What Would You Change About Dominators?

[FUBARczar]

4 hours ago, oedipus_tex said:

 

Regardless, something should be done because right now Dominators get a penalized Confusion duration versus the Controller version

What's more, I think you are making the wrong comparison over all.  Doms should to be looking to blasters and Controllers to MMs, especially after the Tank/Brute changes at the beginning of the year.  And then there are Corruptors/Defenders, and Scrappers/Stalkers/Sentinels.  Controllers should be asking for pet windows and commands.

 

Blasters and Doms are or should be High Risk, High Reward ATs, and measured/compared against one another.

like this:

Blasters:                                 - Dominators:

Defiance (ie more Damage)  - More Control (especially w/ Domination)

& crashless nukes                

Sustain Powers                      - Mez Protection (via Domination)          

Edited September 1, 2020 by FUBARczar
added comparison

[oedipus_tex]

11 hours ago, FUBARczar said:

I still think an auto-hit toggle with multiple effects would be OP.  

 

For Toggles and on targeted location AoEs I think first pulse is the only acceptable timing/place for Domination to apply.  Which probably rules out domination on toggles.  

 

 

Like I mentioned there are already toggles that Dominate. That is how Telekinesis works. It's an autohit Hold.

 

I see from your list of sets you've played that you have do not seem to have played Ice Control. I've brought Ice Control characters to 50 at least 10 times over the years, and mained an Ice/Fire Dom back on live. I'm very confident adding Domination to the power would not make it overpowered if it was implemented the way I described, but if you have other experience with the power I'm willing to hear your thoughts.

 

 

Edited September 1, 2020 by oedipus_tex

[oedipus_tex]

8 hours ago, FUBARczar said:

What's more, I think you are making the wrong comparison over all.  Doms should to be looking to blasters and Controllers to MMs, especially after the Tank/Brute changes at the beginning of the year.  And then there are Corruptors/Defenders, and Scrappers/Stalkers/Sentinels.  Controllers should be asking for pet windows and commands.

 

Blasters and Doms are or should be High Risk, High Reward ATs, and measured/compared against one another.

like this:

Blasters:                                 - Dominators:

Defiance (ie more Damage)  - More Control (especially w/ Domination)

& crashless nukes                

Sustain Powers                      - Mez Protection (via Domination)          

 

 

I'm not sure I understand your response to my post about Ice Control's Arctic Air power. Arctic Air gets penalized twice. Dominators have a lower base Confusion modifier than Controllers. Normally, this is made up for by the fact that when the power enters Domination mode, the duration increases by 33%. Arctic Air does not Dominate. So it has the penalized Confuse duration that makes it strictly weaker than the Controller version with no extra benefits. That does not follow the Dominator model. Most other powers either have the correct power ratios, or at a minimum, for powers that use psuedo pets, have identical durations to Controllers.

 

The only thing a Mag 6 Arctic Air would do is also confuse Bosses. It wouldn't be gamebreaking. It'd still be much weaker than Seeds of Confusion, which Dominates bosses for 44,7 seconds in Domination mode prior to enhancements.

Edited September 1, 2020 by oedipus_tex

[FUBARczar]

1 hour ago, oedipus_tex said:

Like I mentioned there are already toggles that Dominate. That is how Telekinesis works. It's an autohit Hold.

TK also costs over 3 end per sec so you can't leave it on, so sure if you want Arctic Air to cost 3.12 end/sec   sure

[oedipus_tex]

5 minutes ago, FUBARczar said:

TK also costs over 3 end per sec so you can't leave it on, so sure if you want Arctic Air to cost 3.12 end/sec   sure

 

 

I have to ask. Have you used Arctic Air? 

[Toxis]

Replace Flash Freeze with Frozen Aura. I currently only use 4 Powers from Ice: Block, AA, Slick, Glacier. For a while I even skipped Slick. 

 

Haven't used Jack, or any pet on my Doms after hitting 50. Not sure if that's wrong though. 

[oedipus_tex]

6 minutes ago, Toxis said:

Replace Flash Freeze with Frozen Aura. I currently only use 4 Powers from Ice: Block, AA, Slick, Glacier. For a while I even skipped Slick. 

 

Haven't used Jack, or any pet on my Doms after hitting 50. Not sure if that's wrong though. 

