EnjoyTheJourney

Currently learning more about criticals and scrappers. City of Data and Mids information may be taken to suggest the following: A. The base critical chance for an attack is 5% for a scrapper, by default. B. If a critical happens then the base damage of a power doubles (ie: a base damage of 50 becomes 100). C. The "Superior Scrapper Strikes" recharge / critical hit bonus IO increases the critical chance by a flat 3% (from 5% to 8%) when it is placed into a power. This bonus is "always on" as long as the relevant unique IO is slotted into a power and it never needs to be activated by any attack. D. The "Superior Critical Strikes" (ie: catalyzed) "recharge / +50% crit proc IO" activates 4 times per minute, on average. E. When activated, the +50% crit proc IO increases the chances of a crit to 58% (8% + 50% = 58%) as long as the unique +3% critical hit bonus IO is slotted into a power and the follow-up attack(s) to a "+50% crit proc IO" activation finish within 3.25 seconds after the "Animation time before effect" of the activating power finishes up. This is a lot to take in, so here's a simplified possible combat event log ... 1. "Initiating power" activates the +50% crit proc IO and the "initiating power's" 1.188 arcanatime casting time begins. - The timer for the "animation time before effect" begins when the "initiating power" is activated. 2. The "animation time before effect" of the "initiating power" = 0.688 seconds - the 3.25 second activation period for the +50% crit proc IO begins immediately after "2" above 3. After 0.5 seconds (1.188 - 0.688 = 0.5 seconds) the arcanatime casting time for the "initiating power" ends. - The remaining window of time for a 58% crit chance is now 2.75 seconds, as 0.5 seconds is lost 4. 1st follow-up attack has an arcanatime casting time of 1.584 seconds and a crit chance of 58%. - This attack both begins and finishes its arcanatime casting time within the 3.25 second activation period of the +50% crit proc IO. 5. 2nd follow-up attack has an arcanatime casting time of 1.32 seconds and a crit chance of 8%. - This attack begins, but does not finish, its arcanatime casting time within the 3.25 second activation period of the +50% crit proc IO. Event 5 is true because ... - The 3.25 seconds of activation time for the +50% crit proc IO became 2.75 seconds after losing 0.5 seconds when the "initiating power" took 0.5 seconds after the animation time before effect ended to finish up the arcanatime casting time. - The sum of arcanatime casting times for the 1st and 2nd follow-up attacks equals 2.904 seconds, which is greater than the remaining 2.75 seconds of +50% crit proc IO activation time. So, the 1st follow-up attack began and ended in a timely way (ergo, 58% proc chance), but the 2nd follow-up attack did not finish up before the +50% crit proc IO activation time expired (ergo, 8% proc chance). Am I misunderstanding anything about how critical strikes function? If so, then where am I going wrong? Thank you in advance for any feedback provided!

Smoke canister + liquid nitrogen is a good combination. Smoke canister reduces mob vision so mobs will be passive longer and it therefore keeps mobs grouped together and in the incoming liquid nitrogen patch. Liquid nitrogen triggers the confusion effect on mobs in the smoke canister area. Also, liquid nitrogen means that even if they resist the confusion effect (ie: bosses) then they'll be slipping and falling fairly often. The cloaking device power seems to be fairly close to a "superior invisibility" clone. It's great for being able to seize the initiative in fight after fight because mobs generally can't see your dom until after you've laid an alpha on them. The AOE disorient is quite good and with good slotting its uptime is quite good as well. Basically, with the caveat that -fly isn't abundant and there's no immobilize (like illusion, for example) arsenal control has an abundance of AOE controls. The pet is a good tank with a taunt. However, it can split mobs away from the rest of a spawn. Overall it's a good power to take. But, it does have that downside.

Not sure how long this will last. But, just finished a 40 second pylon defeat with an illusion / fire / mace dominator. After looking at Mezmera's build and noticing the use of envenomed daggers, which had never occurred to me, I wanted to see how well fiery assault might compare to energy assault. So, I largely copied the parameters of Mezmera's 42 second run and tried to see if I could execute well enough to get a quicker run. It took probably about 10 attempts to get a time this low, with most attempts featuring brain farts or really hamfisted misclicks. Execution even at 40 seconds still isn't quite there yet, though, so it's possible that with more practice the defeat time could become at least a bit shorter. Run Type: Pylon Archetype: Dominator Primary Powerset: Illusion Secondary Powerset: Fiery Epic: Mace w/Tarantula Time in seconds: 40 (1086.5 DPS) Burst: Sustainable but I'd have to resummon the Phantom Army in the middle Hybrid: Assault Core (on) Destiny: Ageless Core Interface: Degenerative Radial Alpha: Musculature Core Number of Runs: 10-ish (took best time) Version: Latest build on open beta v4 Temps Used: Offensive amplifier, Gaes and Envenomed Daggers (No insps or Lores used) Build: file attached (PS: It's not an accident that almost everything looks the same as Mezmera) Dominator (Illusion Control - Fiery Assault - Mace Mastery),PylonContest,v2.mbd

