oedipus_tex

I'm personally skeptical that players are entitled to an AoE buff on par with Destiny. I can see someone saying "Nerfs to Destiny will negatively affect the house of cards that is my build." For that reason buffs to the caster and his or her pets should probably not be changed too much. It's IMO a bigger stretch for someone to say "My build was damaged by my inability to buff the whole team." iTrials are balanced around Destiny so in that environment it can probably stay. The majority of Task Forces and missions were definitely not balanced around it. I'd encourage the devs to explore taming Destiny for the same reasons they recently started looking at Farsight. Numbers that far off the charts make designing challenges very difficult.

Yep that's my character as well, Dark/Martial. This poor guy is perhaps my most-rerolled character of all time as I search for the right combo of archetype, primary and secondary. I really want to make this build work for concept reasons. But I feel my heart sinking, because with Explosive Shuriken out, Savage Assault is so much better. (I already have a Dark/Savage version of him at 50, but was turned off by all the bird attacks.) If only I could modify the bird attack into something else. 🙂 Caltrops leaves me a tiny bit of hope, though not a lot.

And here's why I'm glad I started this thread to ask. You're absolutely right. I just tested it to be sure. The AoE only applies to the DoT portion. If I'd read closer I'd have realized it says this in the power's mini description. Yikes. That's pretty weak and actually on some Dominators potentially irritating because its mostly nuisance damage that breaks Sleep. That really makes me want to spec out of the power. However I'm not sure I can without a big drop in ranged damage. Hmm.

I've wavered back and forth on Martial Assault trying to get a pulse on it. It doesn't have any healing or endurance recovery and none of the powers stand out right away like "wow" but it does have a little bit more AoE than a typical assault set. My questions: how good are these powers really? Does the AoE cover for the lower single target damage? I pulled up Icy Assault for comparison because I consider it the "most generic" Assault set. ICY MARTIAL A few takeaways: Trick Shot versus 1 enemy has lower DPA than even the Tier 1 attack in either set. So its not worth casting unless you have nothing else. However if you actually hit 3 things with it, it has a DPA effectively around 111. This seems to compare positively with Ice's Bitter Ice Blast. With the bonus that Trick Shot is available at a much lower level. BIB: 12 recharge, 1.32s animation, 101 damage (dpa: 77) Trick Shot: 10 recharge, 1.32s animation, 37 damage x 3 targets = 111 damage (dpa: 84) EDIT: Nope, see conversation below. Explosive Shuriken is a weird power. It has a 10ft radius (vs 15 for most ranged AoEs). However it is a ranged radial AoE on a Dominator, which itself is very rare. I'd always thought of this as more of a single target attack but its actually a pretty good AoE It caps at 10 targets rather than normal 16 for a ranged blast, but you probably cant fit 10 things inside a 10ft radius AoE anyway. Explosive Shuriken actually has better DPA than the APP version of Fireball (55 vs 62). It also recharges much faster--12 seconds versus 32 If this power hits 2 targets, it has effectively reached 124 DPA, barely shy of Fiery Assault's Blaze (128 DPA). At 3 targets it has significantly eclipsed Blaze. None of this is factoring in the roughly +12% damage bonus from Envenomed Blades. Overall I feel like I've been sleeping on this set. The lack of sustainabilty is a bit of a problem. Ranged single target damage is definitely lacking. But the AoE potential may be better than I thought. Other thoughts?

I hate to come across as a huge min/maxer, but Gravity Control brings it out in me, so here's my piece: It's always hard for me to recommend any Gravity Dominator because of what you give up compared to a similar Controller. All you really get out of the primary is a Mag 6 Stun in Wormhole, which is partly a wash since Wormhole's teleport mag isn't high enough to TP +3 bosses. You do gain some AoE and possibly a snipe, as well as mezz protection. But you lose the better Defense, Resist, Heal modifiers on Controllers and being a force multiplier on teams. Because of Containment, Propel and Lift do more damage on a Controller than Dominator. Further increased by any buffs or debuffs you may have. IMO with Gravity when you consider a Dominator you should be looking first at Gravity/Storm, Gravity/Poison, Gravity/Trick Arrow, or Gravity/Traps. Or any support secondary. You will lose some damage but be a much stronger overall character. You can even take the /Earth APP if you miss melee action. I do wish Gravity on Dominators would be improved. This isn't to say you shouldn't play what you want. I have tons of concept characters. Even a Grav/Psi Dom who isn't bad. Just a prodding to look at the comparable Controller first to see if you can't get something you'd be happier with.