 

 

Flash Freeze is definitely a power with potential for some love, I agree. There have been a lot of suggestions over the years. While I don't want to turn every Sleep power into a clone of Electric's sleep patch, I do think of Electric and Ice as "sister sets" and wouldn't mind seeing that mechanic. It would combo well with Arctic Air and Ice Slick while retaining Ice's "soft controls" theme.

 

Jack is ok. Not great, not terrible. He hits pretty hard, but since Ice Control has mostly soft controls it's hard to keep him alive as difficulty scales upward. In theory you can buff his defenses with pet IOs but IMO its not really worth it.

 

I think if he had the Ice Patch power from the Ice Melee powerset he'd be a lot more interesting. 

[Toxis]

3 minutes ago, oedipus_tex said:

 

 

Flash Freeze is definitely a power with potential for some love, I agree. There have been a lot of suggestions over the years. While I don't want to turn every Sleep power into a clone of Electric's sleep patch, I do think of Electric and Ice as "sister sets" and wouldn't mind seeing that mechanic. It would combo well with Arctic Air and Ice Slick while retaining Ice's "soft controls" theme.

 

Jack is ok. Not great, not terrible. He hits pretty hard, but since Ice Control has mostly soft controls it's hard to keep him alive as difficulty scales upward. In theory you can buff his defenses with pet IOs but IMO its not really worth it.

 

I think if he had the Ice Patch power from the Ice Melee powerset he'd be a lot more interesting. 

Haven't tried the Electric set before, but any form of improvement would be welcome. I love what they've done to improve the Icy Assault set. However as an Ice Cubed dom, I find sleep a bit of a nonbo with all the Ice Storm and Sleet.

 

However turning Flash Freeze into a PBAoE fear power (instead of extra damage like Aura) could be neat. I've used Darks fear cone a few times before to some success, and I would enjoy having another form of control in the set. Not sure how much they can edit the particle effect on the enemies but they do kind of shake/'shiver' when feared. However we already get the fear component in AA but it only makes them run away.

[oedipus_tex]

I personally think Flash Freeze needs to stay a ranged power. It's the only ranged mezz Ice Control has. Few players take it, but the ones that do usually choose it as a ranged alpha breaker.

 

The real issue with Flash Freeze is Ice Slick cancels Sleep. I always thought it was kind of funny that enemies fall asleep standing up. Would seem to make more sense if they fell over, or at least stayed planted after falling, but that may be too broad a change.

[Toxis]

9 minutes ago, oedipus_tex said:

I personally think Flash Freeze needs to stay a ranged power. It's the only ranged mezz Ice Control has. Few players take it, but the ones that do usually choose it as a ranged alpha breaker.

 

Aha, I thought it was another PBAoE ability.. That's a fair point. I love my melee Ice dom but not everyone builds for that.

[FUBARczar]

3 hours ago, oedipus_tex said:

 

 

I have to ask. Have you used Arctic Air? 

personally no, but you can't compare it to TK... and it's not all that dissimilar to a number of other powers that I am very familiar with like World of Confusion, and Shadow Fall, Chilling Embrace, etc.  The price for TK to toggle, auto-hit hold/repel and dominate is 3.12 end/sec.  Are you willing to pay a steep price like that?  

 

3 hours ago, oedipus_tex said:

I'm not sure I understand your response to my post about Ice Control's Arctic Air power. Arctic Air gets penalized twice. Dominators have a lower base Confusion modifier than Controllers. Normally, this is made up for by the fact that when the power enters Domination mode, the duration increases by 33%. Arctic Air does not Dominate. So it has the penalized Confuse duration that makes it strictly weaker than the Controller version with no extra benefits. That does not follow the Dominator model. Most other powers either have the correct power ratios, or at a minimum, for powers that use psuedo pets, have identical durations to Controllers.

That's because Dominators are Dominators.  It's not a penalty, it's just the appropriate modifier for the AT.  And some powers work better on Dominators and some better on Controllers.  

[oedipus_tex]

34 minutes ago, FUBARczar said:

personally no, but you can't compare it to TK... and it's not all that dissimilar to a number of other powers that I am very familiar with like World of Confusion, and Shadow Fall, Chilling Embrace, etc.  The price for TK to toggle, auto-hit hold/repel and dominate is 3.12 end/sec.  Are you willing to pay a steep price like that?  

 

I think you should use the power first and then we can talk about it.  I appreciate that we are all passionate about this game and sometimes have differing view points. However, I don't see how we can continue arguing about a power you don't have any experience with.  

