EnjoyTheJourney

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

Riffing off the last post ... Necro / poison MM called "Health insurance CEO" Lich is named "Complicated Rules" 2 grave knights are named "Preapproval" and "Recission" 3 zombies are called "Refuse Valid Claims", "Screw Over Doctors", and "Poor Data Security" Dark blast summon = "Refuse Valid Treatments" Gloom summon = " Political Contributions" Life drain summon = "Poorly Trained CS (CS = customer service)" This would probably be at least a bit funnier if so much of it wasn't true.

Your build seems fairly well put together overall. One potentially useful change would be to drop flares and take incinerate in its place. Then you can shift slots and the hecatomb set from boxing into incinerate and you then have a melee attack that does reasonable DPA. As a minor suggestion drop damage / recharge from the posi sets and put the other IO you're not using in there instead, at least for roots. The reduction in proc rates often makes slotting the damage / recharge IO in the Posi set unappealing. As one more thought, if you can get more movement / recharge debuff resistance into your build then your dom will function better in a variety of situations in which movement / recharge debuffs are plentiful.

Here's one possible build ... The Mids used is pretty close to the latest version. But, hopefully you can see it anyways if you use that file. In case you can't there's a PDF also attached that you can read through. GL with your dom, however you move forward. Mind-Savage-Psi Dom.pdf Dominator (Mind Control - Savage Assault - Psi Mastery),Vigor alpha.mbd

If you strongly value moment-to-moment availability for AOE controls then fire control is ahead of mind control. But, just as fear is ignored by some mobs, stun is resisted by some key mobs (ie: Nemesis once vengeance engages), as well as knockdown (ie: Cims can be effectively immune to both knockdown and stun unless they're applied ahead of when they buff up). Also, mass confusion has such a long duration that you can follow it up with confuse on a variety of types of EBs and they will tend be confused. For example, in a little over 10 seconds a mind control dom can confuse several EBs in the EB / general spawn in mission 3 of the ITF by casting mass confusion on them and then following up with confuse. A lot of EBs and even many AVs can be affected by confuse, while stun and knockdown are frequently not useful against such mobs. Both the single target and AOE sleep in mind control can be situationally very useful. The variety of tools available to mind gives mind doms at least something they can effectively do against the clear majority of mob types. Fire control can have all of its AOE controls, except perhaps fire cages, become ineffective against certain enemy types. In the end, it feels more limiting to have no AOE controls beyond perhaps an AOE immobilize that can be used effectively against a variety of mob types than it does to have to carefully consider when to use AOE controls that are available. YMMV.

Fire control is very good for players who want a dominator that does high damage. The fast animating hold can be proc'd up for very high single target damage and hot feet can contribute 150+ hit points of AOE damage every 10 seconds or thereabouts. Fire cages can also do a noticeable amount of damage when spammed, particularly if the unique ATO IO that does damage is slotted into it. With an assault set that can do very high single target damage, such as radioactive assault, earth assault, savage assault, energy assault or fiery assault, you can end up with a dominator that plays like a higher end DPS character. Regarding controls, the one control power that fire control has which outshines similar powers in other sets is bonfire. It's up more often than other, similar powers in other dominator control sets and it does more damage. Every other control power it has is either similar in its ability to control mobs or at least somewhat inferior to similar powers in other sets. It doesn't have a confuse power, either, which is sometimes highly valuable. One reason why fire control was selected so seldom in the poll could be that if somebody wants to do superior AOE damage, which fire control is quite good at supporting, then plant control shines above all other sets for that (including fire control). If single target damage is the focus then mind control is highly competitive with fire control for that and mind control also offers more consistently effective AOE controls than fire control. If AOE controls are the focus then earth control substantially outshines fire control, especially with stalagmites being quite noticeably better than flashfire. Edit: As a thought to finish up, fire control functions absolutely fine in-game. The game isn't difficult enough to make it important to maximize everything and if a character concept calls for fire control as the primary of choice there's no reason to shy away from choosing it. Somebody may quite reasonably really enjoy how fire control feels when it plays and that's more than enough reason to pick it. If fire control shines at any one thing, it would be that in a single build it can support noticeably higher than usual AOE damage for a dominator and it can also support top tier single target damage. Plant dominators will generally do noticeably less single target damage than fire control dominators. Mind control dominators effectively have good "burst" AOE through the periodic use of mass confusion and the use of terrify. But, mind control offers noticeably lower sustained AOE than fire control because of hot feet and fire cages.

