Mezmera

I've played all sorts of dommies and when Symphony came out I gave it a thorough test. All of those cone controls make you want to play it from range. Almost all of dom assaults have a mix of powers be it melee or pbaoe along with some ranged attacks that encourage you to play it in various ways. Alas I did not find Symphony to be a good powerset for doms to use where it feels more suited to the Controller AT. If you play Symphony on doms you'll want to target assaults with better ranged styles which would be something like Fire. Psi is a good assault but its pbaoe oriented and yes the damage oomph isn't quite like something you'll find in some of the other assaults. Symphony and Psi is a counterintuitive pairing imo. I'd honestly avoid Symph on doms.

I would not play a dom without permadom if I had the option. The mez protection alone is the best you can get amongst almost all ATs. The endurance refill is great especially since doms are such end hogs. There's also a nice 25% tohitt increase for 15s after you reclick domination which helps with all kinds of attacks and controls. Then yes the better you can control things. Bonfire IS a broken power it shouldn't be as good as it is with that gimmick IO but it is, I'd still take an aoe hold since with that longer recharge you can at the very least proc out that hold to contribute some nice aoe damage at times along with being able to instantly control just about everything.

Yup yup. When IOs and such came out it feels like the devs at the time were okay with permadoms being as powerful as they were to justify the investment someone would make in the character. But they reasonably determined that the damage increase should just be something doms should have at any stage so they made that increased damage natural.

I'd have to agree that Shield would be the most versatile of the potential 'meat shield' tanks due to its ability to easily hit high positional defenses without having to rely on being surrounded by enemies to achieve it along with having high DDR to pair with it so that you're not all of a sudden getting spiked. Then you can build for high resistances, not as easily achieved as Invuln I agree, but I have my tank set for base +50% resists across the board (including psi) before we go factoring in the tanker resist procs, OWtS or Melee Core. As for the difference in hp it's not really all that much if you know to build for it and Shields always maintains a high amount, I have my tanks hp at 3200 and if I use OWtS I'm up to 3500. Dull Pain is nice more so for the healing aspect which Shield not having a heal is somewhat of a liability unless you know to cover it by taking something like Unrelenting or looking to slot those absorb procs from the tank and hold sets (which if placed in powers with a good proc rate the absorbs become quasi heals). About the only other negative about Shield is the lack of an endurance debuff protection which having high defenses should kind of alleviate some of that, and if something does get through you can target powers that help with end recovery from the pools. Shield Charge is an awesome weapon to have in your armor that helps with clearing ads, catching extra aggro, and providing nice movement possibilities. Then Grant Cover like has been pointed out is an awesome team protection power. If you have a good team built the more offensive powersets like Bio do provide better value but in my opinion Shield does bring the best versatility to the team if you need more of a 'meat shield' while protecting the team and helping clear ads and catch max aggro.

I do love me some Mind doms. Buuuuuttt in overall effectiveness in teams and whatnot I'm gonna have to go with Plant as the bar for control characters and every other control is living under its shadow. Yes the sleep is nice in that it doesn't notify and its auto hit but like others have pointed out here there's a lot of controls that get an aoe sleep, granted in my opinion only electric's is the most effective since it pulses that sleep for when your teammates do eventually nudge them awake with all of their aoe damage. In terms of strictly aoe control potential I am with you that Mind control has it in spades compared to all the others. I don't bother with that sleep though, Terrify is a great soft control along with the hard aoe control you get from Total Domination and Mass Confusion. Then yes if you still feel the need for more aoe control there's Mass Hypnosis.

I don't mind to have a stalker in the team to fill the pure dps role if it comes down to it. Bonus points if they know the incan spots since they can get places stealthily. I see them as the big target killers which should do quite well for us with a good team comp. The team should have a decent amount of aoe dmg covered so the most preferred stalkers would be the high ST dps killers like Energy. I've seen both Ice and Energy Melee/Bio's do real well. My stalker I'd bring is EM/Invuln which has a bit safer feel being in the thick of the fight but honestly the higher offensive secondary sets would be better suited since you're there for that ST damage you can put on AVs.

Intuition is a nice one. I also like Agility for the recharge and defense for all of my low slotted defense powers, I build that recharge around the proc'able powers and the rest of my powers are well served with that recharge. Nerve radial is another good one it covers just about all controls. On my Mind/Dark dom I believe I might have Vigor Radial, I think it has some control enhancing as well. There's definitely some unique combos out there.

