Luminara

Powers with cast times can't activate while another power is animating, even if they're set to auto.

Are you implying that Domination's recharge time is balanced by distracting the player from the game? Because that would imply that any power's recharge time could be fairly balanced by having a cat who wants attention, or needing a drink of water, or having to go to the bathroom. And that would be... stupid.

When was the last time a blaster had to pause to activate Defiance? How frequently does a stalker have to interrupt his/her attack chain and wait while Assassination activates? At what time has a tanker had to stop to turn on Gauntlet, or brute Fury? Does Scourge require a break in activity before it's functional? Hell, the only other manually activated inherent in the game is Vulnerability, and that doesn't have a cast time. Set Domination's cast time to 0, like every other archetype's inherent. 1.32s wasted activating Domination every 60-200s isn't balancing the power, it's not giving NPCs a tactical advantage that they can leverage, it's just making the archetype more annoying to play and distracting the player from the game itself, forcing him/her to stare at an icon instead of everything else happening. We build attack chains so we don't have to stare at icons, so we can just press keys and watch the pretty, pretty light show. Watching the UI instead of the game is boring. Losing Domination because we were playing the game is infuriating. Penalizing players for playing is counter-productive and counter-intuitive. So get rid of the cast time. Burn it. It's bad.

That. Tap a number twice, maxed. Also, salvage can be sorted by amount in the salvage window. Bottom right corner.

Put out a bowl of food and some fresh water, make sure there's a clean place for them to go boom-boom, leave something for them to entertain themselves with while you're away. You know, an automated laser pointer, some string hanging from a ceiling fan set on low speed, a crate of grenades, fun stuff that they can play with. They'll be okay for a while

Am not, and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise.

Captress - Dominator (Darkness Control) Haunt (Ice 2).mxd Slightly different approach with this variation. Maneuvers is gone, Combat Teleport is in. Misdirection is out, too, and Masterful Throw back in the build. Those changes free up a couple of slots, which I put into Frozen Armor. Instead of trying to replace the Defense lost when Maneuvers was removed, this leans into the extra Resistance provided by Frozen Armor. You lose about 7% Fire/Cold/Psi Defense, less than 3% Energy/Negative Defense, but gain ~12% Fire Resistance ~37% Cold Resistance and ~8% Smashing/Lethal Defense. I think it's a net gain in mitigation. You're more vulnerable to Slows, but with 200% global +Recharge, you'd have to be ignoring a couple of stacked Snow Storms or something similar for perma-Domination to lapse. It also loses 1.8 Max Endurance, but the endurance consumption is slightly lower (0.8/s versus 0.84/s). The Apocalypse: Acc/Rchg in Explosive Shuriken is also changed to Apocalypse: Damage, which bumps up the proc chance by 9%. More importantly, even if both the empowerment station buff and Offensive Amplifier are lost, the attack is recharging in 3.71s. The animation time for Thunder/Spinning/Trick is 3.696s. The 0.014s difference will be swallowed up by network latency, client response and server response, so the chain will still be perfect under less than optimal conditions. Now, if you want to use Masterful Throw in the chain, you'll have to replace Spinning Kick with Dragon's Tail, and your chain will be Thunder/Dragon's/Trick/Explosive/Masterful. And it'll fold if you don't have both the empowerment station buff and Offensive Amplifier. Move the End/Def IO in Tough over to Frozen Armor, that'll add another ~2.5% Cold Resistance and ~1% Fire Resistance. You could also replace one of the Ribosomes with a Cytoskeleton, for a net gain of ~3% Smashing/Lethal Defense at the cost of ~1.25% Cold Resistance and ~0.75% Fire Resistance. The more I poke this build, the more I like it.

I considered trying that, but Tar Patch has 0.5s pulses, whereas Combat Attrib updates are every... what, 2s? 3s? Even with the occasional lucky overlap when Tar Patch dropped for half a second and the loss of -Res was displayed, it still wouldn't indicate whether or not Tar Patch was properly inheriting caster boosts and buffs. The margin of error caused by that 1.5-2.5s discrepancy is too large to derive a falsifiable result.

