oedipus_tex

Don't forget the Resistable portion of the -Damage in Poison Gas Arrow is multiplied by -Resist from Disruption Arrow and Entangling Arrow. So although the base is -20% or whatever (I forget the exact num and don't have it handy) that's then increased by 45% or so (again I dont have the exact numbers).

Yeah apparently there's also been some issues in the past with STR powers boosting other STR powers. One thing about the stats in this game, they are very literal minded. Damage is handled exactly the same as ToHit, Perception, etc. If a stat exists, it generally has some CUR ABS STR and RES implementation somewhere. So for example, there is theoretically such a thing as Power Boost for Translucency or Only Affect Self Resistance. Whether modifying those numbers would have an actual effect is a different question of course.

Don't forget you could skip Mind Control on Dominator or Controller, take the Psi APP as a Defender or Corruptor, and still get Dominate, Mass Hypnosis, and Telekinesis.

As a beginner, if you want to stick with Ice Control you could do Ice/Electric Affinity and probably have an easier time because it provides mezz protection to keep Arctic Air from detoggling and an early endurance management tool. Your damage will be not great, but at least you can take the Earth APP for Seismic Smash and Fissure since you'll be up close with enemies. IMO if you are new to control archetypes and want to go a support route, Dark Control is one of the better ones. Gravity Control is a good direction (on a Controller) if you want to be more independent and do some soloing.

The blast sets on Defender that stand out to me are Sonic, Water, Dual Pistols, and Beam Rifle, each for their own reasons. In fact I think my Dark Miasma/Water Blast character may be the single most OPed thing I've ever played. Not OPed in a soloing fire farms sort of way, but in a able-to-contribute-to-almost-any-situation-without-significant-downsides way. From a Hover position too. I actually stopped playing it because it was making my Dominators feel so weak in comparison.

For some additional background, the technical reason Resistance and Damage are tied together this way is because the concept of "element type" precedes the concept of "damage" or "resistance" in the stat tables. What I mean is the game defines the elemental Attribs as kSmashing, kFire, kCold, kEnergy etc. The tables for each attrib then have the following rows: CUR - a percent of current value (used for Healing powers that heal a percent etc) STR - this is what modifies the Strength of an effect (Aim, Build Up, red insps, etc) ABS - the absolute amount of damage MAX - modifies the Maximum value (used for powers that raise max HP or max endurance etc) RES - this is what modifies Resistance Fire Resistance for example is really just a change to the kFire attrib, RES aspect. Fire Damage is just the kFire attrib, ABS attrib. +Fire Strength is kFire attrib, STR attrib. The game's texts explains that last one as "+Global Fire Damage." But really it's just a Power Boost type effect to everything connected to kFire, and if the developers didn't manually flag every enhanceable Fire Resistance power, hitting Build Up would indeed Power Boost your resistance shields. TLDR like others said above, if a power has enhanceable Resistance, it is normally flagged to IgnoreStrength to make sure resistance doesn't mutiply. There are a couple of powers that have some resistance but you can still Power Boost because the Resistance isn't enhanceable. Perhaps the most noteable example is Force Field's Deflection Shield, which provides Toxic Resistance, but you can still Power Boost because the Resistance is not enhanceable.

I'm not professing to be an expert, but there are a couple of ways to look at +Resist powers like Temp Invuln. If you're playing a character who has 0 Resistance, adding 30% Resistance to that is really straightforward. You take exactly 30% less damage from Slash and Lethal damage. 30% is actually a pretty good number. Or perhaps more accurately, 0% Resistance is extremely vulnerable to damage. What's a little more challenging to talk about is how good is 30% Resistance versus 50% or 75%, etc. To do this you kind of have to reverse the numbers. 0% Resistance means a hit that should have caused 1000 points of damage does exactly 1000 damage 30% Resistance means the same hit would have caused 1000 x 0.7 = 700 50% Resistance means the same hit would have caused 1000 x 0.5 = 500 75% Resistance (the cap) means the same hit would have caused 1000 x 0.25 = 250 Zero Resistance vs Capped 1000 / 250 = 4, so you take 4 times more damage with no resistance at all versus being capped 30% Resistance vs Capped 700 / 250 = 2.8 times more damage 50% Resistance vs Capped 500 / 250 = 2 times more damage Of course this only applies to Slash/Lethal damage. You take full damage from all other damage types. In general this translates to Controllers/Dominators/Blasters and some others being a lot more survivable (up to 4 times) versus Slash Lethal enemies vs other types in a lot of situations because they happen to be able to get access to S/L resistance and may struggle to cover other damage types.

