EnjoyTheJourney

It dawned on me that if the duration of serum is about how long it takes to take down an AV or GM then looking at City of Data to find out the duration of serum would be a good place to start to figure out how well Mercs taken down hard targets, compared to Necro minions. Serum lasts 60 seconds. So, perhaps the main difference between AV / GM clear times for mercs and necro minions is strongly influenced by whichever primary's pets survive noticeably better, as long as one of them has a clear advantage. With mercs often operating at range I'd guess that mercs probably tend to survive better against AVs and GMs.

Maybe there's a chance to both suggest a possibility and to ask a question at the same time. I'm still fairly new to a necro / traps / soul MM, although all incarnates are T4 at this point. It's built for survival, but still defeats pylons with no lore pets, no hybrid active, no clicky accolades, no poison daggers, etc (all the usual rules, basically), in a little under 60 seconds. That's not even close to a record for an MM. But, is it indicative of being able to take down GMs and AVs in a reasonable time frame? And, so far every GM or AV this MM has tried to solo has felt like it went down fast. Maybe merc / marine blows away the necro / traps / soul build I put together for downing pylons / AVs / GMs. Not experienced enough with Mercs or marine to know and curious about how well necro / traps can compare to other MM builds for taking down GMs / AVs.

If you're happy with an MM, then that's a very reasonable choice. Maelway is giving good advice with the suggested powersets. The suggestion that controllers don't get mez protection is an overstatement, though. Controllers can have decent access to mez protection with rune of protection from the sorcery pool (up 1/3 of the time), indomitable will (can be perma or almost perma, available from lvl 35, but do need knock protection from a separate source), and melee core hybrid incarnate. Clarion can be taken for a controller's destiny pick, although I don't favor that for the build given further up.

There may be a few baseline facts to work with when coming up with a build. It sounds like you'd like an all-rounder that can solo pretty much anything and that won't be all that slow about doing it. Also, you're a returning player who is probably not super-rich and you'd need to run a budget build for at least a fair while. An arsenal control / dark affinity / psi mastery controller could work well for your plan. You can find sample builds in the controller forum. Be sure to pick up the sorcery pool early for the absorb power, the ST blast, and rune of protection at level 20 or close to that. Get indomitable will at level 35 and get a couple of IOs that provide knock protection in your build. Absolutely take the arsenal control pet, it allows you to solo AVs because it is extremely tough and it has a built-in taunt. Edit: Found a build I had in my archives. It's not perfect. But, it's not a terrible resource for ideas to consider. Controller (Arsenal Control - Dark Affinity - Psi mastery),v2.mbd

Soul extraction summons more when your MM has more pets out. If you skip taking and summoning the zombies, then your MM loses half of their extracted souls. For necro MMs, in particular, there's a strong incentive to keep all pets out and to use all single target attacks.

I've played enough melee range necro feel comfortable saying it's a very good primary for fighting in melee range. The controls the lich has, the various sources of -to hit debuffs, knockdowns from minions, life drain, the sheer number of minions that can be out most of the time, and single target attacks that summon minions which have taunt all contribute to making a necro primary MM quite survivable while fighting in melee. It would be a solid choice as a primary for your intended playstyle. I don't have enough experience with playing multiple primaries in melee range to do well thought through comparisons between primaries. A bunch of secondaries could work well with a melee playstyle for an MM. Storm, trick arrow, traps, and marine immediately come to mind, in addition to FF and EA. I played a necro / storm for a fair while a few years ago. Enemies went through a lot on their way to being defeated, so much so that I (for real) sometimes ended up feeling a bit sorry for them.

Glad to be of help. To get a better sense of how the mind / dark / fire build is intended to work, look at the "totals" tab on the bottom left hand side of the screen. Then toggle on gather shadows and unleash potential. Then look again at defense and recovery totals in the "totals" tab. You'll see both defense and recovery totals spike. The key to getting that to happen in-game is to cast gather shadows first, followed by unleash potential before the buff from gather shadows runs out. That combination is intended to provide good "peak survivability" when the going gets too rough for an occasional use of life drain to keep your dom in the fight. It can also help to fix endurance problems when a domination end bar refill won't happen for a while. Barrier core tier 4 also helps with peak survivability, as does melee core tier 4 hybrid. Stagger when you use them and unleash potential so you always have at least one of them running when taking on dangerous content. If you'd like to carry this idea even further, you can get the demonic aura accolade, then convert to hero-side to make it Geas of the Kind Ones if you'd rather run a hero or vigilante, for a 1 minute buff to help cover periods when your other "peak survivability" tools are not enough or not available. This way of organizing peak survivability helps quite a bit when in melee against archvillains, giant monsters, or elite bosses. Also, the "chance for +damage" proc in midnight grasp can get up to 3 stacks if you're chaining together single target attacks. That can add noticeably to damage, so bear that in mind when figuring out which single target powers to use and in which order. None of these ideas tie you to trying out the build provided above, though. By all means, borrow and/or adapt whatever you like and ignore whatever you don't.

