Coyote

Frankenslot is a play on Frankenstein's Monster, who was made up of parts from many cadavers. It means to use IOs from multiple sets in order to get the most effective power, without caring about set bonuses. YMMV is an American saying, "Your Mileage May Vary", meaning that you may get more effect or less effect out of a suggestion than I'm getting. I don't recall the exact numbers on Domination, but it has a 90 second Recharge time. So if you get the Recharge shown in MIds to about 80 seconds with Hasten active, then even with the downtime in Hasten it should be fine. So anything less than 80 seconds will also be fine. If I recall correcty (IIRC), a Mids time of about 83 seconds (with two Recharge slots in Hasten) was perma-Dom even through the Hasten downtime, but with no margin left for error or delay clicking. 76 should be quite fine. I like the last build, it's pretty good. I would change a bit, but you don't have to: 1) Don't click Unleash Potential as it won't be up all the time, you want to see your Defenses at a minimum. But do click Stealth on. 2) I don't like the overslotting on Unleash Potential. You do lose some bonuses if you drop the slots in it, but I would prefer to take some slots out and add them as follows: - a slot in Feral Charge, the Force Feedback proc for +Recharge. This will help when fighting larger spawns - a second Recharge IO for Hasten

Earth/Storm should work great. I had one back on Live, and at a time without procs, it was slow to level up until th Storm powers came in, but then took off. Now, with damage a lot more available to Controllers and faster leveling, it should be great. Gravity/Storm is a great combination, also... because converting Tornado and LS from "semi-AoE" powers that hit 1-2 mobs to small but real AoE powers that are hitting their target cap of 5 mobs every time, is a yuge boost in damage.

Procs, plus something that has Recharge in it. Since slotting directly for damage doesn't do much, that usually means Acc/Hold/Recharge from Hold sets. That usually leaves about 4 slots for procs, and there are nice options, between Lockdown's +2 Mag, Annihilation's -Res, and of course straight damage procs.

Exactly. Illusion/Traps should be one of the best soloing builds for Controllers. Definitely better than /Rad, because Illusion struggles to clear spawns while /Traps adds a lot more damage if you put damage procs in Acid Mortar and Poison Trap, and drop Poison Trap followed by Trip Mine. So that gives you the AoE damage that you are lacking, while Illusion is great at single-target damage and Boss slaying. And for soloing AVs, there isn't much that can argue it's better than Illusion/Traps.

Actually, secondaries other than /Cold get more out of Force of Will, because they don't have Infrigidate to run a constant Achilles Heel debuff on an AV. So they actually have a use for Weaken Resolve slotted with damage procs and Achilles. As you say, they will probably take the single-target Immobilize (Stone Prison, in this case) to make up for losing Project Will, and swap Project Will to Weaken Resolve. And it should work well with Nature because Nature likes to play at cone range from the spawn anyhow to heal everyone, so you're already at the right range for Wall of Force.

Updated to show my current build. Some changes from the original plan: 1: Fossilize up to 5 damage procs right now. I'll see if I want to drop it back to having the Chance to Hold procs as I hit some nastier Bosses... one-shot Holding them is a big advantage, but with Earthquake usually knocking them down and with good Recharge there is usually a good opportunity to layer 2 holds without taking many attacks. 2: Project Will as a backup blast instead of Arcane Bolt. It's a weaker attack, but the pool allows me to take Force of Will for a regular FF proc opportunity, allowing all of the long-recharge powers to come back faster. 3: Found good AoE damage in the epics and slotting Stalagmites as an AoE. This allows for an every-spawn AoE cycle of: Stalagmites (about 300), Stone Cages, Sleet, Force of Will (used early before mobs die to get more chances for the Recharge, 130), Frost Breath (about 400), <alternate power>, Force of Will. It's a long sequence, so it may not be worth finishing with the last two, but having a 800 AoE opener with good control is unusually good for Controllers. The <alternate power> is alternating Ice Storm and Volcanic Gasses and pushes the damage to over 1000 AoE (though with Dot). This is a low-defense build for me, so it takes a bit more care defensively in order to open up more damage... other versions I looked at with more defense felt a lot safer, but a Controller is usually pretty safe and needs to seek damage more than defense.

