oedipus_tex

You could make a female movie star named "Starlet Fever."

We've been talking a lot about Force Field and its drawbacks in the modern game. I mostly agree with those critiques, while at the same time I think Force Field has one space in the game where it can shine brightly: iTrials. While I don't think this makes up entirely for how it plays in normal missions, I also think there's a real space for a player who wants to be the "game changer" on iTrials to have a role. With that in mind I set out to create a baseline build for discussion. Force Field's shields specifically have a couple of parameters that make them desirable in the unusual circumstances presented by iTrials: They recharge nearly instantly, which makes them available for an immediate recast on players who have died or on pets who are newly summoned. In normal play neither of these are huge considerations, but they are huge on iTrials. They have enormous range, making it realistic to hit the entire league or cast them safely outside the reach of death patches. They last a long time (4 minutes) so they continue to provide benefit for players who have broken from the group or when the team is forced to split up, as in Lambda. They benefit from Power Boost, roughly doubling their strength. Choosing an Archetype and Secondary Set While there's a whole lot that could be said about this and plusses and minuses to consider, I personally think for a true support character there's nothing that rivals the Defender version of Sonic Blast. Shriek + Scream + Howl = -60% damage resistance. That's better than many actual Buff/Debuff sets. The fact that we can slot these debuff actions with Defender heal and absorb procs is a big bonus. Sonic Attack has bad AoE but I've never seen an iTrial fail because of AoE. Allternatives I could maybe see: Electric Control Controller (mainly because Synaptic Overload on iTrials is undeniably useful for making enemies kill each other without drawing any aggro on a very fast recharge, this isn't likely make or break for most teams since people ace Lambda these days, but could make a difference on a very disorganized run). Beam Rifle Defender: you'd lose some -Resist and gain some -Regen. Not sure it's worth the trade to be honest. Next up we have our personal defenses in and out of Power Boost. Power Boost is available 50% of the time, and we should press that button every time it is up. As long as we do that, we are capped to most things during those seconds. That's also the time when we want to be hitting the team with Deflection and Insulation Shield. Downtime numbers (not accounting for bonuses from Clarion): Uptime numbers (not accounting for bonuses from Clarion): Other Considerations: Why the Healing Pool? In the core game this isn't a major consideration, but in iTrials the ability to heal is extremely valuable. There's a lot of splash damage thrown around, including some instances where the ability to heal is explicitly valuable. Field Medic removes interrupt from Aid Other making it a (slow) heal. The only real drawback is the Range. More importantly to me personally though is the ability to heal yourself. Power Boosted Aid Self heals roughly half your HP in one shot. You could swap the slots between Aid Other and Aid Self with few worries. You could drop Field Medic entirely. Personally, since we already have 2 power choices in the Healing pool tho Field Medic is worth taking just for removing the interupt in Aid Other, which makes that power actually quite good. We just need to target our ally while super speed is running, hit F to follow, and queue up the power; it will fire as soon as you get into range. This won't work without Field Medic because running would normally interrupt the power. Why Super Speed? For running around invisibly, mainly useful in Lambda, but also generally useful for avoiding aggro. No Force Bubble? Even in iTrials I've never found this useful. If you want it though you could swap Repulsion Field for this power. Note the knockback/repel in either of these powers will lock enemy aggro onto you and cause them to chase you, so I don't recommend leaving either one permanently on. Repulsion Field is an autohit knockback you can use during the few moments that is helpful, in particular knocking enemies away from power consoles during Keyes. RE: Poor damage slotting in Scream/Dreadful Wail. For a general build I'd agree. There may also be a way to move slots around and make improvements here. Mainly I'm using these powers as debuffs and proc cannons though. The damage dealing is meant to come from other league members. Why Vengeance? Because people are still going to die. Might as well use that moment to buffbot the hell out of the team. This buff is more "transient" than your shields but still extremely powerful and useful. Incarnate Choices: Personally, I'd go with the version of Clarion that provides mezz protection and +Special boost. What this will do is pad out the times when Power Boost is down, cover the mezzes you're not protected against (Sleep, Confuse, Terrify). Plus Clarion is incredibly useful during the hardest iTrial of all (IMO). You can of course get more than one Destiny and change them out for the task at hand. For the Alpha slot, this is the incredibly rare case where Agility Core Paragon seems like the clear winner to me, though I could be persuaded to go with something else: Notes on playstyle: Outside of AV fights: For this build I'd do as little attacking as possible. Stay in Super Speed, hit Power Boost each time it is up. Hit the team with Power Boosted shields. Duck into Personal Field if you get caught under assault. Don't do too much to affect enemies, they will mostly leave you alone and won't chase far. If things are going well and its just clear times you're worried about, you can also use your nuke as an AoE Resistance debuff. Inside AV fights: Here the aggro is generally controlled, so it's safer to blast. Make sure to recast shields continually to catch players who are resurrected. A super important moment to nail the shields is when Lore pets are pulled out for difficult battles (here you directly contribute to DPS). If you notice any players dead, hit Vengeance to take advantage of it. In Keyes specifically, it may make more sense to be on the healing team. If someone is disentigrating, Super Speed to them (while watching for green patches) and hit your heal. Field Medicine prevents the interrupt in Aid Other which makes this move possible, and no one should be flying in Keyes. Power Boost vs Clarion +Special There's some strategy and overlap between these two effects that deserves some thought. I've actually lost track of how STR effects from Power Boost and Clarion work on Homecoming these days, because I know some changes were proposed and then rolled back. The main thing is that shields replace each other, so if you cast a new round of shields with these effects down, you lose the enhanced effect. My gut tells me that in general it's more important to hit the team with Power Boosted shields regularly versus charging up for one or two super-powerful mega shields, but this makes the assumption people are dying or new pets are being summoned. If none of that is happening, it's fine to put the shields on full strength and just let them sit. Of course, in situations where the team will scatter, hitting everyone with one huge shield is a good idea. For example, this makes sense in the moments before the team splits up to run the halls in Lambda. Some FAQs: Q: Can people still die even with these shields in place? A: Absolutely. The shields provide no protection from death patches at all. The shields are there to prevent enemy damage. Q: Could you roll this same build as Cold Domination character? Cold Domination doesn't benefit from Power Boost in the same way. This build is explicitly built to exploit Force Field's unique edge with this power and with Clarion. Q: How about Time Manipulation? Time Manipulation performs very well in iTrials using similar techniques and can actually get more perma-personal Defense. It mainly lacks the ability to hit as wide an area with shields as reliably, and its shields don't last as long for allies who straggle away. That's the edge that Force Fielders should press. The build in Mids: Questions, comments, complaints? I'm willing to hear feedback. Thanks for your time. 🙂