I'd personally rank the Control set pets more or less into 7 ranks, like this: Phantom Army (Illusion) and Carrion Creepers (Plant, if we can call this a pet) Singularity (Gravity) and Umbra Beast (Dark) Living Stone (Earth) Phantasm (Illusion), Fly Trap (Plant), and Jack Frost (Ice) Haunts (Dark) Fire Imps (Fire) Gremlins (Elec) Gremlins are the only Controller pet I sometimes consider skipping, though it depends on the build. Even the worst pet is probably still better than taking a blast power when you consider that even if the pet dies, you're probably getting better DPA than a blast attack. The only time pets coming up net-negative versus a blast is if they aggro groups before you're ready, which is why I have Fire Imps and Gremlins ranked lowest.

IMO the reason Confuse penalties are a non-factor is that as far as I know there's no penalty to inspiration drops due to damage done by Confused enemies. If you do any damage to a defeated enemy, your chances for a drop seem to be the same. That's part of why Seeds of Confusion is so amazing on lawnmower builds, your inspiration tray floods with inspirations, and that more than offsets any influence or XP loss.

IMO some of the criticism is justified, because we spend so much time pouring over our builds and thinking about the context of the game the build will be used in. This game's own progression system will lead every player to a nuke power with 90 recharge. On a team of 8, that's a nuke recharging every 90 / 8 = 11.25 seconds. That's on top of any actual nukes available to the team. Even subpar slotting can get those nukes to half recharge, which is 79 seconds. That averages to a nuke firing less than every 8 seconds. They're also hitting enemies who are only +3 or (in the case of Dark Astoria) +1 to you. The only thing balancing this, to the degree this is balanced, is the possibility of a team member not having the power. I don't blame people for thinking that's unsustainable and unfun. I think it is unsustainable and unfun. IMO that's totally fair to observe for the same reason we can observe the soft cap or other game params.

IMO the OP is right to ask why the cost of Hot Feet, Arctic Air, and a few other powers is so high. IMO these are mainstay control powers, or powers that replace controls, and are meant to be left on most of the time. They should ideally cost 0.52 /sec. You can manage the endurance cost with various build tricks, but I do think even the casual observer will notice how much more endurance Fire and Ice Control drain from the bar than other sets. 0.54 would have them break about even. This won't make existing best-case uses of these sets any better since they already mostly manage their own endurance, but would greatly help builds like the Fire/Force Field mentioned above in addition to Dominators, who are a class already prone to blue bar woes.

I had mentioned before that I thought a Earth/Psi sister build to the one you've got might also be attractive to look at, so I drew one up below. No pressure to use this build instead, I just wanted to make you aware of conceptual alternatives you may also find attractive before you drop a lot of cash. This is a very different kind of character than what you currently have, but also represents a sort of "psychic rock." Because Psionic Assault provides good endurance management, we're able to explore other power pools. The Psi APP is lower damage than other APPs but it fits concept and provides a lot of Defense. Also, because endurance is under control we can roll with Destiny: Barrier instead of Ageless, moving our Defense cap target down to 40%. Earthquake also provides -ToHit (about -8% vs the normal +3s you'll be facing). The lowest ebb of Destiny is +5% Defense. So this build is soft capped or very close to soft capped to Smash, Lethal, Ranged, Energy, Negative, Melee if either of those is active. You're close to naturally capped to Melee at all times no matter what else is going on. Indomitable Will isn't perma here, so the Psi defense is only for 90 seconds at a time, but that's probably okay. Don't forget all of this is before we consider Purple inspirations. You'll also have huge Regen rate after hitting enemies with Drain Psyche. I'll be honest that this build probably has a lower clear speed than the Mind/Earth/Lev we talked about above. That's mainly due to dropping Water Spout. You could add that back in if you wanted. I thought Psi might fit your concept better but the choice is yours. A bonus for this build is Muscular Radial Paragon happens to line up exactly with most of its abilities: I'll be honest and confess I don't know if with proc slotting the AoE immobilize could be made into a decent attack. It has low base damage but a fast animation. I don't find myself using it often though. In fact I have at least one Earth Dom who skipped it entirely in favor of Quicksand, on the theory that enemies inside Volcanic Gas will try to flee (Mag 50 afraid) and it's better to let them do that than stand around shooting at me. This turns out to work pretty well. However, it's still useful to be able to Immob and AV, so I kept the power here. Cross Punch is just there in case you run into Psi-resistant mobs. It could easily be dropped and those 5 slots moved elsewhere if you just plan to avoid that type of enemy.