 

In any case, the endurance cost of Telekinesis has nothing to do with whether it Dominates. It costs the same endurance on Controllers or Dominators. The developers didn't jack up the endurance cost on Dominators just because it Dominates. There's no example of a power's endurance cost being increased because it can Dominate and no reason to think that should happen to Arctic Air. 

[Mezmera]

41 minutes ago, oedipus_tex said:

 

I think you should use the power first and then we can talk about it.  I appreciate that we are all passionate about this game and sometimes have differing view points. However, I don't see how we can continue arguing about a power you don't have any experience with.  

 

In any case, the endurance cost of Telekinesis has nothing to do with whether it Dominates. It costs the same endurance on Controllers or Dominators. The developers didn't jack up the endurance cost on Dominators just because it Dominates. There's no example of a power's endurance cost being increased because it can Dominate and no reason to think that should happen to Arctic Air. 

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.  

[oedipus_tex]

The Contagious Confusion proc no longer is very useful in AA from my experience. It used to be pretty good before the proc changes, but I don't see it firing much now. If it's working better now I'd like to slot it though, maybe there's a change I don't know about.

 

I love Arctic Air, and love Ice Control, as a concept. It's fresh and original and plays nothing like other other sets. There aren't many video games out there where you can play a character quite like this. I missed it enough that I wrote a mod for Torchlight 2 partly based on it.

 

But I also think Arctic Air is underpowered, especially on Dominators. It requires far too much work to build a character who can use it effectively. It also doesn't actually Dominate, leaving Ice Doms vulnerable to boss level enemies in a way other Dominators are not.

 

The fact that Arctic Air also has debuffs is irrelevant. Most of the powers in Dark Control, Ice Control, Electric Control. and Earth Control have secondary effects. Most of them still Dominate. 

 

Seeds of Confusion is a Mag 6 Confuse that lasts 44.7 seconds and has a very high chance to proc Contagious Confusion. With proper slotting it has a 95% chance to hit and recharges faster than the duration. There's no way a 30% chance for a 4 second Mag 6 Confuse comes in the ballpark of that. 

Edited September 2, 2020 by oedipus_tex

[Mezmera]

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.   

Edited September 2, 2020 by Mezmera

[Luminara]

I don't play any dominators.  I've tried to, on the original servers and here, but I've already played the control sets, and they hold little interest for me as they stand (copies of existing controller primaries).  They need a flavor of their own.  The secondaries are also too spread between melee and ranged.  I understand that they enable different approaches, but the existing mixed design does more to restrict than enable.  Trying to build toward one goal or the other, melee or ranged combat, effectively cuts your leveling pay-off in half, as you're only acquiring "useful" attacks half as frequently as other archetypes.  And while the option to use ranged attacks in melee always exists, it doesn't work the other way around, so building for ranged combat always feels self-defeating.  Given that the primaries are almost exclusively composed of ranged powers, there should be more synergy for ranged combat, but it just works out to feeling like a gimped controller.  This leaves the choice of playing with melee attacks and mixing in ranged attacks when or where possible (rarely possible with a 40' range cone with a narrow arc, for example), but that involves stopping frequently to use location AoE controls and ranged attacks, and that's especially important when we're discussing controls, because that's the dominator's Resistance and Defense.  That's what they have to stay alive.  It's too hodge-podge, too unfocused.

 

Yes, I do know there are binds to fire location powers on oneself, at a set range, on a selected target, etc.  No archetype should have to depend on binds just to be playable out of the box.  We shouldn't have to work around design flaws and oversights just to make a character playable.  Things like this should be baked into the powers, not an obscure bind command that isn't documented anywhere outside of a couple of forum posts.

