EnjoyTheJourney

After making my last post the thought occurred that perhaps weaken really does nothing and knockback protection does not get reduced by the purple patch. That could fully explain what I'm seeing. The purple patch affects debuffs that characters place on mobs. But, debuffs are delivered either by hitting mobs in order to apply the debuff or by an auto-hit power (usually an aura with a fixed area of effect, such as venomous gas). Knockback reduction (in percentage terms or in points reduced) doesn't seem to function as either an auto-hit aura with a fixed radius or as an "on hit" effect. So, perhaps the purple patch doesn't apply to knockback reduction.

Maybe a gravity / electric / psi dominator? Although, for a lightsaber, perhaps a re-colored ice assault would work better than electric assault.

Luminara - Knockback magnitude reduction always seemed to be a number that functioned much like character resistances and defense totals and which wouldn't be subject to purple patch effects. But, thinking of it as a "debuff aimed at enemy actions, and therefore subject to the purple patch" makes good sense, on reflection. And, it makes what's been happening in-game easier to understand. Thank you. Frosticus - Thank you for clearly outlining the dividing line between "get knocked back" and "never get knocked back." It could have taken a fair amount of time spent testing to find that out otherwise. For me pylon testing on the beta server functions as one way of gauging whether builds are likely to be fun to play or not before spending a lot of influence and many hours on them. Doing that has greatly cut down on the number of characters that turned out to be unenjoyable to play after they were leveled to 50 and fully kitted out. It seems unnecessary to have 14 knockback reduction for general in-game adventuring. So, I'll just apply some kind of rough, estimated mark-up to estimated DPS to try to account for the time lost to knockback when gauging whether a character is ready to be played or not, instead of designing all characters with 14+ knockback reduction in mind. It's been over a year since I spent significant time doing pylon tests. It would seem that I forgot about all those knocks from that earlier time period.

If weaken doesn't work as per its power explanation then it all makes sense. Thank you. I'll look at squeezing 2 extra slots into knockback protection. It will also boost resists offered by rune of protection, so knocks should be no longer happening from the pylon after that. Thank you for a road map forward. Edit: In the end I took one slot out of enflame, proc'd enflame up for better damage, lost 6.25% recharge by doing that, and put a blessing of the zephyr: knockback protection IO into mystic flight. I'll test it later today. After testing even at 12 magnitude knockback protection from IOs and clarion core T4 going once in a while there's still knockback. That's a bit surprising. That said, knockback frequency went down by a lot, which made the pylon fight more enjoyable. 👍for the advice, thank you again.

A search didn't turn up information, hence this inquiry. It seems like lately rikti war zone pylon knockback has been a noticeable factor affecting pylon times. I don't recall having it be so noticeable in the past when I did a fair number of pylon tests. Has there been a change to pylon knockback in the last year, while I was taking a break from the game? Or, is my memory just in need of a reboot? Also, is the knockback magnitude calculated "per missile", with the magnitude stacking for every missile that hits? Here is the City of Data link for rikti pylon ... https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=rikti.war_zone_pylon.swarm_missile&at=boss_archvillain A sample of things done very recently to better manage knockback for a recent set of pylon tests for a poison / fire / mu defender ... - 8 knockback magnitude reduction from slotting karma: knockback protection and steadfast: knockback protection - keep casting weaken on the pylon, which is supposed to noticeably reduce knockback magnitude - having rune of protection engaged when it can be, which is supposed to subtract 10 points from knockback magnitude, alternate with melee hybrid core - having T4 clarion engaged and set to automatically re-activate Doing a bit of math based on the foregoing, there's a steady 11.5 knockback magnitude reduction (IOs = -8 magnitude and clarity >= -3.5 magnitude). There's a 95% chance of a knockback magnitude reduction from weaken at any given point in time (not sure how much of a reduction, but it should be impactful), based on the "to hit" chance of >95% for weaken against +3 foes. Knockback magnitude reduction peaks in the 30s when clarion is in a "high buffs" part of its cycle and rune of protection is engaged. Knockback from pylons looks like it shouldn't be happening unless knock magnitude is stacking "per missile" when hit. Sometimes this seemed to work because even when hit my poisoner wouldn't get knocked back. But, often it did not work, especially when clarion was in the "low buffs" part of its duration. Any clarity offered would be most helpful and appreciated.

