Coyote

Really? 🥺 I'd rather look at Defense set bonuses, but I don't mind a consideration of damage procs... and my Blasters proc out multiple attacks, usually at least a ST Hold. There are lot of reasons to consider the issue that aren't based on Blaster Insecurity Syndrome.

Illusion/Traps, Earth Control/Thermal are good options. Illusion version is more effective, Earth version is a lot cheaper. Another interesting option is Fire/Dark Controller... Dark's -Damage will neuter the damage of almost all AVs, and with its -Regen and -Resist, the damage from Fire Imps will whittle down the AV. And Fire/Dark does more damage otherwise. An interesting option might be Dark/Psy Dominator. You can perma-Confuse the AV to take care of defense, and the strong -Regen from Drain Psyche helps with doing damage. 3 pets do decent damage and you can sneak in some attacks between Confuses, and Sleet is available for -Res.

Grav/Storm is an excellent pairing. Leviathan would fit well with it, though I'd rather run Mu personally. /Storm does need KB->KD IOs, as does Wormhole.

The Regen increase wouldn't matter to Bots since they'll shut down Regen, but... 80k DP every six minutes is over 200 HP/s worth of healing that has to be overcome. Behind some high resists even aside from Unstoppable. I thought it was about 30k heal, and that seemed doable... 80k is probably out of reach. I remember draining Nosferatu before Incarnates... but at a lower level, he didn't have the top AV resistance to debuffs. I doubt that Khan can be drained by a /EA without another source of draining even with Musculature and Preemptive.

Absolutely. You can try one without Fighting, but it will take a LOT more damage, and now that we get Fitness as an inherent pool, it's a lot easier to fit in Fighting. Also, Tough allows you to slot the two +Defense unique IOs earlier than waiting for an Epic armor. Scrappers certainly have better survivability, though Blasters do more damage and have the option to stay at range if a foe is especially dangerous in melee. Be sure to build your Blapper so that if it's stuck staying at range, it's not losing too many attacks. Other defensive options are melee-range crowd controls... Electric Manipulation has a couple of PBAoE knockdowns, Ice Manipulations has Ice Patch, etc.

The Hybrid Control toggle is a great addition to these toggle Holds (and Oppressive Gloom), as it has a flat % chance to activate regardless of the power's recharge or radius. So it really turns them up to being 3 Mag most of the time. I wonder how it works with Fissure... Fissure checks twice for Stun, once at Mag 1 with 80% chance. If it adds +1 Mag to each check, that's yummy.

Oh, ho. And what are your difficulty settings? One problem with Calystix is that his stats are lower as an EB than an AV... but his summons are the same. So THEY will do the same damage even if his damage output is lowered by dropping him to AV. So you may want to drop difficulty from x4 to x1, as I believe that the number that he summons at a time is related to the team size. Also, Bots can soft-cap Defenses... with the Pet Defense IOs. Without them, their defense goes from about 45% to 35%, and they take 3x as much damage. They're not even highly expensive for rare IOs, so given how useful they are for Bots, I would prioritize them over almost any other proc for that character.

I mostly play Dominators, but I wish they played differently. 🤪

AoE powers and longer-recharge powers. Energy Assault with one in Power Burst and one in the Snipe can have it up a good amount of the time when using a single-target rotation. Earth Assault is very good, with two AoEs that can proc it, as well as putting it in one or both of the hammers and/or Hurl Boulder. Martial and Thorny Assaults also have options for it, with Thorny having both a melee cone and a ranged attack with it, while Martial has two melee AoEs that can slot it. In the long run, you don't want to depend on it, but if you're not powerleveling the character, using it in the mid-late 20s up until you get perma-Dom without it can get you to run as a perma-Dom only while actively fighting, but that's still better than not having perma-Dom. Especially as a Villain since you can use the Alignment power to bootstrap Domination at the start of a mission, hammer through it with constant fighting, and then if it drops between missions the Alignment power will be recharged for the next one.

Yeah, that's the power, -500% Regen for 30 seconds. Could it be a misunderstanding thinking that "Cold Dom" refers to an Ice Control Dominator?

What about a Robots MM? The Assault Bot can put out -1000 Regen on a "permanent" basis (other than when it misses with Dual Plasma Blast), so the real issue would seem to keep the Bots from folding to AoE slams. But Tankerminding combined with a Resist-based secondary (EA? Thermal?) may limit the one-shotting, and then AoE heals cover up the damage. I'm actually planning a 2nd build for my Bots/EA to try this, depending on how well he does with Siege (who, unfortunately, has a cycling Heal rather than just Regen, so I can't shut that down).

Yeah, I'm kinda agreeing with this... Cold has much better End management, so that may be a thing, but it has very little self-defense ability other than -Recharge (and -Damage for a single opponent). Thermal has a self-heal to top up between fights. Both have to depend on IO set bonuses for Defense to solo well, but that works well backed up by heals. My main problem with Thermal is the -Res power is so much weaker than Cold's and you don't get +Recovery, so it's weaker on damage, not survivability.

But I don't think they have -Def powers (I could be wrong on that, though), and the Bots should be soft-capped on Defense. I don't understand why they're being hit so much. Do you have both +Defense pet IOs? Do you have any Defense slotting in your Protector Bots? What is the Defense of Assault Bot once fully shielded and inside your Dispersion Bubble? Protector Bots with a LotG +Recharge and one LotG Defense should be over 12.5% Defense. Two of them on him push it to 25%, the two IOs push it to 35%, and Dispersion Bubble puts him over the softcap. I can see some lucky hits going through, but not a majority of the attacks. I think that all of those Defense sources cover all attacks, without a Psychic damage hole, so it should matter even if his Psy Scream is not properly categorized as AoE.

