MonteCarla

I run PUG Task Forces with levelling characters, usually do the weekly task force and whatever else takes my fancy. I set the difficulty level based on how many support characters there are. I count the Defenders, Corrupters, Controller and Masterminds and look at their support powersets and can tell how hard it's going to be from that. 4 Supporters? We can probably run at +3 easy! Radiation Emission's an odd set. It doesn't have a big tangible benefit like others do. (Force Fields = yay! No more damage, Kinetics = yay! Free end for everyone!) But, it takes the edge off everything. Your teammates get some free end and recharge, which can make a Synapse or Yin much more bearable. You do provide layered safety via a -To Hit toggle, unreliable hold, -damage toggle and a weak but reliable heal. So its hard to feel your contribution. Solo, your safety's not guaranteed. But, every Defender (and other supporter) on a team is worth it. And if you ever get on an all-Defender team, you'll really feel it!

Wow, how did I miss Unrelenting? I guess because I took Presence once, on my first Sentinel to get a taunt. How does it work exactly? You get the buffs if you click it while you're alive, but if you're KO'd it rezzes you first (at half health) and then gives you the buffs? And yeah, I suppose I omitted Wall of Force because I'm not that impressed with it, @Uun It's low damage and 33% chance of knockback, so it doesn't do either of it's things well. I've taken it on my tank but probably wont do so again.

And yep, @Dauntless - LotG uniques are in a class of their own! 🙂

I've only really started looking at these two powers now. They're like mini-God mode defensive powers, at Tier 3 in the Sorcery and Force of Will power pools. What sort of builds are people using them in? I get that Rune of Protection (uptime 60s out of unmodifiable 180s) is popular for the mez protection (for those of you who don't indulge in unlimited START Vendor buffs like I do), but I can also see it being really nice on Resistance Brutes/Tanks to push your lesser Resistances to the cap. Damn, that's nearly +40% resistance to all when slotted, for 1/3 of the time! (Tank/Defender values) Unleash Potential (60s out of 600s, so out of 150s on a very high recharge build) gives +24% Defence slotted! That would be extra nice for Blasters or other squishies, but not as good as mez protection...? The big downside to both is having to pick two other powers. Force of Will has: Weaken Resolve, a -Def/-Res power that can slot an Achilles Heel -Res and be a decent boss-up debuff ( with a horrible animation! 😞 ) Mighty Leap - a superjump clone with a stompy long-recharge AoE thrown in for free Project Will - a mediocre ranged attack. Sorcery has: Arcane Bolt - beloved of my Controllers Spirit Ward - an OK-ish absorb shield for an ally Mystic Flight, cool looking fly with free teleport! Enflame is nice, but it's also Tier 3 too. If you're prepared to let these pools dictate your travel powers, they're pretty good. I've taken Force of Will on my Invulnerability tank partly just for fun, and I'm planning Sorcery on a Controller, but kinda feel they're the wrong way round for the +Res and +Def buffs. Tell me your stories on how you use them!

I usually 2 slot Hasten, with 2 SO's as I level and 2 Level 50+5 IO's once I hit 50. You can get perma-Dom without it just by stacking set bonuses, but it's tight and usually won't kick in until you're 50. Hasten gives you breathing room to enjoy perma-Dom from somwhere in your 30's onwards.

I've done this once with a character I really enjoyed playing - Jenny Foxgloves (Nature/Ice Defender). I'd got her to 50 and Tier 3+ incarnates in everything, so I remade her as a Plant/Storm Controller and levelled her up to 50 again. (This was her winter form as a nature spirit, since Plant Control produces spiky thorny effects compared to the lush foliage of Nature Affinity) I'm considering doing that with a couple of other characters who I've capped out on, and kind of miss playing. Same character, but with different powersets.

Repulsion Bolt and Force Bomb will keep a 35% resistance debuff on your AV target, so FF is nowhere near as bad as it used to be for this task. Dispersion gives you status protection and a very good start to capping your Defences. You have zero native regen or recovery tools. Add in Envenomed Daggers from the START vendor and as much damage as you can slot and proc for?