Yes something with challenge settings like that on anything below level 50 it should be organized by the lead through a group of friends that would like to do such an obnoxious undertaking on a level 13 character. It should also be widely advertised if the lead is doing it through pugs.

If you're set on Symphony it's not very synergetic with many dom assaults. It's a ranged damage control which would pair well with only a select few sets with Fire being the most obvious. If you're not set in stone with Symphony then you could do something/energy/soul. Energy and Soul pair real well for a mix of high melee, ranged and pbaoe damage.

A lot of control sets have a confuse power already available and if they do I'm taking it and slotting the full set of Contagious for that 5% ranged defense at the 6th bonus. There's far better Epic pools for dommies that allow you to do far more and like @MoonSheep says that epic pool is a bit redundant and lacking in comparison to other pools like Ice, Soul etc.

All of the Strike Forces are lore heavy what are you talking about?! Take the LRSF and MLTF for instance. There's so much stuff packed into those that if you slowed down to take notice it would be clear again that these were the crest of the lore that was building up to these showdowns with Recluse or all those do-gooder heroes. Eventually people had 'been there, done that' enough that they know all the nooks and crannies and could care less about the lore they are reintroduced to time after time. So they just speed through to maximize the rewards vs time spent since SF's rightly so carry some of the better rewards. I don't contend that it might be one mission too long with all of those epic events and maybe a little too much trying to be packed into this fresh new SF. But as far as lore in SF's go, your SF's should be the most lore heavy content to get others interested in running the smaller backstories. The SF's should be the Avengers events and the in between content should be the Iron Man, Captain America, etc. stories.

This was something I would have liked to have seen with the introduction of the new goldside zones. Instead of creating yet a 3rd tutorial zone I would have liked for them to make these new zones 35+ with all their well written content. At level 35 either red or blue side you're forced to a contact that locks you out of regular content and they try to shuffle you off to Praetoria. You can tell them you'll pass and move back onto your regular shtick blue or red but if you go to these zones with an introductory arc upon completion you would gain access to a Praetorian Epic Pool for your character, maybe related to the various factions. More lowbie zones was a poorly thought out plan with the expansion but I do hope for more things to get integrated with Goldside in the future, it's such a shame and waste of well crafted zones and content. There should be something to attract people over to want to play that stuff beyond just badges.

Some boots and gloves don't have the asymmetrical option no matter what top or bottom option you're under. None of the Talons ones do I know for sure. It may be something where the devs wanted to keep some sets looking balanced since some of them really do look like they should come as a pair. Or maybe they are too hard coded for asymmetrical since some of these things are pulled from the NPC models.

Mind control is great on Doms mind you it's massive amounts of fast fluid control and a little light on damage which is where you depend more on your assault and Epic Pools to fill that in. Psi is a good assault on Doms but I'm not sure it has the right oomph when paired with Mind Control. If I were to play Mind I'd rather pair it with Fire or Energy and Psi I feel is better paired with something like Plant or Fire. I'd suggest identifying the Epic Pool you'll most want to use as well. Something like Soul Mastery has oodles of great aoe assaults paired best with a more ST oriented assault like Energy whereas Psi assault already has some good aoe attacks so you'd likely want to use a different Epic to fill in any gaps from your assault.

This power also does take the Achilles proc so you're getting the base value of -10% res from the power itself and also -20% from the Achilles. It also has an ideal proc rate if you don't fidget with the recharge which you can also slot some damage procs if you'd want to use this for damage on top of the -resistance. Most of my toons that can power boost go with the Force of Will pool for Unleash Potential and I find having Weaken Resolve a great power to have in case the team is low on debuffing. I wouldn't say there's much difference between having another damage proc slotted in lieu of an Achilles when you're solo teamed but the more teammates you have the more effective -res procs get magnified by team damage. If I can I am choosey about only slotting these -res procs in very effective powers and not just all over the place. Didn't get down to you're conversation with Yomo yet but pretty much still the same sentiment.

