EnjoyTheJourney

I'd probably back my way into choosing a primary for fiery assault by asking what kind of playstyle fiery assault tends to favor and how I'd like to play it. In my experience fiery assault works really well for a primarily ranged dominator; fire breath is a much better AOE than combustion, allowing your dominator to do much more AOE damage overall. With such a short recharge for fire breath, after getting good global recharge, you really don't need combustion once you take fire breath. You can pick up fire mastery when taking fiery assault and slot up fireball for high recharge; Ragnarok is a really good set for fireball, dropping the damage IO and taking all of the other five IOs in that set for maximum recharge and for a knockdown that usually applies to mobs when using fireball. Fire breath can be proc'd up to do really good DPA. Alternatively, you can put in the artillery set, have better ranged defense, most likely have fire breath up more often, and do lots of AOE damage anyways, albeit at the cost of more animation time. Mobs tend to fall over fairly soon either way, especially on teams. In the end neither choice is a priori wrong, it's totally up to your preference. Not sure there's too much difference in the electric and fire control sets in their effectiveness overall. Both sets can be quite effective operating at range, which fits well with what fiery assault does best. Still, for fiery assault I would tend to favor electric control primarily because a force feedback +recharge IO can be put into jolting chain to speed up recharge for key powers such as fire breath, blaze, and fiery embrace (and fireball if you take fire mastery). All that said, concept or theme may be important for your level of enjoyment and it would be difficult to go wrong with either primary. Also, combustion is mechanically not a great AOE damage skill. But, if your concept for your character requires it you could drop fire breath, take combustion, and still have an effective character.

The main things to try to improve would be defenses, damage, and slow resistance. Smash / lethal defenses are in a pretty good place. But, smash / lethal resistances at their current levels, in particular, will cause challenges because that will be the most common incoming damage type. The benefits of more damage are self explanatory. Slow resistance matters because incoming recharge debuffs can make key powers take noticeably longer to recharge, which can substantially reduce a dominator's effectiveness and make them less fun to play. Recharge debuffs can also cause domination to stop automatically renewing itself, meaning mez protection can suddenly disappear and controls can suddenly lose quite a bit of their magnitude and duration. I've found that having about 50% slow resistance is quite good, with as low as 35% slow resistance being at least workable in most cases. In my experience, if your dominator is receiving such heavy recharge or movement debuffs that 50% won't help much, then there's probably so much incoming damage that your dominator will be using an awaken soon anyways. So, it's usually not worth the tradeoffs involved to try to push slow resistance much higher than 50% for a dominator, in my view. Tanks and scrappers probably get a lot more out of higher slow resistance totals. But, especially with all the controls that dominators have available, dominators shouldn't be getting hit with recharge debuffs as often as tanks and scrappers do. Some IOs that don't cost much and are worth considering are the preventive medicine unique absorb IO, the reactive defenses unique +resist IO, and the winter's gift +20% slow resist IO. Some pricier, but still highly, highly worthwhile upgrades are the shield wall +5% resist unique IO, the miracle +recovery unique IO, the gladiator's armor +3% defense / teleportation resist IO. I wouldn't bother with the Numina unique and just go ahead and replace it with the miracle +recovery unique. An extra 10% regen will probably have no practical effect on your dominator's survivability. Extra endurance recovery is seldom wasteful, though. Also, you don't need 4 slots in hasten or three slots in stamina. If you enjoy playing your dominator at level 50 you can fairly easily earn about 10 to 20 million inf in an evening of play without really trying very hard. It doesn't take long to pay for all the IOs mentioned above. Do try to craft valuable IOs when you get an appropriate recipe and either keep them or sell them on the auction house to generate even more inf. Also, to get blistering cold and frozen blast IOs you can purchase them from a vending machine using merits earned while leveling up your character. You can then use enhancement catalysts on them to turn them into "superior" versions (IIRC for Winter IOs it takes 2 catalysts to upgrade them and those catalysts can be bought with merits from a vending machine or from the auction house). Enhancement catalysts are not cheap. But, they're good upgrades to make when you get closer to completing your build. The vending machines are a simple way to get very expensive IOs while doing the kinds of things you would usually do, with a minimal inf cost along the way. As a couple of other things to consider, malaise's illusions (the confusion set) in smoke canister will probably do more for your build than the cloud senses set. Also, liquid nitrogen would probably add more value to your build than tear gas because knockdown fields are so useful, liquid nitrogen damages mobs and that helps smoke canister to function better, and tear gas is available much less often than liquid nitrogen. As a sidenote, you have some full sets of IOs that provide marginal benefit with the sixth slot. For example, a boost to psy / toxic resistance from the sixth IO from a set provides noticeably less value for your build than boosting smash / lethal resistances. Smash / lethal damage is the most common incoming damage type, those resistances are currently very low for your draft build, and adding a few slots here and there to boost those resistances is worthwhile. Take a careful look at the attached build to see where different boosts to smash / lethal resistances were made at a low slot cost (celerity IOs, reactive defenses IOs, and preventive medicine IOs, as well as the unique shield wall +resist IO and the unique reactive defenses +resist IO). The total increase to smash / lethal resistances from those IOs in the attached build adds up to 14 - 23%, depending on how much of the sliding 3-12% resistance from the reactive defenses +resist IO is active at any given point in time. For the attached build, unleash potential helps to make endurance management quite a bit more manageable, especially if you activate power up shortly before activating unleash potential; toggle both of those powers on to see how endurance recovery and defense totals spike when unleash potential is buffed by power up. Whenever you suspect incoming damage is likely to spike you can pre-cast unleash potential to reduce incoming damage. It can also be used reactively when endurance totals are dropping very low and/or incoming damage suddenly spikes, as long as it's available. I usually keep unleash potential in reserve, not using it unless I feel like there's a need to use it. The first screenshot shows defense and endurance recovery totals without a boosted unleash potential active, while the second screenshot shows defense and endurance recovery totals with a boost unleash potential active. The differences are stark, with a boosted unleash potential providing a kind of rough equivalent to a "no crash" tier 9 defensive power for one minute whenever it is up. Dominator (Arsenal Control - Arsenal Assault - Fire Mastery).mbd

