EnjoyTheJourney

For the OP, if keeping an electric blaster alive is challenging, then consider an electric / super reflexes sentinel. Take the absorb / mez protection power instead of practiced brawler, cap those positional defenses, and put almost everything else into recharge and damage. Build as a hover-blaster for even better survivability, if you'd like. Those who say their electric blaster would out-survive an electric blast sentinel may not have run an electric / SR sentinel before. If they ran one with a good build then they'd probably quickly change their mind about the "blaster vs sentinel" survivability comparison. Edit: Attached are files that can be use to look over a build that I was following for my electric / SR / electric sentinel. There are better builds for pure speed runs and a dedicated 4* character would probably have a noticeably different build (or not be a sentinel at all, in truth). But, it's a kind of "generalist" build in that it works at least reasonably well when exemp'd to a Posi 1 up to 4* runs and for basically everything in between. Having a template for a build is probably better than having no template. Wizard of Lightning - Sentinel (Electrical Blast - Super Reflexes - Electrical Mastery),v2.mbd Wizard of Flames.pdf

A question that comes to mind is "if flashfire isn't taken, then with what would you replace it?" You can take flashfire and still have a good attack chain, good utility powers, and good defenses. Flashfire holds useful IO sets, in addition to offering close to a perma-stun even against higher level mobs once permadom has been gained. And, there will be times when the controls you're using other than flashfire can't affect the large number of mobs flowing into a battle. Also, flashfire can even be used as a one-slot or two-slot wonder if you have enough global accuracy boosts in a build and it will still fulfill its main function, even if for a shorter duration.

I take volcanic gasses. It's a good mule for +recharge sets like Basilisks. It's also quite effective in busy screens because, even though it doesn't benefit from domination, it sometimes double stacks on bosses and holds them anyways. It's a lot like earthquake in the sense that sometimes mobs will be able to hit something through it. But, like earthquake, it tends to noticeably slow down the rate of incoming attacks. It's also a very good "fire and forget" power when you've got multiple spawns in an area and you can't clear out the area for a fair while. A small amount of animation time leads to holds being applied to mobs for a long time. Also, when there are lots of spawns about it allows for controls to be applied to a larger total number of mobs than could be done if you didn't take it.

Plant control has a cone as its key control power. Fortunately it has a longer base range and a wider angle than most cones and you can often pair it with the intuition radial alpha incarnate to make the range even better. You can also use the coercive persuasion set in it and the proc can lead to more mobs than 16 being confused with a single casting. Plus, creepers distract mobs and absorb some aggro. So, despite relying on a cone for it's most important control skill plant control is still an effective and fairly easy to use control set. It's a great choice for doms for general adventuring, in most situations. Thorny assault is not my personal favorite assault set. It relies heavily on short range and fairly narrow cones for AOE. Damage cones are typically harder to use than other types of AOEs and they tend to miss more mobs, in practice, especially when their range is short and they have a narrow focus. If you didn't have a great experience with the cones from symphony control then it's possible you'll have a similar experience with thorny assault to what I've had. Great on paper, harder to get the set to perform close to the ceiling of its potential. Plant / fire, incidentally, is very effective. You can take flame mastery to further leverage the +damage power in fiery assault. If you like ranged attacks then fiery assault does far more damage than thorny assault. My own Plant / fire dom is a druid of the forest, nature-based theme. He is very effective, capable of soloing content in the final mission of a +4x8 ITF at a similar speed to what the other seven players can do when competing for clear time directly with them, at least for most teams (ie: my dom clears one tower, the rest of the team the other, my dom clears one side of the map that leads to Rom while the rest of the team clears the other side). That's not something any other dom I've run can do. But, seeds with coercive confusion and extra range in them, creepers when proc'd up, and fiery assault are strong enough to do that.

For the OP, SomeGuy is a frequent poster in the scrapper forum, with a lot of posts in the very long "Pylon testing" thread. He has a link in his Sig that shows up in all of his posts to a spreadsheet tracking pylon defeat times and the calculated DPS from those efforts. Dominators are not listed often in that file. But, then again not many people seem to be doing much in the way of pylon tests for them. Fire assault comes up a lot for the highest DPS dom builds, which is not surprising because fire assault does have very strong single target damage. The 375 DPS total given earlier for a fire / psy / ice build shows up about in the middle of the pack for the close to 500 pylon tests listed. That doesn't mean 375 DPS is average for all builds, though; that spreadsheet is loaded with very high damage builds being run by players who are typically excellent at executing single target attack chains (I am not in that category, for the record, as most of my pylon defeats are pretty shambolic in their execution). Also, some of those particularly high DPS builds are boosted by amplifiers or use of an assault hybrid, which the fire / psi / ice build is not. It's just wrong to call psi assault a low damage assault set. Flat wrong. Full stop.

