Plant/Psi assistance

[Doc Ranger]

So I've decided to make my first Dom (I play a lot of controllers) and I've never played Plant control or Psi Blast so why not put them together and give it a go.

 

I went back as far as July and didn't see any Plant/Psi builds posted so I was wondering if there were any floating around or at least some advice on skippable powers etc?

 

Thanks!

[Camel]

We’ve chatted a lot back and forth about /Dark Affinity Controllers and I too just rolled a Plant/Psi! Small world. I’m not at the computer now, but I can share what I learned from the Plant/Psi pros and about build theory. At least before the Dominator veterans arrive 😉

 

What I know so far... Strangler is your staple hold, nothing fancy here. Skip Entangle, I would normally take this power as a Controller to deal damage, but it’s entirely not needed on a Dominator. Roots is AMAZING. As you know, being a veteran Controller user, mass immob is great, but Root also does roughly twice the amount of damage than your usual mass immob and can do a respectable amount of damage when enhanced for damage and outfitted with a proc or two. Take it and spam it! Spore Burst is definitely skippable as is Tree of Life (although you could take ToL and get SOME utility out of it) Seeds of Confusion is your mob neuterer, with the purple confuse set and Domination, practically the entire mob will be confused. Vines is a great power, I opted to skip it because I feel Seeds is vastly superior. Seeds of Confusion will be up every mob with a high recharge build, and since you want the mobs to be damaging themselves, I found Vines clashed with what Seeds could do, more of a personal preference, it’s a great power in and of itself. Carrion Creepers are amazing. Slot them, proc them, abuse them. They will not disappoint. Fly Trap can take it’s fair share of procs too, I didn’t slot the Achille’s Heel proc in mine (opted to put it in Sleet instead) but this is a fantastic place to put that proc if nowhere else.

 

Thats what I’ve picked up on from various users of Plant Manipulation/personal experience. Plant has extremely good crowd control and great AoE to boot.

 

I’m less informed on Psi but have a pretty good understanding of it. I’ve frequently used every power in the set across other builds (I LOVE Mental Manipulation Blasters) minus the ranged blasts which are pretty straightforward. Your T1 is very handy to have when low level, but once you reach around level 28ish I would respec and pull all slots from it. Mind Probe is amazing and allows you to slot some incredible sets here like Hecatomb and Blistering Cold while also being synergistic with your build having a heavy reliance on being in melee, take this and skip Telekinetic Blow for your melee attack. Psychic Scream is pretty handy, too slow for me, and I’ve also never been the biggest fan of cone attacks, but still helpful. You won’t be hurting on AoE without it though, at least not when pairing Plant Manipukation with Psi. I took Mental Blast over Subdue, both are viable, you could even take both. But the build I have is redundant when using both as more important powers can be cycled and Mental Blast is available much earlier. They also have the same damage values, Subdue immobilizes, so that’s something. Drain Psyche is amazing, you can essentially CAP your Regen/Recovery with enough stacks. (Think Soul Absorption but with much higher values and a better debuff) and can basically be perma with enough recharge/help from Incarnates. My build has a 30.2 second recharge and the power has a 30 second duration. I took the snipe and have not regretted it since they made the changes to snipes. Great damage, pick it up, slot it and never look back. Psionic Assaults capstone, Psychic Shockwave, is great and my only complaint is that the potential stun has no synergy with any of the controls from Plant, still an amazing power and would 100% not skip. 
 

Quick overview on skippable powers in order from most skippable to least:

 

Plant Manipulation- 

1: Entangle
2: Spore Cloud

3: Tree of Life

 

Psionic Assault-

1: Telekinetic Blow

2: Psionic Dart (not skippable, but would not recommend slotting it as the damage is pretty meh even with the buff.)

3: Subdue

4: Psychic Scream

 

Hope this helps and gives you some insight (pun intended) before the veterans arrive!

Edited January 18, 2020 by cazden121

[Doc Ranger]

Thanks for the insight 😉 If no one else pops in I might have to look at several Plant/ builds and a few /Psi builds just to see how people are slotting everything.

[Camel]

I made this thread a little while back. I posted my first iteration of a build in there. Got a little bit more feedback from it but not much. Expecting to change quite a bit moving forward. Someone posted a Plant/Fire/Fire build and I learned a lot from it on the Plant side. Give it a look!

[oxmox]

I have little experience with plant but a lot more with /psi.

 

Psychic shockwave, mind probe, and the snipe are by far your best attacks; take and slot all of them. The rest are okay, but you'll need to fill out your attack chain somehow.

 

Between the 3 ranged attacks, subdue and mental blast are the exact same power except one has an immob and one has -rech. Psi dart actually has a slightly better DPA than either thanks to its quick animation and you're forced to take it, so I actually use that to fill out my ranged attack chain and skipped both mental blast and subdue.

 

The other melee attack, TK thrust, isn't awful, the damage just can't stack up to mind probe. What is nice is that it does half smashing damage which helps vs robots. The kb on bosses can also be handy at low levels.

 

Psychic scream is your only other AoE, but it's a cone with a slow animation. I have it on my dark/psi because dark has 2 spammable cones so I'm already in position. You may find yourself in a similar situation with seeds, but the AoE damage from seeds and creepers might be enough to skip this.

 

Drain psyche is the real gem of the set. Slot for heal and recharge rather than end mod; the recovery buff is so strong you can't possibly run out of end if you hit at least 2 targets. An extra fun tidbit is that slotting drain psyche for heal also enhances the regen debuff from 500% up to about 1000%, letting you floor the regen from AVs or GMs and solo them, which most Doms are not very good at. This is a bug that I think is scheduled to be fixed along with the tanker buffs, but luckily the tanks have stumped the devs for now and we can keep exploiting this.

