oedipus_tex

While I appreciate it has been talked about before, the topic was discussed when it was thought impossible or impractical to change the cap. Now that that is no longer the case and there are other CoX servers running with different aggro caps it's worth talking about whether Homecoming should stick to 16 or go with something else.

Homecoming is running on a different code base than the i24 servers, but from what I've been led to believe because of the way the aggro cap was shoehorned in after the game was in production, it's controlled by a single line of code: #define AI_CRITTER_AGGRO_CAP 17 // number of critters that will aggro you at any one time I haven't hunted down the actual portion of the code where this is set (I'm told its controlled by the mapserver code). Some servers that are running modified i24 code apparently have it in a config file. No idea if Homecoming is the same due to its divergent code base, but it should be pretty similar.

Like the title asks "What should the aggro cap be?" This is a theoretical question that's been thrown around for ages. For a long time it was believed the cap was impractical or impossible to change and the discussion was moot. Recently though the Ouro devs who maintain the core CoX gamecode have discovered the mechanism for determining the aggro cap, a const value buried in the C code. A few servers are now successfully running with a raised cap, or with no cap at all. However, just because you can doesn't mean you should. So there's the question: What should the aggro cap on Homecoming be? (I have my own thoughts but I'd like to hear other players first.)

I personally don't like /Storm paired with the primaries that lean on Sleep for utility. Mainly, this is Electric and Mind Control. They're still playable but the conflict between Sleep and Freezing Rain feels like a lost opportunity to me. Mind, in particular, suffers because Sleep is one of the few avenues for AoE Containment. The inability to combo -Resist with Containment really hurts Mind/Storm. There are workarounds (Thunderclap for example to Stun minions) but they aren't always pretty. On the other hand, Gravity/Storm in particular stands out as complimentary. Gravity provides high single target damage from early on, while Tornado and Lightning Storm add damage later. Both sets can be played mostly at range with a Hover build, covering Storm's hole of relatively weak personal defense and resist. High DPA on Gravity's attack lets you take enemies out faster to generate inspirations to assist with the murder Storm does to your blue bar, and both sets have a lot of opportunities for +100% recharge procs. Other combos with Storm tend to be good but slow starting, because most Control primaries have low damage until you reach the pet. Earth/Storm was once a very popular combo for a "total control through chaos" sort of build. You should, of course, play what you want.

Thanks, you are correct. It's spelled /powexeclocation

With Dark you probably want some kind of Resist armor. Defense is somewhat redundant because of Dark's -ToHit component. Usually I try to get to around where one Fearsome Stare would give me soft cap versus the level of enemies I am fighting. You can adjust to your level of comfort. Dying a lot probably also means your controls aren't protecting you enough. I'd look toward Leviathan as the APP for that, for the combo of Water Spout + Shark Skin + Hibernate (skip Bile Spray). On a perma dom Water Spout will have about 60% uptime. Use Hibernate to duck into hiding when you are waiting on a key power to recharge. Radiation Assault isn't a set I've ever gotten out of the mid 30s. I find the special heal mechanic difficult to leverage. It might get better on an end game build, I haven't had time to try it myself though.

/macro SF powexeclocation target "Shadow Field" - will drop beneath your current target /macro SF powexeclocation self "Shadow Field" - will drop beneath you It will change your life. Also recommend for powers like Ice Slick, Static Field, etc.

Someone who's better at the math may be able to prove me wrong, but so far the only Grav Dominator combo I've been able to come up with that is fairly competitive with a Controller build is a late game IOed Grav/Psi. That's because the buff in Drain Psyche on perma-dom is strong enough and recharges fast enough to compete with heals available to a Controller. Drain Psyche is a heal that is preemptive versus most Controller heals which are reactive, so it kinda works. Some Gravity Controller builds are frankly scary. Lift with Containment and Impact does comically huge damage, more than most T3 Dominator blasts and even some melee attacks, and its available from Level 1. It recharges in 6 seconds, animates in 1.18 seconds, and has a 100% chance for knockup that an enemy needs around Mag 13 protection against to avoid. Controllers get access to -Resist and +Damage in sets like Storm, Poison, and Kinetics to make it even more devastating. I haven't seen anyone run pylon tests on it, I doubt its outperforming most Scrappers or Stalkers, but wouldn't be surprised if Gravity Controllers equal or out damage most Dominators in single target.

