Mezmera

After telling me a bunch of times how I am allowed not to use Mass Confusion while I acquiesce to your challenge to show you how to clear a map much faster it dawned on me that you have no objectivity. I wasn't in your Carnie run telling you how you were allowed to use your regular powers, use the tools available to you to clear the map the fastest most efficient way possible. So after warning you a few times not to bother me while I use my regular powers showing you I had no problem just quitting out. You can live your fantasy and gloat all you like, you obviously didn't like the reality of what Mass Confusion could do so you decided to bicker with me while I showed you how it is done. You don't know how powers work outside of the ones you've grown fond of, your opinion is meaningless. So please do go on. Give EJ some insight as to why his realization of Dark's dpa is so low for your pylon test when I'm sure that's not the case for the top tier dom damage assaults. Just because you believe in the Tooth Fairy doesn't mean the rest of us have to.

The OP started this topic asking why his Dark Assault damage is so low doing the lolpylon test. That's his realization not ours. The rest of us that understand the fundamental differences across power sets are aware enough to give him reasons as to why his Dark Assault doesn't seem up to snuff straight damage-wise. They're pretty experienced so I assume they know how to build the dom for damage with procs and such. Create a new dom with Fire, Energy or whatever you like. Show the power details and scale it to level 50. The base stats are your "facts", there's quite a dpa difference in ST attack powers across all of the powersets. But I guess that's too hard to do. For pylons using aoe powers is counter to how you want to build for to pass this "test". Why would you even take any primary powers that don't feed into your ST damage? Pylon tests, ha! What a metric.

Well off hand Fire, Energy, Earth are the top ST damage assaults. I haven't played any of the other revamped assaults since they made them better but I'm sure Ice isn't too shabby nowadays, I hear Savage may be half decent. Psi is more aoe and survivability oriented. Dark is survivability oriented as well with the -tohitt and heal. It's ST dps is okay but nowhere near the first 3 mentioned since those assaults don't have a side benefit that includes a heal or make it harder to hit you. I've played about all of the dom assaults, Dark is a good assault for its own reasons but trying to claim its not middle of the pack damage-wise is kidding yourself. You may want to expand your horizons with some more assaults.

On my Mind/Dark I take Energy Transfer from Primal Mastery since you can heal that damage right back. ET is stupid good ST damage on doms. Dark's damage is mediocre, it's best qualities are the -tohitt and the heal.

I have 3 builds on my Mind/Nrg but the powers I typically take are: Mind: Mesmerize, Confuse, Mass Confusion, usually Dominate, usually Terrify, usually Total Domination. One build has Mass Hypnosis which will be good for the impending LRSF change. TK is trash as it is right now and I'll usually skip levitate and the aoe sleep. Energy: t1 blast because, Power Up, Total Focus, Power Burst, Snipe. Sometimes I'll skip Dominate and substitute Bone Smasher for more damage. The only other power you'd take would be Whirling Hands but I don't like it's animation time for what you get out of it. I go Soul Mastery and just take all of those aoe powers. Power Up is a very strong power, it helps you achieve a lot of different things. Hope this helps.

I have a Grav/Nrg dom I know how good it can be. Grav doms are just fine they have lots of aoe ccontrol you yourself can contribute with your sing doing lots of heavy lifting.

Agility does not affect the recharge on Domination, just so we're clear. I do love me some agility though on my doms since they have lots of defense powers that may be a bit low slotted and then the recharge really helps with the aoe controls and soul mastery powers and then there's the endurance mod aspect of the incarnate. As for Illusion control on doms I'm not sure it'd be a great fit. It might just be too powerful in some areas and lacking in others (like control). I know Illusion is real strong on controllers but I have no envy towards it, I'd have no problem if they get to keep their unique power and doms get an altogether new power set like maybe Wind Control or something. We usually don't see control getting too much alteration going between Controllers and Doms but I'd think Illusion would need quite some alteration. Just my feeling on it. I'd rather doms get new unique shinies to them since they are the ones with by far the lowest power set combinations available..

