Frosticus

While i prefer traps on a controller; the set is geared heavily toward long duration fights that require little mobility. As such it excels quite well at dropping AV's. I will say though that some encounters can be very risky to get close enough to use poison trap (pretty slow cast time). And without poison trap in play then traps isn't that noteworthy.

This is a pairing that I eyed heavily as well for the same reasons you state with the exception that I planned for earth epic Of note though is that poison>poison trap isn't the superstar power that traps>poison trap is. The poison version does not debuff regen which leaves poison as one of the weaker regen debuffing sets available.

Soul Drain doesn't affect Tornados and Lightning Storms. The only damage buffs they can receive are those slotted into them. that's unfortunate , I used to love power buildup and then casting LS and getting a couple super lightning blasts off on my storm/son defender. Is that specific to the storm powers or does the same hold true for icestorm and other psuedo pets not being buffable?

ice/storm/dark cause i think a proc'd out iceblast chain is pretty scary and cause rains of scourge. Also perma soul drain means some pretty deadly tornadoes and lightning storms (even though the buff drops on them when soul drain expires)

I went grav/poison with the idea of motion sickness affecting targets and myself what with the puking/spitting. the -def/res defuff right from the get go plays well with gravs hard hitting st attacks. However poison just falls flat for me with little to no powers that I look forward to unlocking. I rerolled as grav/traps, same concept but only making enemies sick now (traps poison trap makes them puke)

Fantastic advice. An additional reason you will want a solid personal attack chain is because illusion features heal back on a good number of its damage sources. If you defeat something before that kicks in then the damage you deal is very high by pretty much any standard. dps vs an AV for ill/cold is very respectable (even without factoring in -regen). dps vs a boss that you kill before healback is extreme.

It can be pretty good. A fair number of dom attacks have higher than normal damage scale for the power because it has been given a longer recharge. That is generally to their benefit when talking high end builds. They lack a bit of flow when it comes to aoe damage as they are often a mix of cones and pbaoes, but it smooths out considerably with epic powers that are available. They can't self buff to the extend that a blaster can in most cases. Biggest of all is they have no nukes which are really shining these days.

I'll mirror the sentiment that they are in good shape during the 30-45 game and can often make a tremendous contribution. They indeed get overshadowed post incarnates as damage is paramount That said, I still personally play more trollers than anything else because imo they are still the strongest AT with the overall strongest powerset combinations for what I enjoy doing which is solo'ing hard content and teaming when interested. They have at least 7 secondaries that can tackle AV's and even GMs and they are one of the best situated for solo'ing TF's with a large number of combinations. Yes corrs and defs have those same sets available , but the blast sets don't afford you the same opportunities as the control sets for such tasks. I'm still rebuilding my stable of characters, but an example would be my fire/cold and ice/rad corruptors, while awesome and heavily invested in, could never complete the same content as my ill/cold, or grav/rad trollers. The fire/cold corruptor had s/l softcap, but still struggled to take down s/l AV's and had no chance vs psy AV's. Whereas the ill/cold was literally taking down multiple AV's at the same time. So I dunno, I agree about not making much contribution post 50, but at the same time even if I jumped on my blaster the spawns are still dying as fast or faster than I can click sometimes haha. So while I may see more "you defeated" in the chat log I'm still not really needed and the team could prob drop a few players and still blaze through the content without issue.

For low level AV's? grav/dark Has a full attack chain that deals way damage than other trollers by lvl 6 By lvl 8 a grav/dark has all the tools needed to hunt baby AV's: immob, 2 direct attacks and a hold that adds additional damage to your direct attacks (if you so deem necessary). solid heal with minor -regen and a -resistance power

/storm can be a lot of fun. with good recharge you can have a couple tornadoes and a couple lightning storms out and then damage can start to rack up pretty quickly. Paired with a damage heavy primary like ill, dark, fire, or gravity things melt quickly from multiple sources. pretty late game though. Or something like a dark/fire/ice dom. High pet damage boosted by sleet and the superior damage of /fiery. Stuff dies fast. same idea though, it is a pretty late game build.