The Coralax do a lot of damage in melee, because they're damage-oriented mobs. Almost no debuffing or status effects (a bit of knockback). So if you let them close to melee, they will hit Robots hard. They also do mostly Smashing damage, and Robots resist Lethal and Psychic. So they're kind of hard for Robots to fight if they get close. You need to keep them back with knockback powers, Force Bubble if you have it available (probably not). Otherwise a suggestion would be Bodyguard mode with Provoke, and hover above the fight... I think the Coralax may throw coral shards in a cone, and Calystix has Psychic Scream which is also a cone, so pulling the cones to hit a single target at a time would help a lot. This also allows you to use Luck inspirations to affect all incoming attacks, whereas using them on single Robots is not effective. So... use Lucks to increase your personal defense, Hover above the fight, and Provoke all the mobs to focus on you only. Addendum: I soloed him as an AV on a Merc/Traps... he killed me a few times until I figured to pull him to the room of the cavern and use Caltrops to block his summons from coming into melee. Then they were stuck at ranged, I moved the Mercs to the side so the cones wouldn't hit them, and fought him there like that. It worked pretty well, though I had Triage Beacon to help soak up the damage. But he was a true AV, so the EB version may be soloable without a +Regen boost.

I agree with @DSorrow completely on one aspect: damage Procs help lower-damage ATs more than higher-damage. But Defensive set bonuses help lower-defense ATs more than higher-damage ones. It doesn't seem fair to consider an adjustment to damage procs because they help low-damage ATs do more damage... and not adjust Defensive set bonuses because they help low-defense ATs achieve higher defenses. In fact, I think that the outlier in terms of performance is by far a Blaster with soft-cap compared to a Blaster who only uses common IOs, rather than a Defender who uses damage procs versus one who only uses common IOs. The set bonuses help the Blaster increase their survivabiliy five-fold or more, while the damage procs might possibly help the Defender double their damage, but probably not even that much. So the imbalance is much greater on the defensive side of character building, and it seems unreasonable to start by looking at the offensive side of IOs.

Defender. It will work on a Corruptor, but the blast side is better on a Defender due to higher -Res even if lower base damage, the Buff/Debuff is higher on a Defender, and you get the Dark Miasma powers sooner which IMO is an advantage since Sonic Blast doesn't really rely on its later attack powers too much.

Unless you're considering an APP attack as part of the powersets for Defenders/Corruptors, I think you didn't bother to do the math.

True, but good nerf concepts take this into account. I want damage procs "nerfed" by changing their PPM by +1, and lowering their per-activation damage so that the expected DPS over a minute is the same as it currently is. This wouldn't impact those ATs who use them in regular attacks because their baseline damage is low, but by having a lower damage on the longer-recharge powers that are at 90% activation time whether the PPM is 3.5 or 4.5, you lower the DPA of the top performing proc-bomb attacks (both single-target and AoE). But you don't lower the DPA of, say, Arcane Bolt, because that power cycles fast enough that it's below 90%... so the target is top-level proc-bombs, but it doesn't affect baseline attacks with recharges at like 14 seconds or less, or AoEs under 30-40 seconds depending on Recharge slotting, etc. That's one example of how nerfs can be targeted... I'm not saying that they all are going to be like this, but a careful Dev team can generally manage. Look at the TW nerf... it clearly lowered sustained DPS at the top level, but actually made the set play better at lower levels with lower base Recharge. Another example of how a nerf can be targeted to hit the outliers without hurting mid-level performers.

Vanguard are in Mr G's arc also, and so is a pretty rare group, the Awakened. Between the two of them, they make the arc probably even nastier than the Night Ward arc, other than some slightly easier AV fights. I kept going 🤬, what the heck do they have, until I figured out all of their ToHit buffs.

I think it happens only when there is a blue moon on the server.

Softcapping Defense is always helpful, but you do have to make build constraints to get it. I would generally try to make a build for softcapping and see how it plays, as it's easier to re-jig the build for more damage by changing some sets to Recharge and some attack powers to use damage-proc IOs, and then see how that version plays. But that doesn't mean that I would be sold on playing the softcapped version until I tried both.

Looks good other than this, for the following reasons: 1) Most Melee attacks have some Smash or Lethal component to them, so if you soft-cap S/L then you don't really need to worry about Melee. 2) If you're a ranged character and softcap Ranged D, then AoE D is next in importance, because regardless of whether an attack is Smashing, Psionic, or whatever, it will have to go through one of those defenses. Don't worry about S/L unless you're like a Blaster or Dominator and have a mix of melee and ranged attacks. 3) If you do get Ranged D high for a ranged character, it's better to back it up with a Resistance-based armor from the Epic pools, not one of the S/L Defense shields. This is because adding S/L defense against a Ranged attack is superfluous if you already have good Ranged D, but adding some resistance for those attacks that DO hit will be more helpful.

Fold Space has added new life to end-game Controllers. It used to be that on bad teams, controls were still useful, but on good teams they were sometimes worse than not using them because you prevented the Tank from clumping mobs. Now, you can Stun & Immobilize a bunch of targets, and bunch them up right next to the Tank for easy feasting even when the team doesn't need the controls for defense.

I wasn't really, but she totally IS.

Totally support this. My Fire Dom summoning Fiery Orbs is awesome. My Mind Dom, not nearly awesome. He should have a sparky ball of psionic fluff like Penelope Yin.