Mezmera

I think people tend to limit themselves thematically. Mind and Telepathic attacks seem to go hand in hand plus like was said there's probably some residual remembrance of how psi assault was unique in itself thanks to Drain Psyche. With the revamp to most dom assaults I'd say there's a lot of new and improved toys to play around with. I absolutely love how /Nrg came out, so much so that I made two. I remade my Mind/Nrg/Soul from live and it's far and away the best character I could create. The damage chain from Power Up and after is unreal then sprinkle in a Soul Drain to maximize your damage potential and on top of that a power boosted Unleash Potential is sexy as hell. I do see quite a few more Mind/Psi doms running around but aside from DP there's nothing enticing to me to play it. A well built dom will always perform well but when you play something like energy assault you can really tell the difference. I'd say not to sink everything you have into it and give something else a whirl and when you know it's the "one" go all in.

I'd have to agree about Energy. The buff it got is real nice! Total Focus hits hard and is a bit faster but the new mechanics gives Whirling Hands great damage. Power Burst and Snipe hit super hard you can just jump into melee and load up and any stragglers just tab targets with these two. I jump into a mob, drop an aoe hold as I'm landing, pop Soul Drain, Total Focus and Whirling Hands then mop up anything left with Power Burst and Snipe. Also to note any dom with a power up effect can take Unleash Potential and have 30% ranged, melee, aoe AND damage typed defenses. All before counting any other defenses you can pull from powers or bonuses. If you want to scrap on a dom this'll surely help.

Well dropping TK onto an AV then spamming your hold gets them held real quick then you can lay off your holds a little and go to town with your damage. For instance the fight in the Tin Mage task force with Director 11, you get him held quick and he stays there pretty well if you maintain some holds along with your TK. It's not some super duper great power some of my mind doms don't have it some do. There's a baseline of powers you want and then you can sprinkle in a few gadget powers you may want to use for situational purposes. Generally I always take Mesmerize, Dominate, Confuse, Mass Confusion and one more AoE control of either Total Domination (I like harder controls) or Terrify. Meaning I'll skip Levitate, Terrify, Mass Hypnosis and TK. But if I have an extra power open at the end with minimal slots to devote to it I'd take either TK or Mass Hypno.

I have both a /Rad and /Dark dom. I find this stipulation about healing only off of contaminated targets so much less reliable than Life Drain. Radiation's healing is only good in that when you're going through your chain of attacks it's "oh hey I healed" but when you NEED to heal you pretty much need to pause your chain to make sure to contaminate a target then heal off of them. Life Drain > Radiation Siphon

I typically have a spare power to take at the end of my build usually reserved for an emergency Mind power I don't have the slotting for like TK or Mass Hypnosis. I just use TK on those prolonged boss fights, all that stacking mag from your controls and TK really is effective, you're a one person hold machine. I've got a 50+5 End Redux IO in it but you'll still want to make sure your endurance is in good order if you plan to leave it toggled for long. It's only meant to complement your other controls in certain situations.

My main is a Mind/Dark dom and my favorite to play. You build the dom right you'll be able to be super effective at whatever you like. Hope you're not too invested in theme that it keeps you from being creative with your power selection. I find the healing aspect of /dark to allow some creative choices as far as damage chains. I do like Soul for the shield and Soul Drain on my other doms that don't have a heal. But /dark can take full advantage of having Energy Transfer in your damage chain so I'd highly recommend Primal Mastery. As for flying I go with Sorcery as my 4th pool so you can have a flight power along with a great resist shield in Rune of Protection. The bare bones you'll want in your main powers are: Mesmerize, Dominate, Confuse, Mass Confuse and one other AoE control ( I like Total Domination, some like Terrify) Dark Blast, Gather Shadows, PBAoE attack at 20, Life Drain, and Moonbeam My pools are Speed, Fighting, Leadership, Sorcery and Primal Mastery I won't put everything out here but if you'd like a guide I can give you my build and reasoning for it.

Since when they revamped pvp before it shut down. DR hit slotting so bad it was super hard to get permadom and if somehow you did it was a total gimp to your build and no real point to it really since targets are guaranteed to break free from mezzes after a few seconds anyways. Not saying having domination running is totally pointless, just that pvp is a damage spam and building up other tools in your kit is more beneficial.

Yes you will have the best mez protection in pve. But in pvp it works a bit different. First, you can't get perma domination in pvp. Second, holds and mezzes if they hit will automatically hold the target for a few seconds no matter if they should have mez protection available or not and then the target is then immune to another mez for 10 seconds before they can get held again. So even in domination you can still be held in pvp. Pvp is a whole other game unto itself within CoH.

