Parabola

Bio/stone is such a good combo. Once you get the aoe online in the 20's and put ff+rech in everything it's so much fun. I take everything from bio and everything but hurl boulder from stone. Proccing out DNA siphon creates a very functional extra aoe. I nearly always take focused accuracy on every melee character but it's particularly important here. Being to hit debuffed can be a death sentence with how much this combo relies on active mitigation.

I put a build together for this a while ago (never actually played it though). SS/SR with force of will and mu. If you do a forum search for 'brutinal' you should find it.

Everyone will of course have their own priorities when building characters, the beauty of this game is its flexibility in play styles. Personally I always build my characters with the levelling process and then exemping in mind. They also have to be competent at both single target (solid, end sustainable, able to solo an av attack chain), and aoe (able to clear full spawns solo in reasonable time), for as wide a spread of the game as possible. I simply would never play a character that had to wait until lv35 for aoe, or that then lost that aoe exemping down to several of the commonly run task forces. I take the epic aoe in addition to (generally one of) the available aoe in the secondary on doms. Yes, fireball for example is better dpa than whirling hands but it recharges much slower and whirling hands has both the double tap mechanic and a minor control side effect. It also allows the slotting of an extra purple set which is always a boon for dom builds.

Any plant control character not taking seeds or carrion creepers may as well play another set. Those powers are plant control. Also I've no idea where this 'don't take whirling hands' thing came from. Dom's are painful enough to level without waiting until epics for direct aoe (seeds and creepers will provide quite a bit of indirect aoe but you still want a button to push that spreads damage around). WH with it's double tap mechanic makes energy actually decent at aoe. It's almost like getting two aoes in one power, with the benefits that they share slots (very efficient) and are both pbaoes (unlike most sets that awkwardly have to juggle a cone and a pbaoes).

I really wouldn't drop siphon life. With no recharge it fires 3.5ppm procs at something like 70%, and a chain of smite, siphon, smite, midnight is reasonably easily achieved. Put two winters in it (acc/dam, acc/dam/end) and four procs and it hits like a truck. And it heals you.

I'm pretty sure the OP is engaged in some obscure form of performance art at this point.

Fire control has always had extra damage and less control than other control sets. That is how it was balanced from the start of the game. The addition of kb->kd added extra control but it was never supposed to be a balancing factor for the set. I admire your enthusiasm but the entire basis of your argument is unfortunately mistaken.

I'd also love the option to have the travel auras without the trail effects. A couple of them look fantastic when you are still but are far too much when moving. The rainbow and radiant effects for example are dynamic and interesting effects but both make flying a nightmare.

I thought there had been some mention that procs were only going to be addressed by making changes to individual over performing powers rather than a systematic change?

I wouldn't bother with the damage procs in Choking Cloud and slot it heavily for hold and end red instead. It ticks slowly so you need to ensure that the hold duration lasts until the next set of ticks, but it is autohit so you don't need to worry about that. Procs aren't fantastic in auras and toggles and you've got a whole damage set so there's little need to eek out more by proccing powers you really need for survival. Proccing out Char is a good idea though and it can become a serious hitter with its fast activation time. Otherwise your basic plan is sound. Choking cloud is underappreciated in general, particularly when it can be stacked. Procs also don't scourge and as you say they don't benefit from damage boosts.

I've tried both these combos. Elec melee looks very cool with dark armour but in all honesty it really needs some help on any AT other than stalker. It manages the trick of sacrificing single target performance for more aoe and then not actually being very good at aoe. Avoid until buffed. Staff is decent without being great. It has a ton of utility and really benefits dark armour in particular. I was put off it the first time around by the forced redraw every time I used dark regeneration, but redraw 2.0 should have fixed that problem. I might revisit this as I loved the theme I had (might go brute though to change things up a bit). Another suggestion is energy melee. This also layers on stuns, both aoe (less reliably) and single target (guaranteed). It is also very endurance efficient as energy transfer is free. This is another one I have in brute form and it works well enough.

I can give you some general bio advice but dual blades is not a set I'm all that familiar with. Bio lives and dies by the three clickie heal/absorb/regeneration powers. You want to build a basic level of mitigation, e/n/f/c defence soft cap and as close to 90% s/l res as you can get (factoring in the offensive mode debuff), but after that go all in on recharge. Actually brutes are good candidates for looking at running the defensive mode when necessary as fury overpowers the damage debuff so if you're struggling that's always an option. Look for opportunities to slot ff+rech, particularly in aoes. You really want to get parasitic aura up well over half the time and push that uptime as hard as possible. Many other tier 9's are used as a last resort, bio's should be used on cooldown. It goes without saying it needs to be fully slotted for recharge and healing. I like 5 doctored wounds in it when I can spare the slots (all but the heal/end iirc), three boosted heal/rech when I can't. On brutes and scrappers I don't proc bomb DNA siphon but slot it mainly as a heal. As it provides regen as well as an outright heal it straddles the line between reactive and proactive use. Whichever way you use it I find it a good candidate for hybrid slotting - three eradications for the defence and some heal pieces on top for example. The other thing bio loves is any soft control your attack set can provide. Even minor disruptions to the flow of incoming damage can make a huge difference when you are regenerating at the kind of rates bio can achieve, and of course it's all precious seconds for the next clickie to recharge in.

My CoH addiction doesn't worry me too much. My Mids addiction though? Terrifying...

I'm wondering if this isn't better evidence that phantom army is a problem rather than that the GM's need more buffing?

Plant is very strong and it lends itself to the two archetypes in different ways. For controllers it offers huge amounts of effective aoe damage that they don't normally get. Confuse, contained double damage roots and of course procced out creepers combine to do very respectable damage. Ideally you want a secondary that works with this, buffing recharge to cycle creepers more quickly and debuffing defence and resistance to make confuse even more deadly. Rad is a good secondary, the only slight niggle being that the debuff toggles pair something that helps confuse with something that hinders it. This isn't a huge issue though. Storm as mentioned is another good pairing, as is time. Traps and trick arrow are also decent pairings, I kind of enjoy the thematic mix of plant and tech too. Dominators enjoy having the extra aoe damage early on as this is something they tend to lack. They also like the fact that plant doesn't need to take too many powers freeing up room for secondary picks. I suspect plant is the easiest dom to level and the most exemp friendly because of these. In terms of secondary pairings it wants much the same things so thorns (huge defence debuffs) and sonic (res debuffs) are fairly natural fits. As doms are less reliant on confuse to carry their damage (once they mature at least) really anything will work though. I am currently levelling a plant/psi and psi offers nothing in particular to plant but the combination is still enormously strong. A side note for plant on either archetype is I've found it useful to have some form of stealth or -perception. Seeds is obviously your lynchpin control and being a cone it ideally wants to be carefully lined up to ensure maximum coverage. I've also been experimenting with using full stealth to drag the creeper patch into spawns, the downside of this is that as soon as it alerts them you attract aggro so you can't use it to tank in that way. Many spawns are quite spread out and my hope was that I could use creepers to pull them in a bit before firing off seeds but results have been mixed. Nothing beats toggle corner pulling if you have access to that.