Mechanically it's a bit of a challenging combination, or at least it felt that way when trying to put a build together. Attached is a Mids file for a build I put together. It's thematic in the choice of mastery (psi assault, psi mastery). One mechanical benefit for psi mastery would be better defenses from mind link, which with rotations of force of will / barrier core destiny / melee core hybrid should keep defense totals against melee and ranged attacks in a pretty good place. Hopefully the sample build helps. Dominator (Plant Control - Psi Assault- Fire Mastery).mbd

Thank you for the insights. It seems clear that at least sometimes I was indeed trying to target them before they could be. I'll watch more closely next time to learn more before giving up on the current targeting macro. I have an illusion / poison controller whose ears perked up upon hearing that phants may distract hostless and get them to waste their grab on them.

I find combat jumping very useful because I tend to find running mystic flight all the time hard on my characters' end bars. But, it's difficult to say for certain whether or not you'd get much use out of combat jumping. If end is consistently in a good place (which for /dark in particular may be true), you're really good with the translocation bind, and you're comfortable with dropping down temporarily to drop poison trap then perhaps combat jumping will only serve as a mule for a unique IO and a bit of extra defense at a very low endurance cost. But, perhaps with the last power pick a slot for a helpful IO and a bit of extra defense at a very low endurance cost wouldn't be a bad choice. Or it would be a bad choice. Not sure. Mycella seems like a great pick / find for a character name. Hopefully your controller ends up being a lot of fun to play.

My dom ran a 4* ITF this evening and I tried using a macro to target hostless nictus aspects, with some success and with some failed efforts at targeting them even when they were in plain view. Not sure why a macro would work sometimes to target a specific named creature type, but not at other times. Are "Hostless ..." considered different creatures once they are trying to take somebody over, requiring the use of a different targeting macro? The macro used was as follows: /macro Target target_name "Hostless Nictus Aspect" It is perhaps worth mentioning that when this same macro is used with targets such as Sally, Echoai, Jack in Irons, Atomic Bomb, Kidnapped Salamancans, Walter Daschle, etc, it seems to be totally reliable. Any insight provided would be most helpful and appreciated. Thank you in advance.

Ah, I probably overdid the advice then. You seemed to dislike illusion, and so I mistakenly ended up concluding that you didn't have much experience with the set. My bad on that.

It might help to think of spectral terror as being much like bonfire or earthquake. It controls an area, reducing mob attacks and movement within it. It can also act like a kind of gate, minimizing mob movement into an area, as well as out of it. So, think about a part of the battlefield where you'd like mobs to not do very much, drop it there, and then you can focus your attention mostly elsewhere. With experience you tend to get better at using spectral terror proactively to slow down incoming ambushes, create chokepoints where mobs can be gathered up for AOEs, and so on. If your positioning is off or the battlefield changes, then you can reposition it with about 2 seconds of casting time. Getting the most you can out of spectral terror can be a kind of mini-game carried out within the larger game of playing a controller.