Nope. I had it for 29 or 30 respecs, and no matter how hard I tried to make it work, it was just a problem. Everything in /Martial is fast, except Masterful Throw's recharge time. Chaining a bunch of attacks with fast animations and one with a slow recharge time creates a whole lot of headaches. Replacing it with Explosive Shuriken was the best change I've ever made to the build. You can sub it in where Misdirection is, if it's important to you.

I have my first edition copy of Shadowrun right next to me.

The cannibal wants to know if that was a menu or just the daily specials.

Captress - Dominator (Darkness Control) Haunt (Ice).mxd That's the /Ice Mastery build I'm contemplating for my Dark/Martial. It trades soft-capping for reliance on the stun and healing up/capping HP with Hoarfrost. With the +Recharge and +Recovery empowerment station buffs (Mids' doesn't include the +Recovery buff in the Temporary Powers group, and the group can't be edited. i edited the +Perception power on the older database i'm using, adding the +Recharge/Recovery buffs to that, which is why it's in the build), this build pegs 200% +Recharge and 4.24/s recovery. Added Envenomed Blades for the +ToHit, might be better with Caltrops to further restrict enemy movement while Sleet is active. Have to test it, but I'm focused on my Elec/Rad dom right now.

I think everyone will easily work around the increased endurance costs, since almost all endurance management problems are the result of under-slotted click powers, not toggles, and leverage the increased mitigation to blitz through content even faster and safer with less reliance on support and control archetypes. I also think any idea rooted in the concept of taking things away from others for the sole purpose of enriching a few is repugnant.

They did. Toggles were mutually exclusive at launch. But with multiple damage types in each spawn, an overabundance of status effects, graphical or audio cues being little more than animations or flashes of light which were impossible to see in the middle of combat, and an animation system which wasn't designed to support reactive gameplay, toggle mutual exclusivity wasn't viable without forced teaming and specific team compositions, which directly opposed Jack's fundamental vision of the game, so toggle mutual exclusivity was removed.

My Dark/Martial dominator originally started as a nod to Batgirl. The Haunt shades are named Jason and Todd.

CoD says it does, but... it's not verifiable in-game. I spent several minutes monitoring a chat tab, with all of the Pet channels, doing nothing but standing there with Darkest Night active and re-applying Tar Patch every time it recharged (49ish seconds), and the only message (in Pet Combat) was that Tar Patch was used ( Tar Patch: You reduce the running speed and damage resistance of Seneschal with a Tar Patch! ). This character had 45% +Acc and no active +ToHit during the test, and testing was against -1 foes (Portal Corp parking lot), so it wasn't a perfect test, but I spawned Tar Patch six or seven times, a miss roll should have happened at least a few times. A second test with Domination active failed to show the Domination graphic on the Tar Patch pseudo-pet, and I know Domination graphics show on pseudo-pets because I've spend the last few weeks watching the little rainbow bubbles moving around when I was leveling up my Elec/Rad dominator. I did hear the Domination drop sound when Tar Patch expired, so there's at least that evidence that it's properly inheriting caster boosts and buffs... but without hit roll info, there's no way to be certain. Have to agree with the proposal. If Tar Patch's -Res were higher than the alternatives, a hit check would be a sensible balance point. But it isn't, and the hit check whittles down the -Res over time to a lower value. 180s recharge time, 3.3s animation and less -Res? Might as well just rename it Turd Patch and call it done.