I'd have to agree. I do love me some ET but with the rooting and animation of that and TF they'll almost be recharged before you get to your other attacks. I like to use TF for the mechanics of what it now allows you to do with Whirling Hands and Power Burst. Great single target damage is well covered now in /energy's revamp. There's plenty of other good epic pools out there. I recommend Soul Mastery, Soul Drain is like having your very own Fulcrum Shift but it also greatly increases your tohit. It just combos well with being in melee and helps fill some lack of AoE damage.

Yeah I'd not go for the Leaping pool at all. If you want a good travel go with Force of Will, you can get a leap travel, plus a great debuff and a very good defensive power much more useful than combat jumping. You can also go with just Super Speed for your travel with the stealth IO in that for invisibility like was said. If you're going to take maneuvers you might as well go with tactics and vengeance, both great powers. If I can pull those +10 recharge bonuses out of other sets I like to put a six set of Mako's into my melee, it gives some real nice bonuses. I have an /nrg dom these are how I slot my powers: Power Bolt (1) 50+5 dmg IO Bone Smasher (6) Mako's Bite Power Up (1) 50+5 recharge IO Whirling Hands (6) Obliteraion (or 5 of Armageddon if I don't have another viable pbaoe attack) Total Focus (6) Mako's Bite Snipe (5) Sting of Manticore (I don't slot the acc/int/range one) Power Burst (5) Apocalypse

11) Why not work in another slot to the confuse and ascendancy sets? That 6th bonus for those two will get you another 10% ranged defense. Enough of those and you can get 60% ranged defense at no expense to your other abilities. 12) Why skip two godly powers in snipe and power burst? You can be in melee and pretend and still get use out of them, they're even better actually since you don't need to be right next to the target. The only better attack you'll have that out damages those two is ET but that's a scary power on a squishy without a self heal. Drop cross punch you won't have time to activate it. Bone Smasher, Total Focus, Energy Transfer and Whirling Hands are more than enough melee. Throw in Power Burst and Snipe there you go a fabulous damage chain.

The epic pools for doms are actually quite good, especially the villain side of things. For the hero side, Primal Mastery you can get Energy Transfer, on a dom it's the best ST damage you'll get by far and compares to the best ST attack for any AT, it's up there with stalker attacks, just not godly critting ones. In the villain epics always get the pets, they're all quite good and unique. On some of my doms I go for Soul Mastery, the shield is sneaky good with resists to more damage types than other dom shields, you can take Soul Drain which is fantastic and then the Seer pet. Mace Mastery has fantastic debuff capabilities. Lastly you can go with your Mu Mastery with the two high resists you can get out of that which'll allow you to focus building your defense and recharge. Also if you didn't know that Mu pet heals you and he's quite good about it so you could likely drop the Medicine pool and slot a couple heal IO's into that pet. As for the regular pools Hasten is a must. I love leadership, maneuvers along with vengeance are great LotG mules and tactics is really beneficial as well, just an altogether great pool teaming and otherwise. I'd still go with Fighting pool for tough/weave, true tough will be a little redundant with all of your other resists but weave is a nice power to have toggled, I get a little over 6% defense out of it. You could look into how another pool with defenses could help you like the stealth pool. Personally I don't like the flight pool, hovering into a fight is not for me, there's a few defensive powers though you can get use out of. So you have Hasten/Speed, Leadership and Fighting which are all pools I go with. The last one I'll go with is one of the new pools, Sorcery is real nice for 90 seconds you can get 40% resistance to all damage and with all the recharge you're aiming for it'll be recharged in about 135 seconds. You can also use the ally buff as a mule for the absorb proc. I'm really liking Force of Will as well, weaken resolve slotted with the achilles heel debuffs the target of 33% resist which is real noticeable, you'll get your leaping travel, and last Unleash Potential is a nice 20% additional defense plus recovery should you need that. I think you'd do quite well dropping medicine and taking Force of Will. With all of these pools and my bonuses I get 60% ranged defense and 40-45-ish other typed defenses. Build up those defenses and resists and go ham.

Read man. I've been offering advice and alternatives you're the one going in on the attacks and contradicting yourself at every turn. Time and again I've been saying not for anyone in this thread to take everything said here as gospel including from my side, my playstyle will not match anothers. I tried to keep my latest responses short and still there's a need for you to cause some irritation back so yeah. Do you man!