Your results are interesting, particularly vis a vis symphony, which I know almost nothing about. When it comes to illusion, the use of spectral terror can make quite a difference to both safety and clear speed. If you six-slot it with the Cloud Senses set then it provides a noticeable amount of ranged defense and some recharge. Plus, it becomes another layer of minus to hit that complements the dark secondary. Spectral terror is very helpful when dropped near groups of ranged attackers, which the controller dark secondary can sometimes struggle to manage. Ambush spawns, over-aggro, etc, can often be managed more or less entirely just by dropping spectral terror nearby. You'll notice it locks down bosses because it repeatedly casts fear and its fear magnitude stacks on mobs with each casting. Even if mobs are immune to fear the minus to hit is quite noticeable and will help to protect your controller and your party. With dark being a fairly busy secondary it's helpful that you can drop spectral terror and let it do its thing for usually the entirety of the rest of the fight without spending any more casting time on it. Finally, the damage from the cloud senses damage proc will finish off mobs with a sliver of life left while your phants and you are focused on other things. Here is a link to the COD entry for controller spectral terror, in case you'd like to learn more about it ... https://cod.uberguy.net/html/entity.html?entity=pets_terror Spectral terror and phants together improve safety for illusion controllers and their teammates by quite a lot. They complement dark very well for improving safety for your controller and your teammates. Regarding the "AOE vs single target" focus for any given set, on teams AOE is not that often an issue. Enemies will tend to melt whether you play illusion or fire when playing on a team. But, having phants available when the tank goes down against a tough AV and being able to more quickly defeat GMs / AVs (or to solo them if you'd like) makes a team noticeably stronger. Clearly, I'm biased. Those who really like other primaries will also have their own reasons for their preferences.

I totally forgot that. doh! Pairing with melee hybrid core sounds like a good idea. Then you can rotate them and with some care about timing melee core hybrid should routinely be activated when it's time to re-activate indomitable will.

Another straightforward one that you almost certainly know about is indomitable will in psi mastery. With perma-hasten it can be about a couple or a few seconds from being permanently activated. It's available as of level 35, as well, which provides some help with mezzes while exemp-ing down to Manticore TFs and higher. It doesn't offer knockback protection, though. So, taking indomitable will can cost two or three more slots to take than it might at first appear if it's your primary source of mez protection.

It looks like you're homing in on symphony / dark, which seems to be a strong pairing. Hopefully that goes well for you. To briefly answer your questions, there are four main powers from the sorcery pool that can be quite useful for a controller. They are rune of protection, mystic flight, arcane bolt, and spirit ward. They're all quite good at what they're intended to do when in the hands of a controller. Rune can be particularly appealing because it gives you part-time access to mez protection that can serve as a break free inspiration replacement, as well as a resistance boost. It's available as early as level 20 and it's very nice to have on hand when exemp'd down for TFs and such. I don't like knockback, in general, so your reservations about phant knockback make particular sense to me. But, phant knockback becomes noticeably less noticeable as you move deeper into your controller's journey. First, when fighting higher level mobs knockback magnitude seems to be subject to purple patch reductions, or at least it seems that way. Second, as your build fills out (and especially with poison -res debuffs stacked up) phants defeat mobs at a healthy pace, so those things you occasionally notice falling over as they move back a small distance are quite often not getting up again. Third, poison is a busy secondary and you'll seldom lack for things to do. With bodies not flying hither and thither I find that I seldom notice phant knockdown / knockback once powers are slotted up. FWIW, and others may quite reasonably feel differently about phant knockback.

One strong pairing could be illusion / poison / psi, with the sorcery pool, and ultimately with agility core, melee core hybrid, and barrier core. Spectral terror slotted for -to hit and venomous gas help to make up for any shortfalls in defenses. Get perma-hasten for phants and indomitable will. That combo should be able to get around 400 DPS on pylons (or more) and has a mini-nuke in a proc'd up poison trap. Snag psy shockwave from the mastery for more AOE and a bit more mez (plus for the force feedback +recharge proc, very handy for this kind of build). Stealthing missions is easy with illusion. You mentioned illusion as being "chaotic", which it can be. But, a simple way to reduce the chaos is to just not take phantasm. Your ability to do damage doesn't suffer much in his absence anyways, given all the tools available for this build. Without phantasm the build plays quite differently, with spectral terror, flash, and blind typically locking mobs down instead of causing them to scatter.

