EnjoyTheJourney

If your friend has you up front soaking up aggro then taking tar patch at 38 and moving enflame and weave later by two levels would probably help the two of you more. Whether you do that or not, though, I'd agree that you and your friend should have a smooth ride through the leveling process. Best of luck!

That is not at all a bad combination. I'm not sure which powers need to be in the build for your friend to feel like they're playing a warlock. But, I happen to have a build handy that might serve as a helpful template for either "as is" use or as a template for putting together another build. Good luck to your friend, either way. If defense totals seem too low for your friend and/or endurance seems hard to manage, then you can replace the sorcery pool with the force of will pool and take unleash potential for a recovery boost and for a good "peak survivability" option when incoming damage seems likely to be particularly threatening. Rune of protection is quite nice for having higher resists on demand, though. Also, a six-slotted spirit ward can help singularity or the team's tank survive better. So, that's a choice to be carefully weighed. Dominator (Gravity Control - Dark Assault - Dark Mastery).mbd

I was curious about how to make a fire / ice dom work and I ended up putting together the following build. Unleash potential holds the build together. It makes endurance manageable in the earlier levels and so taking it at level 20 seems like a functional choice. Unleash potential also provides improved peak survivability when your dom is facing a lot of incoming damage. You may still want cardiac or vigor alpha to manage endurance, even with help from unleash potential, unless you decide on ageless for your destiny incarnate pick. To see how peak survivability can spike when using unleash potential, toggle on power up and unleash potential at the same time in Mids; doing this mimics the effect of casting power up and then shortly afterward casting unleash potential, which boosts the defense and recovery totals for the period that it remains active. Melee and ranged defense then spike upward to a little over 50% for the minute that unleash potential is active, before it goes on cooldown for a little less than 2 minutes. To further boost survivability, you can use melee hybrid core to boost resists for a fair amount of the time that unleash potential is down. You can also time the use of T4 core barrier to spike defense totals when both melee hybrid core and unleash potential are on cooldown. It also helps to get the Eye of the Magus (Demonic for villains) clickie accolade for whenever incoming damage can spike to dangerous totals and all of the forementioned tools for boosting survivability are not functioning at peak levels. The single target attack chain will need weaken resolve or fireball or power up as a gap filler from time to time, as the recharge times on ice slash and bitter ice blast will otherwise sometimes create gaps in the chain. Using power up is usually a no-brainer to boost damage. But, for this build sometimes you'll want to save power up for when it can boost unleash potential. As a general rule, it's probably good to use fireball as a gap filler when multiple targets are about and weaken resolve when focusing down stronger single foes. Hopefully this ultimately ends up helping. Good luck with your Frostfire character. Dominator (Fire Control - Icy Assault - Fire Mastery),v2.mbd

The above is a key insight into what kinds of assault sets work well for ice control. What's easy to miss about ice control is how impactful the slows that it inflicts on mobs can be. Anything that interrupts mob AI, recharge, or movement requires a longer recovery period before normal actions are available again when mobs have strong slow debuffs on them from ice control. So, as per Snokle's observation knocks, disorients, and (more) movement / recharge debuffs in the assault set are even more valuable when paired with ice control.

On other poison characters I've found the superior entomb absorb proc quite useful, including poison defenders, an illusion / poison troller, and a gravity / poison troller. But, for all of those characters poison trap was quite often used as the opening move with new spawns. So, the absorb proc did a lot of good work. For this character, though, fearsome stare offers an effective way of taking most alphas while consistently reducing incoming damage by quite a bit. I'll try out replacing the absorb proc with the -res PvP PbAOE proc. Also, when taking a vigor alpha incarnate an acc/hold/rech IO makes more sense than acc/hold/endred does. I want to find a way to incorporate the superior will of the controller set somewhere for the tasty set bonuses and the damage proc. Some slot juggling will need to take place to make that happen if I put the cloud senses set into fearsome stare. You're right that cloud senses is better for fearsome stare, though; Especially given that I'm going to rely on fearsome stare to take most alphas then maximizing the -to hit debuff is a very good thing to do. I'll ponder this further. My sense about haunt so far is that I like the distraction the shades provide and that the chip damage they do adds up noticeably when trying to focus down a boss. But. the journey to level 50 about to finish up and endgame on the horizon. So, I may end up re-thinking whether or not they're worth keeping around. If I remove haunt then I'd probably replace it with neurotoxic breath because that can be a useful follow up power to fearsome stare in many situations. Your feedback served as a good reminder that incorporating slotting ideas used for other characters can sometimes lead to inefficiencies and lost opportunities. Thank you for taking the time to reply.

Two specific questions I have relate to poison trap. I was considering removing the Acc / hold / end reduction IO and replacing it with the -20% res PvP proc. It would be another nice debuff to bring to teams, at the expense of some measure of accuracy. With the -def already in venomous gas, potentially also from envenom for some mobs, and the +acc from vigor radial alpha, perhaps to hit values would still be in a good place. Or not, not sure, as it's very hard to parse out from city of data what the baseline "to hit" values are for poison trap. Another question connected to poison trap concerns whether to put in PbAOE damage procs versus hold damage procs. I provisionally went with mostly hold procs. But, Frosticus in his carefully done guide to poisons mentions that PbAOE damage procs may be a better choice. Not sure if that's been confirmed or discomfirmed since the guide was put together or if that has changed, if it was previously true.