It's fair to say that psi assault is not the most damaging dom assault set. It's wrong to call it a low damage assault set. As pointed out by others, assault sets should be evaluated for what they allow a character to do, and not be eyeballing DPS numbers that were generated in a way that's detached from a larger build. Check out the fourth build that's given on the following webpage ... It's a fire / psi / ice dom that did 375 DPS in a pylon test. Multiple other such tests were ballpark with those numbers, as well, with similar or comparable builds. 375 DPS is quite good, even if its not the highest total possible across all dom builds and all ATs. Psi assault has a few things going for it that make it hit harder than you'd believe just by eyeballing peak DPS numbers for other assault sets. 1. Drain psyche reduces the need for slotting or incarnate choices that help with managing endurance. Thus, a fire dom running hot feet full time can still comfortably pick a damage alpha, which increases both AOE and single target by *both* the amount of damage hot feet does and more damage beyond that from having a damage alpha, as well as having a proc'd up hold with a short animation time available to further boost single target damage. There is no downtime for those bonuses to damage and there is never a need to devote animation time to activating a powerup skill. As a sidenote, I can't remember that last time somebody factored in the animation time or downtime for aim or a power up skill when calculating DPS. Doing that doesn't give an accurate picture of in-game DPS. 2. Even after reductions from AV resistances and purple patch effects the regen debuff from drain psyche noticeably reduces regen for hard targets. That affects pylon times, which some might see as artificial. But, it also affects actual in-game defeat times for mobs that live long enough to be affected by drain psyche, and so it's a relevant factor in-game. 3. The single target skills can be combined with a single strongly damaging skill in a primary to form a smooth single target attack chain. Even if subdue is used as part of the attack chain because of the choice of a low damage primary the effects of subdue's low DPA are ameliorated by its ability to slot in the +damage unique IO from a dom IO set.

The gap between "floor" and "ceiling" performance for dom builds tends to be very large when compared to a high proportion of other ATs. When a dom build is at its floor domination is often not active (which means mez protection is often not available when it's needed), defenses never really came together, resistance to debuffs is poor or nonexistent, controls recharge slowly and don't last that long, and attack chains have low DPS and have noticeable gaps in them. Attacking solely from range tends to be ineffective because of low-to-very-low DPS and it's too dangerous to stay in melee and fight there. Basically, dom builds at their performance floor suck. Fortunately, the performance floor for dom builds isn't a good basis for judging how a dom can perform when the build is carefully put together and resources are invested in making it perform at or near its performance ceiling. You can try dom builds out for free on the beta server if you're interested in seeing how your symphony / psi dom can work once a strong build is put together for it. PS: Don't buy the message that psi assault is a low damage set. It's not, especially when a build featuring psi assault is well put together.

For ranged AOE a fire / energy / mu blaster is very strong. With a decent amount of recharge and good slotting, then pre-casting boost range and build up or aim with the gaussian +damage proc a sequence of ... fire breath, fireball, electric fences, fire breath, fireball, ... ... functions a lot like a nuke, except on a repeated cycle with little downtime. In my experience no amount of mobs can stand up for long against a consistently repeated cycle of these three powers. Mu's electric fences only has a 10 foot radius. But, after aim + gaussian proc or build up, fire breath, and fireball a lot of mobs are down anyways. So, electric fences can be focused on whatever is left over. The snappy animation and good DPA make electric fences highly worthwhile, though, for an AOE-focused blaster. Incidentally, boost range makes fireball's range close to 88 feet, which is more than sufficient to hit the ten target cap pretty regularly in busy screens.