 

I also dislike the way the design of the AT revolves entirely around Domination.  I don't find myself building a character, I find myself building a Domination enabler, and the builds, overall, fall short because they so narrowly focused on that single aspect.  As an inherent, Domination should work inherently, without the need to design the entire character around making it work.  Every other archetype's inherent functions naturally.  A controller doesn't have to build a specific way to make Containment work.  A brute doesn't click a button and pray he/she has sufficient +Recharge and builds enough Fury to re-enable the button before the timer expires.  This is the only inherent that isn't inherently usable.  And I say that as a +Recharge junkie.  Even my mastermind builds have 100% or more +Recharge, sans Hasten, and they have little use for it.  Building a dominator tends to skew around building around that one goal, making Domination permanent, and it's boring, detrimental to creativity and stifling of experimentation.  I can do so much with any other archetype, because the simple nature of their inherents being inherent, rather than an active power, gives me a world of flexibility.  Dominators lack that flexibility.  They may have primaries and secondaries which are thematically alike, but they're not actually complementary of one another in play style.  There's no real synergy between dominator primaries and secondaries.  And Domination has become less an inherent and more a burden, a necessity to build for and around, creating unnecessary restrictions on variation within the archetype.

 

I've played a defender who eschewed her secondary set and used pool melee attacks instead, all the way to 50, post-ED and GDN, just to prove it could be done.  I played a TA/A to 50, solo so no-one could accuse me of leaching or power leveling, before the Issue 7 buffs and bug fixes to those sets.  I play without travel powers.  If I wanted to (and i have been tempted), I could play a petless mastermind to 50, rapidly and with great ease.  I'm very, very good with numbers and mechanics, and using what I know to make "impossible" characters work well.  But I don't play a dominator.  For me not to want to touch something, that's notable.

 

Decouple the primaries from being duplicates of controller primaries, and make all of the powers usable mid-combat, as PBAoEs or critter-targeted AoEs rather than location AoEs, so survivability is more under the player's control.  Streamline and focus the secondaries so there's a complementary style of play with the primaries which is encouraged, or at least, made possible, and so you're not leveling up and shaking your head because you have to wait until the next power unlock to get something useful.  And make Domination more inherent, less of a defining click power for the archetype and more of a secondary effect like other inherents.

[oedipus_tex]

1 hour ago, Mezmera said:

I'm pretty sure those other control sets with debuffs don't "dominate".  

 

I'm sorry if it feels like I'm badgering you. I appreciate your thoughts and you may have reasons don't think AA shouldn't Dominate based on your play experience.  

 

However, just in the interest of data, there's no link between a power having a debuff effect and whether it can Dominate. There are attacks that debuff enemies that Dominate, like Psychic Shockwave:

 

 

The -Recharge in Psychic Shockwave is identical to Arctic Air.

 

 

The "rules" for which powers Dominate are currently a hodgepodge. The best we can say about Arctic Air is it doesn't Dominate because someone, at one time, felt it shouldn't. Maybe it was because the word 'Domination!' flying up the screen all the time would be annoying? Hard to know.

 

The Dominator balance equation is supposed to be:

• 1) Duration of mezzes out of Domination mode are weaker than a Controller
• 2) Duration and magnitude of mezzes in Domination mode are stronger than a Controller

 

Right now AA has the penalty of 1) but not the benefit of 2). Providing Arctic Air with a Mag 6, 4 second Confuse in Domination mode would bring the power into alignment with the Dominator rubric. This would allow Ice Control to confuse bosses the way Plant. Mind and Electric (should) be able to.

Edited September 2, 2020 by oedipus_tex

[Mezmera]

15 minutes ago, oedipus_tex said:

 

I'm sorry if it feels like Im badgering you. I appreciate your thoughts and that you don't think AA should Dominate. However, there's no link between a power having a debuff effect and whether it can Dominate. There are attacks that debuff enemies that Dominate, like Psychic Shockwave:

 

 

The -Recharge in Psychic Shockwave is identical to Arctic Air.

 

 

The "rules" for which powers Dominate and do not are currently a hodgepodge. The best we can say about Arctic Air is it doesn't Dominate because someone, at one time, felt it shouldn't. 

 

The Dominator balance equation is supposed to be:

• 1) Duration of mezzes out of Domination mode are weaker than a Controller
• 2) Duration of and magnitude of mezzes in Domination mode are stronger than a Controller

 

Right now AA has the penalty of 1) but not the benefit of 2). Providing Arctic Air with a Mag 6, 4 second Confuse in Domination mode would bring the power into alignment with the Dominator rubric. This would allow Ice Control to confuse bosses the way Plant. Mind and Electric (should) be able to.

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.  

Edited September 2, 2020 by Mezmera

[oedipus_tex]

19 minutes ago, Mezmera said:

Hold on.  A stun in your secondary is not a debuff nor should you be relying on that as a control.

 

It is also a debuff. -50% Recharge, identical to Arctic Air.