Understand that in the early levels say up to 30 your role is strictly control. Dom's are late bloomers since they get most of their best attacks from 28 and after plus by 30 you start getting enough slots to start filling out some of your better powers. As you're leveling it's good to experiment with the powers in your primary and secondary so you can get some familiarity with the ones you notice are highly effective and the ones that are redundant. Typically until 30 I will concentrate on taking control powers with some of the better earlier attacks and then around those later levels I will respec out those early now ineffectual powers and start slotting for perma dom. The goal is to make efficient use of the primary and secondary powers and then build yourself through pools targeting lots of defense powers. I'll not usually have more than 6 powers from my primary or secondary. Mind control is quite fun on doms. Hope this helps!

Well if it were to truly be considered worthy of a badge called 'old school challenge' shouldn't you be limiting it to villain AT only runs? You had to have a really sturdy built brute to make it through that, having a proper tank is cheating the experience.

Yeah I'd like to see a special reward if it's say the weekly and done on super duper hardcore mode that you get a buff that lasts the week or a month. Then maybe you can tone down the p2w stuff a smidge. It could be something like the buff you get from completing the DA arc and take the power for yourself by killing that witch doctor lady. That buff lasted me like 6 months and it was real nice. Lasting a week may be a bit too short and it'd be neat to have some pretty unique buffs overlapping so maybe a buff that lasts 14 days of game time which'll probably net you a month's worth and you can only have 2-3 of those currently active.

Energy. Stupid good ST dps, you get 3 big extreme attacks. It's aoe is subpar but you can pull some aoe out of procs and such in Mind's aoe powers. I also go with Soul Mastery which is fantastic aoe, it compliments Energy real well. My first toon back was Mind/Dark. My old Mind/Nrg became my main after how well they revamped Energy Assault. Dark is decent because the heal offers strong survivability but its damage is mediocre. Electric is bleh. Has been since they nerfed Havoc Punch way back on live. Counting live I've played all 3 assaults with Mind. My main was the Mind/Nrg but I knew it was subpar and that my Mind/Dark on live was better. Now that's not the case, my Energy assault is so much more fun to play than the others.

So long as its obvious enough that we're not caught off guard with our first inclination being stuck in some hive under some nuclear reactor with a bureaucratic general taking our bullets away from us then all will be fine. I mean I can dish out some mighty harsh language if I need to but if these are truly going to be harder I'll want to prepare myself accordingly. All is well until things start coming outta the walls.

Been there done that. We need fresh creative content that the devs have access to create.

Or maybe we can get some actual hard content for these level shifts that Going Rogue was supposed to be introducing... I'd like to see what they finally have cooking up before we go blaming peoples grandmas for the troubles in the game.

This is why I don't use mids. There's lots of things that changed from live that I hadn't experienced and wouldn't know how I wanted to tailor my characters to fit my playstyle. Upon my return I just built my first characters as I had remembered last on live with the caveat that I knew proc's were a bit different so I tried to take advantage of those new rules where it best fit. I was familiar with incarnates but there was some new powers like the Origin pools and other changes to pool powers that I hadn't experienced which affected my characters more than I had known when first back. Heck I'm even still adapting, I recently changed out a 5th piece of Manticore which netted me a 7.5 recharge bonus for a Force Feedback proc which would net me on average a 30 recharge bonus so long as I am actively fighting. If ever someone asks for a build on something I have lots of expertise on I will give away some of my ancient secrets but try to leave them room to adapt a build to how they themselves like to play.

Blasters are effective so long as scoundrels shoot first.

If you have maybe 100 mil you can scrounge from other toons it's great to build for perma dom for the early levels. If I ever make a new dom I get it PL'd to 30 then go kit it out for perma then play it from there. I'll typically have it so my doms can perma to 25 should they ever exemp. Target some pools with lots of defense powers and slot in some Lotg's.