Dominators could be seen as damage dealers, controllers, and debuffers. For damage dealing, dominators can do good to very good single target damage. Not at the level of a scrapper or stalker built to do damage, but even with and perhaps ahead of many blasters. AOE is not a strong point for dominators. But, it probably still lands even with or ahead of most scrappers / stalkers (crits are a key inflection point, here, so probably this is not always true) and below ATs with a nuke and other strong AOEs (blasters, sentinels, corruptors). For control, dominators are the strongest AT in the game because of the effects of domination. For debuffs dominators tend to come in ahead of blasters, sentinels, and melee ATs, perhaps with some exceptions, but noticeably behind many controllers, corruptors and defenders. This does vary a lot by powerset, though, as some powersets have very good debuffs, while others do not. For team buffs, the main ones that come to mind are mind link from Psi mastery and spirit tree from plant control. They are modestly helpful buffs, in general, and most dominators probably don't have them. Also, these two buffs are easily eclipsed in their value by the buffs available to ATs that specialize in buffing. So, while it could be said that (some) dominators have buffs, it's probably more accurate to say that buffs are not a noteworthy plus that dominators tend to bring to teams.

It might help to note that phantom army does knockdown against even con enemies that are not susceptible to knockback (ie: clockwork). It's phantasm that blows mobs all over unless "knockback to knockdown" IOs are used. Here's what seems to be a particularly relevant webpage from UberGuy's City of Data ... https://cod.uberguy.net/html/entity.html?entity=pets_decoy_dominator

Just one hypothesis, may not be true. There are a lot of new players these days. They'll naturally bring ideas about MMO character roles based on their past experiences with them. Not fair or helpful, for sure, but it will sometimes happen. Also, with sonic / sonic being a fairly rarely combo it's likely even some moderately experienced players don't understand what your character brings to the table, at least not in a detailed way. For PUGs you could try stating at the beginning that the main things your character brings to the group are resistance buffs, an anti-mez bubble, and -resist debuffs for mobs. You could even make that announcement into a macro that you press once just before starting out with a new group. Unfair comments will still probably happen. But, especially if you've already explained what your character brings you can politely point out that "reading is good, understanding even better" if others try to deflect blame for their own mistakes onto you.

Distilling the core message down, it seems the following are the basic facts to bear in mind ... 1. Add arcanatime to each attack's base animation time, as well as a very short time period that rounds up to fit CPU cycle times - Do this by clicking the appropriate place in Mids options so it adds in arcanatime and also adds in the "rounding up" effect to adjust for CPU cycles 2. Each power starts to recharge after its animation time, where "animation time" refers to ... base casting time + arcanatime + rounding up to fit CPU cycles 3. To make an attack chain seamless, all powers need to recharge before all other attack powers used in the chain finish their animation times - This last point can be a bit more complex to work out when powers are used more than once as part of an attack chain. But, this principle still holds. As a related observation, 3 - 5 attack powers in a chain is usually a good number. Practically speaking, as more powers are added to an attack chain you're at some point going to be adding in powers that have lower DPA and that you couldn't slot as well because the total number of slots available for attacks will always be limited. So, this totally makes sense. Hopefully I got it right this time. And, thank you for your patience in explaining this.

Thank you for a full explanation. It is very helpful and much appreciated. There is a potentially crucial detail that I may have somehow missed. For a long time it seemed visually like powers start to recharge once they are activated and I've been trying to calculate attack chains with that in mind. But, it seems implied that powers only become available to use again according to the following formula ... power cast time + 1 unit of arcanatime + recharge time ... where recharge time is the result of dividing base recharge time by the total recharge directly in the power plus global recharge (assuming no external recharge buffs or debuffs). Did I get that right? If I did, then everything else about your post makes sense to me and I can (finally!) start working out attack chains in a better way.