After some testing with trapdoor runs and with teams, the AOEs were tweaked to improve their damage. The ideas given earlier and Mythical Creature's sample build were very helpful for making adjustments. It's true that accuracy is a bit low for +4s. But, most battles take place at +3 or less, so accuracy has been set to match that. With a year layoff before recently returning perhaps that way of slotting accuracy needs to be re-visited. Is slotting for +3 mobs now a not-so-good way of slotting accuracy? Regarding how the build was tested, nobody would ever confuse me with somebody who is actually good at running Trapdoor. I miss jumps sometimes five or six times in a row, get hung up in the geometry, and make all manner of other errors. But, this particular sentinel now does an easy and relaxed 8 minute trapdoor run, using all defensive measures along the way (absorb consistently up, wait a few seconds until the next spawn if it allows key powers to recharge first for a good alpha, destiny used when up, etc). Single target rotation execution has been adjusted to include AOEs ahead of charged bolts and is now about 280 DPS without working that hard on optimizing damage done. In teams this sentinel is quite efficient at clearing spawns because the AOEs are up so often and they have pretty good DPA. Their frequency of use and quick animations (well, other than the nuke) helps to make up for their ten target cap. This character is intended to be able to serve as the "tip of the spear" for most groups, capable of taking most alphas and being the center of attention for most AVs and GMs while teaming. With that in mind, the attention paid to increasing most resistances not only reduces the risk of one shots, but also causes resistances to hit their ceiling noticeably sooner than they otherwise might as damage is taken (basically, trying to leverage passive resistance increases from SR and make them stronger). Unleash potential from Force of Will also helps when serving as a team's "tip of the spear" because sometimes your character will get defenses debuffed or take big hits when (s)he is taking alpha or getting a lot of love from an AV or GM. Unleash potential is also a way of at least partially neutralizing mobs that bypass defenses via large +to hit bonuses or special abilities. Unleash potential isn't used that often. But, when it is used it tends to be quite impactful. Edit: New build attached Wizard of LIghtning - Sentinel (Electrical Blast - Super Reflexes - Electrical Mastery),v2.mbd

The build at the top of page 2 for the thread below doesn't qualify as "low budget." But, perhaps there are some useful ideas here that can be adapted or borrowed for your own plant / dark dom. GL with your build, however you decide to move forward.

All of the ones mentioned earlier can be very good. Musculature core or radial are also reasonable picks for quite a few builds. For some builds cardiac is almost essential to function unless the psi secondary is taken or a mastery offering an endurance management power is selected. For example, an ice / ice / psi dom will tend to have a hefty end drain from toggles and taking cardiac can be an appealing way to try to manage that.

Thank you both for your feedback. On reflection and after a bit of testing damage could use some improvement. I didn't try a trapdoor run before, thinking that with a quick recharging nuke and two other fast animating, quick recharging AOEs that AOE would be in a good place. But, it took nearly 10 minutes to clear a trapdoor run a little while ago. Both single target and AOE damage were responsible for that because bosses took too long to defeat and minions and lieutenants didn't fall fast enough to AOEs. It may be that force of will should go. That would make room for more and better attacks. I like the use of chain fences and lightning field in the sample build. It should noticeably improve AOE damage. I'll explore some possibilities on the beta server.

Here's a possible build. It will be quite mechanically effective and perhaps it fits with your preferences. Good luck with your character, however you decide to move forward. Edit: Sorry, forgot to toggle off the gather shadows and force of will. Having those toggled off gives you a better picture of default defenses. Pair this build with barrier destiny and melee core hybrid, plus cast gather shadows before using force of will when barrier is in its "lower defenses" cycle if you'd like your vampire dom to come closer to having the toughness of vampires you tend to see in movies and TV shows. Dominator (Mind Control - Dark Assault - Soul Mastery).mbd

It probably would have taken a fair number of hours to figure these things out on my own if I ever figured them out at all. Thank you for sharing your insights. I can empathize with why soloing AVs without insps / temps can be a phase that somebody enjoys doing for a while, but then wants to eventually stop doing. It can be a pretty big time sink. And, enjoying the game with others is usually more fun (at least for me, perhaps for a fair number of others).