Agreed that alternatives to tar patch look more appealing in light of this accuracy slot tax. That's especially true given how tar patch already lagged those alternatives in that they can slot in an Achilles -res proc, while tar patch cannot.

I never hovered my mouse over that particular icon before. Also, I previously never noticed the absence of that icon on most of the tar patch webpages that you'll find on City of Data (more on that below). After reading your most recent post I looked carefully at every instance of tar patch in "dark mastery", "dark affinity", and "dark miasma" that I could find on the City of Data website. I only found that "requires a successful hit roll, even in AutoHit powers" bullseye icon in the "dark mastery" powersets that offered tar patch. Those seem to only be applicable for tar patch that's available to tankers, brutes, and dominators. My best guess is that you're right and a successful "to hit" roll is needed. This flew completely below my radar until now and thank you for pointing it out. I can't say I like having an "accuracy" slot tax added to the dominator / tank / brute versions of tar patch given the very high cost of Provocation D-Synchs. Overall, it feels unintuitive and unnecessary to need accuracy specifically for the resistance debuff for a few versions of tar patch, but not for other versions of tar patch.

The City of Data entry for a dominator's dark mastery tar patch is below ... https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=redirects.dark_miasma.tar_epic&at=dominator It lists "Foe (alive)" as entities that are autohit by a dominator's dark mastery tar patch. If you look at various attacks that are part of assault sets, they typically don't have any entry listed next to the "entities autohit" flag. To be fair, it can be confusing because in the initial data entry screen for a dominator's tar patch it lists "Self" as the entity that is autohit. But, when you click on the link on the right hand side of the screen for that webpage to see the effects of a tar patch that has been placed on the ground, the "entities autohit" flag is very clear in stating that foes which are alive and in the tar patch area of effect are autohit by the different tar patch effects.