Even though I think it underperforms on Dominators: Arctic Air. It's a fascinating power that I missed the most when CoX closed. There aren't many other games I can think of that encourage you to play in such a strange way. If they ever fix Arctic Air so that it can Dominate I'd play Ice Control a lot more.

Have you already rolled this character? What strikes me right away is that by switching from Force Field to Traps you'd have a better personal shield, which would let you ease up on slots and hit your target easier. If shielding the rest of the team is part of what you're looking for, you can stick with Force Field. FFG does work slightly differently than Force Field's big bubble, but because it isn't a toggle also costs less endurance. Also, keep in mind that you have a ton of Defense but almost no Resistance. This build probably could tank a few shots from iEnemies but will be punished very hard when a hit gets through.

You can recruit more during a Sewer trial for sure. I'm unsure about other trials, but I use the Sewer trial trick to get teams moving with 6 members, knowing I can add more if they /tell mid mission. Unless something has changed I don't think you can recruit during a Task Force. Tinpex is two separate TFs with a break in the middle where you can recruit new members. I've had that happen fairly often on these TFs.

In Synaptic it's both a blessing and a curse. Synaptic is programmed to skip over enemies who are already Confused. Since the duration of Contagious Confusion is much lower than Synaptic, having it trigger can potentially disrupt how Synaptic is supposed to function. You'll mainly notice this with small groups of enemies where there aren't a lot of potential hops available.

There are couple of ways to define "most control" but you're right that Storm is a good option for that. Nominally, Dominators are the "most control" archetype when they are in (perma)dom, but in practice Controllers can nearly match them in the ability to Stun bosses if they are willing to enter close range. Two powers stand out here: Thunderclap, the Storm power, which is a guaranteed Mag 2 Stun Fissure, the Earth APP power, which rolls two 50% chances for Stun (one is Mag 1, other is Mag 2) The Earth APP also has Seismic Smash, which is a Mag 4 Hold out of the gate Specifically. Earth, Fire, Gravity or Dark Control mixed with Storm Summoning are capable of stun-locking bosses between their 90-second recharge AoE Stun and Thunderclap. Non-Storm players or Stormers who want to go even more all-in can take the Earth APP. (Back on live Fire/Kinetics/Earth was a go-to in part because of synergy between Flashfire and Fissure). If your idea of control is more knockdown/up/around, you can exchange the Earth APP for Leviathan, which gives you Water Spout. Spout + Tornado + Freezing Rain + Lighting Storm + knock from Singularity/Earthquake/Bonfire is a sight to behold. There are a few other assorted control-heavy secondary sets. Trick Arrow in particular and to some extent sets like Time and Traps.