So, how attached are you to specifically running this character as a Dominator? Grav/Dark Assault is playable and I would never tell a person not to run a character they find fun. However, in order to avoid you being disappointed later, I want to point out that Dark Assault trades away a lot of its damage for a weak combo attack/heal in Drain Life. With a different Dominator primary, this wouldn't be a huge tradeoff, because any source of healing is rare for a Dominator, so they should pounce on it when its available. For those primaries, Dark Assault is a not great but not bad choice. But for Gravity specifically, there are already high damage powers in the primary Control set. The equivalent Gravity Controller would still dish lots of damage but be far better at survival and providing support. I don't mean to make it sound like a Gravity Controller will perfectly match the Dominator in DPS. But the Controller will be close enough that the huge disadvantage of trading away the benefits of a Buff/Debuff set will be evident. A Controller secondary like Dark, Electric Affinity, Storm, Poison, Trick Arrow, or Kinetics will provide much better survival and almost as much (in some cases more) damage and control. Gravity/Storm and Gravity/Dark specifically can even match the Dominator's ability to Stun bosses, altho it takes two powers to do it instead of one (on the other hand, unless you're a permadom, those Controllers have better handling of bosses than you do). I don't want to totally put you off rolling a Grav/Dark Dominator if you're set on it. There are some advantages for the Dominator. The Controller can't pick a minion off in one shot with a Snipe, and the Controller has to find mezz protection somewhere if the Buff set doesn't offer it. But Controllers have better everything than Dominators: Healing, Defense, Resistance, even Lift and Propel do more damage because of Containment. Run the character you want, but it's not too late to evaluate other options.

Electric Control is in a slightly weird place IMO. It suffers more than any other set from having few AoE hard controls that Dominate--only the AoE Hold does. What keeps Electric Control from being in the same boat as Ice Control on struggling to shut down alphas is the contextually either very good (solo) or somewhat bad (on a team) Static Field sleep patch. Static Field annoyingly conflicts with damage over time abilities. Obvious conflicts are stuff like Caltrops and Thorntrops, but also some entire secondaries like Thorny, Fire, and Dark. It conflict with Earth Assault's PBAE damage aura, but not Icy's (Icy's won't damage sleeping enemies). It also conflicts with both Ice Storm and Sleet in the widely-considered top tier Ice APP. A point in Electric Control's favor is that sapping doesn't really have a recharge associated with it, so you can open with a mezz, sap endurance, and fight mostly helpless enemies from there. You don't run into the situation other sets do where you have to make a choice on whether to re-use a 90 to 240 second recharge power to re-mezz the couple of enemies left over in group you are fighting and slow down your ability to steam roll towards the next big group. Electric Control is also the undisputed king of control sets... and maybe all powersets really... of controlling Elite Bosses. Endurance Drain drains a percentage of max endurance, so even though Elite Bosses have massive Endurance pools, Electric Control can floor them. This used to be really useful in the ITF. Teams are steamrolling the ITF these days so it may go unnoticed, but as a bragging rights thing, there is something to say for shutting down 6 ITF Cyclopses at once. IMO the best secondaries for Electric Control are anything that has these characteristics: Deals direct damage instead of DoT (sets with lots of DoT are Thorny, Fire and Dark, as well as somewhat Savage and Martial; it also conflicts with Earth's damage aura) Anything that has a Power Boost like power to boost energy drain percent (Icy, Energy, Earth, Dark) Anything with lots of knockdown, which locks an enemy out from responding before being re-slept (Earth, Psi (single target)) Anything that provides a backup buff or debuff effects to power you through not-as-strong mezzes (Psi, Dark) Taking all this into consideration, I consider the strongest secondaries for Electric Control to be Icy, Psi, Earth (if you can deal with the damage aura conflict), or Energy. Electric Assault I guess could go in there too, but it's such an uninspiring set.