That's an interesting build. Incidentally, you might consider dropping a slot out of dispersion bubble, putting it into damping bubble, and then moving the reactive defenses +resist unique IO to damping bubble for a bit more smash / lethal resistance. You could also replace two LoTGs in dispersion bubble with shield wall equivalents (the def / end and def IOs) to get slightly more life into your build. These aren't build breaking or build enabling changes, by any means. But, sometimes marginal improvements make a difference in-game. FWIW, although this is clearly a solid build either way.

I don't have an energy assault character build handy. But, I do have at least one recent example of a possible slotted build for pyrotechnic control for a dominator (attached). You might consider taking fire mastery for fireball and then the armor, perhaps with melt armor or the rez as well. If you do, then consider dropping whirling hands, which has a slow animation and mediocre damage per second of activation time (DPA). Fireball won't be up quite as often as whirling hands. But, with 5 pieces from the ragnarok set, including the unique knockdown IO in that set, which will activate often, it will have noticeably better DPA than whirling hands and it will have a consistently activating control effect. For energy assault, you've got the key single target powers for this build. You may want to review the knockback that each power does and most likely will want to put knockback-to-knockdown IOs into powers with knockback values of 2 or higher. Also, consider putting a sixth slot and a damage proc IO into total focus, as it will activate often. You can proc up one or two of the single target attacks, as well, for a minor hit to global recharge and a noticeable boost to single target damage. Also, as per the attached build, consider whether you'd rather have leadership powers or the force of will pool. If you keep leadership powers, consider taking vengeance over assault to boost global recharge a bit more (with a LoTG 7.5% global recharge IO in vengeance), to make endurance management easier with a click power instead of another toggle, and to give the party a boost after a teammate gets defeated in battle. If you take the force of will pool, note how unleash potential will be strongly boosted by "power up" in energy assault, leading to big increases in defense totals and in endurance recovery while unleash potential is active if you cast power up shortly before casting unleash potential. Supported by power up, unleash potential becomes a pretty good mini-T9-defensive-clickie without an endurance crash at the end of the minute that it works. Dominator (Pyrotechnic Control - Sonic Assault - Leviathan Mastery).mbd

Energy assault has very strong single target damage and not-so-great AOE. Pyrotechnic control has a couple of powers that can do really good AOE damage when proc'd up (glittering column, hypnotizing lights). So, if you're looking for well rounded and very noticeable damage, pyro / energy is a good combination to consider. If you play to each set's strengths, your dom may approach new spawns as follows ... Glittering column (draw aggro, get mobs closer together), then hypnotizing lights to shut mobs down, then close to melee range and put those really strong energy assault single target powers to good use. Rely on to hit debuffs in incendiary aura to help patch up any holes in defenses while in melee range. Use other controls as needed to keep mobs from causing too many problems. Back out briefly to use hypnotizing lights and re-mez a lot of mobs if the fight doesn't finish up within a handful of seconds. Then head back into melee and keep applying heavy single target damage to mobs. Rinse and repeat for other spawns, perhaps starting with hypnotizing lights or explosive bouquet instead of glittering column from time to time. One reason for following this flow would be to maximize damage done, which for single target damage would mean putting the really heavy hitting single target melee powers to good use. Survivability should be quite good if you build for it. It is possible to take a primarily ranged approach as a fallback if being in melee seems too dangerous for a particular mission or team. Pushing the envelope and figuring out how to tweak your playstyle and build to survive in melee has some really nice rewards, though. Your dom will do more damage when using their best attacks and, as a bonus, your dom will more frequently and reliably get strong team buffs such as fulcrum shift and defense / resistance shields. Edit: It's not necessarily wrong to focus more on building up ranged defense, even if you'll be operating in melee. Doms do sometimes eat fairly large incoming alpha strikes, particularly on teams that don't have a sturdy tank or brute along. Those incoming alphas usually have a high percentage of ranged attacks. Also, if there are 10+ mobs in a spawn, then if you get a lot of aggro most incoming attacks will usually be ranged attacks even if your dom is already in melee range. Finally, energy assault single target attacks are good at mezzing or knocking down (or back) single target enemies that are in melee range, which cuts down on incoming melee attacks, but which are not as effective at reducing multiple incoming ranged attacks.

