EnjoyTheJourney

Was that caused by the first levitate being cast? 😇

FWIW, Ston used Hemo as part of the single target attack chain he posted about for the melee damage testing that he did. He provided the builds used for testing, as well. Here's the link, with the attack chain used for pylon testing listed for each stalker primary given in the stalker pylon testing table ... IIRC Ston stated that he couldn't guarantee all the attack chains he used for testing are optimal, just that they were the best that he found. So, perhaps there are better put together attack chains for savage stalkers. Or not. What's here may still a useful data point, though, even if it's not optimal.

One thought to consider is what you'd like to have your dominator be able to do (and not do). The "don't bother with more than minimal defenses" build approach works best if your dom operates frequently at range, focuses mostly on single target damage, and has vengeance. Then you take less aggro and you have a defense-boosting response if your teammates start to fall and your dom might next on "hit list" for mobs. Inspirations can be a great shorter term fallback for this kind of build. Moonsheep's thorough coverage of the role each of these play is a kind of "textbook" about how to successfully build and play that kind of dom. Another approach is to try to build more survivability, or at least more peak survivability options, so you don't need to lean as hard into inspirations and into having your teammates there as targets for aggro. I favor this approach because I want my doms to take a fair amount of aggro and live through it. To me taking a lot of aggro is a team friendly thing to do and I build my doms so they can do it with (usually) minimal or no inspiration use (at least for most regular content, starred content is of course a different ballgame). So, for example, on an Apex TF I'll usually down a couple of medium orange inspirations, maybe also a purple if my dom has less than the incarnate defense cap, and then go into melee with the pylons when underground. Sometimes that can be a dicy move and some green inspirations get used. But, usually they're not needed. When there are dozens of mobs in a big cluster in an ITF I'll usually have my doms right in the middle of it all and on the ground, getting fulcrum shift without needing to move into position first to receive it, getting as a matter of course while fighting. Face-tanking EBs and AVs, or at least staying near melee range, will often be preferred because if my dom can take getting a lot of attention from an EB/AV and survive then that means less attacks directed at teammates. It's a lot of fun to run a dom this way, in my experience. This approach does have its limits. If a dom I'm running is in the middle of a lot of Cims and defense starts to dip below softcap, then I'd better fix that quickly or my dom will rapidly faceplant. Also, for example, I haven't yet built a dom that can survive being the primary focus of attention for an extended period of time when fighting in melee with an enraged Bobcat at the end of the Tin Mage TF. That's true for a lot of ATs, though, and there isn't any shame in having limits. Finally, in the quest to incorporate good damage, have superior survivability (or at least peak survivability), have permadom, and have a good set of controls, in my experience it's very difficult to avoid having hasten in the build. However, having domination drop doesn't matter very much if you have, say, melee core hybrid T4, as you just engage that if you have mez troubles and rapidly get domination back up on teams by spamming quick-activating powers. If you have a decent amount of baseline defense then you can often just take one purple inspiration and rebuild domination quite quickly without getting mezzed along the way, keeping some form of mez protection in reserve for another time. The sheer willpower accolade can even further reduce the risks associated with having domination temporarily drop. Hasten is such an efficient build choice, so powerful for the investment it takes, that I'd never consider dropping it to have what amounts to a minor QOL benefit. To each their own, though, and it's a great thing that there are quite a few different build approaches that can work well for a dominator. Good luck to the OP, however they decide to move forward.

Telekinesis assistance for breath of fire, which is a fairly narrow cone, can help to at least partially compensate for potentially getting fewer fulcrum shift buffs because of operating at range; bunching up mobs tends to be a really team friendly thing to do as well.

Once you have enough attacks and you don't have a lot of slots left over even if you took more attacks, then how to use any "extra" power picks still available becomes an open question and there isn't always a clearly best answer. It often comes down to what functionality you'd like to boost further, or perhaps a general preference that spans many kinds of builds. I like mass hypnosis for the ability to shut down incoming overaggro, the ability to shut down alpha ahead of using telekinesis to bunch mobs up, and for occasional (aggro-free!) usage on hard targets that have a sleep hole in their mez protection. In the build further up there's just 1 extra slot beyond the base slot for added flexibility to handle mobs up to a fair distance away. So, the cost is not that high for the utility provided.

Not sure how many notes, if any, you wanted to receive for your builds. I looked at build 2 and there's quite a few things to like about it. One surprise was to note that single target damage would be very low because of low damage for key powers and because of times during which all single target powers doing noticeable damage would be recharging, with nothing ready to go. Also, smite does better damage per second of activation time than any other power in dark assault. So, leaving smite at one slot and slotting up midnight grasp instead (which does less damage for the time it takes to activate and is available less often than smite because of higher base recharge) is a puzzling choice. A relatively simple way to at least improve that could be ... 1. Put 5 pieces of the hecatomb set (including the damage proc) into midnight grasp (especially all the recharge IOs in that set) and the superior ascendancy of the dominator (SAoD) +damage proc IO into the sixth slot; put the other unused SAoD IO into cinders. 2. Remove 3 slots from fire cages and 2 slots from life drain. Add those slots to smite. 3. Put the two winter set IOs now in midnight grasp into smite, and then fill the rest of the slots in smite with damage procs. 4. Put two superior frozen blast IOs into fire cages, fully removing the gravitational anchor set. Also, I'm a bit confused to not see the sudden acceleration KB to KD unique IO not in bonfire. Did I miss a change in how bonfire works in a recent patch? If not, then your teammates will be quite glad and grateful if you put a KB to KD IO into bonfire so mobs don't get scattered everywhere when you drop bonfire onto enemies. Hopefully this helps.

