oedipus_tex

I'm not sure I'm down with AoE Clear Mind, but it might be interesting if Clear Mind was a low-radius toggle (15ft or so) and anyone who passed through it got mezz protection for 90 sec. That would preserve some of the not-always-on intent and also gel with the Empathy concept.

Dark and Energy are both good performers, and together have a lot of synergy. The main attraction here is the ability to use Power Up, which magnifies the -ToHit in Dark's powers. Specifically, Power Up is worth +74% -ToHit. To put this in perspective, -ToHit is a Schedule B enhancement so two standard -ToHit IOs provide about +51% -ToHit. So even if you slot no -ToHit enhancements at all, as long as you hit Power Up first you'll still do more -ToHit than a fully enhanced Dominator who doesn't have Power Up. (For some additional background, the reason this happens is that -ToHit, along with +Defense and +ToHit are all Schedule B enhancements. Schedule B provides the smallest amount of additional effect compared to Schedule A and Schedule C enhancements. However, Power Up and similar powers don't follow schedules, they multiply everything equally. So, any time you have a set with a lot of Schedule B effects, it benefits a more than it "should" from Power Boost type powers). There are three other sets that have a Power Up effect: Icey, Earth, and Dark. Of these, Energy is generally considered one of the better performers, mainly on the strength of good single target damage performance between Sniper Blast, Total Focus, and Power Burst.

I admit Illusion/Kinetics is a build I don't know how to min/max as easily as other Kin builds. Normally with Kinetics builds the strategy is to underslot the main powers for Damage in order to let Fulcrum Shift fill in the gaps, and load everything up with procs. However, Phantom Army doesn't benefit from Fulcrum Shift, so that power at a minimum needs damage slotting, as probably does anything else meant to contribute to a AV fight. For me, the optimal APP for this particular build is possibly Earth, for Fissure and Seismic Smash. This won't help you a whole lot in the above mentioned AV fights, but will add a lot more crunch to your Fulcrum Shifts against normal packs. A nice Synergy between Spectral Terror and Fissure is anything knocked down loses its chance to retaliate. It does mean fighting up close, but /Kinetics sort of implies that. I'd recommend picking up more AoE damage powers if any are in grasp. Enflame is a good one.

Hey all, It's been ages since I built a Blaster. I'm a lot more familiar with Dominator and Controller builds. Mind having a look for obvious mistakes in this build? I envision this primarily as a Ranged Hover blaster who occasionally steps into his own Blizzards to take advantage of Disruption Aura. Ranged Defense is looking good, but I may be passing up too many good opportunities. Electric Fences is there to help hopefully keep enemies immobilized in the rain powers, but there may be better options for that in other APPs (Fences has a fairly unimpressive 10ft radius so perhaps another option works better). I dont love my slotting in Boxing. That's 5 slots spent where adding a single 6th slot in Sound Cannon would achieve the same thing. However doing that adds knockback proc to Sound Cannon that IMO would be annoying. If not for that proc, I could reconfigure and earn better Slash/Melee defense. If you can think of a way to slot that part better please chime in. I didn't do any enhancing to Recovery powers because I assumed all the combined endurance from procs and two Stamina like powers would be enough, but that assumption may be wrong. I assumed the Destiny slot is the Clarion with mezz protection + +Special effects, to enhance Defense and to increase slows and mezz times. I assume that rotating Clarion and Rune of Protection will be enough to generally avoid being mezzed. It does mean some vulnerability to Disruption Aura being detoggled, but given how unsafe it is to use that power up close probably only really using it during RoP up-time is the best bet anyway. I went with Inituition Radial Paragon for the Alpha slot for the combo of Hold, Range (Frost Breath/Sound Cannon + extended range on the rains), ToHit Debuff (Blizzard), Damage, and Slow Movement (all Ice powers).

You are correct. The pets summoned by a Storm player will not injure enemies inside a Dimension Shift if the caster is outside it. This happens because the pets don't accept buffs. Thus, they can't be independently Phased. Pets that accept buffs, like Mastermind and Controller pets, can theoretically benefit from Phase Shift, but this also means the Mastermind or Controller is cut off from supporting the pets while they are Phased.

To understand why people resent this power so much, you should remember that it doesn't just cut players off from attacking enemies and vice versa, it actually prevents players from affecting their own teammates. If you're playing a support character and your intended target steps into a Dimension Shift, you blow the power. Adrenaline Boost, Incarnate Destiny, AoE heals, Chrono Shift, Farsight, etc will all be affected. Big bubbles, Leadership powers, and other auras are similarly cut off for the duration. With Dimension Shift you are forcing support players to close distance with melee characters to continue supporting them. There are very few situations on a team where Dimension Shift is likely to give you an edge, and a lot of situations where it adds more problems than it solves. Probably the best case where it's briefly useful is if you somehow aggro an AV you're not ready for. But this is such a one-off situation I wouldn't take the power anticipating it. For sure it's not something you should be casting frequently unless the team is in way over its head, and I wonder if a team that far in over their heads would be coordinated enough to rely on Dimension Shift anyway.