Here's a weird idea for Regen - what if the set was made so that "death" was not much of a problem at all, but part of the playstyle? Revive currently has a recharge of 300s and provides 90s of Debt Protection, meaning if you slot it for Recharge build up a big Global rech you can pull off serial Revives. What if we made that really easy? Add 100% Debt Protection to Fast Healing, so its always on. Lower the Recharge on Revive to like 60 seconds or even 30. This way, every time you get defeated, you're seconds away from being able to get up again. That's a very Wolverine/T-1000 -like way to fight. 🙂 What am I missing here? Every time you die you wipe all debuffs (which is good) but also lose Hasten and Instant Healing and other click buffs. If there was a way to put the buffs on hold so they still applied when you revived, that could work? (And I second the idea of lowering Reconstruction's recharge to 30. It struck me as odd when I started playing that it took 60 seconds but Healing Aura had like a 8 second recharge)

I defeated her the other day using the Complete Mission button. I totally hear you. She is insanely hard, even for characters who should be able to handle her.

Working backwards from the Rule of 5: 5 x 10% (Purple sets for Melee, Melee AoE, Ranged and Ranged AoE, (or substitute Confuse for one of them) and Superior Ascendancy of the Dominator) 5 x LotG +7.5% (Manouvers+Vengeance, Weave/Hover/CJ, and Stealth+Grant Invisibility or Indomitable Will+Link Minds) 3 x Other 7.5% (Basilisks' Gaze x 2 and Sting of the Manticore) That's 110% You can then add 3 x 6.25% (Stupefy, Glimpse of the Abyss, Positrons's Blast, Decimation, Malaise) or 5% (Crushing Impact, Obliteration) to bring it to 125% or more. It won't be cheap, but it's doable. And if you're willing to rely on the SG Base Empowerment buff, you can drop two purple sets.

OK, so it sounds like it's failing for you only when its on that knife's edge of 123.75% Recharge? Because that's when your window to reactivate Domination is less than a second. (It recharges in 89.3 seconds and only lasts 90 seconds) I think this can fail due to lag? The server has to tell your client that the power's recharged, then your client automatically presses the button for you, which then fires off to the server to tell it to activate the power on the server. If either of these messages are too slow, it might be the server gets the message too late. I typically have Domination on auto-fire, but also set up Q and E to activate Domination and Hasten for convenience, and because I've sometimes seen Domination un-grey itself without activating straight away. Particularly in the mid-30s when I'm getting unreliable chain-Dom with Hasten, I tend to press that button. If you're getting reliable perma-Dom with the SG base buff, then I'd say its' worth rebuilding with an extra 5% recharge to cover that gap. (Gives you 87.4 second recharge with that extra Crushing Impact set, so 2.6 second leeway instead of 0.7 seconds.)

Hmm. So avoid things like Illusion that thrive on high recharge. Scrappers love Kinetics. Plus it gives you a bit of bonus recharge via Siphon Speed, which is what you'd be missing from a high end build. And it doesn't lend itself to IO slotting, so no big loss there. Earth Control's good for making those Kinetics powers hit with the -Def, and gives a lot of security with multiple fast AoE controls. Its main problem is lack of direct damage, but that's helped a lot by picking up some START vendor powers these days (or Sorcery for Arcane Blast) and by having a Scrapper buddy. Does Earth/Kinetics sound any good? Actually, Arsenal Control might be good too for similar reasons, lots of different AoE controls if you're not running on high recharge? Arsenal/Kinetics would be an odd combo, and maybe quite effective 🙂

SO's were traditionally only available at level 25, so 22 became a big watershed level when you could start slotting SOs. The Homecoming team only changed that recently to make them available from vendors at all levels. I guess they didn't update the merit vendors.

Domination can only be activated while your Domination bar is full Your Domination bar stays full while Domination is active. So... If Domination recharges before it expires, you can activate it straight away because your Domination bar is already full! I do have to build it up first, which takes maybe half a mission solo? But after that, by having Dom on autofire and wither pressing Hasten manually or having +123% rech or more, I never lose it until I log off or die. That's the absolute beauty of Perma-Dom. Once you have the recharge you don't have those downtimes where you're building it up.

What I have noticed recently (post the last big update) on my up and coming Arsenal Dom was the drain sound effect would go off sometimes when I was chaining Dominations. It felt like it happened when a Domination expired, regardless of whether it had been stacked/replaced with another one. But I didn't get a Domination drain actually happening, just the noise.