A player coming to sentinels for the first time after extensive experience playing other blast sets can't help but to notice that sentinel cones perform noticeably worse and are harder to use than the cones they've been using for years on characters built using other ATs that use blast sets. That observation can quite naturally lead to feelings of disappointment vis a vis sentinel cones. It doesn't help that sentinel AT cones perform substantially worse and are harder to use than sentinel targeted AOEs and PbAOEs.

You're far from alone in finding sentinel cones disappointing. The extent of the performance and ease-of-use gap between sentinel cones vs other kinds of sentinel AOEs makes the cones stand out as exceptionally weak performers and also bothersome to use. FWIW, for me the power slot assigned to a sentinel cone in any sentinel power set is effectively a "blank space" and that "blank space" always gets filled in with a different power. As one piece of good news there are patron / epic targeted AOEs and PbAOEs. They have 10 target maximums and they don't all suck.

Another issue to consider is how to avoid or resist mezzes; without a plan for managing mezzes they can quickly and at times frequently put a damper on efforts to blap, and also cause some difficulties for jousting. As part of that planning you'll probably want to consider the level range in which you'd like to blap and joust. For example, if you consistently prefer level 50 content then you can pick clarion as the destiny incarnate, find a way to minimize problems with knockback, and you're probably OK stopping there. If you're rich and don't mind spending quite a bit of money on amplifiers at the P2W vendor then that's another solution that's available. If you'd like to blap / joust while leveling to 50 or to exemp down fairly often after reaching fifty then you may end up preferring certain blaster secondaries over others, at least for your first blapping / jousting character. A few ideas about managing mezzes as a blaster ... Potentially valuable anti-mez options outside of blaster secondaries that can be accessed while leveling include combat jumping (immobilize protection) and acrobatics (strong knock protection and hold protection of 2 points (that can be boosted to 3.57 with power boost from energy manipulation). Both acrobatics and combat jumping are in the "leaping" power pool. Rune of protection in the sorcery power pool is also available as early as level 20, which can be used as a break free when mezzed. You'll need to take two other sorcery pool powers before rune of protection can be selected. Rune of protection can be used as a substitute for a "break free" inspiration. On that note, break free inspirations are also available and probably should be carried when possible. At the incarnate level clarion destiny and melee core hybrid can be taken to increase protection against mezzes. Finally, the unique IO in the "(superior) defiant barrage" blaster set provides resistance to mezzes, which also helps. When looking across all the blaster secondaries, martial combat and energy manipulation offer particularly useful protection against mezzes. Energy manipulation only directly protects against stun through the "energize" power. But, energize can be paired with combat jumping, acrobatics, and power boost to enhance protection against multiple challenging mezzes. Energize can be made perma, with enough recharge. But, you end up with no sleep protection this way. Also, energize needs to be cast proactively because while your character is mezzed you cannot cast energize. In contrast, inner will in martial combat protects against a wide variety of mezzes, including sleep. But, inner will has a default recharge time of 180 seconds and only 30 seconds of uptime after it has been activated. So, you'd probably want rune of protection, break free inspirations, and/or some other solution for managing mezzes during downtime for inner will. In the end you can only reduce the frequency with which your blaster gets mezzed, and not bring it to a complete stop. But a substantial reduction in time spent mezzed still leads to better blapping and jousting. GL with your character, however you decide to move forward.

Was curious about how a build such as above might be put together. What's attached is a possible draft build. Play around a bit with toggling on gather shadows and unleash potential to see how high defenses go when you cast unleash potential with gather shadows active. You can toggle on melee core hybrid and look at barrier buffs at different time frames when it's active to get a sense of the defenses that are possible for the build. Look at the heal from life drain with and without gather shadows active, as well. The build has 50% resistance to slow and recharge debuffs, which when paired with good defense totals tends to help out quite a bit. This build does have some weak points in its overall defenses (ie: energy and negative energy resistances). But, it's still quite sturdy overall. Single target damage is reasonably good, especially for a build this sturdy. AOE wouldn't be a strength of this build. But, the confusion auras should increase overall damage output to help compensate for that. Going back to theme, this build can represent a quite tough void creature that messes with mobs ability to act freely and effectively, both with physical and psychic effects. When it focuses its attention on one creature it can do quite a bit of damage. Edit: The earlier version, now deleted, didn't have the +3% defense uniques in the build. That oversight was corrected in the attached version. Dominator (Ice Control - Dark Assault - Psi Mastery),v3.mbd