Cold Domination or Trick Arrow IMO are probably better than either, if you're talking about sheer ability to strip the enemy of resistance and debuff their ability to respond, but I'm not sure if you're interested in those sets. Between Rad and Poison my money is on Poison. But Poison's debuff aura in some ways plays against a ranged Phantom-Army-as-tank strategy. Rad is an older set, a fan favorite from issue 1 that IMO in some ways hasn't really kept up with the times. It's certainly not bad, but I think a lot of the newer sets are better designed.

Technically Gremlins and Imps have the same AI as a lot of other pets, including Carrion Creeper vines. What makes them feel so boneheaded is their lack of ranged attacks and high run speed combined with the tendency of Fire and Electric players to stand very close to enemies, which gives the pet more leash to run off and aggro further off groups.

Here's a fairly generic Fire/Fire/Ice permadom build. This would be used with Destiny: Barrier to carry Slash, Lethal, and Ranged defense to the soft cap.

An underperforming power it would be interesting to see this in is Sonic Resonance -> Liquefy.

I think what the OP is not understanding is that End Mod sets boost both Recovery and Endurance Drain/Recovery debuff. The reason players requested Damage in End Mod sets is that they were not previously useful in Electric attacks. This meant that in order to enhance the endurance drain of their attacks, Electric Control. Melee, and Blast players had to bypass set bonuses. It's true the sets that provide damage don't help powers that don't deal damage. But mostly also true that powers that need damage are not attractive places to slot the sets that don't add damage.

Nice ideas. I personally wish Adrenaline Boost was a low cost toggle, flagged not to disable when caster is mezzed. Keeping track of it is part of why I don't like playing Empathy. There's already too much to track. Empathy's Resurrection is indeed disappointing. IMO the best and easiest buff there is for it just to have shorter recharge than other sets. IMO Recovery Aura should also provide -Recharge Resistance.

I was gonna second the Plant suggestion. The other pretty good option is Gravity. Wormhole pairs extremely well with Poison's low radius AoE debuffs.

I like Dominators a lot as a class, and am constantly exploring their powers to figure out things I didn't previously know. But there are some things about them that are straightforward. Dominators are in some ways exactly what they appear to be. A mixed range/melee class that mostly doesn't have access to heals, defense, resistance, or debuffing. There are exception cases (Psi's Drain Psyche, Dark Control's -ToHit, Fiery Assault's Consume, the Ice APP's Sleet). Most of these abilities are in sets considered top tier because they break the rules for the archetype. The couple of other top performers (Plant) are there because of numbers far more favorable than a standard set. Domination is in some ways both a blessing and a curse. Yes, in Domination mode you can one-shot mezz a boss. But also because you have this potential ability, your secondary and APP sets are mostly bereft of reliable mezz. Dominators are a Control archetype, but have only one Hold power in all of their secondary and APP choices. Other archetypes do not have this restriction. A Controller or even certain Blasters, Defenders, Corruptors and Masterminds can stack a Hold. That is why people say Domination mode is so important. It's not just that the extra Hold is useful, it's that its the only access you even get to dealing with a Boss, and you (mostly) have no armor, buff, debuff or healing to deal with it if this fails.

I'm not sure what your definition of "viable" is. Psy/Emp is certainly playable. I wouldn't call it a game changer. If you're looking for something with similar concept that might make you feel more effective, you could consider switching to a Gravity/Empathy Controller. You could still take the Psi app if you wanted for Psionic Tornado. You won't be able to directly heal the pet, but you can Fortify and Regen Aura it. Having such a difficult to kill pet you don't have to bother healing can calm down the action and make it possible for you to deal some damage while concentrating on team buffs, if you want to play that way. Illusion/Empathy offers similar options. Other people are likely to tell you that Empathy itself isn't that attractive a set, and I kinda agree. There are some players who truly love it though. Personally I think Pain, Nature, and Thermal all perform better, although I also appreciate how important concept is to some players.

IMO on a character without mezz protection Combat Jumping is superior to Hover.

One of the most weirdly unclimactic powers in Empathy is Resurrection. That's something I feel like an Empathy set should really shine at it, but its sort of like Empathy got the most vanilla one and everyone else got a special flavor. Some sort of Mass Resurrection thing or else a much faster recharging Resurrection would make the set feel better to me. Slightly off topic, but I've storyboarded versions of Empathy under a different name, "Martyrdom" that would hopefully capture more of the "sacrifice" feel a set like this could entail. I don't think changes like that should happen to the main Empathy set this late. I'm going to show my age here, but I still associate "Empathy" with the "Empath" class that existed in Gemstone III and Dragonrealms, text based games on AOL in the late 90s and early 2000s. In those games, Empath couldnt directly heal you, but they could transfer your wounds to themselves and then heal themselves. It was an interesting design I always wished some MMO would copy.