After a fair while trying it's still not clear to me how to work out a seamless attack chain. Arcanatime doesn't seem to explain what I often see about how powers recharge and activate. Perhaps there's something about the UI that I'm missing so I don't realize when it's time to click an attack icon. I definitely don't have an easy time looking at cast time and recharge time in Mids and then predicting what DPS is likely to result. Perhaps somebody can explain to this slow learner (and others who read this thread who are probably quicker to figure things out than I am) the art and science of putting together a seamless attack chain without wasting slots or IOs to create a lot of overlap between when attack powers are available that in the end doesn't raise DPS.

This reply comes quite late, so perhaps the OP has already moved on to other things. Which would be understandable. When it comes to builds, a good option to check out is JJDrakken's Random Builds, which is further down on the "Archetypes" forum, below the subforums for each AT. Here's a link to that thread ... I don't feel qualified to provide builds for electricity control, especially on a budget. So, hopefully JJDrakken's Random Builds ends up being helpful if you'd still like to play the dom you are inquiring about here and hadn't gotten to finalizing a build.

A sample build is attached. It's not perfect and ranged defense, in particular, could be improved, as could resistances. Still, hopefully it ends up helping. A few notes on the build ... 1. Getting softcap on smash / lethal damage was a priority. It helps in many situations, although definitely not all. 2. Burst of speed can be cast three times in rapid succession before the power goes on cooldown. This means you would have a "second nuke", as three button presses of burst of speed in close proximity with each other will do more damage than the nuke in your primary. It also recharges faster than the nuke in your primary. 3. Past experience with martial combat suggests that both the absorb and the recovery bonus in reaction time are worth slotting. The absorb, in particular, seems to take care of a large percentage of incoming chip damage. 4. Despite having more damage, dragon's tail was overlooked in favor of psionic tornado. Psi nado has a larger AOE radius, and so it will tend to hit more targets. It can also be used from range, which makes it quicker and easier to use in many situations. A core idea of the build is to "stay in the fight", which involves managing incoming mezzes and having good "peak survivability" options when receiving moderate-to-heavy incoming fire. For incoming mezzes inner will and rune of protection (RoP) help quite a bit. RoP is available at level 20 in this build, meaning that even when exemp'd down for a Positron task force you may be able to have some mez protection. At level 50 melee core hybrid adds a third option for managing incoming mezzes. You'll always want a couple of break free inspirations in case your mez protection gets overloaded by stacked mezzes or for gaps in mez coverage that may appear. For peak survivability you can get certain clicky accolades that temporarily buff your character and you can use the barrier core destiny incarnate and the melee core hybrid incarnate choices. RoP also helps peak survivability by increasing resistances in a noticeable way while it is active, in addition to providing good mezz protection. Blaster (Psychic Blast - Martial Combat - Mace Mastery).mbd

The most natural and believable place to add -fly might be the single target hold. Ice is water and water is heavy. Add enough ice to prevent somebody from moving, factor in all the added weight, and it would tend to make sense that frozen flying things end up dropping out of the sky. Edit: Gravity control already has -fly in the single target hold. So, it wouldn't be breaking entirely new ground for arsenal control to also have -fly in a single target hold.

Global recharge is the key to permadom. The attached build is a "permadom" build. There have been some threads that carefully go over what it takes to achieve and maintain permadom, in case you'd like a closer look at different ways to make one.

Atom smasher is admittedly a slow casting PbAOE. But, if you skip devastating blow and take the melee heal on a grav / rad dom you can end up with the following for single target ... 1. lift (1.03 second cast time) 2. contaminated strike (0.83 second cast time) 3. proton volley (snipe on quickform is 1.33 seconds cast time) 4. radiation siphon (2.23 seconds cast time) That doesn't seem like a slow attack chain. Also, with liberal proc usage single target damage will be pretty good. Try out some builds that don't incorporate devastating blow and you might find the damage such builds can put out to be surprising.

FWIW I (also) didn't miss an AOE immobilize power at all when testing arsenal control on a dominator.

As an update after a bit more testing for the same build as before the best run went down to 58 seconds (789 DPS). The way the run started was that I pressed "start" on timing right after beginning the process of summoning the phants, so that probably no adjustments are needed to the timing for this last test. The key change was to use Geas of the Kind Ones for the 58 second run, which I didn't do for the first run reported about. Frosticus happened to be present when I did the most recent test. I haven't yet finished refining the build that was tested on the beta server. It's highly likely that efficiency for the build I've tested can be further improved. It's even more likely that there are flat out better builds for a pylon test than the one I happened to put together. Looking forward to seeing how high DPS can be for a dominator.