A void-themed character might be an ice / dark / psi dominator. Ice control can represent the freezing nature of most voids. The "arctic air" (ie: void) aura is so bone-chilling cold that it slows, causes fear, and makes many creatures lose all sense of who is their enemy and who is their ally. The reasoning behind the choice of dark assault is obvious, as is the reasoning behind to hit debuffs that dark assault imparts. Draining away another's life force to heal oneself could also make sense. The "head tricks" played by such a void-connected creature are represented by the confusion aura, as the closer you get to the void-creature, the more it clouds your thinking, even beyond the effects of arctic air. As you might expect for a creature of the void, psi mastery provides for better defense against incoming psychic damage, better status protection, and resistance to smash / lethal / psychic damage. After all, how many primal earth beings would understand the mind of a creature of the void? Void radial judgment would be a natural pick for judgment. Vigor could be a good pick for alpha to increase the number of procs that could be used and also to manage the higher-than-usual endurance costs of this kind of build. More than just a themed character, if built well this could be a character you enjoy over the longer run. Good luck, however you decide to move forward.

You may end up liking electrifying fences from mu mastery quite a bit more than cutting beam. Electrifying fences has a quicker cast time and much better DPA, as well as having a higher target cap and being easier to use. Immobilize is a helpful secondary effect, as well. Sometimes getting just one more good AOE into a build can change how it feels to play it in a very noticeable way. FWIW, and in case it helps.

Sentinels can be thought of as well armored blasters with lower burst damage, but often with comparable or better sustained damage across all spawns than a blaster. Spawns tend to consistently melt quite well when a nuke is up every 25-ish seconds or less and there are also 2-3 quicker recharging AOEs available. And, BR for sentinels facilitates that role by providing good AOE (3 in the set, if you don't mind cones, plus perhaps one more AOE from a mastery). If you focus more on spawn deletion as a goal via the regular use of AOEs and the occasional use of single target skills on leftover bosses and lieutenants, then you're really playing more like an AOE blaster. Spawn deletion through relentless AOE and debuffing hard targets with vulnerability may be the key roles that sentinels play particularly well. Also, being able to dive into combat head first in almost all situations, surviving almost any alpha thrown at your sentinel along the way, can sometimes help a team go faster. Single target plinking is for ATs afraid of drawing a lot of aggro. That is not how a sentinel needs to be played in the clear majority of situations. Bring on the aggro, with more aggro almost always being better because it means less fire directed at the rest of the team. My own bias is that I'm drawn to characters that can successfully run one build and handle a wide variety of content, such as being exemp'd down for Posi TFs, running 4* content, iTrials, +4x8 "Master of" runs, speedrunning TFs, and being on PUG teams that are composed only of inexperienced players driving bad builds. A reasonably well built sentinel can deal with all of that, so I'm drawn to them. Opinions can reasonably vary, of course.

The OP is on to something when saying that it's hard to pick "best" powersets for dominators. They can all play quite differently according to which controls they best support, whether they're better at single target or AOE damage, and the extent to which they can buff allies or debuff enemies. The masteries can provide quite different defensive tools, as well. In the end, different players tend to assign different value to the controls a set brings to the table, to single target vs AOE damage, to burst vs sustained damage, to the amount and kind of defenses powersets offer, and to the buffs / debuffs available. A lot also hinges on how well specific primaries, secondaries, and masteries mesh together. Another non-trivial influence on choices is the kind of content players like to run (a solo AV hunter vs an endgame teaming speedster vs always-on-a-budget players). And this probably isn't an exhaustive list of significant differences in what players might value when ranking powersets. I chose earth / ice / psi for my picks. Earth offers strong AOE controls and valuable debuffs, making it my favorite primary. Ice is my (new) favorite secondary, although radioactive is a very close second choice for that. Ice offers a good balance between AOE and single target damage when key powers are proc'd up, power up enhances defense totals and damage, and chilling embrace is a strong and versatile power. There are some really good synergies with certain other sets for the ice secondary, as well. For example, the movement and recharge debuffs in the ice secondary pair well with knockdown fields such as earthquake. Psi mastery is unique in what it offers, so it's fairly predictable that views about it are split. I like everything about psi mastery other than the AOE damage pick, which offers strangely low DPS for such a long cast time. The confusion aura more than makes up for the bad AOE damage spell, though, and because it takes zero cast time to do its thing it's easy to underestimate its value in both keeping a dominator alive and in speeding up spawn deletion.

