put a Gaussian's (Savage Assault is other). It can easily slot the Achille's Heel proc because of the -Defense (again Savage Assault is similar). I've never really gotten that deep into it despite having a 50 Grav/Rad I rolled just to be a completionist. Nice to see it validated in these runs.

I think part of their Defense they may come from this power: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=romans.legionarii.energized_shield&at=minion_grunt If I'm correct about the history of that power, the Romans had it on live, and at some point it was commented out because it was thought that a ton of enemies running toggles was creating lag. The power gives them +0.25 Defense per critter within 8 feet of them. So they will tend to have more Defense if clumped close together. It's a Toggle, not an Auto, so if you can mezz them or sap their endurance, it should drop. The Centurions do appear to have their own source of +Defense armor that is an Auto power and sadly can't be detoggled. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=romans.centurion.phalanx_fighting&at=lt_grunt In any case, it's good to see some of my suspicions confirmed by top level players. Quicksand is actually an extremely good power, much better than it is ever given credit for, for the autohit -Defense. Shame it doesn't have a shorter animation time. What's kind of interesting to note is that both Ice Slick and Arctic Air in the Ice set are auto hit. Not that I'm advocating for Ice Control as a major contender, but there may be an interesting Hover strategy there using some of the techniques you've shown off here. Kinda interesting there too, if you do manage to force one of the minions to toggle drop and their -Recharge is floored, they can't toggle it back on for 16 seconds (versus normally 4 seconds). This may be one of the vanishingly few situations where -Recharge can be said to make a potential difference.