Coyote

You're confusing (hah) World of Confusion with Mass Confusion, which is a good power. World of Confusion is only "good" if you put the Contagious Confusion proc in it, and even then... it works better on characters who fight in melee for a while, giving that proc a chance to activate and turn some minions to your side. But Blasters don't fight in melee that long, and generally blow minions to bits pretty quickly, so... the number of times it will actually activate and turn a minion to your side, who will then take one shot at his friends before catching one of your AoEs to the side of the head and going down, is not worth it.

Only if you shoot at mobs to the right of the character. You need to slot it to the left to shoot farther to the left, but I prefer to slot it in the middle so I can aim right at them.

I really didn't need to know that. And I may report this post, too.

I agree, without looking at your exact build, I also really liked running Bio and Rad Armors since they have PBAoE powers that aren't meant as attacks, but do some damage so you can use procs to turn them into half-nukes, helping cover the usual AoE hole that most Stalker primaries have.

1: 6-slot Roots if you're going to use 5 of that set, the Ranged Defense bonus for it is too good to pass up. It's certainly better than a bit of extra Defense from a 2nd slot in Stealth. 2: 6-slot Seeds with Malaise (switch to Contagious Confusion at 50), again for the Defense bonus. 3: 6-slot Bood Craze with Preventive Medicine, the bonuses are better than Doctored Wounds. 4: Domination gives you Knockback protection, so I'd drop Acrobatics. If you get perma-Dom you would never want to use it, but even otherwise it's better to find a power to put a KB-protection IO rather than spend the endurance and pick on it. 5: switch Multi-Strike to Obliteration in Rending Flurry. 6: switch Creepers to some set that gives Recharge... Ragnarok or Positron. Positron would add a Damage proc which is nice in it. 7: I really like Gaussian's proc in Spot Prey. 8: If you can find another slot and 6-slot Fly trap with Expedient Reinforcement, you get another 3% to Ranged Defense. At this point you're up to the mid-30s in Ranged Defense, so a single Luck will soft-cap you, and you'll notice a huge difference when ambushes come in. You seem to be chasing resistance and damage, where a Dom's first need is Recharge and second need is Ranged Defense. 4-slotting your melee attacks is getting you neither of those... 6-slotting with Mako's would give you Ranged Defense, or 5-slotting with Crushing Impact would give you Recharge (and allow you to put a Force Feedback proc for more Recharge). Unless you plan to powerlevel to 50 and then into the Incarnate abilities so that you can run Ageless at max level, I don't know if you'll have perma-Dom. Maybe with the Blood Frenzy stacks running. Edit: the only way I see to get Air Sup is to drop the Leaping pool, use Superspeed as the movement power. But you lose a LotG and some defense for it. Also... you have two melee attacks, and you're slotting up Strangler partially as an attack so that will be in your attack chain. Not to mention Feral Charge later, and since you'll want to use that at bunched up targets, following with Rending Flurry will make sense. That's probably enough attacks that getting a 3rd light melee attack is not all that useful. You should easily be able to cycle Strangler-Maiming-slow, where slow is either Vicious or Feral Charge, so you won't have room for a low-DPA filler attack.

There was a guide from June or July for Dominators about how to set up keybind files so that Hasten and Domination alternate being the auto-execute power. It would be possible to extend that concept to alternate between three powers as the auto-execute power.

Um... that was exactly my point, are you agreeing or arguing? Fire/Psy works well, because Psy helps defensively. Fire/Rad or Fire/Nrg, for example, wouldn't work nearly as well. And the point about end issues was that Drain Psyche takes care of them, but if you were running some other secondary, you would be likely to have end issues due to Hot Feet. So, again... Fire/Psy is a good combination, probably the best secondary for Fire.

Same. Full teams just smash everything. Smaller teams can still find a challenge. Or fight Rularuu with defense based characters 😄

Well, Power Up doesn't have a ToHit bonus, though some secondaries (Rad, Thorns, Savage, I think) have a version of Build Up with +ToHit replacing +Special. Doms are more slot-starved than other ATs, because other ATs usually have defensive powers that are auto-hit. A tank's defense toggles hit it automatically, meaning that it has to slot for End Red and Resistance (or Defense). Controllers often have defensive powers like Darkest Night, that need End and -ToHit, or maybe +Defense, but not more. Blaster Sustain powers are usually auto-hit and don't need Recharge Reduction. Meanwhile, Doms need to slot for their defensive effect (control) and Accuracy, and also usually Recharge. End Reduction would be nice but nobody can spare it unless it comes as part of an IO set. The extra requirement of having to slot Accuracy in all powers, both offensive (which other ATs have to do) and defensive (which other ATs generally don't have to do) sucks up 3-5 slots before the 30s. This is why they are a bit more slot-starved than most other ATs.