I love it with Titan Weapons... Quick Recovery helps with TW's self-drain, and Defensive Sweep helps slow down incoming damage at the start of a fight when Regen sometimes gets overwhelmed with too much burst damage. All the knockdowns also help, and with so many chances to slot Force Feedback it helps recharge Regen's long-recharge powers very nicely. Mace does some of that (knockdowns for damage mitigation and for +Recharge), and so does Axe.

Solid, but a few things: 1: Defenses are good but not great when Unleash Potential is down. 2: You have 6 Recharge bonuses of 10%. 3: There will be Endurance problems. I assume you're planning on Ageless as an Incarnate slot, but that still leaves problems for earlier in the game and exemplaring down. 4: Heart of Darkness should be slotted for Stun, not -ToHit, and personally I frankenslot it with about 4 damage procs. YMMV, but if you're not going to proc it for damage, then definitely slot it for Recharge. 5: No Fearsome Stare? Sacrilege. I would give up on Shadow Field as it's not needed on with Dark Control being very strong defensively without it. Also, you won't need Maiming Slash AND Vicious Slash AND Feral Charge AND Call Hawk, so I would drop Maiming. This frees up 2 powers and a lot of slots. 1) Take Fearsome Stare and 6-slot it with Cloud Senses. This gives you better Recharge since you're exchanging a 10% set bonus that can't be used and a usefulf 5% bonus for a useful 6.25% bonus. And it gives you a better power and Ranged Defense. 2) Max out Dark Grasp for a 5% Defense bonus. 3) Max out Heart of Darkness. Either frankenslot or 5 Stupefy plus a damage proc. 4) With 1 slot left over, I would add it to Stamina for playing without Ageless. And as a separate change, swap Project Will (you don't need an unslotted weak attack) and take Weaken Resolve, and put Achilles Heel in it.

Which topic is this? It sounds like interesting reading. For this character, Wall of Force is absolutely great, for several reasons: 1) a lot of long-recharge powers (something usable once a fight but not twice due to Recharge) 2) even the other main AoE, Frost Breath, can use more Recharge since it's slotted with damage procs and so it shouldn't have slotted Recharge... but with a 32 second base, getting more Recharge is good 3) No other actions to take after a point: Controls are fired off, Sleet is out, and not enough AoEs to cycle them. Tightening up the attacks with a +Recharge bonus helps a lot. Now, without reading the other post, I'll say that WoF isn't that high a percentage per attack since it has a large Area Factor... but if you're fighting 10+ guys, it's pretty reliable in activating, and also it has a fast base Recharge so you're firing it several times a fight. With 3 uses of it, you expect at least 2 activations, and that's better over a minute than 2 LotGs. But you can get 4+ activations within a minute, and that over 30% average Recharge boost. Well worth spamming, at least so far for me. Heck, the only reason to not care much about it is if you already have such high Recharge that you don't really have much use for more, but... Earth/Cold will never stop wanting more Recharge. Not quite as bad as Illusion/Cold, but /Cold is still a Recharge-hungry set.

Cold is way better than FF. Still very good on the Defense buffing, but a lot more additional tools in the toolkit. FF provides AoE status protection including for you, and with that power some more +Def, but that's all... Cold gives -Res and -Regen for AV fights, -Damage for AVs and +level bosses, -Recharge and a few other goodies.

Rularuu eyeballs. Awakened. Vanguard bosses.

If you're going to take the 3 heavy single-target attacks of Skewer, Impale, and Thorn Barrage, then you don't really need Fling Thorns... you can slot up your single-target Hold with procs for damage plus Hold, so you have enough attacks for a single-target chain. Or you can slot it up and not use one of the heavier attacks... I would drop Skewer so you have a fully-ranged single-target cycle. It's hard to skip any good AoE attacks, but Thorntrops at least can get away with lower slotting... damage procs don't work that well in it, and it doesn't need Accuracy, and the End cost is low, so you can get away with 3-4 slots of Damage/Recharge. Build-up also saves slots since you 1-slot it with the Gaussian proc. Other than that, welcome to the Standard Dominator Slot Crunch 😛 . It's actually why I really like Plants as the primary for it. For one thing, -Def from Thorns helps the Confused mobs kill each other faster... but also, Plants doesn't need as much slotting as most other sets.

