EnjoyTheJourney

In general, dominators tend to have a harder time keeping pet alive than controllers, as controllers have access to a secondary that can often help their pets survive better. Also, controllers have a stronger incentive to take their pets because they're a substantial source of extra damage for an AT that doesn't have a damage secondary or primary. That said, Frosticus has found ways to keep certain pets alive and to build AV-hunting dominators around the ability to do that. You can still find a fair percentage of dominators that take pets, though. Most who post regularly here would agree that there are multiple reasonable ways to build a dominator. There are some who post fairly frequently who prefer to rely primarily on controls for safety, rather than defenses. It's a viable playstyle. But, having good defenses is also viable without necessarily giving up having good damage. Also, a fiery assault dominator tends to do very well operating at range and there's nothing wrong with making that choice. If you're concerned about damage and you'd like to operate at range, then you may want to consider taking fire mastery instead of psi mastery and hover-blasting. Fire breath and fireball (from fire mastery) make a nice 1-2 punch, especially supported with fiery embrace. Melt armor is a good debuff and a self rez is never a bad thing (more fire mastery stuff), depending on how you'd like to put together your build. Hover blasting also allows you to focus mostly on ranged defense and resistances, which lessens the degree to which you may be tempted to sacrifice defenses to get good damage. Below is a sample build, in case you're interested. Barrier core Tier 4 adds a minimum of 5% to all defense and resistance totals while active, plus superior invisibility adds a persistent 2%-ish to all defense totals even when attacking. So, the ranged defense total you end up with in-game will be higher than what shows on Mids. Dominator (Illusion Control - Fiery Assault - Fire Mastery),v2.mbd

I don't have an arsenal / poison build handy. But, here's an endgame arsenal / dark / psi build that can hopefully provide some helpful ideas. If you'd like a budget version, then some substitutions can be made for multiple sets. Good luck with your arsenal control character, whichever path you ultimately choose. Edit: It's been a while since I looked at this build. After learning a bit more about arsenal control I'd probably swap out enflame and instead take psionic tornado, with five armageddon IOs in it (not the knockdown proc, though) and a force feedback +recharge IO in the sixth and final slot. That would make it easier to keep mobs to having been damaged every 15 seconds or less, which helps for keeping mobs confused with smoke canister. Nightshell - Controller (Arsenal Control - Darkness Affinity - Psionic Mastery),v2.mbd Nightshell - Controller (Arsenal Control - Darkness Affinity - Psionic Mastery),v2.pdf

Glad to hear you found the build appealing. I forgot to tweak the IOs in subdue. You can increase the damage a bit more, get a hit point buff from the apocalypse set, and noticeably improve endurance management by slotting it as follows: Apocalype - Damage / EndRed Apocalype - Acc / Damage / Recharge Apocalype - % chance of negative energy damage Gladiator's Javelin - % toxic damage Trap of the Hunter - % lethal damage Superior Ascendancy of the Dominator - % damage buff You'll still have 97.83% accuracy against +3 mobs with this slotting, even with no to hit buffs from external sources or from the Gaussian build up proc.

Here's an alternative build that you may find interesting, even if in the end you decide to go in another direction. Some key changes ... 1. Noticeably more damage. 2. A little less global recharge. Still comfortably permadom, though, and with a good amount of slow resist to better protect global recharge from debuffs. 3. More resistances. Hits will still hurt, but a bit less so than earlier. See further down for ways to increase resistances on a temporary basis. 4. The empty slot in tactics would contain the Gaussian build up proc. On teams it should activate about 3 times per minute, which means about 1/4 of the time there's a good to hit and damage buff active. 5. No knockback IOs. You cut down on "Freem" knockdowns with those IOs, but most of those will be screened out by your smash / lethal defense. You don't really need them. 6. The superior ascendancy of the dominator damage proc has been placed in subdue. If it's being used regularly in the single target rotation then you can get multiple stacks of that proc active at one time. That should help damage for all powers being used. Endurance management is still going to be fine the clear majority of the time, except when drain psyche fails to hit. Haven't really resolved that with the attached build, but maybe it won't happen often enough to be concerned about. Your build seems most focused on fighting from range. And there are benefits from doing that. Still, to get more damage out of your build and to leverage the survivability granted by seeds, creepers, and drain psyche, it is absolutely fine to fight in melee. Plus, with this build you can take the barrier core T4 destiny, which boosts defenses further and provides strong "peak survivability" when your dom is receiving a lot of aggro from mobs that hit hard. Also, consider taking melee core hybrid for better mez protection, better resistances when the heat is on your dom, and better regen. Hopefully you get some ideas from this that you end up liking. Good luck with your dom, however you decide to move forward. Psylantt - Dominator (Plant Control - Psionic Assault - Ice Mastery).mbd

