EnjoyTheJourney

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.

A couple of very basic questions just came to mind. Beyond function, is there a specific theme or character-driven concept in mind for this build? Or, is it curiosity about how these powersets would play, or ...?

A couple of questions that help when offering feedback are in what content you want to play your dominator and how much of a budget you are willing to spend for your dominator. Also, what mix of teaming and solo play do you prefer? As "first pass" feedback mostly focused on using Mids remember to turn off stealth in Mids when looking at defense totals, and then add 2%-ish to the total you see without stealth activated in Mids. All but about 2% of stealth's defense total suppresses when in combat, so it overstates your defenses to leave it always activated when planning a build. Also, leave power up switched off as well when reviewing totals in Mids (especially defense), as it is typically activated under 50% of the time anyways and leaving it activated in Mids can create confusion about how high your dom's defenses are when power up is down (which it usually is). As a bit more feedback on power selection, heavy mallet and seismic smash are two of the hardest hitting powers in the earth assault set. They hit much harder than project will. Also, mud pots is a very endurance-intensive power that doesn't do much to help your dominator. It's probably better to come up with a build that leaves out the two latter powers and introduces the former two powers.

To add one more set of experiences to the list, I ran a PI radio mission with an endgame-build arsenal / arsenal / mu dominator at +4x8, bosses enabled. If the primary hadn't been used it would probably have been nigh undoable. But, the AOE controls from arsenal control made the mission quite safe. There were only a couple of fights that were semi-challenging and that's because on those occasions I was a bit lazy re-applying controls after initially laying them out. The liquid nitrogen / smoke canister combination worked particularly well for slowing down incoming damage. The single target hold would be used for the occasional boss that wasn't controlled well enough by that combination. Problems with overaggro did come up. But, they were solved by layering on more AOE controls, which arsenal control has in quantity. Edit: After a bit more reflection about why it was a smooth and easy mission to take on the new CoT, cloaking device allowed this dominator to deliver an AOE control alpha in every fight. No going around a corner, getting surprised, and then eating alpha and all the associated debuffs from the entire spawn before being able to react. That undoubtedly helped a lot.

Arsenal control and traps can work together well if fold space is part of the build. Strong AOE control patches, a pet that seems to stay where it is and taunts mobs into swarming it, and the location-based nature of traps can all work together well then. That's a bit of a narrow niche, admittedly, and the pet is a mixed blessing for other kinds of arsenal / traps builds. For doms, it's unfortunate that arsenal assault has anti-synergies with arsenal control. Testing them out made that clear. Not completely sure how that happened or why it wasn't corrected. In a sense, both of the sets across two ATs that would thematically fit best with arsenal control are functionally awkward. And, the "wet" mechanic doesn't help those anti-synergies at all. The hypothesis that comes to mind is that arsenal control and arsenal assault were designed for a kind of internal consistency for how the powers functioned within each powerset, with possible synergies across powersets given low priority. It's a pretty complex undertaking to design a powerset, with a *lot* of detail involved, so it's understandable that those involved would want to narrow down the number of variables to consider. Wasn't part of those conversations, though, so that's just speculation on my part. Arsenal control has the virtue of being a very good set for newer players using SOs and playing on lower difficulty levels both while teamed and (especially) when solo. The patch-based AOE controls are easy to understand and it would be intuitive to stack them together. The pet is an absolute gem for soloing on +0x1 notoriety levels because its taunt and toughness will reliably bring entire spawns over to the dom and it won't be easily defeated while doing that. So, it does have that going for it.

So, noob question ... I couldn't find a combat log file in any file format on my PC. Do I copy and paste the combat log from the in-game "combat" chat channel into a .txt file, save that, and upload that file to carnifax.org?

