EnjoyTheJourney

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

Mud pots does about 13 DPS on my grav / earth dom with just two slots in it. That works out to about 130 DPS every 10 seconds at the cost of a manageable amount of endurance, no animation time, and one slot. Mud pots also slows and can immobilize mobs. Plus, it activates every 2 seconds and it will take out mobs with a sliver of life left without needing to spend time targeting them. It's quite a good power if you take earth assault and you can find a way to manage the endurance cost. Mud pots will annoy mobs and make some of them eager to kill your dom. But, as a dom you have tools to deal with that and making mobs hate you more seems to fit with your goals for your troller / dom.

For a dominator earth assault has a damage toggle, a PbAOE, and a shorter range targeted AOE. The PbAOE and the targeted AOE can take force feedback +recharge procs, which would help to get primary controls back more often. You can probably take another AOE from your mastery as well, if you'd like. As one caveat, all those knocks in earth and the hold in seismic smash would get in the way of letting confused mobs hit each other, in case that's important to you.

Moving the mouse around to both find targets and to click powers leads to a fair amount of misclicks for me and slows down the process of getting things done. This seems like an excellent suggestion that should save some wear and tear on my mouse-hand wrist, as well. Plus, after a bit of reflection it seems likely that I can work out single target attack chains that rely on consistent key press combinations. I'll try this idea out. Hopefully my left hand can learn the muscle memory needed to make this smoothly work.

This may be a dumb question, but if so then it wouldn't be my first dumb question. With the exception of auto-renewing hasten as per the video, is there an alternative to clicking powers that aren't toggles that I've not heard about? Also, for the OP, it was a bit surprising that corners weren't used to gather mobs together because breaking line of sight would have brought mobs shooting from range that were aggro'd on your stalker closer together with the melee mobs, allowing for better target saturation for your AOEs. To be fair, your stalker clearly wasn't struggling and so use the corners wasn't necessary. Perhaps you didn't mind being a bit slower to finish up, which would make sense.

Based on my experience so far it seems like the build up proc may activate more often when using AOE powers. Also, I tend to use it as soon as it becomes available in most situations, unless it is saved for the next spawn (like Due Regard above). For example, to open a fight with a new spawn with my savage stalker I often do the following ... build up savage leap into a spawn assassin's frenzy something placate rending flurry ... and fairly often build up recharges somewhere in that sequence, usually right after using savage leap or rending flurry. If build up recharges in the middle of this then I tend to use it immediately before moving on to the next power in that sequence. It may not be optimal in all cases to use build up right after it's available. But, a general pattern of doing that leverages muscle memory to keep up the speed at which powers are used, which in its own way tends to increase damage and to make playing a stalker a little simpler. Edit: It is perhaps worth mentioning that I tend to integrate savage leap into the single target attack chain, when it's available. Anecdotally, it has seemed that with multiple enemies around savage leap will proc build up quite a bit more often than any of the single target attacks used in the same attack sequence. This was the origin of my hypothesis that AOE powers are probably more likely to proc build up than single target attacks.

People can reasonably differ in how far they're willing to go to maximize damage or in how they figure out which primary / secondary combos interest them and which ones don't. The game is easy enough that following one's preferences is still likely to lead to a mechanically functional build. Taking a step back and thinking in terms of math, with all of the other increases to damage and multipliers of various kinds, procs, etc, a 35% increase in damage for the amount of uptime provided by a build up power won't have a large impact on overall damage. It is at best a low to middling single digit percentage point increase in damage overall, after all the math is done. On a connected point, if anybody wants to argue that psy blast with reach for the limit at 70% extra damage is going to outdamage fire blast with reach for the limit at 35% extra damage, then it would be interesting to see some math showing that. The point here is that there are a lot of factors that (especially collectively) impact damage in a much more significant way than extra damage from reach for the limit; if one only looks at damage math, then the idea that martial is only really suitable as a match for psy blast because of reach for the limit is a bit of a head scratcher. Circling back to earlier in this post, though, preferences don't need to have solid reasons behind them. "I prefer the following ..." is more than justification enough, even when a preference isn't well supported by math.

Sometimes it helps me to put a build into a forum post. This turned out to be one of those cases. The revised build below incorporates eagle's claw and there's a simple single target attack chain for it that leads to more damage than the earlier build. The sequence is blaze - eagle's claw - blaze - storm kick - blazing bolt, repeat. There's a small loss to defense totals and a few defensive powers arrive a little later in the build. It's probably still worthwhile for better damage and more blapping, though. Flamefoot - Blaster - (Fire Blast - Martial Combat - Mace Mastery).mbd

/energy has very easy endurance management, a good heal, good blaps, and a complex pathway to good mez protection. The pathway to good mez protection goes as follows: Take the leaping pool, including combat jumping and acrobatics. This provide immobilize protection, good knock protection, and enhanceable hold protection (more on that later). Take the heal in /energy and use it proactively for stun protection. Take power boost, get recharge to where it's close to perma, and proactively use it before engaging with spawns and mid-fight with spawns that are taking a while. Power boost increases the hold protection in acrobatics from -2 to -3.77, which is enough to ward off one incoming mag 3 hold. There's a sleep hole in mez protection, for which you need break frees and your blaster set mez resistance IO. There's also protection from just 1 incoming mag 3 hold. But, in practice it still functions quite well overall.

Storm kick has no recharge in the power itself. So, it procs well. Numbers below ... Mids lists the average damage from procs in storm kick as follows (numbers rounded to nearest whole number): Hecatomb damage proc - 57 damage Mako's bite damage proc - 30 damage Touch of death damage proc - 30 damage Gladiator's strike damage proc - 30 damage The average damage per storm kick as per Mids is 358, and procs are contributing 147 of that damage on average. It seems reasonable to say that storm kick does much more damage with procs than without; eyeballing the numbers, damage seems to go up by roughly 60-70% by putting in damage procs, compared to not having damage procs*. With storm kick available for use so often the damage procs in storm kick noticeably improve single target damage done by this build. * This is a guesstimate based on the idea that without procs the percentage of increased damage added to storm kick from enhancements would probably be higher, leading to more than just 358 - 147 = 211 damage without procs.