 

Second of all: So? 🙂 The statement that was made is that powers that debuff do not Dominate. There is no such rule. Here's another power to demonstrate, taken directly from Ice Control. Glacier does exactly as much -Recharge, and slightly less -Run Speed than Arctic Air, yet it Dominates.

 

 

 

19 minutes ago, Mezmera said:

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.

What? No. How did you come up with that? It's a Mag 2 Stun. The point was that it Dominates. Whether it Stuns bosses or not is not related to that. The point is there is no rule that says powers that debuff cannot Dominate. 

 

19 minutes ago, Mezmera said:

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?

 

If you are somehow already Confusing bosses with Arctic Air as-is I don't see why you'd object to the power Dominating, because the only thing Domination would do is add more Magnitude and 33% more duration to the mezz. That longer duration would patch some holes in the Confusion coverage but not radically change the impact. Once you beat a mobs Confusion protection extra Magnitude does nothing extra.

 

In general though, no. Bosses are mostly not Confused by AA for most of the fight. Certainly not with the certainty that Plant and Mind's enemies are Confused, or Earth, Fire, and Gravity are Stunned, ie, with what I'd expect from a Dominator.

 

Note I didn't list Electric there because we know why Synaptic Overload doesn't Dominate. The developers told us when it was created: the tech didn't allow it. That's the reason. Maybe someone still has the post.

Edited September 2, 2020 by oedipus_tex

[Mezmera]

1 hour ago, Luminara said:

I don't play any dominators.  I've tried to, on the original servers and here, but I've already played the control sets, and they hold little interest for me as they stand (copies of existing controller primaries).  They need a flavor of their own.  The secondaries are also too spread between melee and ranged.  I understand that they enable different approaches, but the existing mixed design does more to restrict than enable.  Trying to build toward one goal or the other, melee or ranged combat, effectively cuts your leveling pay-off in half, as you're only acquiring "useful" attacks half as frequently as other archetypes.  And while the option to use ranged attacks in melee always exists, it doesn't work the other way around, so building for ranged combat always feels self-defeating.  Given that the primaries are almost exclusively composed of ranged powers, there should be more synergy for ranged combat, but it just works out to feeling like a gimped controller.  This leaves the choice of playing with melee attacks and mixing in ranged attacks when or where possible (rarely possible with a 40' range cone with a narrow arc, for example), but that involves stopping frequently to use location AoE controls and ranged attacks, and that's especially important when we're discussing controls, because that's the dominator's Resistance and Defense.  That's what they have to stay alive.  It's too hodge-podge, too unfocused.

 

Yes, I do know there are binds to fire location powers on oneself, at a set range, on a selected target, etc.  No archetype should have to depend on binds just to be playable out of the box.  We shouldn't have to work around design flaws and oversights just to make a character playable.  Things like this should be baked into the powers, not an obscure bind command that isn't documented anywhere outside of a couple of forum posts.

 

I also dislike the way the design of the AT revolves entirely around Domination.  I don't find myself building a character, I find myself building a Domination enabler, and the builds, overall, fall short because they so narrowly focused on that single aspect.  As an inherent, Domination should work inherently, without the need to design the entire character around making it work.  Every other archetype's inherent functions naturally.  A controller doesn't have to build a specific way to make Containment work.  A brute doesn't click a button and pray he/she has sufficient +Recharge and builds enough Fury to re-enable the button before the timer expires.  This is the only inherent that isn't inherently usable.  And I say that as a +Recharge junkie.  Even my mastermind builds have 100% or more +Recharge, sans Hasten, and they have little use for it.  Building a dominator tends to skew around building around that one goal, making Domination permanent, and it's boring, detrimental to creativity and stifling of experimentation.  I can do so much with any other archetype, because the simple nature of their inherents being inherent, rather than an active power, gives me a world of flexibility.  Dominators lack that flexibility.  They may have primaries and secondaries which are thematically alike, but they're not actually complementary of one another in play style.  There's no real synergy between dominator primaries and secondaries.  And Domination has become less an inherent and more a burden, a necessity to build for and around, creating unnecessary restrictions on variation within the archetype.

