EnjoyTheJourney

My comparisons between assault sets presume a particular build focus on building up semi-decent defenses, with good peak survivability defenses, instead of ignoring defense and resist totals and instead relying fully on kill speed, aggro management, and controls the way some do. So, my damage baseline calculations tend to yield higher damage totals than those who highly value consistently high defenses and lower totals than those who completely ignore defenses. Also, I have little experience with thorny* and martial, and so I can't say much about them based on my own experiences. Likewise, my experience with arsenal and electric assault are limited. I may not have maximized damage for all sets, as well*. So, some caveats are in order. For single target damage fiery assault is top tier. Still, sonic assault is reasonably close to fiery when procc'd up. And, sonic assault noticeably debuffs enemy resistances through its aura and through single target attacks, which leads to sonic assault probably contributing the most to single target damage when on larger teams. Energy assault also has very strong single target damage. The initial math that I did looks good for arsenal assault single target damage, although I've not tested it yet. Dark can be made noticeably better by putting the +%dmg proc from the dominator set into midnight grasp. My own results with dark assault suggested that it belongs in tier 2 for single target damage. But, Voltak had very good results in pylon testing with dark assault and I'd rate his work as being closer to the true ceiling of dark assault than mine was. If a primary with a potentially strong single target damage power is taken, then the gap between top tier single target damage assault sets and others noticeably narrows. So, if lift from gravity control or the single target holds from fire control or mind control are in a build, then earth, psychic, radioactive, and even ice* can do noticeably better damage. These sets have their damage improved by being able to drop a lower DPA power and replace it with a strong single target damage power from the primary. Savage sits not too far behind the rest, with a quickly recharging, heavily procc'd up feral charge making it perform even better in game than pylon tests would suggest; the ability to teleport between targets shortens up the time spent moving between targets, which increases damage done. ---------------------------------- * I've been told that thorny assault can deal top tier single target damage when procs are maximized without regard for the effect on defense totals and I believe those who've said that. Also, in pylon tests martial emerged as the strongest set because its +damage power adds damage to pets; builds made especially for pylon testing using lots of pets did extremely well with martial assault. Finally, my initial assessment of ice assault was overly pessimistic. After posting that, I later found some opportunities to proc ice assault out better and the gap narrowed to about 10-15% for ice, which isn't a large enough gap to be overly concerned about.

Here's another take on a build. It's defensively quite a bit stronger because of unleash potential and life drain, in exchange for doing somewhat less AOE damage. Smite makes a decent replacement for havoc punch, in case you'd like to stay thematic for your mastery pick. Sentinel (Dark Blast - Super Reflexes - Electric Mastery) (2).mbd

One of the key advantages of savage assault over other assault sets is feral charge. When proc'd up feral charge has similar DPA to a proc'd up maiming slash. Essentially, feral charge fits comfortably into the savage assault single target attack chain. But, feral charge hits up to 5 targets, instead of just 1 for maiming slash; it's usually mechanically better to use feral charge whenever both maiming slash and feral charge are available. Beyond hitting more targets, though, feral charge also teleports to the intended target. This cuts down on travel time to switch between targets, which increases total damage done. Also, recharge time for feral charge can be closer to 3.5 than to 4 seconds with a decent amount of global recharge. So, it's frequently available, which offers users of savage assault noticeably better AOE damage than many would probably expect. And if all those benefits weren't enough, feral charge accepts the force feedback +recharge proc IO. When using feral charge as a regular part of the attack chain, and without any local recharge in it, on average you'll get several +recharge procs per minute. Beyond the mechanical benefits, though, it's a lot of fun to be Nightcrawler, teleporting all over battlefields nearly at will. Savage assault pairs particularly well with ice control. Instead of taking ranged fire while moving into a new spawn and then taking even more attacks after your ice / savage dom arrives, just teleport into new spawns for more rapid application of arctic air to enemies. Also, teleporting around within a spawn with arctic air slowing enemies down means they are less likely to catch up to your ice / savage dom and hit them with their melee attacks.

In case this helps, I had an ice / earth / fire dominator build that I had put together, but have not yet tried. The default defense totals may look a bit underwhelming. But, much of the time controls will substantially limit incoming damage anyways. Plus, power up can boost unleash potential for much better defense totals when incoming attacks start to stack up; unleash potential should have good uptime, especially with force feedback +recharge procs in both of the AOEs in the build. Melee core hybrid and barrier core should also help further with defense totals, as well as with resists. The recovery boost in unleash potential is particularly nice for ice control because endurance burn from arctic air is high even when it's slotted with a lot of endurance reduction. Having unleash potential supported by force feedback +recharge procs should allow for taking barrier as the destiny pick, instead of ageless. Unleash and +recharge procs also makes it easier to exemp down below 50 and to still be able to manage endurance. Unleash potential also make it easier to select musculature over cardiac for the alpha incarnate pick, for better damage. Dominator (Ice Control - Earth Assault - Fire Mastery),v3.mbd

Here's another potential build. To get a better view of how the build functions, toggle on power up and unleash potential to see how defense totals and recovery look when you cast power up, then unleash potential (in that order). Also, toggle melee hybrid core on and off, and also toggle barrier on and off, to see what peak survivability tools are available during times when incoming attacks and damage are much higher than usual. For the single target attack chain, basically just use stone mallet after every two of the other single target powers (hurl boulder, heavy mallet, and seismic smash) have been used to keep a pretty close to continuous single target attack chain going. Hurl boulder will activate the build up proc about 22.5% of the time. Given how hard heavy mallet and seismic smash hit that probably leads to better damage in most situations than using a damage proc in place of the build up proc. If your dom is damage capped a good percentage of the time then a damage proc is better than the build up proc. Hopefully some ideas here prove helpful, even if you go in different direction for your final build. Dominator (Dark Control - Earth Assault - Fire Mastery),v2.mbd

There are undoubtedly better builds out there. It's not a cheap build. But, it should work just fine for most content. Best of luck with your TW scrapper, however you decide to build. Nightswing - Scrapper (Titan Weapons - Stone Armor - Soul Mastery),v3.mbd

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.