I've made some changes to increase the Defense. I think Recharge got lowered but only a very little bit. Also improved the damage of a few powers... for example, the Hold was way overslotted for Accuracy (right now it has no Acc slotting and is still over the cap for 54s). But overall it wasn't a bad build so I didn't make any major changes, only IO tweaks. Only real change was dropping the purple Sleep set, because you already had 5 set bonuses of 10% Recharge so you couldn't use the main reason for taking that set. Adding the slots around helped improve the Defense mostly, and an extra slot in Thorn Barrage.

Traps. Rad works fine, but Traps specifically fits holes that Illusion has, while Rad doesn't. Traps: AoE damage, AoE containment, immobilizing AVs. These are Illusion's specific holes compared to most other Control sets.

To be accurate, more impactful than any single +Defense powers are Hasten and probably Weaken Resolve. I can't say that there's another pool power seeing major use other than those, Tough (and mostly to mule the unique Resist IOs), and then the +Defense powers. But definitely Hasten is #1, and I'd argue that Weaken Resolve is a strong contender against anything other than maybe the Fighting pool.

Psionic Tornado does that, but only with a 50% knockup chance.

If you have a build already, put the Mids output here... it's always easier to modify an existing build than start with something new. Also it will give posters an idea of what you're looking for, which travel powers you prefer, etc.

I slot 3 Thunderstrike (no Recharge), 1 Dam Proc, 1 Theft of Essence proc, and 1 Achilles Heel proc. Changing the Thunderstrike to maybe a Hami-O and two damage procs would increase the damage, but lose some Ranged D.

Huh. AFAIK, all "sustain" toggles should be with 0 Endurance cost. So having it cost no Endurance seems reasonable to me. I don't know why it can slot End Red IOs, it should slot End Mod IOs since it also gives +Recovery, but not End Reduction.

Don't you think that might possibly be an arrogant statement to make, that someone who has played only one MMO game understands it better than someone else who has played MMOs since UO came out? I'm not saying that I'm necessarily right, but being told that I don't understand this game is not so much offensive as amusing. I know there are posters here who understand it far better than I do, but ... to claim that I don't really understand it is amusing. And then your examples come out and make me amused again. For one thing, I'm certain that my proposed changes... would still have a Shield Defense Tanker with soft-capped Defenses. And while they might have lower defenses and thus have to worry a bit more about stacked defense debuffs... I think that there are more situations where a Resistance based Tanker may have to worry more about being End-drained because the mobs hit far more often. Or ToHit debuffed. Basically, Resist-based sets SHOULD take less damage than Defense-based sets, because they suffer more mez and debuff effects. Also, I play all ATs but mostly squishies. And when you say that the squishies don't need defenses because they can mez/debuff everyone, I have to say "go try the Night Ward and see how that goes". Yes, you CAN go through missions controlling everything, and defenses don't matter... when the missions don't have ambushes or other tricks. But missions where the mobs get the jump on you, or where you have to fight in multiple directions at once, make it very difficult to depend on control, because mobs get to shoot you before you control them. Having 70 seconds of Confuse rather than 50 is meaningless... either way, if you initiated the combat you can keep the spawn permanently confused, while if you didn't, it's Defense that has you survive the ambush's alpha strike so that you can then mez it. In easy content, control works well, but then so does everything else. In hard content, Defense is king.