I really enjoy the following build. It's efficient at mowing down enemies, especially in melee range where single target and AOE damage both get noticeably better. Two key draws for opting for a /martial blapper are that there are good blaps available and you can have good availability for mez protection from a relatively early level; for example, it's nice to be able to say "nope" to the ruin mage during a Posi TF when he stuns, holds, or immobilizes your blapper. You may receive quite a bit of advice for how to reduce or avoid mez, with the obvious implication that having mez protection isn't strictly necessary. It is technically correct to say that. But, if you'd like to just wade into the frontlines and fight then the simplest and easiest way to deal with mez is to have mez protection. Full stop. Rune of protection and inner will can help your blapper easily deal with a high percentage of incoming mezzes from a relatively early level; the resistance buff from rune of protection can be very helpful at times, as well. The main blap is storm kick. It is available for use very often. Burst of speed is a melee range AOE, with a suitable animation for a blapper. Eagle's claw is also a good blap. But, because of its slow recharge it doesn't replace any other single target attack particularly well. Dragon's tail has a small 8 ft radius and it usually doesn't hit many enemies; burst of speed is a teleport-into-melee-range-and-attack power that has better range for hitting targets than dragon's tail and that is also available at a lower level than dragon's tail. Flamefoot - Blaster - (Fire Blast - Martial Combat - Mace Mastery).mbd

In case it helps for providing some ideas, I had an ice / earth / fire build already done. To make the single target attack chain fairly smooth, use stone mallet after every two other single target attacks that you use (heavy mallet, hurl boulder, and seismic smash). One adjustment was to drop mud pots for this build to make endurance management easier. Stacked slows make life very difficult for most mobs, though, so it might be worth trying out mud pots to see if endurance management is still manageable with both mud pots and arctic air running. Dominator (Ice Control - Earth Assault - Fire Mastery),v3.mbd

Gravity doms tend to feel a bit light on AOE controls. Wormhole activates slowly and it's only available a little over every 20 seconds, while the AOE hold is available even less often. So, a secondary that offers some soft or hard control tends to pair well with gravity control. Fiery assault is good for damage. But, it doesn't help with control at all. I tend to prefer fiery assault with control sets that offer strong control on their own, without any help from the secondary. Below is a sample build for a gravity / earth / fire dom. Replacing hurl boulder with lift makes for an easy-to-manage and smooth single target attack chain. With three AOEs and an AOE damage aura, and the extra soft control from knockdowns and from mud pots, this build can put to good use the ability of wormhole to pack mobs tightly into a specific location. Also, stacking hold magnitude from seismic smash and singularity works very well on hard targets, even AVs. Finally, unleash potential helps to hold the build together; it substantially increases defense totals when power up is cast shortly beforehand and the added recovery from power up + unleash potential helps for managing the high end drain of earth assault. Gravity control and earth assault are basically peanut butter and jelly, in terms of mechanics, as well as being thematically a really good match. Regarding ice control, savage assault pairs very well with it. Feral charge allows for teleporting into the middle of packs, which works well with arctic air. The Nightcrawler vibe from having a rapidly recharging teleport-to-target attack can be a lot of fun, as well. Best of luck with your dom, however you decide to move forward. Dominator (Gravity Control - Earth Assault - Fire Mastery),v2.mbd

Thank you for noticing that the +ToHit Kismet piece wasn't needed. I'll replace it with the Winter's set +20% slow resist unique to better resist incoming -recharge and -movement debuffs. Three pieces of the gladiator's set were put into tough both to enhance resistances and for 3 points of knockback protection, which when added to the 4 points from the steadfast protection knockback protection IO makes for a total of -7 to knockback. It's not a commonly seen way to enhance tough. But, I'm satisfied with what it does for this particular build.

I've had a lot of fun with the build below. It's a toe-bombing build, meant to take names, alphas, and the lives of AVs and GMs. Played aggressively it can keep up with teams and even lead them into battle with each new spawn. This playstyle flips the script on the usual narrative of traps being a slow secondary. Pylon times hover at 60 seconds and below, which speaks to having solid single target DPS (not top tier, but still respectable). There's a kind of rhythm you can get into, in which you enter a new spawn with all minions on bodyguard, drop something into the new spawn, extract souls if they're ready for that, convert all but the lich into aggressive mode and give them something to target, use the single target attacks to summon critters and/or heal, and then keep the pressure on the new spawn, mixing in single target attacks and traps when available and appropriate. When the team has that spawn in clean-up mode, put the minions on bodyguard and go drop something in the middle of the next spawn. Necro provides a self-heal, which with decent defense and resistance totals helps for toe-bombing. Controls from the primary are also reasonably good, as are debuffs, which further helps toe-bombing with trip mine. The sheer number of minions, plus the taunt inherent in those summoned via the single target attacks, also help to keep your character quite safe in most situations. As one tip, when using this build stagger when to activate barrier and support core so the average "floor" for minion defense totals is kept as high as possible. If you remember to activate one about every minute, then that's a good pattern to keep. That also helps to keep a higher average "floor" for your necro's defense totals. Finally, FFG can arrive late at new spawns and sometimes it gets blown up or it expires (and blows up). It's still very helpful to have a source of mez protection for pets and your necro without taking clarion as the destiny incarnate. Trapped in Twilight - Mastermind (Necromancy - Traps - Soul Mastery),v2.mbd

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.