IMO best Dominator performance you'll get out of the box with no IO plans is /Fire paired with a mostly ranged Control set. You can build /Fire more or less how you'd build a (nukeless) Ranged Blaster who moves in occasionally for an endurance refill with Consume. Consume allows you to avoid the normal Dominator curse of poor endurance management. Plant/Fire is a good choice because even without a lot of IOs you still have good up time on controls. Dark/Fire is also pretty good for this, with most powers very reasonable and second hand some mitigation built in via -ToHit. /Savage is another good secondary if you'd prefer something with a bit more melee focus.

For a first Dominator I tend to recommend Dark or Plant. Dark is just an all around good set. It has -ToHit as a secondary effect, which allows you to have less than ideal Defenses and still act like you do, at least in normal content. Other archetypes have the luxury of chasing Defense. On a Dominator you're usually pulled in too many directions. You need Recharge, damage procs, and whatever defense you can scrounge up. Dark covers that hole nicely, especially because the pet also tosses its own -ToHit and is fairly tanky. Plant is mainly good for the newbies on the strength of its simplicity. It banks on two powers: Seeds of Confusion and Carrion Creepers. There's no secondary effect to think about, it's just a rush-down set. Seeds recharges 4 times faster than Mind Control's Mass Confusion (to some controversy). With that kind of recharge you don't need a whole bunch of other control powers. I had mentioned Earth before. Earth isn't quite as strong as the two above initially, but with Recharge IOs it becomes magnificent. Mainly this is because Volcanic Gasses, a power that doesn't actually Dominate, can be reduced in duration to around 60 seconds, and it lasts 60 seconds. At that point, a well built Earth Dominator is truly terrifying. Stalagmites + Earthquake + Volcanic Gasses just makes you feel powerful. I like to throw in Water Spout for even more chaos. Most people find the -Defense secondary effect not that useful, but IMO this misses that on many teams with lowbie members, most teammates are severely under slotted for Accuracy.

I will back Coyote up on Plant/Savage being... savage. I was going to suggest a similar combo. Oedipus Tex the character himself is a Earth/Savage and its a very powerful combo. In general I've found the strongest Dominator primaries to be Dark, Plant, and Earth, and the strongest secondaries to be Psi, Energy, Savage, and Fire. Pair any of those control sets with any of those assault secondaries and you likely have a fairly powerful character. Pair most of them with one of the other sets for a still-pretty-strong character. No set is truly terrible. All are at least playable. The only kinda disappointing thing to me is several of the Assault sets just don't really stand out. I've never gotten either Thorns or Electric Assault past the 20s because there's nothing interesting really going on with them.

FWIW Disruption Field, the Sonic Resonance power the Blaster version is based on, is actually entirely non-notify. That flag was added during beta tests for Disruption Field because Defenders would place it on melee characters and the mobs would aggro the Defender LOL.

What's unfortunate is I think some newer players never got to play the game under the older rule sets. Sometimes when we talk about how things were "harder" they think that we mean the game was actually "hard." It wasn't, it was just that the late game powers that ruled the game were your actual power picks and not incarnate powers. That made the game thrilling in a way that I don't really find it now. Each team member could mostly feel like they were contributing something. Controllers and Dominators really took a hit when the meta shifted hard to pure damage. I think the Homecoming team has done an amazing job with what the OG team left as the servers were closing, but I really miss the thrill this game provided. There was a real sense that the team needed some cohesion to succeed.

A couple of things happened toward the end of the OG life that hurt Controllers and Dominators. Mainly we just kill stuff too fast now. Blaster/Defender/Corruptor nukes were going to become crashless and have their recharges significantly lowered (this never existed on live, was still on test servers when the game was shut down) Refactoring of proc damage to a PPM schedule suddenly made many attacks do more damage ATOs which were intended as a pay-to-win mechanic became unlocked for free and widely available Judgement available for every team member Level shifts, one of the single strongest buffs available in the game, were allowed to exist in content designed to cap at +4 Most teams are simply killing stuff way, way faster than we did on live. I have old videos of my highly IOed characters soloing at +0 x8 and me being soooo proud. 😄 These days that performance out of a level 50 decked out character would be laughable. I don't want to make it sound like the OG was an equalitarian paradise, but you did used to have more uses for controls because stuff was just plain more dangerous and harder to kill.

