Mezmera

With the +recovery from Unleash active for you half the time it'll push off your reliance on Dark Consumption so that when you do need the endurance it'll always be available for you. You should have no problem swapping in Barrier.

Well yes endurance runs hot on this dom which I found was the Achilles heel of my build but I typically only team so never found a reason to optimize it in case I solo at first. Unleash Potential gives you +recovery when in use so I'm not gasping when that's active. I found when I do run hot it's typically when Unleash isn't active and domination is still a ways off from recharging so I can refill my bar that way. What I did to fix my endurance was to drop Vengeance and take Dark Consumption which standing close with just 2 bad guys it refills my bar when I need it along with domination. It's worked out quite well, I only have 2 slots in it with the Efficacy Adaptor's chasing end mod/recharge/accuracy. Also my Alpha is Agility so I'm getting nice end mod/recharge already along with the defense to boost all of my defense powers.

A few things here. There's only one slow animation in Energy in your attack chain and that'd be Total Focus and it has been sped up from what it used to be. It still hits real hard and sets you up automatically for the Energy Release mechanic. The overlooked benefit Energy has over Fire is the Power Boost ability. On top of the +dmg added it allows you to control much better than Fire and it also boosts things like defense. So if you build your dom right you can powerboost Unleash Potential which mine gets me 31% defense to all to pair with all of my other defenses as opposed to it netting you 21% on a Fire dom. Then I have Barrier to cycle in once Unleash wears off then after a minute Barrier's best bonuses wear down and back comes Unleash. At almost all time I'm running around with 56+ positional defenses along with 50+ elemental defenses paired with high resists. Energy caps my defenses Fire does not so it's far less "scary" than you think.

Well my Mind/Nrg would like to have a word. Total Focus, Power Burst and Snipe out ST damage anything /Fire can get you. Then there's the Energy Release mechanic which doubles the damage on Whirling Hands, which'll make it the hardest hitting pbaoe power a dom can use, far better than any aoe powers in Fire's arsenal. Additionally as a /Fire dom you're kind of locked into taking the Fire APP for Fire Ball to get the most out of your Fiery Embrace. Whereas /Nrg doesn't lock you into that so you could get great use out of something like the Soul Patron pool and take Soul Drain which ups all of your damage 100% along with doing fabulous damage on use, then there's 2 other aoe powers in that pool to take on top of that.

I just made one of these. I got my resists pretty meaty and my defenses to elemental and melee capped. The only hole I have is the psi hole which is what it is. I'll give you a quick rundown of what I did with mine. I took every power in Invuln except for the first auto resist physical damage. You'll be about capped already without it so no need for it. All of my resist power and tough I slotted to 4 with Unbreakable guards for the melee defense bonus. I have Unstoppable and just slotted the two defense uniques into that one. Dull Pain I slotted a 6 set of preventative medicine. Then on hide I 3 slotted with reactive defenses with the unique. I 2 slotted the two defense powers in invuln with gamblers defense and def/rech IOs. Then I slotted weave with 3 Gamblers. I ended up going with the Force of Will pool and took Unleash Potential and slotted 4 Shield Walls with the unique and a gambler +recharge. I also went with Body Mastery as my epic pool for Focused Accuracy (6 slotted Gaussians) and Physical Perfection. As for my Savage attacks I skipped the t1 and placate, everything else I 6 slotted but for AS which has a set of 5 of the stalkers set with the chance for hide. The other stalker ATO set of 6 I put in the first attack. Then with the 3 pbaoe powers I put in one set of 6 of Superior Avalanche, Armageddon and Obliteration. Then I put in a 6 set of Hecatomb into Hemorrhage and lastly BU I 2 slotted. I didn't outrageously proc my attacks as I don't tend to do that most times anyways since I typically like to aim for a sets 5th bonus with the proc from that set and maybe add another proc with my 6th slot or the meaty 6th bonus of usually the purple sets.

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?