Pyrotechnic control would probably be a good choice. It's not only flashy, which you indicated you wanted, but it helps to patch up the weaknesses of radioactive assault and helps for leaning into the strengths of radioactive assault. They're thematically not that hard to link together, either. Radioactive assault offers really good single target damage if slotted heavily with procs. But, its two AOEs have really long, slow activation times that offer mediocre damage per second of activation time. However, hypnotizing lights and/or glittering column in pyrotechnic control can be proc'd up to do excellent AOE damage, allowing for the replacement of at least one of the thoroughly mediocre AOEs in radioactive assault. Also, the -to hit in incendiary aura helps to reduce incoming damage, making it easier to lean into procs and damage when slotting radioactive assault. The end result can be a thematically sympatico primary / secondary combination that offers noticeably better than average damage and good survivability.

You've put together a well thought through approach to building a "rock star" character. Who is, of course, a dominator. Very cool. Here's another approach to a pyro / sonic rocker. I wouldn't argue it's necessarily better overall. Still, you may (or reasonably may not) like some of the ideas offered. The "force of will" power pool seems to fit really well from a thematic perspective for a rock star who commands attention while on stage and who performs for extended periods of time. It's also functionally really solid, with endurance recovery and defense totals both going up by a lot for a full minute when bass boost is cast shortly before casting unleash potential. Uptime should be over 30%, which provides a helpful boost. With weaken resolve and the achilles heel -res proc applied to mobs (27.5% -res), along with disruption aura (15% -res) and the two ranged blasts (15% -res), there is a serious amount of -res debuffing brought to the table by this build (57.5% -res). Click the RHS buttons to be "off" for bass boost and for unleash potential to see what the "baseline" defense and endurance recovery totals are without bass boost or unleash potential active. Those baseline defense and resistance totals are fairly close to what you were mentioning in your OP. But, having unleash potential in the build offers the chance to increase recovery and defense totals quite noticeably when incoming aggro spikes and/or endurance totals dip too low. In the build below leviathan mastery replaces energy mastery. Water spout can be re-skinned and re-colored to be a wind funnel created by the wall of sound emanating from Alison. Functionally, this improves crowd control (which every rock star wants) and also improves single target damage. That said, energy mastery could also function just fine if leviathan mastery doesn't appeal. Also, to improve AOE damage, glittering column has been proc'd up into a mini-nuke that's available about every 14 seconds. Glittering column hits so hard, with such good damage per second of activation time, that it's worth including in the single target attack rotation when it's available. The incarnate picks in the build below offer a more defensive build approach. But, none of the changes made are necessarily essential to allow the build the function. If you like ageless better than barrier then that should still work just fine in most situations. Hopefully what's here proves interesting and you can find at least some ideas that end up being helpful. Dominator (Pyrotechnic Control - Sonic Assault - Leviathan Mastery).mbd

I'm as puzzled as Snarky. I don't see how this thread has not yet reached a consensus. I've seen rational arguments in multiple game forums for why "additive" increases to damage can have a very marginal effect. But, damage multipliers (such as resistance debuffs, although there are also other kinds of damage multipliers) are usually a crucial focus for builds across ARPGs, MMOs, and other games where damage is important. I can't recall any other game forum in which I've seen players, other than perhaps brand new players, repeatedly assert that double digit damage multipliers won't make a noticeable difference. At this point, there are other things to do.

