Mezmera

Well Energy Assault is on par with fire for the highest damage assault, especially with the new mechanic. You have to venture into melee though yes to get the most out of your pbaoe melee power. You won't be doing too much aoe damage until you do get those Epic pool powers but the Dominator epic powers round out the AT nicely.

First, a couple of things. You probably fizzle out because the best attacking abilities doms get bloom from 28-40. The early levels are all about getting your controls situated. Controlling the battefield can get a bit boring if you don't have the ability to set them up then knock them down. I'd recommend Energy Assault. It's extremely fun when you get the mechanic down but still it's a late bloomer so you'll want to stick it out until at least 40 before you see how you really like it. As for what control I'm always a big fan of Mind control, the power activations are all so seamless. There's a lot of good control sets though I think your enjoyment will be dictated more by the assault set that suits you.

I'd have to say the Gravity pet is probably the best overall. Very durable and controls for you while you can focus on damage. Dark would be the way to go if you're looking for more damage. Also, don't sleep on the Patron pets, they're very good. Coupled with your Primary pet and Lore pets you'll be a mini MM.

Ice/Nrg/Soul. Tons of pbaoe goodness. Take Jack tho even for him occupying some aggro.

Honestly I almost like SR as it currently is. It's cheap on the required slotting to cap all of your positionals and it's great how much +recharge you can get out of it. I like how the passives are in theory with the resists scaling into play the more health you lose but it only is really a significant boost when you're down to 2/3 health and like you say there's no real way in it's toolkit to get you back out of danger. One or two lucky big shots and you're roadkill. Now if you can boost your resists to where you can take those big shots and get use out of the passive scaling resists then you're doing well but that means you are pretty much locked into taking Sorcery. I'd like to see the passive's resists adjusted to where it's significant enough at full health even if it doesn't scale as high at 10% health. I can make due without the heal since that is it's known weakness anyways. I'd totally advocate for Elude to be reworked since most SR builds are already defense capped by when you get it settled.

I think the intent from Arcanaville was to illustrate that building in more hp is almost as important as having high resists. Coupled together you get quite a meaty toon. The allure of Hoarfrost is that it is both a heal when you need it and also that it buffs your hp. There's a few problems with the power though. First it's a base 6 minute recharge so it's quite unreliable as a heal when most times it's not available when you'll need the heal so you'll still find yourself popping green inspirations. The other issue is that Dominators hp cap is 1600 and a well built dom with their accolades is typically already in the 1400-1500 range so you're only benefiting on maybe a 150 hp buff. If I took the Ice APP I'd take hoarfrost but there are these caveats.

Where are you I've been broadcasting your name in LFG for 15 mins. I'll be waiting.... Edit: Now 30 mins...

Oh we'll find out who has a mastery of math and who doesn't. I'm getting on right now. I'll be shouting your name in broadcast.

Welcome back Kira, I'm still waiting for you to come show me how to Dom.

This whole time I've been in agreement that Ice as a whole is an under performing set compared to just about every Dominator primary. The saving grace IS Arctic Air. I'd be all for buffing Jack, tweaking the cone slow and maybe adding a mechanic unique to Ice Control to give it some more appeal.

It's not Ice's fault you're not capping your defenses and resists. That'd be dependent on the secondary taken, shields overlooked and bonuses missed.

Semantics. Here's some more semantics. It does have 16 targets in an area that it keeps pulsing its effects onto. What mob is ever more than 16 people? When you do aggro 2 or 3 mobs the Minions and Lieutenants should be being defeated on a fast pace so as that first mob should be evaporating and enters a new mob that aggros to you which your Arctic Air will be affecting them as soon as they enter in range until all you have on you are bosses which will all be affected by AA.

I never said it didn't "dominate" due to the fact it had a debuff. It doesn't "dominate" because it has a constant auto hit reapplying control that has a limitless amount of targets that it can affect in a large area around you that's always active, which also just so happens to have auto hit debuffs.

If you're on Excelsior I'd love to show you I can debunk just about all of what you've just said. By the very fact that they have an "unfocused" array of attacks all in one tree seems to set them aside as unique wouldn't you say? Dom's have every which way to attack available at their disposal aside from a nuke and their Epic pools are fabulous. You don't like doms, cool that's not your play style as you say you're more of a controller type. I don't want to come along and have the whole makeup of what makes the Controller AT unique to them changed to suit me.

Hold on. A stun in your secondary is not something you should be relying on as a control, the debuff is what your aiming for. Because it has some aspect of a control it is amplified by having domination active. Just like my Total Focus. The mags on byproduct control effects in secondaries are far lower than what's in your primary. These attacks are not auto hit and have a finite amount of targets they can affect. With this analogy you seem to be saying Psi Shockwave will control a boss before AA will. At a mag 2 control you will need 3 applications of this power to control said boss which by the recharge indicated will take 1 minute, with recharge reduction lets say down to 25 seconds. Are you telling me standing in a mob your Arctic Air can't confuse a boss in 25 seconds along with everything else around you automatically? The whole point of the argument over Arctic Air is that it has auto hit debuffs on top of a much faster gradual control that you can just turn on and forget about than the point you were trying to make with Psychic Shockwave.