I've recently been diving more into the process for how developers create powers and bin them for the server and client. After diving into that I have a better sense of why certain powers didn't change for years after creation, and also how heroic the efforts of the Homecoming team have been with updating things. It's not an easy thing to just adjust a few variables and test them like it would be in a more modern game. Any edits done involve a lot of forethought and planning, you can't do much live editing or quick building like modern engines do. Some of that just comes down to this being an old MMO with code bases started in the late 90s. The reason I think that's relevant here is how we should probably view the base game and certain things that have remained unchanged seemingly forever. My sense is that the developers just didn't want to test certain changes because its a long process. With CoX as it is now you can be a bit more experimental because you have all these different teams doing different things with the code. For example I recently wrote and tested a version of Defender Energy Blast where I adjusted the knockback chance to follow the percent scalar for Defenders just to see how it felt to have knockback chances be higher on the set (felt awesome, by the way). In doing so I broke a lot of graphics and stuff. Just changing a few variables has some risk associated with it. End point being I think virtually any idea is on the table with where we should take the game. I can see why a commercial game company would be wary of cost/reward ratio with updates. I think the newer volunteer teams have a lot more room to experiment with stuff the OG developers wouldn't have been able to justify.

Why not go full out and use the "Make a cup of tea" emote? 😄 But seriously, this is an idea worth looking into. I'm not sure right now if player emotes can be used as attack animations, but it would be nice to grab some of the simple gestures like nods or waves. There are some really subtle animations in the engine.

The ITF used to be one of the Task Forces perma-Dominators could make a difference, back when it was harder. The TF does show though how useful Dominators would be if more of the game was designed the way it is, with discreet packs of all-bosses or elite bosses thrown in. The ability to hurl a Mag 6 mezz is huge here. The ITF is IMO one of the best designed series of quests in the game and either a perma or non-perma Dom potentially can contribute (though perma Doms will of course be better). Personally I think Electric Control built as a Sapper rules the ITF. I mean, its not hard enough for it to really matter as much anymore. But the ability to tank the Endurance of the Elite Bosses goes a long way. Other than that, the usual sets tend to do well.

If we're talking about level 50 Dominators don't forget you can choose Destiny Ageless to further close the permadom gap. I personally think Destiny Barrier works best on /Psi builds because throwing Defense and Resistance on top of Regen creates layers of survivability. But for non-Psi builds, Ageless offers good endurance management and around ~15% Recharge when averaged out over time (I'm estimating). If you go with an Ageless build you can put more slots into damage procs or defenses. I do still happen to think Barrier is the holy grail of Destiny powers for Dominators though. This is mainly because Barrier strongly benefits your pet and Lore pets where most other Destiny choices do not. But for various reasons, especially related to Endurance Recovery, its not always within reach. For /Psi it should be though.

I really thought at first you were asking for a Shark Blast or Fish Control set, and the weirdest thing about that is the assets exist to make it.

Agreed. I consider that a "must fix" issue.

For a soloist Defender you probably want a mix of good -Resist and defensive abilities in the primary set and lots of ability to proc attacks in the secondary. For primaries, Dark Miasma, Trick Arrow, Time, Storm, or Traps lead the pack for me. For secondaries, I would lean towards Dual Pistols, Beam Rifle, Water Blast, or possibly Dark Blast. One thing to consider is how much you care about entering PBAoE range to nuke. For ranged nukes, look to Beam Rifle or Water. Otherwise one of the others.

I wish Dominator powers that summoned psuedo pets worked like Shadow Field does. That would help Electric and Ice and have an impact on a potential Illusion Control. Basically when you summon Shadow Field, the first pulse of the power Dominates but subsequent pulses do not. I'd like to see other similar powers updated to work similarly: For Electric Control: Static Field: Add a 20ft radius Mag 3 Sleep for ~5 seconds (enhanceable) with the Domination! text For Earth Control: Volcanic Gasses: Add a 20ft radius Mag 3 Hold for ~7 seconds (enhanceable) with the Domination! text For Illusion Control: Spectral Terror: Add a 20ft radius Mag 3 Terrify for ~7 seconds (enhanceable) with the Domination! text

I've wondered for a while whether most of the long recharge Control powers should have half the recharge time but also half the control duration.