I did say the pvp proc made Dark Consumption almost as good as a straight sleet. I'll give it a nod strictly for the more frequent use, the proc's debuff lasts for 10s and sleet's is 15s so not much difference plus just about everything is dead within that 10s anyways unless it's an AV which something like Weaken Resolve with Achilles combined with the pvp -res proc will show considerably better resistance debuff than your sleet. Sleet's -res is about the same as the proc and it scales lower the higher level the enemy. Then there's all that added damage you can get out of procs and slotted damage in Dark Consumption plus then by the way it doubles as an emergency endurance refill. Dom builds are tight so I don't depend too much on procs but I do make use of the good ones where I can. Then you have Soul Drain which is your very own personal fulcrum shift that also feeds more good damage, the damage boosted doesn't scale lower based on the level of enemy like your -resist does. Last there's Dark Obliteration which again feeds more aoe damage. The utility of Soul Mastery is far superior to anything you can get out of the pool chasing Sleet. If you're too scared to party in close with the baddies you've just locked down then I guess Sleet is better for your social distancing playstyle. 😛

Don't lead the new person astray with your wonky religion. The dom epic pools are all quite good in their own right. With sleet you can't slot anything beyond what you can get out of its base -res stats and there's not really much else attractive in that pool. Now you can go with Soul Mastery and take Dark Consumption and slot that pvp -res proc into it which is sure fire thanks to the recharge. So you're getting almost the same effect as you would sleet but you're also getting pbaoe damage out of that power plus any other procs you may slot into it and then it also refills your endurance. Then you can also get Soul Drain from that pool which is one of the best powers doms have access to and a great aoe power in Dark Obliteration and arguably the best shield in those pools. Matthew 12:34 😜 Soul Mastery is where it's at.

He was the toughest one on that back in the day. The thunder strikes he called down were rough. You had to take Numina down first because you couldn't have Statesman constantly getting buffed but he was surely the 2nd must kill target after her. They made that SF easier by default taking him out of it. I'm glad to see him coming back, no offense to Yin.

The attractive thing about HC is the larger player base which means a larger pool of resources HC can pull together. I'm more looking forward to considerable content being added. We get Gadgetry then we run the same mundane stuff? You'll throw the Bolero a few times at Recluse then what? We don't need to copy other servers word for word. Sure it'd be nice to get the remaining Origin pool powers but they'll likely find their way into HC in some shape or form. Some ability to flexibly add powers and tinker with them on the fly would be novel but there's broader things that can be accomplished on HC which I'm hoping to see soontm.

They probably mean that the Origin pools that we do have are already hardly selected by most people that don't realize how good they are. The Sorcery pool was a good pool for some AT's because how OP Rune of Protection was and yet when they were revamping that pool last update the devs talked about the statistics about how many leveled out 50's selected the Sorcery pool it was selected at a rate of less than 5% and it was better before. Which I'm sure that 5% selected rate would likely apply to Force of Will and Experimentation as well. Showing just how niche these pools are in the minds of most players even though they are arguably some of the best pools. So the HC devs may be thinking why introduce more niche pool sets when they can repurpose the powers into other things they may be looking to revamp.

Ascendancy is a very good set. Like @MoonSheep I slot that whole set into my most used lead in ST control like Dominate. The damage boost it gets you is quite nice and the bonuses are great too. The other set does need some work. I wouldn't have a problem if they reconfigured that set into an assault set that could be slotted into damage powers.

It's not another servers "idea" though. These origin pools were all dreamt up by Paragon Studios. There were to be origin pools for each origin which means a few more were accounted for and was in the coding passed along in sekret. Building onto that coding with their own ideas sure no need to be a lemming to another server in that regard. But there's no reason not to have the other missing origin pools. I think they're just going to hold off on introducing those other ones so they have some original powers they can pull from when they choose. They can introduce some new power sets with some of those powers and call it fresh.

Carrot on stick my friend.