They both work well in very different ways. Fire Control is weak defensively for a Control set, and having Drain Psyche to mitigate that with +Regeneration is nice. Also, running Hot Feet and spamming Fire Cages so the mobs don't get to run out of the area and out of Bonfire takes a lot of Endurance, so the huge +Recovery boost that you get from it also helps. However, the combination that you probably heard about is Mind Control/Fire. Unlike other Control sets, Mind has no debuffs on its powers, it's all lockdown or nothing. And because permanently locking down a spawn is a lot harder than a mix of locking down and debuffing, Mind Control really likes to have a secondary that can clear the mezzed spawn fast. Fire Assault has no debuffing also, so it likes to shoot at controlled mobs rather than debuffed mobs. Dark/Dark stacking -ToHit may not care as much if mobs get to shoot back a bit, but Fire Assault really doesn't want to get return fire. Mind's ability to Sleep an entire spawn without aggro, then single-target Hold/Confuse works well with Fire's high single target damage that clears the mezzed mob fast and goes to the next one.

With IOs and how easy they are to get here, the game has gotten really easy. Easy game, no need to learn how to play it right. You still win the missions without much difficulty. When debt mattered, and learning how to survive Vahzilok was a practical necessity, and squishies pulling Paragon Protectors onto themselves by not letting the tank pull and bunch at a corner, players learned how to play more efficiently. Now the game is easy enough that you can button-mash your way through content, so... fewer players are FORCED to learn. And then the playstyle of "just blast, baby" becomes more viable, and then it becomes more common. And players see teams playing like this, and learn that this is how to play. Why is it accepted? Because many issues ago, playing like this really did lead to debt and to much slower progress. Now... it slows down kill speed, but given the lower level of threat in the game, it doesn't have the obvious impact of a wakie-wrapped clue-by-four to the face that will teach more players to play right. Maybe they don't notice the slower kill speed, and without the obvious "you did something wrong" of that "hospital or base" option menu in the middle of your screen, probably they don't realize that they're Doing It Wrong. Now, if we could force everyone through a training regimen of Vahzilok missions in the teens, I'm sure that the problem would go away 😛

That's EXACTLY what I do 😄 ... It does work great. Well, actually, start off with Synaptic Overload, and then go and do that. And once SO is fully slotted out, I may forego the Static Field, because at that point I want them to attack each other whenever they get up. And I made a mistake earlier... for Electric Control, actually, the powers will always do -100% Recovery, making it possible to keep spawns permanently drained if you're willing to spam Electric Cages at maximum rate (the debuff is for 6 seconds, so it shouldn't be hard to keep it up permanently). I see mobs sometimes getting slivers, but it may be because activating other powers prevent me from spamming Electric Cages at max rate. And also since mobs are +1 or higher, it won't really floor them unless I wanted to slot for End Mod, which I don't plan on doing.

Electric/Poison Controller can do it, and probably an Electric/Psychic Dom since Drain Psyche has a strong -Recovery that's rarely noticed. But without some other source of -Recovery, I don't think that just Electric Control alone can do it. I mean, I have zeroed out spawns with an Ele/Earth, and due to spamming Electric Cages, they are often under a -Recovery debuff... but it's not strong enough to keep them zeroed all the time, just to slow down their rate of occasional potshots. Knockdowns also help, because if they're on the ground when they regain their sliver of Endurance, by the time they get up and attack it's probably gone. They only get to use it if they're upright and not mezzed when they regain it.

I do think that if you're not looking for much damage, Time is the best combination with Ice. They stack -Recharge very nicely, they both have important reasons to be in melee, and Time's strong defenses and healing keep you alive to utilize Arctic Air in melee. It's a very good defensive combination, and since you're relying very much on toggles and Time helps with Recharge anyhow, you're free to slot sets up for defenses rather than for Recharge.

Dam is better for ATs with good direct damage, doublehit is better for ATs with pet/summons damage.