Previously looked at the damage numbers in Mids, the fact that feral charge only takes single target IOs, which implied that it probably did damage to just one target, and also considered the fuss and bother connected to maximizing the radius of rending flurry. Then I thought "nope" and looked at other doms instead for quite some time. Totally guilty of not previously digging deep enough to really understand the set. Still on the fence about the set, even after recently hearing good things about it. Really like the single target skills. Feral charge is a lot of fun. Also, really love the strength of the heal, with the caveat that the recharge even for an endgame build feels a bit too slow to set a high value on the heal. Don't love the cognitive load associated with monitoring the number of blood frenzy stacks to figure out when to begin repositioning to put rending flurry to its best use. On that note, when experimenting with the set I found myself fairly often losing track of exactly how many blood frenzy stacks had accumulated, given all the other things to think about in combat. Thus, I often didn't know which attack(s) I could pick as the next attack to max out the number of blood frenzy stacks before using rending flurry. Also, the need to build up stacks to maximize rending flurry radius runs counter to how teams usually function. Usually teams alpha with AOEs and then clean up with single target damage. With savage assault you'll often want to build up charges with other attacks before using rending flurry. Thus, when on a team it was often no longer worth casting rending flurry by the time I had built up five stacks of blood frenzy. In the end, the need to build up five stacks to give rending flurry the same radius that other dom PbAOEs get by default, without any added bother, made the set less enjoyable to play. YMMV, FWIW. Maybe if blood frenzy only took three stacks to maximize it would be noticeably less bothersome. Or not, as even water blast's three stacks can be a bit of a pain to manage. At least for me, though, maxing blood frenzy stacks at three would probably have made it significantly easier to enjoy playing.

The strongest anti-mez combinations for blasters are ... 1. martial combat secondary, for inner will, paired up with rune of protection from the sorcery pool and the unique blaster IO that increases mez resistance. Get a good amount of recharge into inner will and good global recharge for better uptime for inner will. Can take combat jumping to have really high immobilize protection. Can also pick up melee core hybrid incarnate for even more mez protection at 50, if you'd like, for both martial combat and the next anti-mez option ... 2. energy manipulation for energize, which when cast proactively gives solid protection from stuns. Then layer on combat jumping (solid immobilize protection), acrobatics from the leaping pool (strong anti-knock protection and -2 to incoming hold magnitude that goes up to -3.7-ish IIRC while power boost is active). There's still a sleep hole in this combination and slotting the unique blaster IO that increases mez resistance is worthwhile for this build as well. You'll want good recharge in power boost to make it as close to perma as you can. The second option above (energy manipulation) is a bit more complicated to make work in part because it has multiple powers involved and in part because you need to click a fair amount for power boost, which has a short duration. Martial combat is the easier-to-use option out of those two choices because it involves less clicks and protection provided is relatively broad. But, you're more likely with martial combat than with energy manipulation to have time intervals in which no anti-mez skills are available. For example, inner will and rune of protection might both be recharging for a martial combat blaster when mez happens, while the energy manipulation blaster would have a permanent sleep hole in mez protection and occasional weakness to holds (when power boost is not active), but would have very stable protection against stuns and immobilization. For either option you'll still probably want a few break free inspirations to handle stacked mezzes affecting your blaster or to cover holes in mez protection provided. For both of these options I've found from experience that barrier is likely to be a better destiny incarnate pick than clarion, as clarion just doesn't seem to be needed.

There are lots of ways to put together a reasonable fire / dark build. Just to get some ideas out, one of many potential builds is attached. It's not a perfect build. But, it should still be functional and, with sleet from ice mastery, it should contribute well to team damage. Controls should be in a good place for most content. Perma dom is indeed a good thing to try to attain. Dominator (Fire Control - Dark Assault - Ice Mastery),Vigor alpha.mbd

My main hesitation about providing a build that could be used as a template is that I have little experience making electric control builds and even less experience running them. There are definitely better candidates for suggesting an electric control build than me. Still, having asked the OP for further input it would feel borderline impolite to not respond any further. If nobody else provides at least one solid build in the next day or thereabouts for the OP to review then I'll put something together.