captress.mbd This build really only needs Darkest Night in conjunction with the Defense I've accumulated, or Heart of Darkness. Either will neuter spawns. I like to have a lot of knives in the toolbox, though, and more places to squeeze in global +Recharge. No, it's not loaded with procs. I'm too lazy to play Whack-a-Mole with Hasten and Ageless and a bunch of other crap. I play to relax, not to work. The latest version of Mids' is, as usual, rife with database errors. In this case, Darkest Night's not showing a toggle cost (it's 0.37 with that slotting), or the correct -ToHit (it's 19.06%). Ice may be a better APP if you go with Heart instead of soft-capping, but the potential for KB resulting from KD stacking has kept me from trying it. Haunt isn't integral, I mostly use it as a distraction. Like Gremlins, the shades about as dangerous as a cheesecake, and only slightly more durable. That's okay, there's more where they came from. Dumped the dog, couldn't stand the noise. Standard approach is to open with Haunt, toggle on Darkest Night, drop Tar Patch and run in screaming. I'm trying to figure out how to fit the Teleportation pool in so I can Combat Teleport into a spawn, Heart of Darkness, then Tar Patch and start kicking things in the face, but I can't thread the +Recharge needle yet. Still looking. Tried using Fearsome Stare for seven or eight respecs, problem with that is when something runs, it spends an extra half-minute standing in one spot before it starts running again, so it takes even longer to finish runners. Also tried World of Confusion for about a year (the character was modeled after Batgirl/Huntress, and i thought a PBAoE Confuse would be really good for emulating the chaos that the fear of those supers would cause), but the soap bubble was driving me up a wall. Soul Consumption is bad, but 7.5% global +Recharge is good. Carry blues. Or use the Survival Amplifier. Even with the empowerment station +Recovery buff, I go through endurance almost as fast as I go through spawns. That's /Martial Assault, though. Fast animations mean fast endurance burn. Caltrops is just a filler. Replace it with whatever's interesting to you. Hell, with this build, you could throw Envenomed Blades in and have it almost perma with a 50+5 Recharge in the default slot. It doesn't add any appreciable damage, but the ToHit buff might be helpful when you're facing one of those damned all-ghosts CoT spawns, or dealing with Carnies. One of these days, I'll find a way to squeeze the Teleportation pool in and take it to the next level. Just have to figure out how to thread the +Recharge needle.

The cannibal, the apostate, the queen, the elemental, the avatar, the soldier, the shaman, the ensorcelled.

I'm too poor to pay taxes. I can afford KB enhancements, though. You're on Excelsior, don't worry, I'll find you.

for_steamy.mbd That's a starter template for you to fiddle with.

Time to make an Energy blaster named "Snarky's Bestie".

