Caimie

There are many ways to build Dominators, it all comes down to what concept and intended use/ play-style is. Pets aren't mandatory, but they 'can' help and are a decent power to slot in 4 pieces of a set for recharge bonus. There are those that get Fighting or Fighting & Leadership to bolster their survival, but the downside is added strain to to an already Endurance intensive AT when Domination isn't up to replenish it. Your Controls are your best defense and damage resist, imo. Yes, you can crutch Incarnate powers to help, and it is an option if needed. I tend to make my Doms Perma-Dom and fairly exemplar friendly and they do solo fairly well. In that, Dominators are late bloomers (Plant/ is an exception to a point) and can struggle with EB's and AV's. I tend to avoid AV's, but there are those that fight them and tune their builds to do so. I'll include a Mid's EXAMPLE template, of one way I could build it, with your requirement for the Experimentation Pool, and you can see if it helps you with a build. There are some Powers. Epic pool included, that are essentially mules for things like LotG global +recharge (Maneuvers is one, since I never run it), so keep that in mind. I chose sets with the intention of going Perma-Dom and bolstering Hit Points and resistances a bit, to soften some stray attacks that get thru. Template-Dominator (Plant Control - Fire Assault).mbd

I have one that I enjoyed playing, but it's an older build that I should revisit and 'tune' up a bit and it's built towards my play-style. The combo is cone heavy when it comes to a lot of your skills from the power-sets, and less so with aoe stuff, so repositioning will happen fairly often, but single target does fairly well. Since it's built towards how I play and what I do, I can send you it's Mid's build in a message and you can tweak it or use it as a template. It is Perma-Dom and low level content friendly.

The combo is fun to play and can be built multiple ways to suite how you like to play or your concept. I loosely modeled mine after my MA/Invul Scrapper from Live and that's how I played it. I took Leadership instead of Fighting pool, so it's more of a glass cannon type build, and loaded the skills up with Procs, especially those that would take the Force Feedback Proc. It solos well and does good in teams, but can struggle building Domination, at times, on teams that are melee heavy. I didn't take Exploding Shuriken, Phantasm and Shuriken Throw, but took Deceive, Gleam and Flash. Gleam is a great opener and Deceive is very useful if you want to run some solo stuff. It's not Perma-Dom yet and I'm still slotting sets, but it's a blast to play.

I read this thread and it reminded me of the CoV Beta testing and that one of the days I was on there was focused testing going on with some powerset tweeks and Plant/ Doms were in that particular one, so I was on my Plant/Thorns Dom running stuff with people. Castle happened to be there observing for a bit and his comment on Masterminds being the intended Tanks kinda stuck with me is why I mentioned it. He could see the Community making Brutes the tanking AT at release but was reluctant to make too many changes. I'm guessing that the Going Rogue expansion was already in the preliminary planning stages is why. Just my guess, though.

As someone who likes to play Brutes (and Dominators) more so than other ATs and was in the CoV beta test, the perception of Brutes being the CoV 'Tank' was made by the Community after it's launch, but started it's momentum towards the end of Beta when they started allowing more people in. The original intended 'Tank' for CoV was the Mastermind with Brutes filling the off-Tank Scrapper-like role, but that never really panned out, on the Servers I played on at least. Masterminds were few, at least the ones wanting to group, and if you were a Brute and joined a group, they expected you to Tank, no matter your Powersets. I lost count of the times my BA/SR Brute face-planted because of this and before it got fully IO'd out. I'm not going to argue with anyone about buffing this, nerfing that and so on because I've not played since the shut-down and have only been back for 3 months and there's so much that has changed and or been added that I'm not fully up to speed as of yet. I've remade my BA/SR Brute, but it's only lvl 8 because I've been too preoccupied with leveling my Dominators and SJ/Rad Brute, which has decent survival for only being lvl 40 with SO enhancements.

I've just returned to the game and haven't had much of a chance to play around in Mids to see, but back before the shut-down I ran a BA/SR Brute and it was pretty fun but a toggle nightmare and slot hungry. I can't find my notes on the build, since it's been so long, but I know leaping and fighting were 2 of the pools I used. I just don't remember what other pools and incarnate I had on it, sadly. It did have some HO's and at least one purple IO set in it, that I know for sure.