I had a little time, so I put together a mind / dark / fire build. There are some ideas in here that you may like. Or not, of course. Hopefully you have a blast with your mind / dark dom, however you build. Dominator (Mind Control - Dark Assault - Fire Mastery).mbd

I don't have a mind / dark build handy. But, in case you want to try stitching something together here are a couple of different builds, one with mind control and another with dark assault. There are ideas you might find useful in both builds (or decide that you don't like, that's always up to you). The mind / fire build is defensively conservative, giving up a noticeable amount of damage to softcap ranged defense. The second build settles for lower ranged defense and relies more on a combination of controls, to hit debuffs, aggro control, and healing from life drain to minimize defeats. PS: The triple dark build is noticeably flawed, with insufficient accuracy in soul consumption. Slotting for that power should be carefully evaluated if you decide to take dark mastery. PSS: It's possible to drop gloom and replace it with dominate if you proc up dominate. Then you can put the apocalypse set into moonbeam. I haven't done those calculations. But, a quick look suggested that might lead to higher single target damage. It's also helpful to have a single target hold in your single target attack chain; a lot of mobs (right up to AVs) can end up being held a noticeable percentage of the time if you're constantly stacking holds as part of your single target attack chain. You'll still want enough recharge, though, so you'll want to carefully balance those considerations. Finally, life drain is worth keeping if you can fit it in because it will sometimes save your dom from being defeated. Dark Humour - Dominator (Darkness Control - Dark Assault - Dark Mastery),v2.mbd Dominator (Mind Control - Fiery Assault - Fire Mastery),SoftcappedRange.mbd

A few thoughts below on tweaking the build ... Recharge, defense, and resistance totals are reasonable for the kind of build you're putting together. Building on what MoonSheep mentioned, smite, gloom, and midnight grasp all offer better damage per second of activation time than life drain and dark blast. Terrify is a bread and butter power for mind doms. This is true because total domination and mass confusion have recharge times that are too long for swapping between them for each spawn unless the rate of progress through missions is very, very slow. Build efficiency can be improved by looking at more builds to figure out the maximum impact places to use damage procs; on that note, putting a damage proc into a power that doesn't recharge more than about once per minute tends to be less beneficial than putting damage procs into powers used regularly as part of an attack chain. Putting a third generic recharge IO into a power is probably overkill. It tends to be more efficient to put in two level 50 generic recharge IOs, then boost them both to +3 or +5, and to then put that third slot elsewhere. Hopefully these thoughts help.

My previous testing and calculations for ice assault suggested that it does about 15 - 25% less single target DPA than other assault sets against which I compared it. Based on feedback from @MoonSheep and @Frosticus I reviewed a couple of ice dom builds I had put together. I found some better slotting choices for single target attacks were available than I had been making. Changes made raise the DPA enough to make it fairly comparable, with chilling embrace ticks, to other assault sets I like using. I was glad to figure that out, so my thanks to both of you for speaking up. Regarding AOE, my calculations suggested that chilling embrace + ice sword circle do roughly comparable DPA to trip mine*. I was comparing two broadly similar builds with the same fives pieces from the armageddon set in both of them. The same alpha and interface choices were made for both builds. So, it's a bit surprising to hear that ice sword circle plus chilling embrace ticks were found by someone else to be clearly better. * There seems to be some funkiness in Mids with the armageddon set's damage proc's fire damage calculations for one or both of these powers. Oddly, the fire proc fire damage was listed as higher for trip mine in Mids. That doesn't make sense because trip mine has a shorter cast time and a shorter base recharge time than ice sword circle. In the end I took the fire damage proc out of both builds to see how 131% added damage (from 4 pieces of the armageddon set) compared. Also, total damage numbers for ISC are higher than TM on a "per use" basis. But, TM tends to recharge faster than ISC because of a base 22 second recharge for ISC versus 20 seconds for TM. Personally, I find the almost 3 second long animation for ISC to be uncomfortably long. That's probably a YMMV thing. At the end of the day, though, if DPA is a useful metric then ice sword circle doesn't seem to shine above trip mine.

I'm trying that combo out for the first time as well. Just reached level 29. It's still a bit early, but so far it's effective and plenty of fun.

Hold is the only status effect that makes mobs unable to move or act. But, AOE holds for doms always have a default 240 second recharge time. In practice, holding groups of mobs can never be the "every spawn" control for a dom unless they move at a glacial pace through missions. The closest you can come to frequently freezing mobs in place and making them take no action, in practice, is with AOE fear powers. Even though mobs can move and attack while afraid, often they will do neither. Some are functionally immune to fear, though, so you can't rely only on fear to control mobs in all situations.

If you're getting hit with lots of recharge / movement debuffs then there's a good chance that so much damage is being received that an awaken inspiration will be needed soon whether your dom has slow resistance or not. And, most of the time slow resistance doesn't matter at all because there are no incoming recharge / movement debuffs. In the majority of cases slow resistance doesn't provide any tangible benefit. Still, I tend to view 35% slow resist as a minimum goal. All that takes is getting the Winter universal travel set unique IO into a travel power's default slot and an extra slot into boxing or brawl to slot in 2 "superior" pieces of the melee winter set. That takes a grand total of one extra slot used beyond default slots for each power for a total of 35% slow resist. That's not overly expensive. I usually try to reach 50% slow resist, though, as in my experience that seems to be a functional level for the clear majority of content. My primary goal for slow resist isn't so much to preserve domination as it is to keep my doms' powers recharging quickly so a continuous stream of controls and damage can be applied to mobs. Even a single 20-30% recharge debuff can noticeably reduce recharge and movement if no slow resistance is in a build, in my experience.

Gravity is quite effective at what it does well. But, it's a late blooming control set. So, juggling mobs and using the AOE immobilize tend to be your "go to" choices in the earlier levels. Also, consider using the vet attacks available for free from the START vendor (sands of mu, nemesis staff, and the blackwand are especially good) to take things down faster in lower levels. Here's a few routines for soloing ... lieutenant and 1 minion ... hold the lieutenant, lift the minion into the air. When hold recharges re-apply to the lieutenant until the minion is down. Then focus down the lieutenant. For bosses activate domination, hold them, then take out their minion(s). Then keep applying the hold to the boss and focus them down. For 3 or 4 minions, apply the AOE immobilize to them all and hold whichever mob you miss with the AOE immobilize. Focus down one minion at a time. Feel free to use terrain / corners to only expose yourself to one minion at a time if you feel like you're having difficulties keeping your health up.