I did some reconfiguring on your posted build and was able to come up with something with close to ~32.0% Defense to Slash, Lethal, Melee and Ranged, so that eating one Purple roughly soft caps you to all of them. When you hit Power Up, for the following 10 seconds your Defense is roughly 40% to all of these. You're free to experiment with moving slots around to further improve or cover holes. This build "only" has 88.*% Recharge, which is just under permadom levels. However using Ageless destiny plus the various +Recharge procs in the build should end you over the top. Terrify is slotted with the Dominator ATO. This sacrifices some direct damage. However, the gamble I'm making is that triggering the +30% Global Damage proc alongside the +10% Recharge from the set probably contributes more damage than adding direct damage to this power. Tremor. Fissure, Seismic Smash, and Heavy Mallet all put you at close range and unable to use this power as offensively as I might otherwise like. I dropped Bile Spray because it's a very slow cone attack. Tremor will serve you better and takes better set bonuses. My suggested opener with this build is Power Up > Mass Confusion > Terrify (triggers +damage proc) then go crazy. Seismic Smash does enormous damage so I'd focus fire a boss and cycle in other attacks as necessary. When Mass Confusion is down, I'd substitute with Mass Hypnosis > Power Up > Total Domination > Terrify. I kept the single target Confuse on the theory you might use it on the rare AV. If you don't solo AVs then this is a good power to drop. If there were some way to cycle in Combat Teleport so you could instantly close range for Seismic Smash I think that would be a good trade off.

One of the first things you should look at when dealing with a blast-y Control set like Mind Control is how the DPA shakes out between the various possible abilities. Below is a chart comparing the DPA of each Mind attack to each Stone attack. Overall I think you've made reasonable choices that align with the power map. Powers that stand out as must-takes are: Seismic Smash, which we can further proc out for huge damage Hurl Boulder Heavy Mallet We're also forced to take two from the list below: Mesmerize or Levitate Stone Spears Stone Mallet has surprisingly small DPA and given everything else can probably be left out. It's a real shame that Dominate doesn't come at level 1. It's more desirable than either Levitate or Mesmerize. Given the choice between these IMO you made the right choice, because at least you can Mesmerize an AV. Levitate is a weak power on Dominators. Based on the data above I'd probably prioritize like this: 1 slot in Mesmerize like you have is fine. Personally I wish we could just skip this entirely since Mass Hypnosis can also sleep an AV Slot Stone Spears as a standard attack. Slot Heavy Mallet, Hurl Boulder, and Seismic Smash with damage +damage procs. You've already done a pretty decent job here IMO. For your APPs I would skip Energy and for this build take either Ice or Leviathan. Both give you a source of autohit -Defense that will allow you to get away with slightly more aggressive proc slotting without fear of missing. They also have Hibernate which is a good way to restore lost HP or blue bar or duck into invincibility when a key control needs to recharge. The difference between the two is mainly Sleet/Ice Rain vs Water Spout. I've used both. Sleet is far better on paper; in practice Water Spout is ferocious and demonstrably improves survival. Just as an FYI, I think this character is going to be interesting, but I do wonder if the inverse build Earth Control/Psi Assault might deliver more of what you want. It kind of depends on how married you are to these specific sets. One thing you'd rarely have to worry about as Earth/Psi is endurance, where Mind/Earth as you noted will have to account for it. Another build to consider as an alternative, if you are open to it, is Dark Control/Earth Assault, because the Power Up ability doubles the -ToHit in Dark's powers and covers the hole you mentioned in your Defenses even at very low levels of +Defense.

"Fear" is the Name (used by various systems for lookups) and the mezz duration table, kAfraid and kTerrorized are the names of the mezz internally. I'm sure the power text describes these two affects inconsistently. Here's look at the Afraid effect in Arctic Air. You can see it uses the kAfraid attrib, pulls from the Ranged_Fear table, benefits from Strength and enemies can Resist it.