Okay then end of conversation. You're the one insinuating your Mind/Fire is far superior because you're playing the fotm of doms using a cookie cutter mids build assuming no one can grasp the concept of not aggroing a mob and "I can do this on a solo TF blah blah". It's like in the NFL combine a player performs so well in all these technical aspects then you put them into the game under practical situations and a lot of their shine fades. Since when is Terrify not directly comparable to Total Domination since we had been touting which is the better to have in your build? Seeing how they are both AoE and meant to control the incoming aggro the only thing is Terrify doesn't stop the targets from attacking your way so sometimes you'll then need to use another AoE control like Mass Confusion. Whereas with having two hard rotating controls for every mob the aggro management is far less time consuming thus you can focus on your dps along with the superior set bonuses available to you and the bonus damage from having procs in the two. Like I said before I had Terrify the first month we came back and it's a useful power no doubt. Since I've spec'd out to Total Domination instead I've not found myself wanting at all.

Do you man. Like I said come along and show me how it's done. If you can out dps and survive better than my dom maybe I can be swayed by that uber /fire goodness but it's gonna be a tall task though.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120906114927/http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showpost.php?p=4215135&postcount=208 3) Procs will have a maximum chance to trigger. I'm leaning toward 90%. Someone mentioned a minimum chance to proc. I really like this idea and I am thinking about this value being 10%, but I'll have to test this internally to find out if this breaks anything. Procs have a maximum chance of firing of 90% for anything that goes above the calculation up and to firing 100% of the time. a power with a base recharge + activation time of 12 seconds will guarantee a proc every time it executes, even if the power's final recharge is less. Slotting a power for recharge doesn't affect the ppm, only the base recharge and activation time have an effect on ppm. BUUUUTT I did see this bit at the link so I'm a little uncertain it made it in since it looks like he was getting pushback on it so not sure what these Devs did in this regard. 2) Change the Base Recharge in the formula to your actual power's recharge. This is the part where I think a lot of you are scared. I'll show you an example of how this will actually play out in game later in this post so you can decide how much this will actually impact you.

Pretty sure I got a good handle on how procs were changed to reflect the ppm rules. There's a good deal extra math in that AoE calculation but as I see it on the link it's showing just how I thought as procs for cones and AoE's fire in much less regularity per target in the area highly dependent on the base recharge of the AoE power. In addition, when this change comes, all enhancement procs will utilize PPM, not just attuned enhancements. For instance, if an enhancement has a 5PPM rate, then 60/5=12 seconds; a power with a base recharge + activation time of 12 seconds will guarantee a proc every time it executes, even if the power's final recharge is less.

Cool yeah I'm pretty sure you're misinterpreting how good a proc will fire in an AoE. Lets say for calculations the AoE hold has a base recharge of 4 minutes. The purple hold proc has a chance of firing 4 times in a minute so that's 4 x 4 for 16 chances of firing when you fire that power. It just so happens the hold has a max target of 16 so it should fire on everyone in the area but it'll compensate for the 90% chance rule. On a fast recharging AoE the calculations will be much lower odds so the proc shouldn't fire on but maybe two targets so yeah odds are it'll fire just the same as in the hold but on much lower quantity of targets. The other bit was for Cheeseman who felt the need to go in on me.

You don't read very well or at least choose to add meaning to what you will. I mean how can you misinterpret what I'm saying here: "If I need to be stealthy I can just pause and use my ST confuse on a boss in the next mob before I dive in, my single target confuse is for the tactical situations like you want to box us into. Or again I can use Mass Confuse even with the Malaise damage proc that group will be dead at 4x8 solo before they notice me thus still keeping you stealthy for the next mob. " My assumption is not based on whether my team is good or not, hopefully I choose a competent team. My dom is built with the assumption I'll need to be the tank, dps, debuff and control all in one on any team I find myself on. The fireball bit was speaking in context to another user, nothing to do with you. I was more making fun of /fire dom tryhards and their fire blasts, not realizing I was referencing the fire ball epic power. So that's how that all got started. I'm doing quite better with Total Domination slotted with Constraint with the bonus damage proc than having Terrify as I had it. You do come off as contradictory, on one hand you're all about dps and saying your controls need to be controlling but when pointing out the AoE hold is a much better control with the added benefit of more damage than the power I'm replacing all of a sudden I'm supposed to be only slotting my "attacks" with damaging abilities. Tell you what load up your Mind/Fire onto Excelsior and lets meet up for some DA missions or duo a TF so we can see if you can out damage, out survive and out control my Mind/Dark.

I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding how procs per minute work in relation to faster charging AoE's like fireball. The Positron proc will have a 90% chance of firing at least once yes but that's all, it doesn't mean it'll fire on 9 out of 10 targets. But hey I may be wrong, load up a fireball on a group of baddies and screen shot it so we can count how many ticks of minor damage we see.

