Frosticus

I've found over time that I really prefer a fast aoe control on my doms. single target control takes a backseat on my doms with decent aoe. In order of effectiveness/preference: Earth - stalagmites: 70ft range, huge aoe, ridiculously fast cast, paints everything with -def Plant - seeds: 60 ft, wide cone, ridiculously fast cast and recharge an honorable mention to Ice Ice - ice slick (it's now decently fast for something you can cast around corners) and jump in with arctic air running I sometimes go entire missions without using single target controls on my doms if I'm running normal content.

In the entire game that only includes dominators yes it is tied for fastest, although dominate actually affects the target faster by a small degree. If stopping something in its tracks is the goal, char is middle of the pack. It is however the fastest at letting you move after use and tied with dominate as the fastest in letting you activate your next power. In the entire game that includes other AT's it is not the fastest as my ice/elec blaster has 2 holds that are faster. But I'm sure that's what you meant.

*For dominators It is the same cast time as dominate 1.32 seconds

I'm not sure where you heard that savage leap is anything other than amazing. Stuff it full of procs and some acc/dam and let it delete mobs Rending flurry is quite good with dot factored in, but with full blood it is a really good pbaoe. Hemo is meh. Dot is too slow imo You single target chain might need strike until later when you add an app attack. Some people use shred as a single target attack because it can take 2 -res procs. For a sav/rad you'd likely: sav leap > ground zero> viscous > boosted rending skip viscous in that chain if blood thirst was up. Not much should be left standing to clean up.

Some of your powers are a tad low on accuracy. If you are building so defense focused I assume you plan to fight +3's? If so, some of your key powers aren't going to hit consistently

I personally have more fun playing /cold than I do /dark both solo and teamed. I think skipping the shields on /cold is a tough sell if you plan to team much. I don't have them on my solo build, but flipping to team spec is a macro away. I find /dark to play a bit too slowly for my liking as just about everything seems to have a fairly long cast time and/or needs to be recast very often. There is no denying it is a very strong secondary though. If you enjoy it there is no way it will disappoint.

HL is a different beast. Generally the recovery buff 90sec, is more sought after than the -res and huge -rech debuff (30 seconds). The -rech is so strong it can even tangibly impact AVs through their massive resistances. One recovery buff originates from you. That is auto hit. The debuff and recovery buffs that come off of the enemies needs to hit and you have to be near them to receive the buff (like fulcrum shift) If you are fighting in the middle of a spawn it is very unlikely that at least one enemy will not be hit. You will have ample endurance with 2 buffs (iirc my troller is around 6.5 end/sec) with that. I have acc in my HL, but I fight a lot of AVs with my cold troller and I built around the mechanic.

Global bonuses/tactics/kismet do not transfer to pseudo-pets. Doesn't matter for sleet because streakbreaker will make sure the debuff lands even against Mako in elude (could technically miss all ticks, but unlikely) Does matter for icestorm. Most people don't realize it is missing because it ticks so much. Sleet (unslotted) will give icestorm (unslotted) a 67.5% chance to hit vs +3 80% chance vs +2 92% chance vs +1 You'll either want to enhance the def debuff of sleet and/or slot some acc in icestorm for most content.

Love it. I've long been a fan of RoF on scraps w/o a taunt (not applicable to bio of course) because it doesn't matter how great your dps is if it won't stand still. and RoF is no damage slouch itself.

It's all good, we don't all measure success the same way

Poison/Fire/Psi defender: It is very snappy to play and every victory (and defeat) feels like it was within my control to change the outcome. It almost never feels overpowered because it always walks the line of survivability vs offense, yet it has solo'd (no temps/insp/amps/lore) many AV's/GM's/TF's. I think because I embraced the set mechanics and tried to build around them rather than the cookie cutter approach of ranged softcap+hover so many squishies utilize making their primary and secondary more of an aesthetic choice than integral to play* *I'm guilty of doing this on other builds too of course, and it ends up not being as fun. Illusion/Cold/Stone: Similar to the defender I leaned in to the mechanics and synergy of the combo and didn't worry about complying with the prevailing wisdom. The power of that build is unlike anything else I've seen.

The main aoe hold that goes on cast needs accuracy. The tohit debuff and short pulsing hold are autohit.