We mostly agree on this point. So hopefully no one would be too upset if Destiny became mostly 'self and pets' only outside of iTrials. I certainly wouldn't. I have a lot of praise for the original dev team, but Destiny is a power that has made the game less rather than more fun for me.

RE: giving mobs toggle powers to make mezz more useful, we should keep in mind that in the current proc system a Scrapper has a better chance to mezz a boss on the first attack than a Controller or Dominator out of Domination, because Lockdown: Chance for Mag 2 Hold has a 90% chance to activate on a long recharge Hold like the Scrapper or other melee archetype has in the APPs. The Hold will be more difficult to perma but it won't matter if the goal is just to detoggle. And yes I'm a bit sour that non-Dominators have such easy access to mezzing bosses, because that was long supposed to be a Dominator thing. 🙂

Isn't Rad Blast currently considered to be on the weak end of sets? Maybe you could add a damage proc to it that rolls a Defense check versus AoE (since Toxic defense doesn't exist). If you fail to dodge you take Toxic damage. The proc wouldn't be enhancable for Accuracy, so the idea is that debuffing something's Defenses makes it more likely to hit.

I think the issue is bigger than radio missions or Task Forces. I'm currently on a Trick or Treat team with a couple of incarnates. My defense hasn't dropped below 75% for more than a few seconds. What role does a control or defensive support character play in that environment? The only thing the team needs is more damage. It wasn't always like this. I distinctly remember getting pasted by Trick or Treat mobs and hoping a support character would join. Destiny is the major offending incarnate ability. Part of the challenge of balancing Destiny is it was originally intended to be behind a paywall so the whole team can't use it. We can't reinstall the paywall. But there are ways to make it useful without breaking the game. That's why I would like to see Destiny changed in the following way: The full buff of Destiny always affects caster and pets in any type of content The AoE portion of the Destiny buff is conditional The AoE portion always triggers in incarnate trials (they are balanced around it) Outside of iTrials, the AoE portion of the buff only triggers if the caster has the new "Unleashed" flag "Unleashed" would be a new flag in the vein of Domination that ramps up the player's incarnate abilities to full strength even when they are outside an iTrial. The main way you get this flag is from a Support character's "extra special" T9. The idea is that the support character can empower one other team member to supply AoE Destiny buffs and greatly enhance the value of bringing the support character while still allowing them to operate by proxy, boosting someone other than themselves. I imegine the following powers would apply the "Unleashed" flag: Empathy: Adrenaline Boost Pain: Painbringer Electric Affinity: Amp Up

Mezmera summed it up nicely. What's worth knowing is that both Gravity and Energy have an "extra damage" mechanic where certain powers do more damage when chained together, and the sets don't talk to each other. The two of them together probably don't do a ton of favors. IMO the best current pairing for Gravity is either Psi or any of the sets with weak ranged damage (Earth, Radioactive, Electric). Below is a look at the damage-per-animation frame of Gravity Control laid up against Psi. You'll notice the Gravity powers out damage most of Psi Assault, so that pairing actually benefits. Lift hits almost as hard as Psi's melee attacks. Propel meanwhile outclasses either of Psi's two T2 blasts, Mental Blast or Subdue. Here's Grav/Fiery. Lift does about as much dpa as Fire Blast, but Propel actually does less. Meanwhile Blaze outclasses any of those powers. This isn't to say this combo is bad, Lift and Propel are controls as well as a blast.

I really like Electric Affinity paired with Ice Control. There's a lot of ways Electric Affinity makes up for weaknesses in Ice. Mainly, in giving you mezz protection to run Arctic Air on a set that still gets healing and endurance recovery. Jack Frost is normally a so-so pet. Paired with Electric Affinity I suspect he's nearly unkillable. Electric even gives him knockback protection. You'll still be a low damage character, but a sustainable one. For APPs I really like the Leviathan set for Water Spout, which does decent damage and adds some much needed control to supplement Ice's so-so soft controls.