I've been tempted to roll one as well. In case it provides food for thought, here's a build I worked out earlier. Damage is in a very good place (especially single target) and defenses are pretty good, especially once T4 barrier core destiny incarnate and melee core hybrid incarnate are in place. Edit: To avoid misleading, when examining attack powers click off domination so you get a better feel for where accuracy sits. Domination only provides a 15 second bonus to accuracy or to hit (I forget which) and 75 seconds without that bonus before it's activated again. So, it's better to have it clicked off when looking at accuracy totals. Dominator (Mind Control - Radioactive Assault - Psi Mastery),Vigor alpha.mbd Mind Rad Psi Dom.pdf

For the martial secondary there really isn't a solid replacement for rune of protection from the sorcery pool to help with managing mez. It's your "go to" power to manage mez when inner will is recharging. Thankfully, the sorcery pool has relatively good other powers you can take to gain access to rune of protection. Mystic flight takes the unique winter's gift IO that increases resistance to recharge / movement debuffs and it has a teleport power with it. It's also a way to hover just above combat while being able to fight in melee with, say, Lord Recluse in an MLTF. Much safer to melee from the sky sometimes because if you position right then your blapper won't get hit with PbAOEs or cone attacks. It's actually pretty cool to deliver those single target martial kicks from the air because the animations are pretty good and if you're above the fray then you can actually see them. Spirit ward is a good way to make the team's tank stronger. If you're getting speed boost from a kin, which is not that unusual, then you won't need to worry about endurance at all and you can just go ahead and run it full time. If there's no speed boost, though, you'll need to be more careful about end, but you can still pick times when it will be quite helpful. Incidentally, a procc'd up burst of speed can hit quite hard if you rapidly cast it three times in a row. It's an unusual power and it's easy to forget about it because nuking is not its usual function, nor does the spell description emphasize that you should think about it as a damaging AOE. Definitely a good power to remember, though, as it helps noticeably for clearing mobs.

I had a bit of time, so here is a sample build below ... It has some sturdiness, although that aspect of the build could be tightened up if that was desired. Resistance to recharge / movement debuffs is decent at 50%, though, and mez protection is in good shape with 3 powers providing it. All three powers providing mez protection (inner will, rune of protection, melee core hybrid incarnate) function as break frees. Incidentally, the recharge bonus from reaction time is quite noticeable and it doesn't show up in Mids "global recharge" total. I've found that mobs affected by reaction time and trying to target your blaster tend to move slower than other mobs around them as they look toward your blaster, which helps for spotting them soon enough to reposition. That helps for safety. Damage is pretty good, overall, and was the main emphasis in putting together the build. You could take siren's song to make this a better build for soloing. There are quite a few reasonable variations on this "foundation" for a sonic / martial blapper build. Once again, good luck with your blapper, should you decide to make one. Blaster (Sonic Attack - Martial Combat - Flame Mastery).mbd Blaster Sonic Martial Flame.pdf

You can make a sturdy blaster with sonic / martial as the primary / secondary. Blaster damage is good, so damage shouldn't be a problem. Some thoughts follow ... If you take inner will, rune of protection from the sorcery pool, and melee core hybrid incarnate, your blapper has good mez protection overall. That way you free up the destiny slot for a T4 barrier, which helps toughness. Musculature core can work just fine for the alpha. For powers, consider taking 4 from sonic (scream, amplify, screech, dreadful wail) and 8 from martial (all except throw sand). Sorcery (mystic flight, spirit ward, rune of protection), fighting (boxing or kick, tough, weave), leadership (maneuvers, tactics, perhaps vengeance), and speed (hasten) pools. That gives you 5 single target powers, so you'll always have a single target kick or sonic attack available. For AOE you get the nuke, a usual PbAOE in the secondary, and a third AOE in burst of speed, if procc'd out (which you can use 3 times rapidly in a row to spam damage). For epic pool, you can go fire for some combination of bonfire / char / fire shield, for mace and high smash / lethal defense by taking just the armor, or for soul for dark embrace / oppressive gloom combination. Force mastery has some attractive power choices, as well. GL with your blapper, however you decide to move forward.