Good addition. I don't believe they're Taunted to a new target. The Haunted temporary gets applied during the player's initial cast. The pet itself doesn't have the ability to apply the Temporary Power. However if there's another Dark player around and they cast Haunt on something, or if you just have enough Recharge to apply the power again before the previous Haunts expire, the Taunt from their cast should theoretically Taunt any existing Haunts within 60ft.

Had a few minutes today so decided to finally peek through Darkness Control's Haunt power. Hopefully this is a mostly accurate description, please let me know if I've misinterpreted something. Darkness Control > Haunt Haunt has two main features, which interact closely with each other. It summons two Haunt pets at the location of your target. This part is probably straightforward enough to understand. It applies a temporary power called Haunted to the target. Haunted is an Auto Power that forces the enemy hit by it to immediately cast a Scale 60 Taunt in a 60ft radius, affecting only creatures in that radius named "Pets_Shade." This is what forces the Shade pets to focus on that target. WEIRD CASES: This Auto Power also has a target cap of 16, which implies that if a bunch of Dark players get together, their Haunts become collectively Taunted by multiple enemies. For some reason the Taunt is Resistable. I have no idea if this impacts actual gameplay. However, since Taunt is normally subject to the Purple Patch, I believe it means higher level targets taunt Haunts longer than lower level enemies, because the Haunted power is cast by the enemy. The Shade's attacks are mostly straightforward. Shadow Punch, minor damage and -ToHit every 3 seconds. Scare, Mag 3 Scale 4 (pet tables) Terrorize every 6 seconds. Note this power does not do damage. The takeaway on the attacks is proc damage doesn't look to be very attractive. One power does damage and -ToHit, the other does Terrify, so procs wouldn't seem to be firing too often. But I could be wrong about this. Controllers and Dominators summon the same pet, with no differences between the two. As many players have noted, with enough Recharge it is possible to have multiple Shade pets. It's my assumption that recasting the power with Shade pets still alive will Taunt them to the new target if they are within the 60ft radius of the Haunted power.

I just had a look at Oppressive Gloom and interestingly enough not only does it roll for Accuracy, I'm pretty sure the self-damage portion does too, so at least you won't lose any HP if it misses.

Grav/Storm is even better on HC than it was on live, so if you enjoyed it then you'll probably love it now.

I'm always on the fence about the word "worst" because most things in this game can be made somewhat functional. It's true there are some massive gaps in performance from some sets though. So with that in mind, Ice Control/Electric Assault Dominator has to belong somewhere near the bottom. It's playable in the sense that anything basically is, but this is one character I just couldn't bring myself to spend time on. Arctic Air doesn't Dominate so you're barely even a Dominator even after going perma dom. Electric Assault's secondary effect is totally moot on this combo. Long animation times on the attacks. No recovery, healing, defense, or meaningful debuff. Not a force multiplier on teams. Just a world of "Okay, but why?" RE: Force Field, although I think it needs buffs for general content, it's at the same time undeniable that is a situationally very good set for iTrials. It does require a mindset on the part of the player that are building for that goal and leaning into it as hard as they can, namely with Power Boost to double shield strength. The main strength of Force Field is the ability to blanket an area with +Defense. Players can IO themselves for Defense, but pets can't be IOed, and a huge portion of iTrial damage comes from pets. The ability to re-shield resurrected players very quickly is also not a huge need in general content but does play a big role in iTrials. I'd never turn away a good Bubbler from an iTeam, if they understand what they are doing they may have the single biggest impact on success or failure than anyone else on the league. That's not to say the set doesn't still need love, but it's something.

You're correct, Homecoming has a solution for that. I was going to make that correction by my interner shorted out. 🙂The older powers weren't coded that way though, so Defenders enjoyed years of Blaster strength Rain of Ice and Blizzard. Even the new code doesn't account for Scourge or Defiance etc as far as I know. It would be theoretically possible to write both as Inherent Powers but as far as I know no one has done that yet.