Coming back to this with some free time. In this post I'll discuss Containment. This won't be a rundown of every single power that has or does not have it because that was be exhausting. For a lot of people this is mainly just confirmation of what you are already know. First Things First The main thing to know is Containment is not an actual power. It's more of an idea. Containment requires every single power that a Controller can use to dish damage to manually be coded to deal Containment damage. The Status Check The standard Containment formula that checks whether to apply Containment damage is written as follows: enttype target> critter eq kImmobilized target> 0 > kHeld target> 0 > || kSleep target> 0 > || kStunned target> 0 > || IncarnateBoss target.hasTag? || && This formula basically says apply Containment damage if any of the above are true: The target's Immobilized stat is greater than 0 The target's Held stat is greater than 0 The target's Sleep stat is greater than 0 The target's Stunned stat is greater than 0 The target is tagged as an Incarnate Boss In case you are wondering, mezz protection powers work by applying negative Immobilize, Held, Sleep, etc. A target is considered affected by the mezz if the total is greater than 0. Fractional Magnitudes do exist (Mind Control's Mesmerize for example is Mag 3.5). Bosses have Mag 3 protection (that is, they have -3 Sleep), so because 3.5 + -3.0 = 0.5 the enemy is Slept. Sometimes people wonder how hard it would be to add other status effects to the Containment list. Every damage effect that Controllers have has this formula manually applied to it. If the power deals multiple damage types (e.g. Energy/Smash) often it has the formula multiple times. Since most powers do different damage in PVE vs PVP the formula is applied again. So there are some powers with this formula two or three or more times just in that one power. It's hard to say how hard it would be to make the update but there is some possibility of missing some powers and having them respond differently to Containment than other powers. Containment obviously doesn't care whether you yourself are the person who mezzed the enemy or it was someone else. NOT QUITE A BUG: Containment requirement flags are checked the moment you execute a power. So, if enemies are Sleeping, and you hurl projectile and follow that immediately with another damaging power they will often both get Containment damage because technically the flag was true when the power fired. This isn't 100% reliable and probably only relevant to Mind Control players. The Damage Containment damage is similarly manually coded power for power. For example, if a power deals Scale 1 Psi damage outside of Containment it generally deals Scale 1 Psi damage inside Containment. I don't know if the developers were fully consistent with preserving DoTs versus just delivering immediate damage. Also there are probably at least some cases where the developers were like "Naw screw this" and just had the Containment part of the power deal all of its damage as a single energy type even if the main attack does not. Pseudopets In general most pseudopets don't deal Containment damage. I've lost track of which ones do and do not. Basically for most powers I'd advise asking on the boards or trying on the text server. Not having Containment can radically change a power's respective strength. Damage procs Damage procs are independent of Containment entirely. Damage bonuses and -Resistance Containment benefits from +Damage and scales pretty much exactly like unContained damage. There are lot of balance takeaways from this that are larger than this post. The short version is that Controllers who can deal heavy damage significantly outdamage lower damage counterparts. That's because Containment takes the higher damage character's damage and then doubles that. There's no archetype with such an enormous difference in performance.

Containment doesn't have a DisplayFloat, so it shouldn't appear in text when it triggers. Interestingly DisplayFloat is coded AttribMod per AttribMod, and is not a global system tied to Containment. You could technically make any power effect pop up whatever message you want. That's how Gravity's Impact pop up works. So it wouldn't surprise me if there's one power out there does have some kind of message by mistake. I believe occasionally the text has been left off certain powers and had to be added.

Take Combat Teleport and create a bind that casts it at your current target. I believe that is: /macro CT powexeclocation target "Combat Teleport" Tap that to instantly teleport directly in front of each enemy you want to attack, with no running. You get a brief ToHit bonus too.

I think the answer to the incarnate powers may lie in the third line of code in each of them: They were created to sell subscriptions. 😄 I for one would be happy to see them toned down, and in the case of Level Shifts, removed or reworked completely. Dark Astoria is actually a really cool zone if you encounter it without Level Shifts. I do think Level Shifts and full strength incarnate powers are still appropriate for iTrials though.

Since you asked for a specific recommendation on a shredder character, I'd recommend trying Plant/Savage/Leviathan. It's an incredibly straightforward performer. Open with Seeds, recast Carrion Creepers and Water Spout each time they are up, attack with your Savage powers. IMO you cannot go wrong with this recipe. You could safely change out Leviathan for the Ice APP (to get Sleet) if you'd prefer to specialize more on teamming and AVs. Personally I think Water Spout adds more safety plus is just insanely cool looking for what you're looking for though.