Having worked in academia for a couple of decades it would have been difficult to not notice that one of the worst things that could happen to a team of people working together would be to be asked to evaluate a program of some kind without having a good understanding of its objectives. Inefficient, ineffective, prone to getting sidetracked, prone to internal conflict, and prone to failure would be words / terms that commonly apply to such situations. On the other side, sometimes a team was not only given clarity about program objectives, but those objectives were well thought through and well written. Even better, sometimes a good set of measures for program success was put together, which was quite helpful for minimizing the scope for organizational politics or internal confusion to derail a program. FWIW, and hopefully these thoughts help. Totally get the appeal of the "blank canvas" approach for fostering creativity and for getting unbiased feedback. Just haven't seen that work well in my pre-retirement line of work.

I summoned lore pets and then phantasms to test out whether or not phantasms accepted commands. They definitely do not. They determine their actions through their own AI only. There's a simple way to check, which is to select "options" on the pet menu and show the commands that can be given to pets. Lore pets allow for commands to be given to them. Phantasms do not have any commands listed that would be usable by players. Edit: It's still very helpful to know when phants are out and when they've disappeared. I'll be keeping the pet window always on for my illusion dom. Thank you all for your input.

I've got the pet window consistently open now, after following your directions. It looks like I'll need to summon lore pets to be able to temporarily given commands to the phants. Otherwise there's no option to do that. Thank you very much!

It would be quite helpful to be able to get phantasms to focus on a desired target, when possible. But, the default lack of an open pet window with which to give phantasms commands prevents that from happening. Is there (non-cheating) a way to get the pet window to consistently stay open so when phantasms are summoned they can be given commands? Would those commands work if they're issued? Thank you in advance for any insights offered.

A fairly early report-out on how things have been going for the illusion / dark / fire dominator so far in 4* content. She's still only vet level 27 with T4 incarnates for alpha, destiny, and hybrid and T3 otherwise, so not quite done with her build yet. So far she's done better than expected in a couple of key ways. I still need to work on finding ways to keep her more consistently in melee range while maintaining high survivability, to more consistently get those tasty AOE team buffs such as fulcrum shift. Not sure how this particular build works on super fast damage-optimized teams. If a dominator fits there then it's probably a ranged dominator build with the fiery assault secondary and ice mastery. Those builds can push out serious damage and debuff enemies so the team hits harder. That said, for a hybrid melee/ranged to full melee run, and especially if a "kill most" approach is taken for a significant part of a 4* run, the build seems to work quite well. A brief report-out of some key powers follows ... Phants are great as distractions and to pile more damage onto hard targets. They can be told to focus on hard targets easily when lores are out because the pet screen is then consistently visible. Edit: It turns out that phantasms can not be given commands by a player. Their AI makes all decisions for them, with no player input possible for such choices. Still useful, just can't be directly player controlled. It was fairly common to see hostless at full health for a fair period of time not target any players, possibly because they ended up targeting the phants (or other pets) instead. Deceive has seen less use than expected. Originally it was planned to deceive rather than kill at least some surgeons instead of defeating them. But, everybody targets surgeons out of habit, which is understandable. So, it ended up being simpler to just kill surgeons instead of deceiving them. Maybe I'll find a way to make deceive more useful down the road, though. Life drain has prevented many, many defeats already, as chip damage is very common in highly crowded screens, especially when laying out AOE controls. Group healing was often not enough to keep up with incoming damage and getting 135 - 200ish healing every couple of seconds was a really big factor in surviving those occasions. As one example, on a 4* just last night this dominator's life bar spent significant amounts of time bouncing up and down like a yoyo, even with plenty of good support from experienced and highly skilled teammates. In the end, with 45-ish defeats for the team this dominator was defeated once. That defeat happened when I didn't notice Rom going down and he re-spawned close by and in plain view of my dominator. Life drain can't protect this dominator from driver brain farts, it would seem . Regarding AOE controls, gleam is really good in many parts of a 4* run, including for council spawns, dark novas and dwarves, and even Cims if it's activated before their buffs are up. It's quite useful for the computer in part 3 because as the romulus phalanx wakes up when the computer is being defeated gleam keeps them drunk-walking most of the time. The single target hold functions very well. Rom and Req are susceptible to stacked holds, with Rom spending a noticeable amount of time held and unable to take action. Cim bosses are also susceptible to stacked holds. Where the hold really shines, though, was when fighting hostless. Once a hostless is held their timer for possessing teammates stops, so I've started early and aggressive hold stacking on hostless as they come up. Damage is in a decent place and it jumps a lot (of course) when fulcrum shift or other team buffs are active. It should get better as I learn how to better keep this dominator upright while consistently in the thick of melee, instead of on the fringes of melee or at medium range, even in large scrums and when fighting the AVs.