EnjoyTheJourney

Both of your doms can contribute very well on teams. If you're enjoying them, and you don't want to make more dom alts, then there's no need to look beyond the two you already have. Mind / fire operates most naturally as a primarily ranged blastroller. You can use a procc'd up terrify and then fire breath from range, perhaps with fireball added in from fire mastery, for a good AOE salvo that thins out spawns. Fire / earth would operate most naturally in melee range and could be a knockdown specialist with bonfire and the two earth AOEs. You may want unleash potential with a couple of boosted level 50 recharge IOs in it from the force of will pool and musculature radial to help manage the high endurance costs of running that build. You may choose to only run mud pots instead of hot feet; both auras do roughly similar things, but mud pots costs noticeably less endurance to run. Or, you could go for ageless destiny core and run both auras, totally up to you. An interesting mastery choice could be leviathan for water spout, giving even more control from knocks / stuns and more single target damage. Water spout also provides a source of defense debuffs and that would sometimes be helpful. As a sidenote, earth assault and leviathan mastery are mechanically a "peanut butter and jelly" combination. You can put a force feedback +recharge proc IO into tremor and fissure and they will proc quite often. Those force feedback procs help to increase uptime on water spout, which is probably the key power that tends to make taking leviathan mastery both fun and effective.

In a sense, dominators are too good at what they can do better than any other AT, which is to shut down mobs and turn them into punching bags that can't hit back. So, to avoid having higher end content trivialized, a lot of higher end content, and especially AVs / GMs / higher star content, can mostly shrug off the usual ability of dominators to shut them down in large numbers with a single press of a button. Dominators can bring good debuffs and good damage to a team and so they can still contribute well. But, other ATs will outshine them in at least one of the buff / debuff / damage categories and will often be preferred by players over doms. The point mentioned by others about how tight dominator builds tend to be is also totally valid. They are expensive to build and not easy to build well. Also, even when you build them well there will tend to be more compromises or weaknesses left in the build than for most other ATs. I really like doms and have more of them than any other AT. That's probably an unusual preference, though.

There are plenty of ways to build a stormie controller, of course, and your build may reasonably look very different from what's below. Still, in case it helps, here's a build for an earth / storm / psi controller that's intended for teaming. Controller (Earth Control - Storm Summoning - Psi mastery).mbd

A dark / storm controller might be exactly what you'd enjoy, given your thematic focus and a desire to do good damage. Dark control has fearsome stare and 2 pets with fear and storm summoning has two powers that inflict quite a bit of fear on enemies (tornado, lightning storm). Freezing rain in storm can also make mobs want to run. If you take storm summoning build for recharge and endurance recovery to have as many freezing rains, lightning storms and tornadoes out as you can. Consider putting "knockback to knockdown" IOs into tornado and lightning storm, along with force feedback +recharge IOs. You'll be glad you did and your teammates will be even more glad. Also, consider not taking hurricane. FWIW, I don't have hurricane on any of my stormies and I don't miss it in any way, whatsoever, not ever. I don't need to bully mobs with hurricane to enjoy the storm set and I like it when I and my teammates don't have a massive swirling hurricane fog making it hard to see what's happening. Dark control and storm summoning are both strong sets and there will always be other tools available to manage any situation in which using hurricane might be tempting. Finally, take the AOE immobilize in the primary because all those fear effects might just make mobs run all over the place otherwise.

The mortar seems to inflict -def and to have the ranged AOE tag every time it fires. If the Achilles' Heel proc is worth slotting, then it seems counterintuitive that the annihilation -res proc wouldn't be. Is there something about the mortar's status as a pet (or pseudopet) that gives a better proc rate to -def than to the ranged AOE tag? Or, is the annihilation -res proc percentage a bit too low, compared to the achilles' heel proc, for it to be a good use of a slot?

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