Try out the math another way. Let's say a generic level 54 boss has 2730 hit points and a generic level 54 elite boss has 5400 hit points. For ease of calculation, they have no resistances to any kinds of damage and their life regen is zero. This makes for conservative estimates of the effects of -res damage multipliers on clear speed. With purple patch effects applied, damage does 65% of its nominal value to +3 mobs. With the above assumptions about enemy resistances and life regen that means enemies have the following effective life pools ... effective boss hit points after purple patch effects ... 2,730 / 0.65 =4,200 effective elite boss hit points after purple patch effects ... 5,400 / 0.65 = 8307 So, let's say a nuke does 2,000 hit points of damage. Very impressive, the boss only needs 2,200 hit points more incoming (nominal) damage to be defeated. But wait, that pesky VG-using poison character was in the vicinity applying VG to that boss. So, they lost about another 240 effective health. Now it only takes a little less than 2000 more (nominal) damage to take down the boss. The same calculation shows the elite boss can still survive 6307 hit points of incoming (nominal) damage before they fall over. Or, just over 6000 damage if VG has been applied. When you add more and more damage to each them the question becomes whether or not the amount of damage added from VG is likely to more than make one or more incoming attacks to the boss or elite boss unnecessary. Since bosses and elite bosses have significant life pools, and in practice they often have some meaningful damage resistances and some life regen, VG is noticeably contributing to damage with every single attack that lands. The odds are quite good that as you're getting close to doing all the damage needed to take out a boss or elite boss that VG already contributed more to damage done than at least one (and perhaps multiples) of the individual attacks being directed at a boss or (especially) an elite boss. This is a more accurate way of trying to analyze the effects of VG effects on clear speed, instead of trying to work backward from a small amount of "remaining life" to figuring out the same thing.

I've been along for quite a few teams for which envenom is the only poison power I'll consider using fairly regularly because movement speed seems to be the main limiting factor for clear speed; maybe weaken would be applied to AVs on such teams, but that's about it. VG will still be engaged because the cost to run it is functionally nonexistent when endurance management is consistently under control. Which it can be with careful build choices, without making major compromises. Obviously all minions and lieutenants are going to fall over in the first few seconds for each new spawn on extreme teams. So, it's usually differences in defeat times for bosses and EBs that will determine whether, for example, a KM ITF will clear in noticeably under 30 minutes or not. That's where the passive application of a 12% damage multiplier^ such as VG is most likely to make a difference for clear speed. ^ VG provides a passively applied damage multiplier of about 12% or higher to +3 mobs, after purple patch effects, and assuming that only the -res effects of VG provide any help with clear speed (a conservative assumption, but let's roll with that). One of the reasons a figure of 12% is probably conservative when considering the effects of VG on clear speed is that regen has a way of extending defeat times for mobs with more hit points, which gets reflected in how DPS calculations increase in a non-linear way as pylon defeat times decrease, especially when doing particularly high levels of damage. Another reason that a 12% increase in clear speed is probably conservative is that sometimes resistance debuffs are reducing resistances that were noticeably above zero, in which case the damage multiplier they provide is larger than their nominal value. For example, a (nominal) 12% resistance debuff becomes a 24% damage multiplier for any damage for which the (+3 level in this case) enemy to which it is applied has a native 50% resistance to the damage it is receiving. With overkill damage potentially being substantial it's possible that clear speed won't increase by exactly 12% because of VG. That's going to be true for most other debuffs as well, though. Plus, for most other debuffs activation time is required that could instead have been used to pile on even more damage. So, the value from using them is even more in question than it would be for VG. Which, again, costs absolutely zero activation time to apply to mobs. Snarky is basically acknowledging this when mentioning that tar patch isn't worth using when a team is clearing things at extreme speed. VG is worth using, though, because, once again, its functional cost is nonexistent once endurance management has been organized and it probably will make at least some marginal difference to clear speed. DarkCurrent has done some interesting, granular work comparing defenders and controllers. The level of precision in measurement is much higher than that being shown by anybody in this thread (myself included, to be fair). I'd be a lot more interested in differing views about VG if there was at least some level of precision in the measurements being done, instead of just a determined, resolute willingness to keep making the same assertion that "I don't see (much of) a difference." But, you're arguing against math and, well, math is math and it shows a lower end double digit increase in clear speed is likely from passively applying VG to mobs. Clear speed seems likely to drop by a couple of minutes or a few minutes for most TFs, except perhaps on extremely fast teams. You might not notice a difference. But, unless you have measurements to show otherwise there's no good reason to disbelieve the underlying math.