Some other things to get back to the main track: 1: Strength of mob debuffs. I think that having -30% from a single minion was reasonable when only a few mobs did that. If we're going to spread around a lot more debuffing effects (and buffing) into spawns, then it makes sense to lower each buff/debuff power, especially when used by minions. 2: One thing to realize about spawn sizes: say that you play at +2/x4. Not too high. Then you add 3 players to your party, all at the same level of difficulty. I think that with the spawn size calculations, you just maxed out the spawn, with 4 characters. Supposedly this is the right difficulty level for your team. Now, add 2 more characters. The spawn doesn't increase in strength, but the player team does. So, we need to realize that the spawn difficulty falls off a cliff after it's maxed, as you add characters to a team. For some characters, that cliff starts off at 1, because they max the spawn by themselves. But in general, most teams will max out the spawn size before they max out the team size. So, adding AoE buffs/debuffs to spawns so that they scale better at larger team sizes is probably the only way to handle difficulty for large teams. 3: Back to #1... I'm 100% with Luminara on this. Adding AoE buffs/debuffs (and maybe even single-target buffs and heals) to just about every larger spawn would be in every way a good thing. Even if it does end up "nerfing" strong characters much more than my meager little proposed nerf to IO set values 😛 ... because we have the imbalance from #2, that says that the only way for spawns to keep up with team size increases is to add buffing/debuffing to all factions. I'm not actually sold that they will necessarily all need new models, though. They added Assailants and Strikers to Skulls, which made the faction a lot more dangerous at low levels without using any new models. They also added Meat Doctors to Vahzilok, which DID use new models, but I can think of ways to add reasonable buff/debuff mobs there without using new models. For example, a Plague Zombie that runs Venomous Gas (in the name of Nurgle, lol). Sky Raiders could get Leadership toggles added to any LTs without changing graphics, as they're all supposed to be just people in military clothes with some armor. Etc.

No, they have not. Other suggestions have been given for raising difficulty against tuned characters. But that's not what I want. What I want is a better balance for set bonuses, so that building for Recharge and/or Defense is not so clearly better than building for +Special or +Damage. Those who are offering other suggestions are doing fine, for what THEY are trying to solve, which is difficulty. I'm trying to solve a balance problem in IO sets, and that's not going to be solved by introducing more interesting mobs to the Freakshow, though that WOULD be cool. Oh, and... I've pointed this out multiple times in the thread. Which is why I got snarky enough to say that people aren't reading what I'm writing, they're just kneejerking reactions with "don't touch my IO set values and nerf my character!" without bothering to see what I'm talking about.

Oh, wait, you were serious? I thought you were just taking a dig. I have absolutely no special interest in nerfing, or in nerfing defenses specifically. I'm not trying to weaken defenses to drum up use for defense-buffing sets. No, I want to nerf defense set bonuses because they are an outlying modifier that is far stronger than the other modifiers from IO sets, and the smoothest way to balance bonuses is to raise the weak ones while lowering the strong ones. If it happened that the design would have had Defense set bonuses as too low while Damage would be too high, I would argue the opposite. And, in fact, I wouldn't be against raising the Defense values of Pool Powers by a bit, because we see that the +Damage from Assault is far higher than the +Defense from Maneuvers. It wouldn't be by as much as lowering the set bonuses on tuned builds that built for max D, but probably over the entire server including those players who don't use IO sets, you would probably end up seeing a slight overall increase in Defense. So... I'm not against Defense in general. It's the set bonuses that to my eyes look out of whack compared to how Defense values are treated in other powers.

Do you even read what I write before arguing? I'm really only suggesting nerfing ONE set bonus (Defense), while suggesting buffing many others, or even adding some buffs (+Special as a general improvement is currently split amongst a lot of bonuses and combining them into one would be a great improvement). I'm suggesting far more buffs than nerfs. Can you not admit that sometimes nerfs should be mixed in with buffs in order to balance things while avoiding power creep? Or is buffing everything the only avenue for you?

No. It's an imbalance EVEN IF the game works. The fact that such a complicated game with so many choices and options works and plays fine despite imbalances... doesn't mean that there aren't imbalances, and doesn't mean that it wouldn't be improved if the bonuses were balanced. You're making an argument that "it works, therefore any change will be bad". Also, I have never claimed nor will that it's my decision to make. But in exactly the same logic, it's not your decision to make that balance changes wouldn't fly here, or that it can't or shouldn't be done, and especially not that it can't be proposed and discussed. Lastly... always be clear to yourself and analyze your arguments. I think you may be confusing "this works" and "this is fine" and "this game is great" with "and therefore any changes are going to make it worse". The game was great from early issues, and yet most issues have improved the game. Some mistakes were made, but in general... there is always room for improvement. You should never argue from the point of view that says "it's perfect, don't change a thing"... at least, not in such a complicated game. I'm certainly not arguing from the POV of saying "this game is broken" or "this must be fixed". Short version: this game is fine. This game could also be improved. And discussing how to improve it, is not a bad thing.