@Voltak I apologize, I am just a bit chapped. Not for the reasons you probably think though. You are the biggest self hype man in this game and despite me knowing better I actually bought into the inflated self promotion you put out. I was so stoked when I clicked your Sinclair vid. He's a legit AV. Even fighting him as an even con as you did could have been pretty momentous. My main AV killer took about 6 minutes to kill him as a 54+3 (of course no insp/temps/lore/amps/etc), so I was ready to be very impressed. cue sad trombone What followed was a 20 minute video of you watching a longbow lore whittle him down. It was the epitome of mediocre. I apologize that I thought they were super insp you downed in that fight, I just glanced at your tray and saw a bunch of fancy insp (my tray is always closed and/or locked). I'm not going to watch the other vids you linked because fool me once... I saw enough in the Sinclair fight to know you haven't come up with anything new. I'd be more impressed to see you even make it to Lord Recluse in the Ms. Liberty TF than yet another confuse spammer in the LRSF. You do play the combo well, so if you ever do anything interesting - for example, the other night I solo'd the Twins+vandal (troller, no insp/temps/lore/amps/deaths...well you get the picture, I've already explained how I play) If you do something new or interesting that hasn't been done to death by other AT's, I'll be only too happy to reconsider my assessment and tip my hat. Not that it matters what I think, just have fun. In the mean time, the Driver Assists (nicer way of putting it) that you use don't negate the things you do, they just make them not really register any significance.

I personally only solo under standard scrapper rules - no: insp/temps/amps/lore/click accolades. So to answer your question: no, I have zero experience solo'ing a dom against lvl 54 AV's using the training wheels that you drive with. I do have experience doing it under the constraints I listed above and I openly admit on numerous occasions my doms struggle with AV's. I have no idea if they'd be consistently successful under your irrelevant rules. I don't plan to find out. There is world of difference between "scrapper rules" and "no temps". I'm also not sure why you are so riled up? All I said was the tohit debuffing is heavily resisted by AV's and that mind can pause the fight if they want. Both are true, there is no debate, but that seems to have driven you off the deep end. I've only ever clicked on one of your "solo" vids and you were driving your longbow lore, using super insp, and cruising under a bugged shadow field. I promptly shut it off. I'm sure you can rationalize it all, but it truly falls on deaf ears. We don't play the game the same way, but as long as we are having fun that is all that matters.

It's been a bit since I checked. Thankfully this power has already been fixed. It no longer behaves like you describe and are likely used to leveraging. I'd guess it got fixed in the last major update. Depending on how heavily you leaned on shadow field you might want to put your dark/dark through the paces and see how it holds up currently. Shadow field is no longer a pocket hurricane. It now correctly calls only one psuedo pet depending on player state rather than both. If> a or b rather than if > a and b It still uses the wrong AT modifiers, but that is small potatoes compared to how broken it was before. The rest of your post is nonesense. I think you are the first person to ever question my in game experience, especially solo. Thanks for the chuckle.

I know no one asked, but in case they are wondering how bugged shadow field is on Doms? It overperforms by a factor of 2.67x on the debuff side. It overperforms a small amount on the hold side 1.25x Given the popular advice to combine it with powerboost the tohit debuff is tremendously more powerful than it should be. Fully slotted+powerboost it provides 70.4% aoe tohit debuff (auto hit haha) for ~7 seconds It should be 26.38% without powerboost it provides 47% aoe tohit debuff It should be 17.6% Mine recharges in 65 seconds and it lasts 45 seconds. Edit: the power has been (mostly) fixed. Not sure when, maybe last big update? It is still 1.25x too strong, but that isn't uncommon in the psuedopet category.

Ya it helps. I just showed you how much it helps. 100% tohit debuff is reduced to 8.5%. It is what it is. Some players will value that a lot, others may not. I have not looked at your build, but if you rely on the set mechanics to actually run your build in the mid 30% def range and fill up on procs then that is great. I know I've championed for people to try similar with a poison and damage debuffing. It is very satisfying when it all comes together. This might just be a misunderstanding. I mean when an AV like silver mantis hits buildup. A mind dom can pause the encounter until it wears off. You don't want her hitting because the damage is very high during buildup, but perhaps more importantly, she will cascade your defenses with her huge -def debuffs. 8.5% tohit debuff won't protect you. Pausing the fight for a few seconds to tip the encounter can be valuable. As you said, you might run for the door, I dunno. It's good work and a good combo. No one is suggesting otherwise. Dark control is great. Shadow Field is very very bugged on doms and overperforms on multiple fronts, but it is one heck of a power in its current state.