Arctic Air is basically an inherent pbaoe control permanently actively affecting a large swath of enemies around you that you don't have to cast thus you can cast your other Ice controls in the meantime. Whereas something like Mind control has to make the effort to cast Mass Confusion and it's other aoe controls not to mention the long recharges they have and they also don't come with any debuffs. I am not advocating for any buff to Mind I think it's fine as is, maybe reorder a few power picks but other than that it's quite well off even with the longer recharging controls. I'm pretty sure those other control sets with debuffs don't "dominate". The dark aoe hold dominates on first cast I believe and then doesn't keep dominating as I understand it and Dark seems to sacrifice extra control for a higher damage potential. Elec's pbaoe power doesn't dominate while it's debuffing enemies endurance and its confuse doesn't dominate beyond the initial target. Earth's stalagmites don't dominate while making people flop around. And nor does a bunch of ice powers like Ice Slick, the cone -slow and -rech. Like I said I think tinkering with some ice controls is more in line with what you're advocating. You don't have to convince me with anything about Seeds of Confusion. It's an outlier power that is obviously OP compared to all the other confusion powers and never got the same nerf like Mass Confusion ended up getting.

I do have experience with Arctic Air and TK so I'll chime in here. Arctic Air is an auto hit that affects everything around you in a wide area, yes it's not an instant confuse but it's not like it takes forever and proc'd with the contagious confusion its a very nice power to have running. It costs nowhere near the amount of endo that TK does and doesn't have such a small amount of targets it can affect. There's also the side effects that Fubar mentioned like the -stealth, -rech and -speed. Arctic Air is pretty much the reason to go with Ice control. Mind control hardly ever takes TK especially if you've got minimal ways for endurance optimization. With perma dom you'll never get AA detoggled so you'll always passively be dominant in melee. Maybe a few other powers in Ice control could use a tweak but Arctic Air is working just fine.

Ah okay I'll defer on that one I don't have much experience with either power set but hope someone can point you in the right direction.

I've tanked those same things with my doms too. Mine are energy assault and dark assault but I'd assume just about any dom secondary could do it if the person knows to play to the dominator's build strengths. For instance any dom with a powerboost capability in their secondary can cap all of their positional defenses and a lot of secondaries have a powerboost power. Also doms with a healing mechanic could manage it.

Do you mean Mind Control/Dark Assault or is it Dark Control/Psionic Assault?

Well it is what it is. Control AT's get control ATO's. Leave Ascendancy as it is, if you want to make a case for Dominating Grasp, the other ATO set, to be switched over so it can fit into attack powers that's fine. But you'll also need to help the devs balance a second set for all AT's so now everyone gets a set that fits into defense powers, resistances, heals and other support powers. Then what if blasters and stalkers don't want to have their second ATO sets changed so that it looks all nice and balanced for everybody? I'm fine with the weaker ATO set being reworked into a damage set for doms but know that's a huge can of worms that'll get opened.

Um the bonuses are 4% damage, 8% mez, 15% accuracy, 10% recharge and 5% ranged defense. Those are some mighty fine bonuses. On top of that there's the stacking damage boost from the proc. Only thing extra you could ask for is the 3% hp bonus. The mez bonus is there to be identifiable to your control AT which is fine with me for all that other win in the set.

Ascendancy of the Dominator is a very nice set, all of the bonuses are fabulous. The proc boosts your all around damage by 21% for every stack up to 5x. Typically I'm running around with 1-2 stacks always so lets say a 32% damage boost on all of my attacks, yes I'll take that thank you. This set needs nothing changed. The set with Fiery Orb is junk I'll give you that. If there were an overhaul the Orb would need to be made a bit better and some set bonuses would need reworked. The Stalker ATO's are the bar. If they aim for that type of transcendence for the Orb set but come up short that'll be fine with me.

Not everyone's experience is the same. I live in melee with my dom and thirst to alpha every attack. I love tanking AVs right in their faces and alpha zerg the 8 Heroes at the end of LRSF all the time. Coyote is a bit right in that it's sometimes combination of powersets with the ATs that usually define your experience in general. A fire/atomic blaster is going to play a whole hell of a lot better than say a AR/devices blaster. I'm all for subtle tinkering with powersets like they did with the revamped assaults. What I'm not okay with is blanket statements about an AT that I'm able to perform exceedingly well contrary to what is being stated. I think it's more a lack of creativity and the ability to adapt to some of the nice new toys out there. For instance I never took Rune of Protection for the longest time since I had no experience with it and I didn't like the idea of wasted mez protection plus I tend to chase defenses anyways but when Unleash Potential came along I gave it a shot and sure as hell I'd been gimping my potential for like 4 months that this game was back by not giving the Origin pools a chance.

I wasn't too sure about Controllers but I knew Defenders had probably the best statistical values for things since they're not intended to be offensive dps, which is kind of true for Controllers too hence why their values are higher also. It's kind of tough comparing doms to controllers, I see them more in terms of cousins of blasters because as you say neither have a support set and rely on their dps to win the day, where a blaster has the nuke to neutralize the enemies the dom has their aoe controls. I'd like to see what values Controllers and Defenders can pull out of the new Origin Pool shields. I think the values you can pull out of Rune of Protection and Unleash Potential were intentionally left higher for doms to compensate for some of the grievances doms have. I know for a fact that Unleash Potential has better values with the same slotting on my dom compared to my blaster and corruptor. As far as diversity in APP powers there's just so much better options in Dominator Epic pools compared to that of Blasters and Corruptors. The dom patron pools have the best of the pets which heck even one of them is a pocket healer where you can also in that same pool get a good resist shield AND a godmode resistance power and even an endurance optimization power I believe. When I level up a dom I look forward to getting to choose from the Epic pools, when I'm making a blaster or corruptor there's not much excitement since it feels like there's a limited amount of good powers in those pools. I'm on the fence about evening out the values to a Controller. It'd depend on the amount of damage a Controller can pump out compared to the dom, which I don't think they can match so it feels like comparing apples to oranges.