Tried a PI radio mission on a grav / savage / fire dominator at +2x8. Had no idea what changes had happened to council, went in blind. A level 53 eclipse galaxy archon rezzed after I downed him, doing a lot of damage. He landed what may have been the warshade human form single target hold just after that and a lot of noticeably impactful DOT damage ticks started. Used blood craze, which is a really hefty heal, and started fighing with that boss. At some point the boss then did 766 damage in one hit, and about 340ish on another hit a few seconds later. Some other damage was mixed in and my dominator was down. It was such a sharp step upward from other council mobs that it was a bit confusing. It may have boss level hit points, but it hits more like an EB would usually be expected hit. Cool. 🙂👍

Maybe the name and the conditional triggers could be re-considered? For example, perhaps any power that would soak somebody with water can trigger the "soaked" condition. This nomenclature is intuitive and not quite as obviously sexually suggestive as "wet." Also, establishing a "soaked" condition perhaps leads to a narrower and probably easier-to-visualize boundary between powers that should or should not trigger the "soaked" condition than would be true for a "wet" condition (the term "wet" suggests a lower bar for power inclusion than "soaked" would suggest).

Run Type: pylon test, dominator pylon time contest entry Archetype: dominator Primary Powerset: illusion Secondary Powerset: fiery assault Time in seconds: 64 (727 DPS) - adjusted to 63 (736.5 DPS), see next post Burst: sustained Hybrid: assault radial, activated (also offense amplifier activated) Number of Runs: 2, first run was extremely inefficient Version: Open beta version (sleet already nerfed) Notes: see below Build: attached Notes: The pylon tested against was an "unleveled" pylon, meaning purple patch effects are probably not present. Thus, no adjustments for pet damage seem likely to be needed? Also, this build is a "pylon build" that wouldn't do well in-game. Was interested to see how high damage could be pushed by going all out to increase it. This pylon test was done on the test server. FWIW, the coming nerf to sleet has definitely already taken place there. Not sure how or whether to adjust testing results for that. Leaning toward "leave as is" instead of trying to extrapolate a higher value, given the number of variables involved. Also, began timing as soon as phants were cast, which doesn't fit the "start at first damage" criteria. Not sure whether to deduct all or part of the 3 second cast time for phants when calculating time. Personally leaning toward leaving the timing at 64 seconds because in the past I've seen the earlier-arriving phants start attacking things almost immediately after being cast. I've tried Carnifax's calculator before, but found it hard to use. If there are concerns about this run then I'd be fine with having Koopak or somebody else watch this happen. My chances of winning the dominator pylon test are probably zero anyways, as there are plenty of higher-achieving pylon testers than me. Dominator (Illusion Control - Fiery Assault - Ice Mastery),PylonContest.mbd

If you prefer to fight mostly in melee then you've got a number of good choices to consider. Fire / psi and plant / psi are both very good suggestions. Other good primary / secondary pairings include, but are not limited to ... fire / earth (endurance would need to be managed carefully, but very solid combination) plant / fire (this works best mostly from range, but it's really strong for clearing spawns) earth / savage (earth slows things down or immobilizes them and savage provides good mobility options) illusion / dark (very strong single target damage if procc'd up and very survivable) ... Basically, you have lots of good choices. Perhaps you can suggest some thematic combinations you'd likely find particularly interesting and share the kind of content into which you'd like to bring your dom(s).

Agreed, on reflection. On beta I only tried arsenal control paired with arsenal assault. There are anti-synergies there and I muffed the build by not including KB to KD IOs. Didn't really see arsenal control at its best that way. But, arsenal control can work well with either a ranged assault set like fiery assault or the more melee-focused assault sets (which is most of them). On the controller side, one potentially good pairing is probably poison. Getting a /poison troller safely into melee range to get venomous gas applying to mobs is made noticeably easier with smoke canister.

It's good policy to not make a lot of last minute changes to a set. Totally understandable point of view. Glad to see that the hold was swapped to T2, that was a helpful change. Arsenal control seems likely to land as a set that could use some love, in the future. Hopefully that idea can be borne in mind, going forward.

Illusion control on doms?