What's wrong with sharing a build? Knowledge is power, knowledge shared is power multiplied. Nothing. no one has in this thread though. not DSorrow who has nothing to prove and has posted impressive videos, not extor who keeps claiming to know everything, yet seems to thing AM is a better recovery power than heatloss and also cant make a build that can solo an EB with said power sets without incarnates. Historically in this game and the forums (this round seems no different) people are very helpful to those that attempt first and then seek advice after. If someone like extor cant be arsed to post up a build and ask why it isnt working then why should anyone else pull out a spoon and feed him? I guess just different perspectives is all.

stick with your ill/rad it is a good choice

Extor Prime, it isnt my job to make you believe, or hand you a build to do it. But I will explain mechanics so you can better understand. Heat loss works like fulcrum shift. just like fulcrum shift 1 buff centers on you (auto) and 1 buff centers off each target hit. You need to hit the target and be close enough to it to receive the buff. Solid build has the rech of under 100 sec on heat loss and it lasts 90 sec. You should be recovering well over 6 end/sec while it is up vs 1 enemy. Used against a full spawn heatloss would let blasters recover thru their nukes back when they crashed. Accelerate metabolism is a good power, but HL is truly a tier 9 power when you have high uptime on it. You want approx 125% global rech+hasten + full slotting in recharge intensive powers (HL, PA, benumb). That isn't that hard to do pre incarnates. Something like ill/rad or ill/dark is very strong and has a much larger margin for error. Ill/cold has a much higher ceiling and requires a more focused min/max approach to realize said potential. It isnt for everyone though just as say a tw/bio scrapper isnt for everyone and I might be inclined to say it underperforms if I jumped on a 50 without a good build and a lack of experience with the power interactions. But that doesn't mean the insane results others are achieving with it are embellished.

You shouldn't need incarnates to have perma PA you just need to really focus on +rech sets. Incarnates make it easier, or allow more personal protection to be acquired. Heat loss is probably (one of) the best recovery power in the game but it also needs a ton of recharge. high recharge cold should have no endurance issues and doesn't even need to slot stamina really. you either want ice epic or mace depending on how you have built your character. poison ray is basically guaranteed Achilles proc. ice blast takes an extra damage proc. I'd suggest hitting your target with heat loss about 7 seconds before your PA drops (perma PA builds still have to cast the power). Even AVs are impacted by the amount of -rech it produces. And make sure they are be numbed at that time too (-50% dam). You can also recast phantasm at that point because it likely will summon a decoy right away which taunts.

Mind solo's well right out of the gate too. Gravity just does a lot more damage with it's three attacks is all. Just looking at base damage. Mind takes 5.28 sec to do dom>lev>mez (second two contained) to produce 172 damage Grav takes 5.41sec to do gd>lift>propel (second two contained+impact) to produce 262 damage you also get singularity helping out. For comparison an energy blaster: 5.28 sec to do bolt>blast>burst to produce 298* damage *didn't factor in defiance That's what I mean when I say grav feels blaster-ish. Now obviously blasters have defiance, aim/bu, higher cap and more attacks available, but trollers get some nice damage buffs or -res debuffs. It is a satisfying experience. If you time it right you can get contained damage on terrify and fireball after mass hypnosis which is satisfying aoe damage provided you can handle the retaliation. Or at least you used to be able to. I haven't tested it since relaunch.

Controllers can end up being a very high damage class, but a good deal of their damage is generated through their pets and debuffs. So that means it is usually quite late game where they start to shine in terms of damage. Even then the damage they produce might not be satisfying to some people as it usually comes from multiple sources or lots of dot stacking.

I have never been a big Blaster player, generally losing interest in most I've tried, but I have played Dominators. What Dominator set is close to Blaster damage, keeping in mind that half of a Dominator's blast set is occupied with melee powers and that what limited AoEs they get generally require being almost on top of what they are hitting? I have Dominator's with both Energy Assault and Thorny Assault and they don't hold a candle to what my Blaster with Beam Rife can casually toss out and that well before we consider T9 powers. Fire's cone requires you to be within range 40, and at upper levels that can be a pretty unsafe range to be at. Dark gets range 60 with it's cone but its an arc of 20 degree. Several of the "blast" sets for Dominators don't even a ranged, AoE attack. And then there are the Blaster sets with no analogue on the Dominator side. A disintegrate Dominator might be loads of fun, but inherently it (and the other sets that did not get proliferated) probably violate some design rule about AoE damage. But I would imagine just about anything paired with TA would come closest. I do not disagree with Ice/TA being suggested for a controlly blaster. It was my first thought when reading the IO. I am greedy though so I would probably shoot for the best of both worlds and do something like Beam Rifle/Tactical Arrow. Of course that could be my new found love of Beam Riflle speaking. ;D Generally /fiery because blaze is so good and fiery embrace is a 85% damage buff for 30 seconds to fire damage. Some other doms do satisfying damage, but imo /fiery is the only one that will sometimes cause a blaster to look at you with envy.