I personally don't think I've encountered a situation where Dimension Shift turned a fight in my favor. I'm not saying it's not theoretically possible, but I've never actually seen it. I've been meaning to do a write up on this power for my Oddball Powers series, so maybe I'll uncover some hidden value in it I didn't see before. Anytime I think I might actually be interested in using it for something I'm reminded of its duration: 20 seconds. I actually don't know what happens if you try to summon another Dimension Shift after the last one fades. The power is coded quite strangely. For example it has an incredibly long Activate Period (35 seconds) and unlike almost all other toggles all of the endurance cost is front loaded instead of costing endurance every few seconds.

Sorry to post twice, but just so I am not editing my post above a dozen times to add things: What Force Field specifically has is on-demand shields that cover a wide area and that can be Power Boosted. You can get Power Boost down to around 30-35 recharge and provides a 15 second window to provide the shields, so roughly a 50% uptime to cast. The effect lasts 4 minutes when it lands, long for an AoE buff. While on paper Time Manipulation can match this performance, Farsight does not have the ability to blanket an area like Force Field can and should. Unlike regular missions, iTrials kill players a lot, so re-shielding them ASAP is paramount. Patches of Doom also mean that traditional gather and spank mechanics no longer work, adding value to long-lasting shields. On top of this, Lore pets are coming and going, and boosting their survivability has a huge impact on the team's DPS. You can't IO Lore pets for Defense so any shields they get add pure survivability. (The inability to heal them like Time can does count against you a bit though.) A Force Fielder on an iTrial has one major role: fortify everyone and refortify constantly to re-shield anyone who may have died. Only Cold Domination can match the abillity to re-shield, but Cold's shields are half of Force Field's strength due to inability to Power Boost. A Force Fielder with Power Boost is as good as two Cold Domsin terms of defense. That's Force Field's advantage for anyone who wants to press it. It may be a limited role, but a Force Fielder built for that specialization does add a lot of value.

I think Force Field is better than popular wisdom may indicate. I want it to see some buffs and I think the knockback/repel powers with the exception of Repulsion Field are mostly toys and not real powers, but it does have a few solid abilities. For one thing, Force Field is actually really good for incarnate trials if you combo it with Power Boost. As in, that one character could potentially determine whether the team succeeds or fails. There are few other sets that can boast that, so at least Force Field has that. I'm always happy to see a Force Field league member. That said there's a lot of situations where Force Field feels lackluster. For some reason its pot of abilities is the one other archetypes and systems keep borrowing from. Even AoE mezz protection is now an incarnate power. The set could certainly stand to see some love to make it more relevant in everyday content.

I just had a closer look at the Trapdoor mission and there are a lot fewer Archanos than I had remembered. That mission probably is doable by a lot of top end Dominators. The parts where you drop down the elevator shafts are likely to be particularly stressful for this AT. Mind Control has a leg up there because it can do it invisibly. I suppose anyone else can too if they turn off their pets and auras.

I have not tried this particular test but Mind Control probably does do pretty well at it because it speaks to its strength. My Elec/Psi Dominator simply cannot beat Arachnos solo on +4x8. I have tried and tried and can usually not get past the first group. Mind Control and Electric Control both have a non-notify AoE Confuse, and I suspect I could beat them with something like a Mind/Energy build with Powered Up Mass Confusion. I suspect I'd also have a really poor clear time. But also the fact that other archetypes consider running an Arachnos mission at +4x8 a decent benchmark really does point, I think, to the overall struggles of the Dominator archetype. Part of is just that Arachnos targets Dominator's specific greatest weakness, -Recharge. But part of it just sort of highlights that the mezz-or-die with no native backup healing or armor falls apart fast against difficult enemy groups in a way that Armor sets (for example) do not.

I think this may be a case where your teammates have some right to complain. It's not that you are awful person for using this power, it's that there are few situations where using it outweighs the confusion it creates for teammates even after they know how the power works. The power has one effect, cutting off interaction between players and enemies. It's mildly useful solo but there are vanishingly few scenarios where teammates will appreciate you forcing them to reposition just to hit the enemy. It's not even often a good power during an actual emergency due to its tendency to cause teammates to waste their long cooldowns in the confusion.

I miss how the game played right before the incarnate system came around. I don't want to make this a complaint post or make it sound like the game was a utopia, there were a lot of powersets needing love. But there was something really fun about the battles at that time being dictated by the actual powersets your team had available. I can still find things that can kill me right now of course, but the conflict is less satisfying due to numbers being pushed so far to their limits.

I've lost track of exactly how powerful Fire Assault is on the Homecoming server. If you happen to play it on most other servers, where it and other Assault sets haven't been rebalanced, it's far and away the best choice though, like it was on live. I still consider it very good on Homecoming because: It can be played almost entirely at range, and is probably the only truly viable "Hover-dom" Assault set that delivers enough damage Both of its specials (Consume and Fiery Embrace) are very useful