It's probably best to begin with a question about budget. The absence of winter sets, Hami-Os, and D-Synchs, the limited presence of purple sets, and the limited use of damage procs suggests that you'll want to be careful about how much you spend on your dominator. If that's wrong, then please let us know and your build can change a lot. Also, knowing your plans for incarnates (if you've made choices, that is) would be helpful. Even as is, though, this is a carefully thought out build that should be quite effective in-game. There's a lot to like about it. Key powers are supported with a lot of slots and reasonable IO set choices. Softcap smash / lethal defense helps to screen out quite a bit of damage. Ranged defense isn't capped. But, it is still noticeably higher than the floor and it will also be helpful. You're well over the global recharge floor for permadom, which helps in a number of ways. Hoarfrost is well slotted and should have very good uptime, which noticeably helps survivability. As a "technical" suggestion, consider switching off "domination" in Mids when evaluating your dominator builds because when it is engaged a temporary "to hit" buff that is only applied for about 15 seconds about every 90 seconds is also engaged; that makes it very hard to see the true likelihood of hitting mobs for the clear majority of the time domination is active. Also, hold down the "shift" key and press the "+" key 5 times while hovering your mouse button over an IO that you'd like to boost to +5. After you've boosted an IO to +5 click on that IO with the mouse to put it into your build with a +5 boost. The main limitations of your build would seem to be fourfold: 1. Endurance drain is quite close to recovery on a "per second" basis, by default. Thus, if drain psyche misses, which it sometimes will, then endurance can become a problem quite soon. 2. Resistances are all quite low. When hits get through they will hurt. 3. Slow resistance seems to not be present in the build. Most of the time this won't matter, especially with such high global recharge. But, when it does matter, it will tend to matter a lot. 4. Damage could be higher. Initial thoughts that might differ quite a bit from (reasonable, definitely worthy of consideration) feedback that you might get from others. PS: I can't copy the data chunk into Mids and make that work. You can try dragging and dropping the Mids file itself into one of your posts. That would probably be easier to work with than a data chunk.

If you'd rather not share your build, then that is (of course) totally up to you. But, if you are OK with sharing it then hopefully you won't mind posting it in a response to this thread. You can get more build-specific help that way. Also, for those who frequent this forum it's always welcome to see a thoughtfully put together dominator build plan.

Psi assault is a very reasonable pick for an assault set. Drain psyche is one of the main jewels of the set. It's a strong debuff against harder targets. It makes endurance management much easier. It handles incoming chip damage quite well. Also, unless it was recently changed and City of Data is now incorrect, psy shockwave is the only assault set PbAOE that hits up to 16 targets, instead of the default maximum of 10 targets*. Psy shockwave applies a default 20 second duration, 50% recharge debuff to mobs that it hits; even with purple patch effects in play that still noticeably slows down incoming damage from a wide swathe of enemies. In the end, psy shockwave makes handling crowds easier. As well, the melee single target attacks hit hard, as does the snipe. Procs and telekinetic thrust offer some diversification from psychic damage, which helps when fighting mobs that heavily resist psy damage. * Other than thunderstrike, but it has quite low damage for the AOE component

That makes sense. Thank you for explaining.

Perhaps best filed under the "pretty good, definitely fun, but fire may be mechanically better" could be leviathan mastery. These days I'm playing an ice / savage / leviathan dom for whom water spout is proving very helpful. Uptime for water spout is about 60 - 65% of the time without external buffs such as speed boost. The soft cc it adds makes getting into the middle of spawns noticeably safer and tougher mobs get chewed down to zero hit points faster with water spout throwing them up in the air and generally ruining their day. Also, while hibernate can fail to save your dominator at times it's still a decent self protection button if RNG turns against you. For AOE damage fireball is clearly better than water spout. Heat metal has no equivalent in leviathan, as well. But, water spout works well with control sets which can slow down enemy movement by quite a bit because feared mobs will generally not be going anywhere fast anyways. FWIW, written knowing that you may have already experimented extensively with leviathan mastery and found that it falls short.