 

I've played a defender who eschewed her secondary set and used pool melee attacks instead, all the way to 50, post-ED and GDN, just to prove it could be done.  I played a TA/A to 50, solo so no-one could accuse me of leaching or power leveling, before the Issue 7 buffs and bug fixes to those sets.  I play without travel powers.  If I wanted to (and i have been tempted), I could play a petless mastermind to 50, rapidly and with great ease.  I'm very, very good with numbers and mechanics, and using what I know to make "impossible" characters work well.  But I don't play a dominator.  For me not to want to touch something, that's notable.

 

Decouple the primaries from being duplicates of controller primaries, and make all of the powers usable mid-combat, as PBAoEs or critter-targeted AoEs rather than location AoEs, so survivability is more under the player's control.  Streamline and focus the secondaries so there's a complementary style of play with the primaries which is encouraged, or at least, made possible, and so you're not leveling up and shaking your head because you have to wait until the next power unlock to get something useful.  And make Domination more inherent, less of a defining click power for the archetype and more of a secondary effect like other inherents.

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.  

[Mezmera]

14 minutes ago, oedipus_tex said:

 

It is also a debuff. -50% Recharge, identical to Arctic Air.

 

Second of all: So? 🙂 The statement that was made is that powers that debuff do not Dominate. There is no such rule. Here's another power to demonstrate, taken directly from Ice Control. Glacier does exactly as much -Recharge, and slightly less -Run Speed than Arctic Air, yet it Dominates.

 

 

 

What? No. How did you come up with that? It's a Mag 2 Stun. The point was that it Dominates. Whether it Stuns bosses or not is not related to that. The point is there is no rule that says powers that debuff cannot Dominate. 

 

 

I

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.  

Edited September 2, 2020 by Mezmera

[oedipus_tex]

Just now, Mezmera said:

I never said it didn't "dominate" due to the fact it had a debuff.  It doesn't "dominate" because it has a constant 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.  

 

I want to apologize for how I worded that last post. On re-reading it I can see how I could have responded more appropriately. 

 

As a point of reference, Arctic Air does not have an unlimited target cap. It has a target cap of 16, like most PBAoEs.

 

I also think we are leaning too hard on the word "autohit." AA is "autohit" only in the sense that it doesn't roll for Accuracy. However the irony is, if it did roll for accuracy, it would probably be more effective. It has a 30% chance to apply its Confuse effect each pulse, which you have no control over or ability to improve. If you average out a 30% chance to Confuse over the likely saturation point of the power (ie the point where the duration of the Confuse overlaps with getting re-confused) you'll find that it comes in much lower than than the 95% chance to mezz of other controls.

An AA that could confuse bosses more easily would certainly be powerful, but Domination is generally meant to be powerful.

[Mezmera]

10 minutes ago, oedipus_tex said:

 

As a point of reference, Arctic Air does not have an unlimited target cap. It has a target cap of 16, like most PBAoEs.

 

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.  

Edited September 2, 2020 by Mezmera

[oedipus_tex]

7 minutes ago, Mezmera said:

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.  

 

Well, no, it's not semantics. The power has a cap of 16 targets just like many other controls do. Did you know on Controllers you can combine Arctic Air with Choking Cloud or that cool looking Nature power I forget the name of? It won't mezz a boss but it will disable a crowd even more effectively than what we're discussing. Controllers have longer Confuse duration too, so they can keep the crowd confused better than Dominators, and nothing breaks.

 

The unspoken element of Arctic Air is this: in order to use it you have to stand within 25ft of whatever you're controlling and not get killed or mezzed. That's easier said than done. It's part of what makes Ice Control different. The control lasts as long as you can withstand the pressure. In order to pull it off, you have to plan for it. There are no super effective Ice Dominators who just happen into being the way there are Plant. Fire, Dark, or Mind Doms.  

Edited September 2, 2020 by oedipus_tex

[Mezmera]

1 minute ago, oedipus_tex said:

 

Well, no, it's not semantics. The power has a cap of 16 targets just like many other controls do. Did you know on Controllers you can combine Arctic Air with Choking Cloud or that cool looking Nature power I forget the name of? It won't mezz a boss but it will disable a crowd even more effectively than what we're discussing.

 

The unspoken element of Arctic Air is this: in order to use it you have to stand within 25ft of whatever you're controlling and not get killed or mezzed. That's easier said than done. It's part of what makes Ice Control different. The control lasts as long as you can withstand the pressure. In order to pull it off, you have to plan for it. There are no super effective Ice Dominators who just happen into being the way there are Plant. Fire, Dark, or Mind Doms.  

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.