Everybody has their own preferences. Traps won't appeal to everybody. I like it quite a bit, though, and I don't find it to be slow. I like toe-bombing in the middle of enemy spawns with poison trap, trip mine, and acid mortar. If nothing else is ready then I'll drop a triage beacon, which has the panacea +regen / recovery IO in it to give allies get a nice buff when fighting that particular spawn. Toe-bombing is a pretty narrow focus as something to enjoy about a set and that preference may not be shared by a high percentage of players. But, when I'm playing my necro / traps MM I find that he is frequently the first to arrive at new spawns and that one kind of trap power or another has already been dropped by the time teammates start arriving. For necro / traps having life drain helps a lot for eating alpha after alpha when diving headfirst into one enemy spawn after another. Not too sure about how well merc / traps could follow that playstyle. Probably by making some build adjustments merc / traps could also be made to work well for a toe-bombing, alpha-absorbing playstyle. FWIW, and in case the OP or others might enjoy a similar playstyle.

Arsenal doesn't have strong AOE. But, it has good DPA for trip mine and you can get a second AOE in a mastery. Drop the armageddon set into trip mine, with the fire damage proc, and put the -20% res PvP IO into the sixth slot. Put the annihilation -12.5% res in ignite, and for good measure put the achilles heel 20% -res into weaken resolve when taking force of will pool powers. Use power up in arsenal assault before using unleash potential for a strong boost to defense totals and endurance recovery. Then you have better survivability and a good amount of -res with which to buff the damage from phantom army. You could get the same -res total with ice assault as for arsenal assault. But, frost breath has really low DPA and a very long animation. So, it's a less efficient way of employing the annihilation -res proc. Plus, frost breath is a cone that uses up valuable time in battle by getting you to move around to line it up, instead of just unleashing PbAOEs and targeted AOEs while you stand in the middle of things. Also, the -20% res melee AOE PvP IO can go in ice sword circle, just as it can go in trip mine. But, ice sword circle has a slower animation and lower DPA than trip mine. Between these two assault sets arsenal can do noticeably better damage overall, while doing just as much to make phantom army shine. Looking briefly at ice assault, the best powers in the set are the power boost clone (power up) and chilling embrace. The debuffs and damage aura in chilling embrace are quite noticeable in their effects. Power up has a fairly modest--but still noticeable--damage boost and some really good buffs when its active. The rest of the ice assault set lags most other sets in the damage offered and the debuffs for those other powers are, as you noted, not that impactful. Also, the two AOEs other than chilling embrace have long animation times that deliver below average damage per second of activation; even adding in the damage aura in chilling embrace other assault sets tend to have better AOE damage. Personally, I'd agree that the debuffs in ice assault, even with chilling embrace doing good work on that front, don't justify the low damage done by the set.

I modified the build I posted earlier. The new build is below and hopefully it proves helpful. I didn't notice earlier that trip mine for arsenal assault natively has knockdown, not knockback. So, the sudden acceleration IO wasn't doing anything useful. Moving that slot to boxing and getting a couple of winter IOs into boxing allowed for removing winter IOs from ignite while keeping resistance to incoming movement and recharge debuffs at 50% (which I find tends to be a functional level of slow resistance). That allowed for another proc in ignite and for slightly better endurance reduction. Efficiency D-Synch IOs are not unreasonably priced. But, if boosting it 3 levels is too expensive then just putting in one unboosted efficiency D-Synch IO would work well. Trip mine in arsenal assault is quite close to foot stomp in how it functions, except the knockdown percentage chance is lower for trip mine (50% for trip mine vs 80% for tanker foot stomp) and trip mine will not trigger until an enemy is close by. If you like foot stomp or other "hit the ground" PbAOEs then you would probably like trip mine. Finally, consider taking a few minutes to review to hit chances for different powers and how much damage per second of power activation time offered by each of the different powers in this build. Toggle on each attack power when reviewing its damage so proc damage is included in the calculations, then turn off those toggles to avoid generating confusing information. So, for example, toggle on lift to see its total average damage, then toggle it off to avoid warping calculations for global recharge that would mislead you about how quickly powers recharge. Also, look at attack powers with power up toggled on and off. Exact numbers aren't needed, "eyeball estimates" would work just fine. There's a functional and smooth single target attack chain here, as well, and that helps for taking down hard targets (basically, use lift as a gap filler after using two of the other single target powers). This isn't the highest damage build that can be put together for an arsenal assault character. But, damage isn't at all bad, either. It might help to have some kind of benchmark, imperfect though this build this, when considering how much damage you can have or would like to have for your own build. On that note, propel is a fun power and if you're taking it because it's fun then there's nothing wrong with that. But, if effectiveness is your goal then it is probably helpful to note that propel does quite a bit less damage per second of activation time than lift, elbow strike, ignite, and sniper rifle, which are all the single target attack powers your build would ever need. Even if you don't like the build overall, there may be things you find useful to either copy or modify. Good luck, once again, however you decide to move forward. Dominator (Gravity Control - Arsenal Assault - Fire Mastery).mbd

Traps is not as quick-moving as a number of other choices. So, in really fast moving teams your MM probably won't contribute as much as other characters, in case that's the kind of thing that might bring you regrets. Also, sometimes force field generator will be destroyed by incoming damage, which can be inconvenient. Still, all secondaries have their weaknesses. Traps is still a really solid choice for a secondary.