Mostly it's as Luminara says. It's the difference in levels of fighting a level 50 baddie equal to yourself or an increasing general overall resistance to all things as it becomes 4 levels above you or 3 if you are 50+1. There's caveats to these values as some powers like Flash Arrow from Trick Arrow for instance it will have two listed values of -tohitt in it's equation if you show details of how the power is. The way mine is slotted I get 13% -tohitt and another 13% -tohitt (unresisted). The unresisted value I'm getting will always be the full 13% and then that other 13% scaled by the level of the critter and their resistance to it so it's not a full 26% but rather somewhere around 18% -tohitt after the various factors and calculations are considered. Most things are varied in resistance as the critter and boss level changes with a few powers which in their descriptions say that they come with unresistable portions. Sometimes the unresistable portions are also meant for buffers so that their teammates get the full values of buffs because they'll likely have high resistances to these buffs otherwise. Then there's things like + or - special which is a whole other ball of wax. It's best to work under the assumption that most things will be resisted pretty high by a +4 AV and that the purple triangles are mainly to help the AV during the fight so they don't get permanently held to give it a fighting chance.

Yes all damage resistance debuffs are subject to the increasing resistance of a +4 AV so any value of resistance debuff it says you get you can expect to have about 2/3 of it actually in effect. Even still maintaining a 13% -res debuff on a hard target is great over the long run, if you're using the achilles proc and then if you can consistently stack the pvp one that's another 13% which having a 25-30% resistance debuff on a target is quite noticeable.

Bananas in the tailpipe.

The only thing I find being an issue is with the PAP rewards being at the moment limited to just skin overlays or auras. The D-sync is a great reward as are the merits and if there were much more to do with the PAPs (I'm looking at you Seer robes) then the reward structure would be the best bang for your buck, even more so than Apex. As for keeping up with speed runners I'll care to know my way around and build myself a sturdy toon that can traverse areas should for some reason I don't get Incan'd to the objective. I have no want for taking the teleport pool nor setting up binds for it so I can get to the finish line slower than others more well practiced that'll likely tp us all anyways. If I make a team for this I'm always reserving someone I know that knows their way around with the Incan destiny. For the TF itself the devs did a phenomenal job crafting this new high quality content by giving us higher difficulties with congruent rewards while also leaving a base difficulty for those that would rather take their time to learn the ins and outs of this one. It's not ever going to be as simple as an ITF but once people play it more often it becomes easier to understand. Incidentally I think the higher star ITFs are quite a deal harder (excluding the Vanguard fight) at much less reward than Aeon.

I have a SG for you although we only take limited applicants but we occasionally do have tryouts.

Well maybe that's the point to make it do best internal damage on fire ammo and they are throwing cryo a bone since theirs doesn't stack and there's mostly little reason to use cryo bullets in comparison to the others. The chem ammo version needs to be doing -dmg though if it's not.

It looks like they want this to take advantage of the ammo types to differing effect. You want damage and some control use incendiary rounds. You want instant control use cryo and for longer more impactful control use chem rounds. Or you have good old standard ammo. There'd be no reason to switch off of chem ammo with most things being equal.

Yeah I went onto live last night and respec'd a few things on my defender and tried changing bullets between attacks. Novel idea to leave some variety to the different bullets so you all are onto something here. Usually I'd just stick to chem ammo on my defender for the harder content and then switch to fire ammo after like say the Vanguard fight on Aeon but changing bullets in the middle of a fight seems like something you'd like to do if you had the ability to do so seamlessly as a gun fighter. As someone well trained on Domination I did find it a bit harder to swap ammo between attacks but doable. I was thinking of binding attacks to coincide with clicking the different ammo types but if I go out of sequence it could get messy so it'd be best to cognitively click the ammo on and off. I think if there was a way to tie bullets and attacks together in a way like @Marshal_General is thinking then yeah it'd probably work out well for DP players. As far as Piercing Rounds I think it's great that the debuff now works on all ammo types and now lasts 15s at the cost of no longer stacking which on the live version you could only be on standard ammo and it only really stacked for a few seconds anyways due to recharge and animation times. I'd say the animation is still a wee bit long for trying to fit this in as an attack in your chain. All in all I'd say this is fine but if it's possible to trim the animation a smidge or up the damage I'd say this power would offer quite a bit more to the power set. I'll test out swapping ammo on beta this weekend.

For Suppressive Fire if we can quickly toggle off the ammo so it becomes standard the power should react as it was then we can toggle back on to Fire or Chem ammo for other attacks and all should react how it should then? I say this as my blaster uses Fire ammo exclusively but to not lose an important attack and not have to respec entirely out of Swap Ammo I guess I can learn to detoggle if its not going to be buggy.

It's not quite as short a recharge as 60s but shorter than most other nukes yes along with Hail of Bullets. They do have 16 target cap though so as Powerhouse is alluding to the recharge would need to increase and they don't want to homogenize it completely towards how other sets play. Understandable. I do hate cones though with the exception of something like Terrify and a few other control cones.