It's a bit tough to come up with another set that works as well as fire if ranged play is your preference. If you're open to other ideas, then take a close look at earth assault. Earth has 3 potentially very hard hitting single target attacks and a bit of a stinker in its T2. With mind control you can replace the T2 assault power with a procc'd up dominate from the primary, taking single target damage to a better place. Also, mind control tends to lean heavily on terror because two of its key control powers have very long recharge. Since Earth assault has multiple good knocks and a hold in seismic smash those powers can help to supplement the control provided by mind control. Note also that the usual single target attack chain has 2 holds in it (dominate, seismic smash) for 10 mag hold being delivered when domination is active, while doing good damage. That amount of stacking for hold mag makes a noticeable difference when fighting hard targets such as AVs, etc. Plus, you can get force feedback +recharge procs from earth assault that bring back those long recharge mind control powers noticeably faster and let the heaviest hitter (seismic smash) get used more often. The phrase "earth smash!" gets repeated a fair amount when talking about earth assault. For good reason. It's a fun set to play. Below is a sample build, in case you or somebody else would like to take a look. It's a good build for general adventuring through most content, including when exemp'd down. Mind Earth Psi Dom.pdf Dominator (Mind Control - Earth Assault - Psi Mastery).mbd

Fire breath is decent for a cone and you'll have no other AOE with as much availability and as much ability to do damage anyways, at least not from range. Also, consider taking incinerate over flares. The damage per second is noticeably higher and incinerate allows you to slot a melee IO set, which can be used for some good bonuses of whatever kind your build needs. Even if you prefer ranged combat sometimes mobs will get up in your dom's face; you may value having hard hitting melee attack for such occasions. Also, not sure why fiery embrace wasn't mentioned as a "keeper" power, but it's a very good way to increase damage and it would help your dom quite a bit to take it. Imps on a dom will probably die pretty fast on higher difficulty levels. A dom doesn't have buffs or a heal to help keep imps alive the way a controller does. Also, with a dom you have plenty of means of delivering good damage without imps, unlike a controller. Finally, if you plan to stay at range then perhaps you can drop hot feet.

Grav / Earth / Soul works. In fact, using wormhole to get fuel for soul drain works really well. Plus, the knocks in several earth assault powers and the hold in seismic smash help to make up for the limited amount of control in Gravity. Consider taking Vigor or Cardiac alpha because earth assault really chews through endurance. Mind / Radiation / Psi works well as a "science" origin character. Functionally it's very solid. Electric / electric / mu should work fairly well, overall. Dark / dark / soul is thematic and effective. Soul drain helps to increase dark assault damage, which is helpful. Incidentally, consider putting the +damage unique IO in the dominator AT set into midnight grasp. With good recharge you can have 2-3 stacks of that that IO's damage bonus a lot of the time. Also, proc up both smite and gloom to take their damage to another level. Plant / ice / leviathan for a coral creature that mutated and became sentient. Pretty solid combination, grab water spout for defense debuffs. Gravity / energy / primal forces for that mad scientist in a suit of power armor GL on your quest to find more fun dom combos. There are plenty of them.

This is true for some situations, but not for others. Barrier is so strong that when it can be kept constantly up by a team then slotting IOs to shore up defenses isn't necessary (or even necessarily helpful). That's why arcane is right in saying that building for defenses in hard mode is the opposite of the current meta. It's also true that speed runs at +0 don't really typically much in the way of defenses. Burnout and doubling up on inferno is a very good substitute for defenses in a variety of situations for those kinds of runs, especially if there's more than one "triple fire" blaster in the team. Thus, at the lower end of the difficulty scale and at the top end improving defenses with IOs often won't do much other than lead to missed opportunities to do more damage or to enhance other good things a character can bring to a team. Also, if there's no real need for you to deal with much aggro because your other teammates will look after that for you, then you don't need defenses for that situation either. So, when might building for good defense / resistance totals be helpful, then? Here are some examples ... 1. "Master of" runs for which there's no incarnates at all and limited other resources available. 2. When only the alpha incarnate is active for a TF / SF and none other, plus inspirations and other good team buffs are not available. 3. When your dom, defender, blaster, or other "squishie" is the one taking alpha / aggro because no other character on the team can take a significant amount of aggro and survive. 4. Soloing high difficulty content such as AVs / GMs / ... Looking across these different situations it would seem that if somebody wants a "min / maxed" dom then there will be at least two builds: one build would have good defenses and the other would have very minimal defenses and would push as hard as possible maximize damage (and perhaps debuffs / buffs). The fifth scenario is if somebody does lack experience playing the AT then it can make good sense for them to build with defenses in mind. Tis more challenging to learn much, and it may not be much fun, to have one's dom consistently "kissing carpet" because of a lack of experience.