The Defender damage buff for team size is actually coded as a global Damage bonus and not into each individual power. The portion of it that affects your damage is Inherent.Inherent.Vigilance. It basically works by providing you with Scale 0.3 +Damage and then taking away some based on team size. Defender versions of Blast sets tend to be the easier version of the power to read and usually is what I prefer to look at when figuring out how a power works. Defiance and Scourge on the other hand are coded power for power (as are Domination, Containment, and Critical Hit etc). So if you design a Blast power that is available to Defender, Blaster, and Corruptor that uses psuedopets, you usually need to code two different versions. One that Scourges and one that doesn't. Defiance can be handled outside the pet. FWIW I wouldn't be surprised if a future Homecoming project is to make Blaster Defiance a global proc system or even based on the Rage meter (like Brutes) which from a code maintenance perspective is a lot cleaner than the current implementation. Scourge may or may not be a bit trickier to pull off as a global proc, mainly because the damage type of the Scourge currently needs to match the damage type of the power that triggered it.

The chaining powers thing as it currently exists is kind of a pain in the butt to code IMO and I can see why they didn't go whole hog with it. The Blast sets have three distinct varieties, Blaster (needs Defiance coded in each blast), Defender (vanilla), and Corruptor (needs Scourge coded in each blast) and coding all the appropriate pseudo-pets probably seemed like a big chore.

I think it my have come from the idea that Electricity "powers things." The Electric sets both drain endurance and also tend to give it back in powers like Power Sink. I think it's a really nice thematic fit personally. It was also an Issue 1 Defender set, and I think there may have been a rule at the time that all of these sets have a debuff/control element: Energy: Knockback Dark: ToHit Electric: Endurance Radiation: Defense Psi: -Recharge Ice: -Recharge/Slow Weirdly, Defenders don't actually do more endurance drain than everyone else with Electric Blast. I think is a missed opportunity. Same with knockback chance in Energy Blast. I'd kill for Defender version of Energy Blast with 25% higher chance to KB in each power, and an Electric Blast with higher chance to drain enemies in the nuke and stronger drains overall, but that is not how the OG team interpreted it.

Yes it is technically possible to code a pseudo pet to Dominate. The Dark Control power Shadow Field does this like you mentioned. It does this by summoning one pet in Domination mode and one when outside of Dom mode. For a chain power, you'd probably need bunch of new pets, one for each link in the chain. Synaptic Overload for example currently consists of three pets (first jump, second jump, third jump). I privately modded this power for myself so that it Dominates, which required adding a new "Domination" version of each of these pets. What you do have to watch out for is any power that relies on Temporary Power effects cannot pass color data or enhancement set data to the Temp Power. At least not on servers I'm familiar with. Someone may have created a way, but it was always a limitation when the game was live.

It may be worth noting the chronology of the sets because I think that speaks a lot to their design as well. Fire, Ice, Mind, Illusion, Earth, Gravity Plant (originally just for Dominators) Electric Darkness Wind (never released) When you look at those last four sets I think a fairly clear picture emerges in terms of how the developers had evolved in their thinking about Control sets. A lot of the powers seem like answers to powers players had not responded positively to in previous sets. All three of the sets released after the initial batch had a clickable Confuse power; the original ratio was just 2 out of 6. Debuff-as-control wasn't really considered a mainstay of Control sets either until Electric and Darkness appeared. Ice's -Recharge was supposed to be this, but other than Earth's Defense debuff none of the other sets had more than a power or two with significant debuff.

Part of what you're running into is the general challenge of building with Dark Assault. It's not an easy set to summarize. I'm definitely not an expert on DPA tables or pylon times, but I do glance at powers to see what their relative DPA is. In the case of Dark Assault this is what we're working with: This tables can be misleading because this isn't accounting for proc damage, which Dark Assault can do a whole lot of. On the other hand, Dominators are often difficult to build for proc damage without losing too much Recharge. Anyway, in the case of Dark Assault what you're generally talking about is trading away some damage for the added safety of -ToHit, mainly in the form of Engulfing Darkness at point blank range. Midnight Grasp, despite being a T9 melee attack is actually lower damage than the T2 blast Gloom. Life Drain is indeed a poor attack, worse even than your T1 blast. It's still useful as a self heal and that's how I'd recommend slotting it. There's some argument for treating it like a combo heal/damage power. On the more critical side, when I look at sets like Dark Assault I can't help but notice it really isn't doing that much more damage than a Controller, but the self heal it's getting as the tradeoff is much more limited. Moon Beam does hit like a truck, so that provides some edge. A Controller will also have one less AoE attack (granted, it's a PBAoE) resulting in somewhat lower DPA. I don't mean to totally neg the set... Gather Shadows doubles -ToHit and does some really good debuffing, so Dark/Dark pans out pretty well. It's when Dark Assault is mixed with other control sets I'm slightly more skeptical, and start thinking "Do I really want to do this or can I get similar benefits from a Controller without trading away the advantages of that class?" A Dark/Storm/Earth Controller for example gives a Dark Assault Dominator a serious run for its money, as would /Kinetics, /TA, /Poison, and a few other builds.