One thing the ITF does particularly well is break up enemies into discreet groups. It's different from most missions and Task Forces because the team has specific "encounters" with various kinds of enemies, including a few fights versus all boss spawns, a few with all Elite Bosses and so on. It feels a lot more like a dungeon designed by a human GM than the standard maps with randomized enemies. Breaking enemies up this way boosts the effectiveness of long recharge powers, because it boosts the number of "moments" the team encounters. IMO the weakest parts of CoH are when the team just fights randomized groups of a particular enemy group for an entire map. It's much more daunting and memorable if 1 group turns out to be all bosses (really requiring that Mag 6 AoE Hold). Agreed. In fact this is how mezz already works with players. When you get mezzed, any armor you have detoggles for the duration. If I'm running Tough and an APP armor, that could be as much as a 75% increase in Slash and Lethal damage taken. Mezz is also effective versus any enemy with a self heal they have to click to use, and that translates directly into faster kill speed.

Question for the numbers people: I think most of us agree that the all of the single target Hold, single target Immob, and AoE Immob powers in the Control sets should do identical damage (except Fire, which should do more). That would mean either the damage scale of the power would be adjusted to the animation, or the the animation time match across powers. My question is: If this is done, what is the appropriate animation time and damage for these powers? Does this value allow a Dominator who takes a melee-heavy Assault set to fill out a ranged attack chain for difficult fights sufficiently to cover that weakness? Here's the current anim time for the Hold powers: Dark: 1.8 Earth: 2.2 Electric: 2.3 Fire: 1.32 Gravity: 1.98 Ice: 2.1 Mind: 1.32 Plant: 2.2 I assume we don't want to nerf Fire or Mind. So should a 1.32 animation time be the target goal? Is that number fair or unfair to blast archetypes like Blasters, Corruptors, and Defenders?

IMO you're splitting hairs. People compare archetypes against each other. There was a time when if you wanted a squishy with mezz protection and the ability to mezz bosses, Dominator was the way to go. This somewhat justified rolling a character who wasn't a force multiplier who did mediocre damage. The archetype had a run where it was more attractive than currently. Now that CC is more widely available and less useful and anyone can get mezz protection, rolling a Dom is harder to justify. Fixing it doesn't necessarily mean adding more damage. It could mean updating the content. But updating the Dominator ATO to something more useful would be a good start..

I think when people say Dominators are "like Blasters" what they mean is that when City of Villains was launched, if you had a Blaster-like concept for your villain, you had two main choices. You could be a Corruptor and focus on Range (the icons are even colored the same), or a Dominator and focus on the mix of blasts, blaps and cones in the Assault sets. It doesn't necessarily mean the numbers would match up. I think most of us agree Blasters should be outdamaging almost anything else in the game. For example here is Dominator Psi Assault laid up next to Blaster Psi Blast and Psi Manipulation: I think what most people are getting it is there is a point in the game where Dominators were much stronger relative to where they are now, but a lot of that has slipped away. They aren't unplayable, but they've lost a lot of ground that calls into question the value of trading so much away to be the "mezz protected squishy class with controls."

I can't even begin I can't even begin to say how I'd fix the incarnate powers. IMO the way they should have been designed is you can only fire one after collecting a particular power up from an enemy, and that power up is only available against certain enemy types. E.G. War Walkers are known to drop Judgment charges. The ship has long since sailed on that though. I'm curious what this development team, who I have a ton of respect for, choose to do with it. If it was me opening a brand new server as lead developer I'd pull all those powers from the game until I could figure out what to do with them but 1) I am not lead developer on my own server and 2) its quite different to remove a power after players have been playing for a year versus removing it at server launch. I trust this team to do whats in the best interest of the game.