If I need to be stealthy I can just pause and use my ST confuse on a boss in the next mob before I dive in, my single target confuse is for the tactical situations like you want to box us into. Or again I can use Mass Confuse even with the Malaise damage proc that group will be dead at 4x8 solo before they notice me thus still keeping you stealthy for the next mob. Purple sets have the best bonuses so I don't get where you can say Unbreakable Constraint slotted to 5 with the sure fire moderate damage proc on 16 targets isn't better than anything you'll get out of a 6 slotted terrify and you still have a bonus slot for another damage proc should you want to use it. You'll only get one Terrify off per mob before your team should have steam rolled it so the point of it being better because it recharges faster is moot. As for the actual AoE fireball from the epics I'm assuming vs the AoE hold I'm gonna go with the hold. If fireball has a base recharge of 30 seconds and the positron's proc fires 3.5 times per minute it'll take you 2 fireballs to get 3 bonus minor damages to fire. Proc's in fireball are meaningless so what you can get out of slotting damage enhancement is the best you'll get. Fireballs AoE is much smaller and yeah max targets is 10 I believe. Like you say you can turn the AoE hold into a mini nuke should you like with the bonus affect of locking enemies down. The capabilities of what you can do with the long charging hold I much prefer.

You'll have 16 abilities to affect enemies with. How ever will you fit all of that into a chain? I'd say drop some of those less than stellar primaries and secondaries and pick up powers like vengeance which is a great teaming power and doubles as a mule for 7.5% recharge. Then you can go after tough/weave, stealth pool, force of will or sorcery pool and still have 10 or more abilities still left over for an efficient chain while giving yourself defenses and easy to attain bonuses for that godly perma domination. Doms aren't like melee toons where it's good to take just about every defense and attack, no AT benefits more from dabbling into the pools than a dom.

First off the purple bonuses you can get from the AoE hold set up to 5 for the recharge is the goal here you don't HAVE to add another proc but procs are sure fires in these long recharging mezzes. Lets say the moderate dmg proc hits for 100 points and the minor one for 50 points. On 16 targets that's 2400 points of damage, even at 90% chance of firing that's 2160 damage in 1.33 seconds, yes "pointless". How many fireballs you gotta trow to get that damage? Nowhere near as many as you'll need to get that kinda damage in 1.33 seconds. The procs in these long charging AoE mezzes are meant to supplement your dps and give you very hard control along with great bonuses but to say the damage isn't clearly good is plain stupid. I do give the cone and that it's available every mob for Terrify a nod but with the recharge you should have, Total Domination will be recharged just fine for almost every mob and you'll have Mass Confusion if not. Everything else you get from Total Domination is better, from the hard control, to the damage capabilities and purple bonuses. With the defense bonuses I get from these sets I could gave a s**t about attracting aggro, these targets will be controlled and dead long before I'll need worry about them being mad at me. My dom can tank with the best of them and that's with throwing out Energy Transfers every few attacks. Some people like to sit back and spam fireballs and some like to cozy right on up to the strongest enemies and give them fistfuls of dps. Thank goodness I go along with my own logic that doesn't tie me to gimpy outdated thinking. Point being, for anyone that doesn't consider themselves already all knowing, no thing is set in stone, don't take every word as gospel, pick and choose what works for you, amazing fun can be had on a well built dom.

Skipping Mass Confusion would be the mistake. Having Total Domination over Terrify is a variation of a very viable build, 2 rotating hard aoe controls is just about right. Not saying Terrify is a terrible power you'll want to have either that or the aoe hold, which I did have Terrify for a while since we've been back but 7 years absence had me question the efficiency of my builds especially due to some changes to how powers and procs work nowadays. Seeing how with all these savages running around now I can only get off Terrify once before the mob is wiped out. So Terrify which has a minor damage cone along with the minor damage proc from positrons and the knockdown proc when those two fired maybe half the time per target in all that gave me less than moderate damage and soft control. I hypothesized I was better off trading that for the AoE hold with the better bonuses from the purple set along with the moderate damage proc and another minor damage proc which totaled for high damage 90% per target with hard control. The next mob I'd just use Mass Confuse with the Malaise dmg proc so I'm good on the damage side of things along with great control. You can always take Terrify, Mass Hypno or TK last as a power you'll get some use out of but maybe don't have the slotting for. To each their own.

It's a purple set in a melee attack, pbaoe attack, ranged attack, aoe hold which you should have access to all of these. Also Superior Ascendancy of the Dominator set into your single target spamming mez, slotting snipe with Sting of Manticore and having 4 LoTGs from the pools. That's 87.5% right there add in hasten wallah perma-dom ezpz.