I have Ill/Savage/Ice (The Pack) and Dark/Martial/Dark (Captress). I've been playing both for quite a while, and they're the two I'm most likely to be found playing. If Illusion Control had been available for dominators when I made my Dark/Martial, I definitely would've made Ill/Martial instead. The only reason I haven't deleted these two and made an Ill/Martial is that I like both of the existing characters, their play styles, too much. On the /Martial side, +Damage, +Damage, and if you can swing it, +Damage. /Martial is Damage-lite. Without a pile of +Damage, it's going to feel like a petless mastermind. Your attack chain is going to be... frustrating. I've tried every variation of chains possible and the only way to make a chain without Cross Punch is to skip Dragon's Tail and Masterful Throw. Yes, that sounds ludicrous, because Masterful Throw is the best attack in the set and Dragon's Tail is a "good" PBAoE, but the problem is that every attack in /Martial is fast and the recharge times on those two are slow. You can't build an attack chain with either, or both, that doesn't require frequent pauses while you wait for them to recharge. I know that sounds like I'm hating on /Martial. I'm not. My Dark/Martial is one of my all time favorites, and I've respeced more than three dozen times in an effort to make it work with those attacks. It just doesn't. I'm sitting on 175% global +Recharge (155% from IO set bonuses and 20% from the empowerment station buff) and Dragon's Tail and Masterful Throw still aren't viable for a chain. No matter how many ways I arrange the sequence, with one or both of those powers, it's only functional if you're using the piddling T1 as filler, or take every attack and use all of them. I don't build that way. It's inelegant, and trying to reach the 6 and 7 keys with one hand makes it too easy to hit the wrong keys when you try to go back to WASD. So you'll be working with Thunder Kick/Trick Shot/Spinning Kick/Explosive Shuriken. You can replace Spinning or Explosive with Cross Punch, if that's your preference. Put the Ascendency proc in Thunder Kick, it'll get you triple-stacked very quickly, and keep you there. Don't waste a selection on Envenomed Blades, or, if you do take, don't waste a slot on it. The damage it adds isn't even enough to call it "negligible". Put Spinning Kick right after Thunder Kick in you chain. The animation transition is slightly faster than if you use a shuriken attack after Thunder Kick. Thunder/Spinning/Trick/Explosive/repeat. Illusion: dominator PA doesn't taunt, but you don't need them to tank for you unless you're fighting AVs/GMs. For everything else, Gleam is your damage mitigation. If you are fighting AVs/GMs, Spectral Wall and Spectral Terror will shave off some of the Defense you need to stay alive, and PA will pull some of the aggro away from you, so you won't have to build quite as heavily for Defense/Resistance. Really, you can easy-mode most content with nothing but Gleam and PA from Ill. They're that good. You'll want a Slow from the *PPs. Stunned enemies can't fight back, but they can wander aimlessly and screw up your AoE targeting. That's especially frustrating with Spinning Kick, since it's not targeted. Dark (Tar Patch) or Ice (Sleet) would be better than the Psi Mastery APP, for that reason. Tar Patch for the strong Slow, Sleet for the Slow + Knockdown. With Ill's ability to neuter entire spawns in a blink, Psi doesn't bring anything noteworthy to the table (you don't need Indomitable Will, you have Domination). Ice would probably be the least thematically appropriate, but Sleet does recharge 60s faster than Tar Patch, so it's up for every fight (if you're competent at building), whereas enemies have to be pulled into Tar Patch. Ice also has Hoarfrost, and you'll want a heal of some kind at some point, because Murphy's Law always applies (not Soul Consumption, though. the recharge:duration ratio is terrible). Fold Space makes Tar Patch just as viable as Sleet, since you can use it to drop things right at your feet, if you want to go deep into Teleportation. Put the Soulbound Allegience proc in PA. Yes, it works, and yes, it's worth the extra slot. Skip Phantasm. It gets stuck in doorways and ceilings and thin air, so much so that I finally gave up on it on my Ill controller and never took it at all on my dominator. When my controller did have it, it was more annoyance than assistance, and I haven't missed it at all in the four years since I dumped it. Be prepared for some KB. Spinning Kick is KD, several of PA's attacks are KD, there's going to be some squirting. PA by itself will cause that. It's not frequent enough to be irritating, even with a KD patch like Sleet active, but it will happen occasionally. Shouldn't bother you since you'll have two ranged attacks. You can easily perma-Dom an Ill/Martial. With just IO set bonuses, the Offensive Amplifier and empowerment station buffs, you can have perma-Dom by the mid- to late-30's. My Ill/Savage is at 162.5% global +Recharge (without Hasten, Ageless, Offensive Amplifier or the empowerment station buff, and not including the +Recharge from Blood Frenzy stacks), and my Dark/Martial is at 155% (again, that's just IO set bonuses). At Incarnate levels, Agility or Spiritual will put PA firmly into perma- territory. Yes, either will slightly reduce proc chances, but perma-PA is worth it. Slot the Launch: Jumping/Increased Jump Height if you can, it stacks with the START running powers and you'll find it handy for improving your mobility (i use it with Athletic Run on my Staff/Willpower brute). A second slot in Hurdle would also bump up your Jump speed considerably (that also stacks with the freebie runs), if the slower movement speed starts annoying you. Go to one of the PvP zones and buy Rampage from the vendor. Pop it while you're there and you're at full Domination. Saves a few minutes of building up Domination by spamming a PBAoE or interrupting a snipe over and over again. It doesn't work outside of the PvP zones, but if you're perma-Domming, you only need it once per play session.

Knockback Increase (the empowerment station buff) is identical to slotting a +0 KB SO. It increases the mag, but doesn't affect the % chance. No buff in the game does, no debuff on enemies, no enhancement, nothing. The only way to alter the % chance is if a developer either adds a Global Chance Mod effect to the power and sets another power (Aim, for example) to activate that effect, or the power is copied to a redirect with a different %, which is functionally the same as using Global Chance Mod if nothing else is changed. More work to set it up in the power def, but ultimately the same thing.

"Chance of" can't be increased or decreased with enhancements, or other powers unless a specific power activates another hidden power which sets the percentage higher (example: Fusion in /Radioactive Assault). Knock has no duration, thus the design permits the mag to be enhanced instead. Magnitudes other than Knock are not subject to enhancement.