Both controllers and dominators can shine at different times on a team. Certain types and builds for dominators and controllers can solo very challenging content. For some content a controller will be preferred because their secondary will be what gets them picked for certain teams. For other content a dominator will shine more because they are the strongest control class in the game. Incidentally, many players like both controllers and dominators and they have multiple of each. Others main just one character and play few or no alts at all. You'll probably need to figure that preference out as you go. As a starter dominator, plant / fire / fire would be a solid choice. It takes some practice to figure out how to line up the cone for seeds of confusion. But, it's a build that starts out strong as early as level 8 and it just gets keeps getting stronger as you go along. It's also very good for a hovering character that really only needs to be concerned with ranged defense and resistances when building your character (AOE defense also helps, but it's not needed as often). I'll attach a sample in-game build that you can look over, if you'd like; use the "Mids" program which is available for free to view the file, if you'd like, or just look at the picture if you'd like. There are other good starter dominator builds that others might suggest, though, so keep an open mind about what seems to be most interesting to you. There are also a lot of reasonable picks for a good starter controller build. But, this is the dominator forum and you have a similar post in the controller forum, so I won't clutter up this response with controller builds. PS: There will probably be one or more players who come along and carry on about how defenses aren't needed and similar kinds of thinking. When you're first getting to know the game that suggestion is, and no disrespect intended to those who say that, bloody awful advice. Your character will spend a lot of time face down on the ground, waiting for a rez, if you're new to the game and you let some well intentioned player convince you that it's more badass / sexy / whatever to run around with terrible defense totals and resistances. After you've played for a while and have a better understanding of the game then you can start back off on your characters' defenses and still keep them mostly upright. Druid of the Forest - Dominator (Plant Control - Fiery Assault -Fire Mastery).mbd Druid of the Forest - Plant Fiery Fire Dom.pdf

FWIW I'm having fun leveling up an ice / savage / leviathan dominator. Shark skin, hibernate, and an icy-looking water spout are from Leviathan mastery. Savage is it's own thing, with a heal and a kind of combat teleport that recharges quite fast. Ice control on a dom has domination in arctic air, a PbAOE hold, and ice slick as its primary controls. Jack can be taken or not, totally up to you. The combat teleport and arctic air work well together. Teleport in with feral charge from maximum range (3 blood frenzy stacks), use vicious slash (2 blood frenzy stacks), and then cast rending flurry use those 5 blood frenzy stacks to increase the radius to 15 feet (shout out to Frosticus for pointing this out). As you're doing this arctic air is confusing and fearing mobs. This noticeably reduces the incoming alpha strike and it's a pretty good alpha to inflict on mobs. In case you want to make your dominator harder to defeat, Darkir has a fairly robust build for what he calls a "scrappy dom", which IIRC is a cold / savage / psi dominator. Another classic combination is an ice / icy / ice dominator. All of the stacked slows makes mobs basically crawl around and do less damage than they otherwise might. Single target damage isn't as high for icy assault as for several other dominator assault sets. It's still workable, though.

-speed can be quite impactful, especially against mobs that do most of their damage through melee attacks. Large amounts can also be quite helpful when fighting part-time olympic level speed runners like Director 11 from Tin Mage and Romulus from the ITF. For a while I ran an ice / ice / ice dominator and the stacked -speed from arctic air, ice slick, chilling embrace, and attacks was very effective at limiting AV movement. From City of Data, here are raw numbers that are high enough that even with purple patch effects and AV resistances AVs were pretty much crawling around ... ice slick ... -350% maximum running speed, -90% run speed arctic air ... -350% maximum running speed, -65% run speed, fly speed, jump speed chilling embrace ... -40% running speed, flying speed, jump speed + attacks, which contributed more. If I was to hazard a guess, it's probably the large debuff to maximum running speed that is causing the bulk of the slowing done to AVs with these powers being stacked together. The direct -running speed debuffs would contribute to slower movement speed, but probably not nearly as much as reducing maximum running speed.

Here's another take on that build. Key defense and resistance totals are better, although admittedly at the cost of somewhat less recharge. Still more than enough recharge for permadom, though. Damage is also in a better place overall, with ice storm adding a lot more damage than wall of force. However you decide to move forward, hopefully you have a blast with your dom. Ice-Jamz - Dominator (Ice Control - Thorny Assault),v2.mbd

Here's a build I put together that offers decent DPA. It has over 300 single target DPS on pylon tests and DPA for AOE that's noticeably 100. AOE is almost always available so, while there isn't a "nuke-level" AOE in this build, the repeated application of AOEs can take down crowds in a fairly short period of time even without any teammates helping. Theft of essence in siphon life keeps endurance in a good place with very minimal attention to directly managing it. If more melee defense is desired then putting the full obliteration set into shadow maul can be done, at the cost of somewhat less damage. Scrapper (Dark Melee - Shield Defense - No Mastery),v2.mbd

Totally true. Hasten with 2 generic recharge IOs boosted to +5 would mean +166.25% global recharge (70% + 96.25% = 166.25%) and, even with a bit of downtime for hasten for which global recharge is lower, domination should reliably renew itself before its 90 second activation period expires. Edit: There are corner cases in which stacked slow debuffs on a dominator can prevent domination from auto-renewing, even with high global recharge. That's why having slow resistance built up to some degree can sometimes help dominators quite a bit. Still, slow debuffs tend to end up becoming stacked to significant numbers via a bunch of incoming attacks and usually the rate and amount of incoming damage ends up being the bigger problem than the slow debuffs in such situations.