After testing that out on the beta server it's clear that you were right; if a power can't take a SO for an aspect you are trying to improve, then HO's will ignore it. How this was tested ... Level 50 dominator on the beta server, Link Minds with 3 slots, 1 LoTG def / global recharge, + two other slots With two +defense / +recharge level 53 Desynchs in Link Minds the in-game recharge time was close to two minutes. The only way recharge could take that long with those HOs in the power is if the "+recharge" portion of those Desynchs were being ignored. As another check, the HOs were removed and in their place two attuned +defense/+recharge set IOs were put into Link Minds (1 LoTG def/rech, 1 red fortune def/rech). Recharge time for Link Minds dropped to a little over 90 seconds, which is the recharge time expected when the "+recharge" portion of the set IOs is working. Thank you for sharing that information. That will help my dom builds, going forward, and also help some others as well. PS: I edited the last version of the build in a post a little further up to replace the HO's that had bonuses which were ultimately not working as intended with a generic recharge IO (ice slick) and 2 defense / recharge set IOs.

After being reminded of how little endurance usage matters for a psi assault dom, the build got revised. Intuition radial alpha replaced vigor radial alpha. A bit of accuracy got added to some powers to make up for the loss of accuracy from vigor radial alpha. Damage went up after these changes. For reference, files containing the revised build are attached. Dominator (Ice Control - Psi Assault - Psi Mastery).mbd Ice Psi Psi Dom,V2.pdf

Doh! Drain psyche is of course the answer. I ran a fire / psi / ice dom quite a bit back before a one year layoff from the game. I'd forgotten how little end burn matters once drain psyche is slotted up and you have good recharge. Agreed also that ice control tends to run most naturally as a kind of blapper, especially with drain psyche and psychic shockwave also benefitting from being in melee.

Characters tend to get fulcrum shift buffs more often when in or at least close to melee, in general. So, melee is often the place to be to maximize the damage you bring to a team. Characters that operate mostly at range can have better "on paper" damage and lose a lot (or perhaps even all) of that "on paper" advantage in dealing damage based solely on those in melee getting fulcrum shift more often. On that note, I've only done one run on a 4* ITF with a dom along. IIRC it wasn't a full team. The team members were highly skilled and the usually represented ATs / builds were present (solid tank, kin corr, at least one cold corr, ...). The dom I brought along pretty much lives in melee range, which based on things I've seen written in multiple posts is supposedly a Bad Thing for at least some ATs (apparently including doms) when doing 4* runs. Good thing I'd never heard that (at the time) because, despite me being pretty much a noob at 4* runs, my dom was defeated once by a hostless nictus when, IIRC, a few of us had one attached to us at the same time and then was defeated one more time by Rom in the very last battle. There wasn't a lot of defeats for the group as a whole, which speaks to having highly skilled teammates. But, my dom didn't stand out in a bad way for defeats compared to other characters. She got more buffs by being basically always in melee, though, including a regularly cast fulcrum shift. Regularly receiving fulcrum shift buffs took her damage to another level (of course). With regularly gained kin buffs, 2 quickly recharging AOEs, and steady chip damage from chilling embrace she contributed noticeably to the team's AOE damage, especially if compared to what most melee ATs would bring. And her single target damage was also very solid. When she was alone with other mobs around, which did happen sometimes, especially in the caves in mission 2, I never felt that she was in trouble just for being on her own. And she wasn't, at least for that run. She was effective at neutralizing hostless nictus by casting a mag 6 hold on them; the low death count for the party probably had at least something to do with having a dom along who could quickly neutralize hostless nictus. Movement and recharge debuffs in hard mode content work the same as for any other content and she brought that to the group. She brought a lot of defense debuffs, including one that's auto-hit and that really slows down mob movement (quicksand). Debuffing movement speed is particularly impactful in the ITF because melee is where mobs in that TF tend to be most effective; fewer allies being swarmed in melee leads to noticeably fewer ally defeats, other things being equal. She also brought heat metal from her epic power pool and had a -resist IO in it. Her debuff contributions were solid and noticeably more impactful than what most other ATs would bring to the table. Maybe that was a lucky run. Maybe the pessimists had experiences with doms that weren't built or run near the ceiling of what their powersets would support when they formed their opinions. Maybe it's a bit of both. But, the pessimists seem at least a bit overly pessimistic, overall, about what a dom can bring to a 4* run. Edit: Originally put "unresistable" in a place where "auto-hit" was the correct term. Should have been more careful with word choice.