IMO the heyday for Dominators was around i19, around the incarnate system came around with the Alpha slot. They were the only squishy class with mezz protection other than Controllers who took Indom Will and Force Field/Sonic Resonance/Traps characters. Blast archetypes didn't have crashless nukes yet and Blasters didn't have sustains, but Doms had a full endurance bar refill from Domination. Without nukes, spawns took much longer to clear so good controls meant a lot. The first problems were starting to show though. The Level Shift mechanic was already beginning to make difficult content easier. The Alpha slot was beginning to make it much more feasible for most builds to run Punch/Tough/Weave. Enemies like Victorias in the iTrials were making melee as a squishy difficult. But IMO the class was still at its peak. This isn't to say the game was perfectly balanced. A few classes of Brute and Scrapper, along with Fire/Kin Controllers dominated much of the end game space and could render a team mostly irrelevant. A lot has changed since then. IMO the worst contributing factors currently: Level shifts - IMO the most destabilizing mechanic introduced to the game Lore pets doing more damage than entire actual characters Destiny The Hybrid slot's double damage ability FWIW I do happen to think the Alpha slot is well balanced. If the level shift, Judgment and Lore abilities went away tomorrow though I would leap for joy. Especially Level Shift. It has introduced more issues than any mechanic I can think of.

I think what most of us can agree on is that the original version of Stalkers and Dominators sucked and thankfully they've been revisited since then. 🙂 Whatever the original vision was, they've changed a lot. Same with Blasters. The original version of Domination didn't even give mezz protection.

Many of the control sets aren't that different on Controller versus Dominator. A few are, but not across the board. Electric Control for example can achieve a mag 6 hard mezz with the single target Hold, the AoE Hold, and the first target hit by Synaptic Overload. Also the Immobilizes if anyone cares about that. With Synaptic, you can slot Contagious Confusion to supplement the power not Dominating all targets, but this is just as effective on a Controller. The real difference between Electric Control on a Controller versus a Dominator is damage capability and where it comes from. Electric Control on a Controller has to rely on the Hold and AoE Immob as attacks, as well as possibly Jolting Chain procced for damage. My Elec Doms don't slot any of those as attacks. Elec also happens to have one of the slower Holds, so Elec Controllers have particularly poor damage. What makes Doms control strength even harder to categorize is around 1/3rd of the sets get a Power Boost like power that makes their control powers have potentially much longer durations than other Doms. This power always appears in the 5th slot of the Assault set, which is always devoted to a set defining self buff. Controllers can also take Power Boost in their APPs, and aren't locked in by the secondary set they choose, so any controller primary/secondary could potentially compete with Dom control duration.

I always viewed the Villain archetypes as somewhere midway between the Hero archetypes rather than direct analogies. Corruptor is basically midway between Blaster and Defender. They were the only Villain archetype to get a Blast set so filled both roles. Dominator is basically midway between Controller and a Blaster who focused on blaps (the Assault sets are very obviously a mashup of Blaster primary and secondary). Other than Corruptor, they were the only Villain archetype with ranged damage. Brute is somewhere midway between Scrapper and Tanker. Mastermind I just think they thought was cool, but I imagine partially inspired by Illusion Control.

Dominators were built for Villain content, which meant they were the only source of controls on those teams. They've seen a lot of changes over their history. The original design had even lower damage, with a +Damage buff in Domination to compensate. We can get a pretty good idea of what developers intended from early descriptions of them, which is pretty explicit: As a Dominator, you control a devastating combination of control and assault powers. A Dominator can freeze foes in place, render them unconscious, or cause them to flee in terror. Dominators can also smite their foes with a selection of single-target melee and ranged attacks, albeit not with the same power as a Corruptor. However, each time a Dominator attacks, he comes closer to unleashing his true sadistic power of Domination. With so much emphasis on diverse offensive powers, Dominators lack in defenses and work best with teammates who can provide protection. However, what the original team intended and what works well in the game 15 years later don't necessarily align.

The original balance point was that most nukes crashed endurance. The first crashless nuke IIRC was Full Auto. Later came Rain of Arrows and Hail of Bullets. We tend to forget that crashless nukes were once one of the biggest advantages of the weapon sets. The other crashless nukes also never actually left the CoX test servers. They were being user acceptance tested when the plug was pulled on the game, so on live never existed side by side with AoE Holds.

The issue with an Accuracy penalty is that it only really penalizes un-IOed builds. Global Accuracy bonuses tends to make these powers reliable. So, giving the holds decent Accuracy would mostly just make the powers better before slotting.

Redirecting-ish here to a long discussion being had in the game balance forum. Dominators have come up for discussion a bunch of times throughout the thread. Posting this here in case the conversation gets redirected.

So we're on page 61. :) I think the Dom discussion is productive. Should we move it to the Dom folder to make life easier for discussions about other end game topics? There's a related topic here about Dominators where we could continue: