oedipus_tex

Mainly it's popular because of Drain Psyche. Get a bunch of global recharge, slot it for accuracy, healing, and recharge. Now enjoy it being perma and you being nearly impossible to kill while it is up, while bottoming out the regen of AVs and GMs.

Savage stands out to me as being ideal paired with Dark, Fire, Ice, or Electric; sets that benefit greatly from being able to instantly close distance. Each of these sets is in this position for slightly different reasons: Ice Control generally wants to drop an Ice Slick from afar, then quickly close distance to surround enemies inside Arctic Air, with Glacier as backup Fire Control generally wants to stun with Flashfire, the close distance with Hot Feet with Cinders as a backup Electric Control generally wants to open with Synaptic Overload from afar, then during the fight stay close to enemies to continually drain them. This is especially critical if Power Sink is taken from the Mu pool for additional quick endurance drain Dark generally wants to open with Fearsome Stare (a cone that requires distance) and then attempt to stun mobs close up with Heart of Darkness The fact that you can use Feral Charge while Hovering is huge. It means you can legitimately play any of these sets as an always-Hoverer. When the battle gets too hot, hit space bar to float upwards. It's fantastic synergy for these otherwise somewhat risky sets.

I really really really dislike O2 Burst mainly because Storm has heavy incentives to take the Healing pool to get access to Aid Self, which meas you're pushed to taking Aid Other. Aid Other can be used for light touch pet healing for non-Gravity controllers. For Gravity you can't heal Singularity anyway so no worries about this. O2 burst also serves as an anti-mezz and endurance drain protector, but only for 60 seconds and not even for Holds or Immobilizes, just Stun and Sleep. Anyway, one thing I never noticed til just now is that O2 Burst heals a set amount of HP and Aid Other and powers like Heal Other heal a percentage. I'm not sure which is technically better but I assume healing a percent is better because it means Tankers and Brutes heal back more. 02 Burst has always felt like largely a waste of animation time to me, at least once I get kitted out. There is the odd low to mid level mission where you dont have better things to do than spam O2 Burst every 60 seconds, but by late game there are so many better things to be casting.

It's really too bad there isn't a reverse Repel that can pull enemies toward you (apparently not possible in this game engine). If TK pulled to you instead of away I think it would have a lot of useful applications.

1. I was low on slots and wanted to achieve as much damage as possible with just two slots. Purple sets provide a higher modifier than any other set type. I grabbed Positron's Damage/Range to try to extend the range of the otherwise short cone at a least a little. In retrospect, I should probably consider adding more procs, because I've been experimenting with damage procs in other builds and they help significantly. 2. I just checked in game and it seems you're right. Maybe I have an outdated version of Mids, because it lets me slot it there, but when I tried in game it doesn't work. Looks like Feral Charge takes single target and not PBAOE damage IOs.

I think the Regen portion of Conductive Aura is auto hit. Don't quote me on that though. The Endurance Drain portion rolls ToHit.

Yeah but they don't notice Wormhole. 😄 I think you could rationalize it in that they know something is happening, just not necessarily where it is coming from. I wish there was a 'Alerted' status for enemies that made them more likely to search for nearby players. Would give us a lot more wiggle room between "totally unaware" and "murderous."

IMO the ultimate "sapper" build would be Elec/Dark Assault/Mu. Dark Assault gets Gather Shadows, which is a Power Up clone (or, more accurately, Power Up is a clone of Gather Shadows.) While /ice /energy and /earth also get a similar power, I am more drawn to dark for the self heal. Elec/Psi/Mu is also good, mainly because /Psi gives you enough Regen to make surviving at close range easier. In general I feel Electric Control is pretty good at sapping same level up to around +2 mobs on its own. If you want to reliably drain higher level enemies, dipping into the /Mu pool is probably necessary, as is picking an Alpha slot with Endurance Modification. To drain Elite Bosses fast enough for it to matter you almost certainly need Power Sink from the Mu pool.

To be honest I just expected Earthquake to behave identically to Bonfire or Tornado and didn't actually test it specifically. That's interesting if the proc is firing during the quake's life but not reliably on the first cast.

You want Sudden Acceleration. Sudden Acceleration applies to all powers that do knockback, where Overwhelming applies only to powers that do knockback + damage. Overwhelming is almost always better slotted into a power that does not cause knockback to take advantage of its 20% chance to knockdown.

Dark Assault is a pretty typical Assault set overall. The basic ingredients are all there, with minor tweaks: three ranged blasts, 2 okay-ish melee attacks, a cone (more slender than some other sets) a snipe, and the bonus power is Gather Shadows, which is a clone of Power Up (or perhaps more properly, Power Up is a clone of Gather Shadows). The only real exception to the generic Assault set rules is Life Drain. It's a Tier 2 blast, which replaces what my otherwise be a T3 blast. It's much slower to animate than a lot of blasts (~2 seconds) but has a heal, which makes Dark Assault fairly sustainable. I have write up somewhere on this forum about Gather Shadows. Fire Control is a well documented set. Good control. Decent damage on a Dominator, but damage isn't as critical from the primary as it is with Controllers. The -ToHit in Dark Assault may help keep your imps alive.

In theory but not in practice most of the time. -Recharge is't very useful on most Dominators since you'll be mezzing enemies anyway and their powers recharge while they are held/stunned/whatever. -Recharge is occasionally useful in a power like Arctic Air where there is a chance to Confuse the enemy (causing them to expend the power) and you don't have a lot of hard controls to keep them mezzed.

No, I just really wanted to make a Dark Control character who wasn't too emo for his shirt. 😉

The best thing about Gravity solo is that Wormhole doesn't alert enemies, so you can easily run missions at x8 by hoovering enemies away. With Grav/Nature I'd try to drop them right on top of Singularity (both powers with KB to KD) with my Hold aura running. I doubt if anything will hit you through the combo of Holds and Knockdown. The fact that Singularity can't be healed is a big bummer given how strong Nature's single target heal is. But you can recruit another pet in your patron pools if you want. Plus your Absorb shields and -ToHit toggles will make him hard to kill.

You probably want to take Aid Self at some point on a /Storm so you can get a source of self heal. It means burning a slot on Aid Other, but its worth it IMO. Storm causes enough chaos that healing in the middle of battle is possible despite the interupt.

I didn't expect the Sandman proc to work as smoothly as it did in Static Field. I'd grown accustomed to thinking of patches as a bad place for procs, but I need to edit that assumption. They're a bad place for enemy affectingi procs. Since Static Field requires virtually no Accuracy, Recharge, or End Discount slotting, its an ideal spot for a proc like this. I'll try out Preventive Medicine sometime in the future.

You could make Telekinesis a non-notify power. That way Mind Control could push targets closer to a center point before launching their salvo. It fits well with Mind's overall theme. It's already the set with the most non-notify powers.

Ice Control does need fixes IMO. Arctic Air, the key power, requires too much work to make it effective after level 25. That's long been a problem for the set. It's too easy to get mezzed and die because your key control got detoggled. That said, it does work much better on Dominators than Controllers. A Controller has to build very deliberately with Arctic Air in mind, where at least a Dominator just has to go perma-dom (or just stay away from enemies when not in Domination mode). We've seen with Cauterizing Aura that is possible to flag a power not to detoggle when the owner is mezzed, and it should apply to this power. I'd also like to see it possible to summon multiple Ice Slicks and the recharge/duration matched up with Bonfire.

I took a video of Singy + Wormhole both with KB to KD. This build is far from optimized, just the KB to KDs mainly, but easily handles +1x8 Council with bosses turned on. I do have several incarnate powers though. I coud

This slotting for Static Field intrigues me and I will have to try it.

I actually just made a Grav/Storm video last night. I don't have a build guide, because this character is not heavily IOed out. Just KB to KD IOs in the key knockback powers (Tornado, Lightning Storm, Wormhole, Singularity). You can see the build, however basic, at the end of the video. I may one day IO this character out but I have so many others awaiting attention. 🙂

IMO it is really not worth slotting Conductive Aura for Regen. It provides about 5% Regen per enemy in range unslotted, versus about 10% fully slotted. In the perfect case of 16 enemies nearby it provides +80 Regen versus +160. A more realistic scenario is probably 10 enemies in range, so +50 vs +100, for the price of 2 slots. Probably not enough to make a huge difference IMO.

I also have this old video lying around: This was from when I had an Ice/Radiation Controller. This was the old days, so the only reliable source of mezz protection to make Ice Control feasible on a Controller was Indomitable Will (Psi pool). These days its slightly easier, but not completely. [If any devs are reading this, Arctic Air really, really REALLY needs to behave like Fire Manipulation's damage aura and continue running even if you are mezzed. The fact that it drops when are mezzed makes it far too unreliable and forces you into a very extreme build. (Somewhat less so on Dominators who at least get mezz protection from Domination.)] Anyway if you look for the purple confuse bubbles you can see how efficiently Arctic Air used to be for this particular farm. I actually leveled this Controller from 44 to 50 by using the AE. It's probably still possible. But you don't get the payoff of being able to slot Contagious Cofusion in AA anymore ad I just can't bring myself to enjoy the set like I used to.

Yes, the around the corner trick is very effective in Ice Slick. The one positive I will give it over Bonfire and Earthquake is it is also a slow, so it is very difficult for enemies to run out of it and chase you down. If you don't mind the choppiness, here is a old video of my Ice/Fire Dom from around Issue 21. This was ages ago, back when that combo was somewhat less gimped compared to other builds. It's not that Ice has gotten weaker, but that other changes have made other options much stronger. The exception is that Arctic Air no longer is a good place for the Contagious Confusion proc--that really killed Ice Control in my eyes. Prior to that it was my favorite control set despite its many issues. T

-Regen can have a psychological effect on teams in the sense that it makes it feel like you are holding strong. Mainly this comes into play on teams where the AV wrecks several teammates and sustained damage is difficult. The Battle Maiden fight during the Apex TF (IMO one of the hardest fights in the game) is an example. At least the health bar isn't going backwards.