Group Invis is actually a really useful power on iTrials. Kind of a hidden gem IMO.

With your Dark/Dark Dominator you'll probably want to to be aggressive with Shadow Field. Hit Power Up and drop it every time it is available on a new spawn. Get into the habit of this and you'll substantially cut your dying. Shadow Field has auto-hit -ToHit that lasts a long time. If you ever play Earth Control on a Dom you'll want to be similarly aggressive with Earthquake and Volcanic Gasses for similar reasons. At permadom levels of recharge you should be able to have these powers active more often than not. Beyond this what I suspect you're running into is the classic Dominator wall of difficulty most players run into around level 40. Dominators mostly lack healing, debuff, or armor. At lower levels this isn't as big a wall to climb but enemies in this level range start really punching back and can paste you quickly. A ton is riding on your ability to mezz things. As a Dark/Dark you've actually got a slightly easier time than other Dominators, because your -ToHit adds a layer of debuff most Doms don't get, so lean into that as much as possible with Shadow Field and Fearsome Stare. You'll hear people Dominators have "better control" than a Controller but this is true strictly in the sense of "true mezz." Controllers can debuff enemies to hell and back or else buff themselves/their pets. As a Dominator everything is riding on your mezzes. That's why Sleet is so highly prized, it does break the rules of the archetype. But also more broadly it's worth knowing you aren't necessarily doing anything wrong, this archetype will get your character killed. A lot. I have Dominators that are pretty sturdy, but at the end of the day Dominators are exactly what they appear to be, a blapper who dies instantly if an enemy breaks out of mezz, barring there being some additional factor. As a final piece of advice, as great as Sleet is, IMO Water Spout is just as good. It's hard to explain what is so good about this power, but if you're completely stuck and not feeling like you're able to charge into spawns safely and come out alive, try adding this power to the mix. The specific mix of control/damage it gives does change the game a lot in my experience.

Thank you for an excellent write up. Control sets have always been my favorite sets in CoX. I'm often critical of them, but at the same time I can tell a lot of love went into their creation. They set CoX apart from other MMOs. Mind Control specifically was designed both pre-ED and pre-Containment. It would be a lot easier to forgive it if Dark Control in general and Seeds of Confusion in particular did not exist. IMO there's still a lot that could be done in a revisit of these sets. Hopefully they will remain divergent and interesting but have some of the sharp corners rounded off. If nothing else, some consistency about how Domination is intended to work with pseudo pets, and figuring out how to normalize Containment.

You could use something like this as a baseline. This isn't a fully factored build, just a starting point. It would be played with Barrier as the Destiny choice, so that def was capped when Linked Minds was also up (most of the time). If you've read my personal opinions on Gravity Doms before you'll know I'm pretty critical of their performance. It's not that I only play topline characters, I have tons that are experimental or just for fun. But I don't spend a lot of money on most of my characters either, which is why I always hedge when posting an expensive build for a combo. I will say that Grav/Psi is one of the better Gravity Dominators though, with the self buff in Drain Psyche pairing nicely with the teleport in Wormhole. You'll also notice me getting stuck a few times in this build. Gravity often relies on KB to KD enhancers to limit knockback in the pet and/or Wormhole. Unfortunately that eats up a slot; if not for that, I'd have an additional +8.5% Ranged defense just from the slots I had to skip. I do think the best place for the +Dam ATO proc on Gravity is usually Wormhole, it's just frustrating to have few places to slot it. There are a whole bunch of ways to refactor this build to make it better. On the other hand if you are strapped for cash and only have enough money to go so far, I'd consider exploring an offshoot Grav/Storm, Kin, TA or Poison. If you put the same amount of money into one of those that you will with this character you'll probably get more for your cash. Disregard is this is all concept, or if money is no object to you. You could also build this as a "trust fund" character if you search my post on how to build that way.

Here's a pretty vanilla, but not necessarily cheap, Plant/Martial build. I think it's pretty similar to the builds posted above. IMO the Ice APP is the undisputed winner for synergy with Plant Control. The -Resist boosts the proc damage in Creepers, its hard to beat that. Slash/Lethal resist is low on this build, as it tends to be on Ice APP builds. The actual slotting I did on Carrion could possibly use some revision. I still need to examine how procs actually work in that power to figure out which are worth slotting. I went with the damage, knockback, immob and general control procs but I'm not certain these are the best options. Someone else may have already gamed this out. My gut tells me some procs are worth far more damage than others given how this power works.