I'd pick fire / ice over ice / fire. I'm not sure either of them are great fits for each other, though. You could also pick fire / fire / ice or ice / ice / fire, in case you like those builds better. Ice / ice / fire is a good combination, in case you prefer Jack over the imps. Fireball and melt armor are nice additions to the toolkit provided by ice / ice, as well. Ice control doesn't have to be underwhelming. It matches really well with savage assault, for example. But, ice control doesn't match well with fiery assault; fire breath is a cone and its fiery' assault's best AOE, but arctic air rewards being in the center of fights.

Does degen radial not apply to damage ticks? If not, then Mids is overstating the damage. If so, then it's probably doing just what is says for damage. Edit: On reflection, I probably should have noted for the OP that having a damage-dealing interface incarnate and alpha is what raises the bar for mud pots damage to a more noticeable level. I so seldom take a non-damage interface incarnate that I tend to forget they exist.

Perhaps mids is wrong. But, it does list almost 26 damage per damage tick, which happens every 2 seconds. This is with musculature radial and degen radial engaged. It would be less damage with just the two superior frozen blast IOs boosting damage. Edit: The build is given below ... Weirdly, the damage shown in Mids is now listed as little over 23 per 2 second tick. Maybe I misremembered or Mids is inconsistent sometimes? So, it looks closer to 11.5 DPS, which would lead to 115 damage per 10 seconds. Still a bargain for what you get, I think. Also, like the OP, I like grabbing aggro with mud pots in most situations because taking some of the aggro is one way I like to contribute while teaming. Everybody's mileage may reasonably vary, though, for mud pots and for other powers. Magnetic Rocker - Dominator (Gravity Control - Earth Assault - Fire Mastery).mbd

I've put together a dark / poison / psi mastery troller build. I'm wondering if I've made some inefficient slotting choices or if there are other paths that could also lead to a functional build. Build goals are to contribute to teams while exemplared down all the way to Posi 1 and up to endgame and incarnate content. It's not intended for solo runs other than, perhaps, soloing some SFs to get the sheer willpower accolade. It's not likely to be a good candidate for 4* content, other than perhaps for challenge runs, and I'm fine with that. Thank you in advance for any feedback offered. Controller (Darkness Control - Poison - Psi mastery).mbd

Mud pots does about 13 DPS on my grav / earth dom with just two slots in it. That works out to about 130 DPS every 10 seconds at the cost of a manageable amount of endurance, no animation time, and one slot. Mud pots also slows and can immobilize mobs. Plus, it activates every 2 seconds and it will take out mobs with a sliver of life left without needing to spend time targeting them. It's quite a good power if you take earth assault and you can find a way to manage the endurance cost. Mud pots will annoy mobs and make some of them eager to kill your dom. But, as a dom you have tools to deal with that and making mobs hate you more seems to fit with your goals for your troller / dom.

For a dominator earth assault has a damage toggle, a PbAOE, and a shorter range targeted AOE. The PbAOE and the targeted AOE can take force feedback +recharge procs, which would help to get primary controls back more often. You can probably take another AOE from your mastery as well, if you'd like. As one caveat, all those knocks in earth and the hold in seismic smash would get in the way of letting confused mobs hit each other, in case that's important to you.

Moving the mouse around to both find targets and to click powers leads to a fair amount of misclicks for me and slows down the process of getting things done. This seems like an excellent suggestion that should save some wear and tear on my mouse-hand wrist, as well. Plus, after a bit of reflection it seems likely that I can work out single target attack chains that rely on consistent key press combinations. I'll try this idea out. Hopefully my left hand can learn the muscle memory needed to make this smoothly work.

This may be a dumb question, but if so then it wouldn't be my first dumb question. With the exception of auto-renewing hasten as per the video, is there an alternative to clicking powers that aren't toggles that I've not heard about? Also, for the OP, it was a bit surprising that corners weren't used to gather mobs together because breaking line of sight would have brought mobs shooting from range that were aggro'd on your stalker closer together with the melee mobs, allowing for better target saturation for your AOEs. To be fair, your stalker clearly wasn't struggling and so use the corners wasn't necessary. Perhaps you didn't mind being a bit slower to finish up, which would make sense.

Based on my experience so far it seems like the build up proc may activate more often when using AOE powers. Also, I tend to use it as soon as it becomes available in most situations, unless it is saved for the next spawn (like Due Regard above). For example, to open a fight with a new spawn with my savage stalker I often do the following ... build up savage leap into a spawn assassin's frenzy something placate rending flurry ... and fairly often build up recharges somewhere in that sequence, usually right after using savage leap or rending flurry. If build up recharges in the middle of this then I tend to use it immediately before moving on to the next power in that sequence. It may not be optimal in all cases to use build up right after it's available. But, a general pattern of doing that leverages muscle memory to keep up the speed at which powers are used, which in its own way tends to increase damage and to make playing a stalker a little simpler. Edit: It is perhaps worth mentioning that I tend to integrate savage leap into the single target attack chain, when it's available. Anecdotally, it has seemed that with multiple enemies around savage leap will proc build up quite a bit more often than any of the single target attacks used in the same attack sequence. This was the origin of my hypothesis that AOE powers are probably more likely to proc build up than single target attacks.