On the other hand, the only place any of these differences (certainly single target) make any significant difference is while solo'ing. So in that regard, -res procs do make a difference in actual game play in the same way that damage procs in single target powers make a difference. They both get washed out in most teams, but that doesn't make them worthless of consideration. At the end of the day, -res procs lose effectiveness vs +cons, so does rend armor in TW. Most -res procs aren't being applied across the whole spawn with any consistency so in most situations it is getting value and not overlapping with other users. Or at least as much value as any small thing does in isolation. IMO you'd be silly not to put fury of the glad in something like Golden Dragonfly unless all you do is team with players that are significantly better at applying it than you. But in that case you probably wouldn't be bringing a katana build anyway. I wouldn't tell radiation players to skip lingering rad because traps exists. Although sometimes casting the power may be of little value. I dunno, they exist, they do something for some builds. I'd be more interested in testing showing even cons vs +3's and see how things change. My experience says not much, but it might shift things around a bit.

Just for clarity, tohit debuffing has almost no impact against AV's. Especially +con ones. A lvl 54 AV has 87% resistance to debuffs + the purple patch reduces the effectiveness to 65% of original (assuming you have a level shift, otherwise reduced to 48% effectiveness) 100% tohit debuffing will be reduced to 8.45% final tohit debuff. Many of the more significant AV's have powers with increased base acc, or other means to ensure they hit more than regular mobs. Its great vs bosses and lower though, but most doms are. At the very least Mind can press pause on an AV encounter if things aren't going well. Personally I prefer the mix and match version of both the combos listed. Dark/Psi has a lot of synergy and Mind/Dark is perhaps the safest single target dom combo.

Basically, instead of hide into ultra-hemo crit, you replace that with snipe crit. I actually removed hemo from my build, the base damage is set too low and needs 3 blood stacks to do proper base damage of a 14 second attack. Crit works properly though. I replaced it with cross punch. I found I was always wasting a lot of damage with hemo because the dot is so slow. Between the +rech of cross punch, and the +rech of full blood (I don't use a single target consumer) you get some good things happening. It sucks at building assassin focus, so your AS crit usually only happens every second cycle of MS>CP>MS>AS>Snipe* *you need a lot of recharge, but you should also slip in savage leap/bu in the gap when it makes sense. It doesn't move through single targets like my fire/stone stalker (but not much does), you ultimately play savage for proc'd savage leap and boosted rending flurry and constantly refreshing buildup due to the large aoes.

I feel similar about vouching for savage stalkers. Pre-hemo nerf they were above all others, post nerf they are still a good ST set and still head and shoulders above the others for AOE.

It would depend on how people time their pylon runs. I can't speak for everyone, but I know I start the timer when I begin interacting with the target. So powers like surveillance, storm cell, boggle, phantom army, etc doesn't really matter that they don't agro the pylon on to me, the timer starts the moment I activate those powers. It isn't always a perfect reflection of in game performance though because like you indicate you can use boggle as you are jumping toward a boss with minimal interruption, but at least for pylons you probably want to avoid some ill/storm dragging PA and tornado from around the corner and pretending it had no impact on the run.

For sure, but there are no aspects of the initial storm cell that should proc upon cast to draw agro. Not since slotting for slows was removed in beta anyway. I didn't see the behavior you describe when I was looking at procs in it anyway, but it could be possible. It will cause agro if you cast storm cell on a spawn that already has storm cell on them if you have self buffing procs in the power like forcefeedback. But the times that would matter are likely pretty rare.

It definitely worked during beta testing., they have a very low proc chance, so should be capped at the floor of 10.25% for normal damage procs. Maybe not worthwhile, but it can make a lot of attacks over its life, many of which can hit multiple targets.

If you haven't tried plant you should. So many good combos of it for trollers and doms. Plant/poison was a very good experience for me. I don't think there is a "bad" plant pairing across both AT's, though some mesh a bit better.