Finished a practice run at -1x8. It took about 1:30 after subtracting out some afk time spent chatting with my wife. Left with mixed feelings afterward. It was a good learning experience concerning positioning and influencing AV AI. It was also a good opportunity to work on smoothing out attack chains to make them more efficient. Parts of it were quite fun. The interesting and fun parts were somewhat counterbalanced by the length of the AV fights. Also, the final four AVs sat there and did almost nothing until the first Nictus AV went down (more on that further below). For the Requiem fight I just stayed high enough in the air that his melee range attacks couldn't land (no dark regeneration for you, Req!). Also stayed quite a bit near cliffs / rock outcroppings so he would dance around trying to hit me in melee range. That cut down on running a fair amount. Running away from him as he ran away from me sometimes seemed to draw him back, sometimes not. Following in-game advice received via PM that DOTs can make the AVs run I moved electric fences and ball lightning in my power trays for the final mission AV fight so I wouldn't use them by mistake. Rom still ran, but not as much as I often see him run. The final four AVs fight started out in an unexpected way. I targeted the middle Nictus AV first from as far away as possible with only single target attacks. Shock still did light damage to the AV to Rom's left from time to time, but otherwise the middle AV was the sole target. The healing Nictus to Rom's right tried a couple of times to land an attack. But, other than that all four AVs just stood there until after the first AV (the middle AV) went down. If how I started the final AV fight was a regularly successful solo tactic it would probably be on the forums. But, I've not seen or heard of that before. Perhaps it was a quirk of this run or perhaps it's something that happens so seldom that nobody counts on it or even bothers to mention it.

Based on the damage values showing up on screen your link shows the correct powers and damage. He probably landed dark regeneration and perhaps a life drain shortly afterward to make his life leap upward from 40%-ish to near full. That gives me helpful information to consider when thinking about positioning relative to Requiem. It also makes it clear that having lore pets out in that battle can potentially backfire if he keeps healing off of them. Thank you for the link.

Tried soloing a +4x8 ITF tonight with an electric / SR / mu sentinel. Used no insps, no temps or amps or any such things. T4 musculature core, T4 ageless radial, T4 assault radial hybrid, T4 Ion radial judgment, T3 Vanguard radial lore, T3 reactive radial interface. The first two missions weren't particularly quick, taking about 30 minutes in total. But, they were straightforward and safe. Very inefficient in mission 3, took about 40 minutes to get the first four generals down and to destroy the computer. Attempted to solo Requiem by leading him to one side in the hills, well away from other mobs. Got him to about 40% hit points and then he seemed to heal up fairly quickly almost to full health. Not sure how he did that as no power with that capability was listed on the wiki. So, not sure if I made a mistake or how to correct next time if I did. Was working him down a second time when he got several hits through in a short time spawn. He may have used power drain on my lore pets, which I had summoned a little while earlier to try to speed things up, and perhaps the higher to hit total and some very good luck helped him get several hits through in quick succession. After my sentinel died to Requiem he was brought back into the mission for more practice at that fight. But, Requiem was nowhere to be seen. So, I tried soloing Rom for a little while. Eventually the hour grew late and I gave up. This time. Requiem ran a lot through all phases of the fight with him. Not sure how to keep Requiem from doing that, or at least how to minimize it. Rom ran a lot as well. Not sure how to keep Rom from doing that, either. Ideas considered include soloing at +0 a few times to get a better sense of how the AV fights go and how to manage them. Also, I may need to take a closer look at lore pets to ensure they have substantial -regen. Or not, not sure. Lore pets probably should have been used on the computer because it takes a fairly long time otherwise. Still, it could take a long time to figure things out mostly on my own, so any advice would be most appreciated. Thank you in advance.