I like that idea of +recovery and ya time bomb is very lackluster. The rest of traps is good to great, it just plays a lot differently than many other sets. In general a bit faster cast times would be all I ask for. I took down a ton of AV's with my fire/traps corr back in the day and never felt useless or too slow on most teams. However you have to get extremely aggressive with traps to keep up when the team starts steam rolling.

without considering much else I think mu mastery would solve most of your endurance issues as powersink can be up every 40ish seconds and is autohit. You don't give up a ton of aoe damage relative to fire mastery as ball lightning is fine.

Apparently the font is a mag 2 stun pbaoe that also does like, 10 damage to whatever mob its sitting on top of. in that case I'll move it to wormhole and give it one more shot. (yay enhancement unslotters!) I would not put the Energy Font proc in Wormhole as it will cause Wormhole to create aggro. If you avoid damage procs and Energy font Wormhole has the ability to reposition enemies without causing aggro on you. yay I like the does not notify feature of the new wormhole. I was hoping (without much reason) it would summon the font upon release. if it summons it upon initial casting then it would be useless in my case as the spawn is often relocated so it would then have to travel over to them. oh well. can't win them all.

Apparently the font is a mag 2 stun pbaoe that also does like, 10 damage to whatever mob its sitting on top of. in that case I'll move it to wormhole and give it one more shot. (yay enhancement unslotters!)

I don't recall poison having any particularly strong -regen abilities. Now if SCORE would swap in the poison trap from traps then I'd be all over poison.

I throw a vote for gravity. It solo's extremely well from right out of the gate giving you blaster-ish damage from contained+impact lift and propel. Propel knocks down everything near its impact point (and along its path from what i've seen) letting you chunk down the lut/boss while everything around them flops. Honestly, no other troller solos as well as gravity from lvl 2 (gd+lift beats blind+spec wounds) up until your build is strong enough to take on larger spawns at which point the lack of aoe damage is apparent. Singularity isn't the highest damage pet but it is much better than it used to be. It can also take controller ATO's. For teams you sometimes hear how people want a higher aggro cap or a higher team size setting for larger spawns... wormhole w/knockdown proc is basically that setting. If two spawns are remotely close to one another I will grab the second one and plop it down with the first one. And it packs them tight so melee toons with their tiny aoe's can be more effective as well as getting further use out of patch powers from the rest of your teammates. I've played a lot of controllers over the life of this game, gravity in its current form is in great shape both solo and teamed. It also "feels" really strong in that lift,propel and wormhole are all very visceral, weighty powers.

dark/storm has some nice synergy and offers a ton of -tohit from moderate range. Fearsome cone and then start herdicannng. And has two pbaoe stuns if you like that sort of thing. single target damage is very high (by any AT's standards) if you strive for it. But comes very late. Benefits from lots of +rech and needs to sort out endurance issues (common to most storms) and personal survival as you can pull heaps of aggro. Similar to the fire/storm you once had (which i also enjoyed myself), but with more synergy. I personally prefer storm on a MM as it allows me to dedicate more of my time to storming. grav/traps has unreal synergy as well and offers a play experience unlike anything i've run with to date. i've run traps up to 50 with a fire/traps corr and a traps/son defender, but this character just meshes together so well. traps really benefits from the new powexec_location binds to smooth out its play (storm does too). Wormhole with the new mechanics and the knockdown proc is one of the most unique powers in the game and used creatively helps traps play well on faster moving teams.

Moved it to my single target hold... I will be selling it shortly... I think it would work well in wormhole based on the rech/aoe proc formula, but the second issue is even when it procs i don't really see the little guy do anything.