Electric saps Endurance down to 0, but does not reliably sap Recovery. As long as mobs have positive Recovery, they will regain some Endurance once in a while, and immediately use it to launch an attack. You could keep a single mob like a boss down to 0 Recover by constantly hitting him with attacks, since most of the attacks (but not Conductive Aura) have a chance for -100% Recovery for a few seconds. Constant attacking generally keeps them at 0. But it's hard to do to groups of mobs since you only have the AoE Immob and Jolting Chain (and I'm not sure if Jolting Chain does -Recovery except on the 1st target). But it should be possible to drain a single target... of course, you won't know it, because the target will be Held also 😛

Storm and Rad are especially awesome :p, and Nature and Kin are both excellent. Thermal is very good if you like team buffing and healing, and Poison is a limited set that really puts out awesome -Res and some damage, and very little of anything else. Well, single-target debuffing, but that's not greatly important. Though it does a good job of limiting AV damage (if you run Weaken Resolve with Achilles Heel, you end up around 80 -Res, which improves your -Dam to about -80% against +0 AVs).

To note, the Miracle and Numina's procs won't proc in Hibernate, but I believe that the Preventive Medicine: Absorb will, if you'd rather get a proc in there rather than a Recharge. Edit: I mean, won't proc just because they're in Hibernate unless you activate Hibernate, while the Absorb will proc just for slotting it.

Just to note, you HAVE to wait to customize power colors until you get the power, if it's not in your primary or secondary powersets. You can only turn Combat Jumping to "no FX" after you select it as a power, for example.

Possess is awesome, I wouldn't drop that. But I'd certainly take HoD over Maneuvers or Afterburner. Now Thunderclap, that's definitely useful, but it may be hard to drop something. However, I could see dropping Hurricane, or dropping Hibernate and moving Hurricane way back... you can't run Hurricane AND go in the middle of a spawn for HoD/Thunderclap, so you have to decide whether to go with ToHit debuff or Stunning. I like ToHit debuffs, but sometimes Hurricane is difficult to use, while Stunning mobs with large-radius PBAoEs is not that hard to use. It's pretty safe to go into a spawn that's not acting because they're Feared then perma-Stunning them. Actually, the only issue isn't safety, it's whether you're willing to move around a lot, back for Living Shadows and then forward for HoD/Thunderclap.

Just as a note, I've had running issues with like 3 AVs so far, out of a few dozen. And one was, I think, due to some AI bug possibly caused by him being a spawned ambush AV rather than a normal map-spawned AV (Nosferatu spawned by activating a computer). Then Nossie again ran around a lot in the New Praetorians arc. The other was Diabolique, because she phases, and apparently the Fear effects last longer than the PA Taunt effects. Otherwise, though, AVs will sometimes just move around a bit to get out of the patches, but will often just plant in one spot. They only really move when one PA drops and the next set has to establish aggro, because their Taunt seems to be stronger than the Fear effect. If you want NO problems, then avoid Storm, but if you're willing to deal with a bit of movement in return for excellent DPS in other situations, Storm is fine. It can handle most AVs without serious problems. It's not as simple "stand in one place, summon, and debuff" as the other sets, but IMO being able to smash through kill-all missions solo without shedding illusionary tears is worth the extra management issues against AVs. Nosferatu, though... ugh, he's like the marathon runner of AVs. Avoid him and things are cool. Otherwise have your decoys do their wind sprints when you train 😉

Dark is very strong defensively. It's best balanced with a secondary that does damage, whether directly or through procs. I like it paired with Storm, Traps, and Poison as main options, with Trick Arrow or Kinetics as secondary options.

Am I missing something? Did you skip Heart of Darkness? It's an every-spawn control that, unlike Fearsome Stare, doesn't allow retaliation. And it can be stacked with Thunderclap to permanently disorient everything around you. Open at a distance with Fearsome Stare and Living Shadows, then run in and HoD/Thunderclap. Put the Energy Font ATO in Thunderclap for more Disorient effects.

One more set that works GREAT with Illusion is Traps. 1: Immobilize for AVs, great -Regen for AVs. 2: AoE damage that doesn't rely on getting Containment. 3: slotting FF: Recharge in Trip Mine allows it to act as a minor +Recharge power when used regularly.

Ill/Cold at the top end, probably. Though frankly, Traps does great also. Ill/Storm is good and better against non-AVs. Earth/Cold does pretty well cheaply. And if you like Fire, I'd very much suggest Fire/Dark over Fire/Rad. The extra defensive abilities more than make up for the small loss in average -Regen debuffing, and you put out more -Res.