Attached is a dark assault build with force of will. To see how unleash potential works with dark assault, do the following: 1. Switch to the "totals" screen 2. Look at defense totals and endurance recovery totals with "unleash potential" and "gather shadows" toggled off 3. Toggle on unleash potential and gather shadows. 4. Look once again at defense and endurance recovery totals. Basically, defense and endurance recovery both go way up if you cast gather shadows shortly before casting unleash potential and they remain higher for the duration of unleash potential (1 minute). Unleash potential recharges in less than 2 minutes for dom builds that have permadom. So availability is good enough to help noticeably for surviving periods where there's a higher rate of incoming damage and to also help at better managing endurance. Also, weaken resolve provides a handy spot for an achilles heel -res debuff IO, which helps damage. Edit: Unleash potential isn't boosted by all damage enhancing abilities in dominator secondaries. Build up powers and fiery embrace, for example, do not boost unleash potential totals. But, unleash potential can still be helpful even for those builds, depending on how that build is put together. For example, I have unleash potential in my build plan for an ice / savage / dark dom to help out defense and recovery totals, as well as for the chance to insert a -res proc and to get a movement power. Dominator (Gravity Control - Dark Assault - Leviathan Mastery),v2.mbd

Below is a candidate build that aims to put the AOE controls of mind to good use and to have reasonably good damage. Fire mastery was selected because it seems both thematic and effective for a mind / fire dom, given how embrace of fire will boost fireball. Having 3 good AOEs should give an effective AOE cycle and single target damage should be reasonable. You can put more emphasis on ranged defense by reconfiguring some sets, if you'd like. But, having unleash potential available does help to make incoming damage spikes easier to weather already. And, being at range tends to make you less of a target anyways. Good luck with your mind / fire dom, however you decide to move forward. Dominator (Mind Control - Fiery Assault - Fire Mastery).mbd

Fire / ice / dark have a solid source of synergy in how they can each contribute to slowing mobs down. Hot feet + chilling embrace + tar patch means mobs would have a very substantial slow debuff total applied to them. Plus, the damage auras would be made more effective by tar patch. To make endurance management more manageable and to boost defenses, unleash potential (force of will) can be taken relatively early. It would be boosted by casting power up in ice assault set shortly before activating unleash potential, for even better recovery and peak defense totals.

Some ideas consider ... 1. Consider adding in power up to your build. Drop a level 50 recharge IO into the open slot for power up at level 47+. 2. You can drop haunt to get power up, as haunt contributes little damage to your build. 3. You can get a set with +10% recharge into heart of darkness to (more than) compensate for losing 6.25% recharge by dropping haunt. 4. Reduce slots in stone spears to 3, use thunderstrike or superior winter's bite in stone spears instead. 5. Put the apocalypse damage proc into dark grasp, replacing one of the lesser psionic damage damage proc IOs. 5. Put some more accuracy into dark grasp to get to at least 95% to hit against +3 mobs. Take out the current D-synch to make room for something with accuracy. 6. Switch off the toggles on the right hand side of the tremor and fissure powers to avoid getting confused about how much global recharge your dom has. 7. Consider putting 4 pieces from the unbreakable guard set into tough or sharkskin, with the +7.5% life unique IO being one of those pieces. 8. When doing "7" above, be sure to keep the +3% defense IOs from the steadfast protection and gladiator's armor sets in your build. 9. Replace the soul allegiance: damage IO with the soul allegiance: build up proc IO. 10. Put the preventive medicine: absorb proc IO into hibernate 11. Put the panacea: +hit points / endurance IO into health. Add a second slot to health and put in the miracle +recovery IO. 12. Several earth assault powers only work when your dom is on the ground. So, instead of taking hover and fly, take combat jumping and super leap instead. 13. Put a luck of the gambler +7.5% global recharge IO into combat jumping. 14. Put two extra slots into combat jumping. In those slots put the reactive defenses 3% scaling resistance unique IO and the unbreakable guard +5% resistance unique IO. 15. Put the Winter's Gift set unique +20% resistance to slow IO into super jump. 16. Look at the current recharge time for seismic smash and heavy mallet. With the +recharge force feedback IOs switched off you'll realize that the usual recharge time for seismic smash is fairly close to 8 seconds, while heavy mallet is under 5 seconds. Balance the recharge on those two skills better and improve overall damage by flipping the hecatomb set into seismic smash and the procs into heavy mallet. Also, drop the damage/recharge IO from hecatomb and replace it with the hecatomb negative damage proc. 17. Although not important right away, as you earn inf at level 50 consider boosting at least the level 50 recharge IOs and all of the IOs that reduce endurance expenditures. You have an interesting take on how to put together a single target damage chain. There's merit to your approach, which involves essentially dumping stone mallet because it's a terrible "damage per second of activation time" power no matter what you do and proccing up dark grasp to replace stone mallet. If you struggle with endurance, and it is possible with earth assault, consider adding in the force of will pool (replace the stealth pool), taking unleash potential and slotting it with a +7.5% recharge luck of the gambler IO and two level 50 recharge IOs. Best of luck with your dom, however you decide to move forward.

I recalled this being mentioned in the "Clear Speed Leaderboard" thread for which Koopak is the original poster. Below is a link to page 4 of that thread; envenomed blades are discussed there ... (Based on your testing, though, maybe there's been some changes in the interim or perhaps the original finding was somehow incorrect)

IIRC envenomed blades also adds damage to pets. Not sure about the amount added to pets. Also not sure if toxic damage is added to phantasms or not, as they are flagged to not receive buffs from external sources.

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.