In my view feral charge is the set defining power. Proc it up and use it as a substitute for maiming slash when you can. Also, feral charge happens to pair up quite well with incendiary aura for reasons that will probably become clear a little further down. So, consider giving the set a bit more time before reaching a final verdict about how much you might enjoy playing it. Feral charge offers very similar DPA to maiming slash, when proc'd up. But, feral charge hits up to five targets, instead of just one target. When looking across all the different AOE powers to which dominators get access, feral charge offers excellent DPA on a quick recharge, in exchange for being limited to five targets. Also, feral charge does knockdown and can take a force feedback +recharge IO; it recharges in a little less than 4 seconds with good global recharge and no local recharge. So, when you use it a lot recharge noticeably improves for many powers. Finally, feral charge's teleport-to-target-and-immediately-attack ability gives serious Nightcrawler vibes, making it sooo much fun to use (at least for me, YMMV of course). Feral charge from maximum range, followed by vicious slash, can maximize all blood fury stacks, allowing for "rending flurry" cast immediately afterward to have a noticeably larger radius. This combo provides a good alpha strike option for new spawns^. ^ Credit goes to Frosticus for pointing this out. At the end of the day, savage assault doesn't boost defense totals the way several assault sets can with their variously named "boost" power that functions kind of like "power boost" and a "damage boost" power all rolled into one (ice assault has such a power, as one example). Plus, single target DPA while fighting a single hard target is middle of the pack, when compared to other assault sets. But, savage assault has a noticeable heal to potentially help to offset its lack of a defense boosting ability and it has sneaky good AOE damage because feral charge has excellent DPA and you can use it so often. To see how you might IO up a savage assault character, you can check out the build offered here. Click on the RHS of feral charge to see how much damage it does, on average. Click it off afterward, though, as otherwise global recharge values will be out of whack and you won't be able to see what the default recharge times would be for any power, once the build has been fully put together. Also note the presence of unleash potential, which helps to ease endurance problems with a strong recovery boost when active. Unleash potential also offers higher defense totals; it can help for absorbing alphas and at other times when incoming aggro is higher than usual. Dominator (Ice Control - Savage Assault - Dark Mastery),v2.mbd

You waited a fair while before posting a single line response and it seemed clear that something about what you quoted came across to you as untrue and worthy of correction. The wording and brevity of your response seemed to purport to state a general truth, rather than a conditional truth that is based on your preferred playstyle. If the effects of VG are definitionally excluded as being part of a team's alpha then, yes, the effect of VG on a team's alpha is null and void. But, it seems arbitrary to exclude the effects of VG from the effects of a team's alpha. To permanently lay to rest a key argument you've been implicitly setting forth, perhaps without realizing it, using VG doesn't necessarily mean a team "needs" VG to be successful or effective. VG is effective at speeding teams up by passively increasing damage done by all team members, thereby cutting down on the average number of clicks needed to defeat most spawns, and by passively and without any button clicks reducing incoming damage^. In a nutshell, "less clicks for better clear speed" is its primary contribution. Maximizing the percentage of the time VG debuffs are applying to mobs is how you maximize the "less clicks for better clear speed" buff that the poison set can apply to teams. There are some marginal cases where the added debuffs from VG may be a deciding factor for the team succeeding or failing. Those are probably marginal cases, though, and there would probably be other powers on such a team that are also helping to push that same team just over the line needed to succeed. So, even in such cases it seems a bit arbitrary to single out VG as the power that the team "needed." ^ Before something picks a nit, one button click gets VG going and it can carry across multiple game sessions. So, technically one button click is needed, but in practice activating VG is done before engaging with enemies.