That's interesting that Enflame procs regularly. I guess connected to how it's technically not a toggle but a pet dropped every few seconds? Makes me want to rethink some slotting on it in general.

I recently had to get real honest with myself about AoE Holds and the fact that if they were APP powers and not core powers I'd find them too weak to take. That's moreso the case with Controllers than Dominators. But it's definitely part of Mind's issue, relying so much on Total Domination to fill gaps. Part of why I think Dark is so much better than Mind is the far better AoE Hold power.

I'd rate the three "safest bet" Control sets on Doms as Plant, Dark, Earth, depending how you want to go about it. I'd rate the four "safest bet" Assault sets as Fire, Psi, Savage, and Energy, with Earth and Dark trailing behind just a bit as fifth and sixth contenders. Pair any of category A with category B and you'll probably get a very strong performer (tho not always in the same way) who puts out enough combined damage, control and survivability to invest in. If you mix any from Category A or Category B with one of the sets not mentioned above you'll probably still have a pretty good showing. There are some hidden gems out there but if you're new to this archetype the seven/nine I mentioned above are a good foundation.

I sketched up something for this recently taking into account the updates to the Sorcery pool, which are pretty hot. This build is a bit of a house of cards. Each piece needs to be assembled for the whole thing to work, and it needs to fight as an incarnate. It's also built for fighting packs of enemies and not AVs, altho it will be still be a good teammate in an AV fight. Here's how the pieces come together. Fulcrum Shift will be supplying +Damage. We still want some damage in powers for moments it's down and for fights where it's not practical. But for packs of enemies, damage is less important than procs. It's because of Fulcrum Shift you'll also notice some weird slotting I wouldn't otherwise recommend, like x6 Sudden Acceleration in the pet Vigor Core Paragon will be the Alpha incarnate slot. It provides several critical components in one excellent package: Accuracy: which we'll need since we'll be proccing attacks instead of adding Accuracy to them, and to avoid having to slot too much in our Kinetics powers, which don't have good set bonuses End Redux: to lower how often we have to slam Transference (we will still need to from time to time though) and can short change some of our toggle slotting Healing: so we can shortchange Transference, which doesn't offer good set bonuses Destiny: Barrier which at top performance provides a lowest ebb of +5 Defense to All. That moves our target for capped Defense to 40. A lot of Accuracy bonuses and a Kismet: To make up for the lack of Accuracy slotting in powers Rune of Protection to break out of mezz or cycle in when Destiny is ebbing. I honestly find this build slightly terrifying from a balance perspective. It basically draws on many of the old tricks of the old infamous Fire/Kinetics Controller but adds extreme heavy single target damage in Lift and a Wormhole opener enemies can't see coming. Enflame (from the Sorcery pool) doesn't deal as much damage as Hot Feet or do Containment damage, but with you hitting the damage cap from Fulcrum Shift still should deal excellent damage. You might also have seen my posts recently on the Dominator forums on how Grav/Kinetics Controllers specifically can destroy Gravity Dominators at their own close range game. When we look at how much damage Seismic Smash (a Mag 4 Hold) deals at damage cap we can see why: I don't think that damage readout is actually even accurate, because I think it is failing to include extra damage from Containment. With that included it would get even more extreme. I am too lazy to do the math to see if this readout is missing that damage. On its own it does crazy damage. I suspect I'll get some questions about why I skipped Propel. IMO it's just not needed here. I think it might technically do a bit more damage than Arcane Bolt over the long haul. However with the new Arcane Bolt mechanics and all the clicking you'll be doing as a /Kin it just makes sense to me that Arcane Bolt is the better power since you have to take two things anyway in Sorcery to unlock Enflame and Rune of Protection. I think there's still more slots to move around here to make it better. Ranged Defense with Barrier is allllmost soft capped but it might be worth further closing the gap. I may post an update if I think of a way to do that. Build code:

The powers mostly exist in the I24 code base, meaning they'd been working on it for a while. Folks are correct about a lack of particle effects. Adding new particle effects is a doable but slow process. I pasted a copy of the publicly available i24 encoding text if you want to see it. No idea if Homecoming will finish the set and keep these descriptions as is or not.