Have dominators been nerfed?

[Player2]

I remember back in the day I soloed the clone missions on villain side to earn the Army of Me badge.  Tried today with all kinds of inspiration help, not to mention having prestige powers now that I didn't then.  I barely survive the first mission against the zombies and the second mission they're kicking my ass before I can lock on target with telekinesis or a group hold.  I hit the hospital, come back in armed with a full tray of Large inspirations (various combinations) and try to make a go of it, but again they're killing me before I can do anything.

[Vanden]

Dominators have not been nerfed.

[Riverdusk]

I remembered domination in the past having a damage buff, and looking back on the wiki, I remembered correctly. 

 

"The Dominator was revised in Issue 15. The inherent power Domination lost its damage buff and the buff was moved directly into the archetype's Damage Scale instead. All Dominator secondary Power Sets were adjusted according at the same time to be more equalized."

 

However, hard to argue it was a nerf as it sounds like they adjusted their base damage scale to make up for it.  Some secondary sets it sounds like may have been "nerfed" though depending on what the wiki means by "equalized". 

[subbacultchas]

Not nerfed in the least. I've been running once for a couple weeks now, and they are still very powerful and underrated both.

[Mr. Vee]

IIRC there was some early squawking when they did it from people who thought it was going to nerf them but that quieted down quickly cuz they were improved quite a bit.

[Pinkrise]

My Dominator is slightly different now from live.

 

I have a Mind/Psi and the things I noticed different.

 

1. Psionic Dart (Basic attack) in live used to help domination bar fill much faster. Can anyone confirm from other power sets please?

 

2. Psychic Shockwave on this server uses the Blaster version. It's less powerful. On live it has higher dmg value?

 

3. Canceling a snipes should also generate Domination faster. On this server it's not the case. Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

 

 

 

[Vanden]

2. Psychic Shockwave on this server uses the Blaster version. It's less powerful. On live it has higher dmg value?

If this is true you should definitely submit a bug report.

[Flux Vector]

PSW was nerfed on Live many years ago because of dominators being too effective at farming with it.

[Vanden]

PSW was nerfed on Live many years ago because of dominators being too effective at farming with it.

Psychic Shockwave was not nerfed because of farming, it was nerfed because the rest of the Psi Assault set was garbage and it was carrying the whole set. When they buffed the other powers in the set they nerfed Psychic Shockwave a little so the set wasn't too powerful.

[Flux Vector]

Sure, if you believe everything "they" say.  Personally I think it was the other way around, given the hate-on that the Cryptic team had for farming in general.  They wanted to nerf PSW, and noticed that the set was garbage without it, so they rebalanced it to try to compensate and keep the players who had it from causing too much ruckus.  It didn't, in my memory, work out quite that way.  People who already were playing /psy dominators were largely doing it to farm, and then losing their edge on that made them switch to brutes.  It took a while for the population of /psy dominators that I saw around to recover.

 

Whether or not you like or dislike farming, Cryptic was on the record as disliking it and made more changes to combat farming than almost any other thing, even to the point of making the game hostile to 'squishy' characters in many ways without any compensation, and it 100% drove the aggro cap and the AOE target cap, as well as playing at least some role in the global defenses nerf and the addition of ranged attacks to numerous enemies who didn't have them before, along with proliferation of crowd control among NPCs and a variety of other solutions that never actually worked because players will always find a way.

 

Paragon eventually gave up on trying to discourage/punish farming; whether this was because they realized that they couldn't or because the changing of the guard led to a new mindset, I'll never know.  But Cryptic definitely despised it.  And IMO, they made the game worse in material ways for everyone trying to stop it.