[Coyote]

Slot Seeds of Confusion early with 6xMalaise, switch to Coercive at 50. It's your main control power and also helps you clear mobs faster, not just more safely. It also frees you from having to spend time controlling so you can just scrap. Or, I guess, with a /Psy, just think. A lot. 😛

Carrion Creepers do well with procs, they should have some although the Positron's set at 5 is nice for Recharge bonus. I like the Annihilation proc in there for occasion -Res effects.

If you solo AVs, Tree of Life is useful. If you don't, it's not.

Roots is a good damage power, not great but fast activating and with a large radius. Don't use it too early, to give Confused mobs a chance to clump up.

Strangler is a must take, but personally I slotted mine for damage: 6x damage procs (with accuracy from set bonuses... at lower levels you'll want some accuracy in there). With procs, you can push it to around 300 damage, making it more useful. In general, due to Seeds, you have less use for control and more use for damage out of it. I get about 320 damage out of it, and my Fire/Psy gets about 320 out of Subdue (and would get less out of Mind Blast due to having 1 less proc available), so it's clearly worth slotting for damage if you can defend yourself without it.

 

The problem with pairing Plant and Psy is that Plant wants the mobs to do more damage, while Psy lowers their attack rate. So you get the same defensive effects out of Seeds of Confusion, but not as much damage from the mobs. On the other hand, you do get more safety.

[Camel]

5 hours ago, oxmox said:

I have little experience with plant but a lot more with /psi.

 

Psychic shockwave, mind probe, and the snipe are by far your best attacks; take and slot all of them. The rest are okay, but you'll need to fill out your attack chain somehow.

 

Between the 3 ranged attacks, subdue and mental blast are the exact same power except one has an immob and one has -rech. Psi dart actually has a slightly better DPA than either thanks to its quick animation and you're forced to take it, so I actually use that to fill out my ranged attack chain and skipped both mental blast and subdue.

 

The other melee attack, TK thrust, isn't awful, the damage just can't stack up to mind probe. What is nice is that it does half smashing damage which helps vs robots. The kb on bosses can also be handy at low levels.

 

Psychic scream is your only other AoE, but it's a cone with a slow animation. I have it on my dark/psi because dark has 2 spammable cones so I'm already in position. You may find yourself in a similar situation with seeds, but the AoE damage from seeds and creepers might be enough to skip this.

 

Drain psyche is the real gem of the set. Slot for heal and recharge rather than end mod; the recovery buff is so strong you can't possibly run out of end if you hit at least 2 targets. An extra fun tidbit is that slotting drain psyche for heal also enhances the regen debuff from 500% up to about 1000%, letting you floor the regen from AVs or GMs and solo them, which most Doms are not very good at. This is a bug that I think is scheduled to be fixed along with the tanker buffs, but luckily the tanks have stumped the devs for now and we can keep exploiting this.

Does Mental Blast do more damage when procs are in play? I slotted 2 procs in mine and they both have a 21% and 27% chance to proc. When I slot those same procs in Psionic Dart  they have a 10% less chance to proc. I'm debating getting rid of Mental Blast but don't see any power picks that would really benefit my build.
 

Edited January 18, 2020 by cazden121

[Coyote]

Generally, the best slotting for Mental Blast for damage is 3x Thunderstrike (since it has 3 IOs with no Recharge bonus), or some other way to get 3-4 IOs in there with no Recharge, and then Apocalypse and Gladiator's. It's stil not impressive damage. The only good DPS power is the snipe since Psy Blast has an 8-second recharge blast as its Tier 3, which means it won't be that good DPA. Subdue does a bit more, up to about 320, since it can take a 3rd proc as an Immobilize power, but it's still not a high DPA power. Basically, Psy Blast has low DPS, period, but against AVs it works fine since it has great -Regeneration to make up for it.

But true single-target, like against bosses or small spawns, eh, it sucks. I think its best pairing is with Fire Control, which can get better damage from its controls and add in high single-target damage from Imps, and from running Hot Feet (with Drain Psyche making up for the End cost of Hot Feet), but with Plant, which is better at AoE damage, you will be inevitably struggling for single-target DPS.

[oxmox]

Good point re: procs. I was chasing set bonuses pretty hard in my build and so didn't experiment too much with multiple procs. The base DPA for psi dart is barely better than mental blast/subdue, so I suspect procs will put those two ahead.

 

As stated above though, neither will be especially impressive either way.

[oedipus_tex]

Subdue and Mental Blast have the same recharge, animation time, and damage. The only difference is Subdue has an 80% chance for a Mag 3 immobilize, and Mental Blast has -30% recharge (negligible in a single target power, especially in the Dominator archetype.)

 

Subdue is the clear winner because blasting AVs is a thing and most Doms skip their single target immob. You just have to watch out if you exemplar frequently below level 23.

[Frosticus]

Unless you are chasing set bonuses early, I actually prefer to slot the 2 damage procs into seeds. The 2 damage procs turn it into an ok aoe blast considering you are going to use it every spawn anyway. And aoe damage is always welcome.

[Camel]

Thanks for the replies! I’ve gotten all of my low level TFs out of the way, so I may consider Subdue to immob AVs. Due to slotting reasons I’ll be putting Apocalypse for the recharge bonus, so won’t be putting 3 procs in there. Good to know, I was being lazy and didn’t compare the DPA of a fully slotted Psi Dart compared to Mental Blast fully slotted, but figured it would edge it out, barely.