Attached is a defender version as potential food-for-thought. Wouldn't claim that what's here is necessarily superior to what you've done. But, perhaps there are some ideas you might like. Or not, not sure. Good luck with your poisoner, however you decide to move forward. Defender (Poison - Electrical Blast - Mu mastery).mbd

Dragons with two or more elements may not be common in fantasy literature. But, if the OP wants to roleplay a dual element dragon there doesn't seem to be any harm in that. Tiamat might agree with this line of thinking. 🙂

Here's a potential "dragon" build ... Damage should be pretty good overall. It can be made better by stacking weaken resolve and melt armor on hard targets, when you can. The -resistance unique IO can be swapped into weaken resolve if you'd like more uptime against hard single targets (ie: if you team a lot and fight a lot of AVs). Intuition radial is a good choice for improving damage. The key reasons to take intuition radial over musculature are that increased range makes fire breath a lot more effective and the boosts to hold and to slows are very helpful for the build. Stone cages isn't something I tend to spam for an earth dominator, in part because the visuals make it harder for melee and in part because the damage is so low. Unless you're willing to spam stone cages, though, the dominator IO AOE damage proc won't make much difference. So, it has been left out of the attached build. Regarding defenses, dragons are seldom glass cannons. Usually, they're not easy at all to take down. This build offers more toughness than a lot of other dominator builds you might see, with unleash potential, barrier, and melee core hybrid. Unleash potential has about 33% uptime without any external speed buffs and it softcaps ranged defenses (without assistance from barrier) while its up. Barrier has 30 seconds of extreme toughness, followed by 90 seconds of somewhat better toughness (huge defense / resist buffs for 30 seconds, followed by a 7.5% defense buff and a resistance buff for another 30 seconds, followed by a 5% buff to defense and resistances for the final minute of its duration). Melee hybrid will help to increase toughness during the "low buffs" portion of barrier. As an easy-to-miss benefit of this build, and in exchange for all that influence spent on winter set IOs, resistance to slow and recharge debuffs sits at 65%. With recharge being so central to dominator effectiveness that ends up being helpful. Also, the buffs to fire and cold resistances and to ranged and melee defense can be helpful, at least at times. So, those winter sets can noticeably toughen up a "dragon" dominator. If you'd like another AOE you can swap out consume and swap in combustion. It may be better to stick with consume, though. The cast time on combustion relative to its damage is so high that it's tough to justify taking it and keeping consume raises the odds that you can get an endurance refill if and when you need it. Dominator (Earth Control - Fiery Assault- Fire Mastery).mbd

About the beam / SR sentinel ... Beam is great on sentinels. It has a chain AOE with up to 10 targets, giving it noticeably better AOE than beam on any other AT. SR is one of the tankiest secondaries for sentinels. Plus, SR gives you a lot of freedom to slot other powers as you like because it's not that challenging to softcap positionals.

My own experiences with Ion judgment are that it can draw a noticeable amount of aggro when it hits dozens of targets distributed across a large area. Many of the mobs hit may not have aggro'd onto anything before that and they will target your blaster, chances are, if you wake them up with an Ion judgment. Thus, ion can backfire for a build with a strong lean in the direction of damage-without-defenses or "defense through teammates." With a view to maintaining a limited and controlled amount of aggro you might like pyro better for judgment. It also fits thematically with a fire / fire / fire character, in case that matters. Also, and especially if you ultimately choose fire breath over rain of fire, intuition radial may end up being more to your liking over musculature core. In exchange for giving up about 3% of your total damage or less (when various buffs are considered), compared to musculature core, intuition radial provides its own solid boost to damage and some helpful utility, including ... 20% more range. Basically, move less, blast more, and get noticed by mobs less often while getting into position to blast away 33% increase to slow debuffs for mobs from hot feet, 2/3 of which will not be reduced (other than by purple patch, no getting around that though) increased hold duration in case you pick up char from fire mastery ... and you probably want char because it's a very good pick for triple fire build and it is in Nemu's suggested build for your blaster. Whichever route you pick hopefully you thoroughly enjoy your blaster.

Beam for sentinels is well regarded and EA is a very solid pick for a secondary. The chain AOE in beam rifle is very good, as is the quick-recharging nuke. Psi is the "go to" mastery for many sentinels because of strong DPA for multiple attacks. But, if for thematic reasons that seems like an odd pairing for your first sentinel there are other good masteries. Mu mastery can give you a quick-recharging targeted AOE with good DPA and mag 3 immobilize if you'd like that, for example. Prepare to be pleasantly surprised with how effective your sentinel can be solo or on teams, especially after the build all comes together.