One of the cooler things about this game is how a pretty wide variety of reasonable builds can be put together even when powersets chosen overlap by quite a bit. And, those defense totals do look quite good. Plus, you have smash / lethal resistances at 75% without any other help. I love damage, though, and that's my excuse for running lighter on defenses. There will be times when more defense would be quite helpful, though, of course. Your dom's endurance burn seems so high I don't know how you run the build. Is ageless required to run the build, or am I missing something about how it functions? FWIW experience taught me that having a good amount of movement / recharge debuff resistance was quite helpful, especially against higher level mobs and especially for doms for whom recharge is so valuable. After a fair amount of experimentation 50% resistance to such debuffs seemed like the "golden mean" for many builds because it made my characters much more resilient against incoming debuffs and relatively little was being given up to attain that total. You may not be having a similar experience with those debuffs, though, and so perhaps there's just no reason for you to bother with that.

Mids does reduce recharge values for mind link and also increase slow debuffs on mobs for ice slick when the appropriate Desynchs are put into them. I take it that Mids gives bad data about that, then?

Below is a draft build for an Ice / Psi / Psi dom build. It's meant to provide a balance between defenses, control, and damage. Procs were mostly focused on boosting single target damage. Hopefully somebody finds it helpful. Will probably test drive this build on the beta server, having put it together. Should be interesting to see how well it does. Ice Psi Psi Dom.pdf Dominator (Ice Control - Psi Assault - Psi Mastery).mbd

There's probably at least partially a perception issue in play. A dominator built for damage can be a high end damage dealer. The lack of nukes for doms and 10 target caps for most dominator AOEs puts limits on how high AOE burst damage can go. But, single target damage can be very high and higher end sustained AOE damage is attainable. Noticeably helpful debuffs can be brought along, as well, more than a blaster or scrapper is likely to be able to access. But, "control with some damage" is the lingering perception of many, many doms are built that way anyways, and that affects hard mode recruiters' thinking. For example, a plant dom can help a lot for huge scrums with seeds and creepers. And there are a fair number of huge fights in hard mode Aeon and some in hard mode ITF. A fire / psy / ice dom can do a lot of both single target and AOE damage, as well as debuffing enemy regen / defense / resistances by a large amount. Other builds can at least come close to the damage potential these particular powerset combinations can put out. Edit: Take a look at the spreadsheet SomeGuy maintains for pylon runs and cross-reference it with the thread on Trapdoor runs, both in the scrapper forum. Dominators don't have a large number of entries in those threads at the highest end of the performance spectrum. But, doms do have representation in them that would generally be viewed as excellent performance. That doms can also bring along noticeably helpful debuffs and control, along with very high damage, would seem to argue for a place in the "hard mode" meta for at least some dom builds.

Attached is a build for a water / energy / mu blaster that can function just fine as a blapper / jouster. Survivability tools for this build are quite good overall, despite not being softcapped. That's helpful while you're in the earlier stages of learning how to blap because your blaster will kiss dirt less often with good survivability tools. Also, while Mu Mastery can reasonably be swapped into something else and some will recommend that, give it a whirl with mu mastery before swapping. The armor is quite good and the extra AOE animates quickly, has good DPA, recharges reasonably quickly, offers an AOE immobilize, and is really helpful when paired with water burst for defeating large spawns when the nuke is recharging. This build has 50% resistance to movement and recharge debuffs. That's not to be underestimated in how it helps your blaster to be more effective. FWIW I took barrier core destiny incarnate and assault radial hybrid for this build, in addition to the incarnates listed for the build. Good luck with your blapper / jouster, however you decide to move forward. PS: Water blast has a well deserved reputation set as a low single target damage set, which usually isn't ideal for blapping. But, this particular build has solid single target DPS because of the two hard hitting blaps from energy manipulation and two heavily procc'd up water blast single target attacks. Summoner of Waves - Blaster (Water Blast - Energy Manipulation - Mu Mastery).mbd Summoner of Waves - Water NRG Mu blaster.pdf