Are dominators balanced around perma-dom?

[RabbitUp]

Supposedly the game is balanced around SOs, but is there a purpose in playing a dom if you don't have perma-dom? At that point, it's like playing a bad blapper, especially if you take the new blaster secondaries into consideration (the ones with the 90s aoe stun/hold). Basically you trade the burst damage and nuke for some mez protection uptime.

 

Of course, there's the whole topic of the role of CC in the endgame, but that's for a different time.

 

Without a large scale rework, why not make it so that the bar empties when you activate Domination, instead of when it expires? For a permadom, it won't change anything, but for any other build, you can start building your bar up again asap, instead of adding another pseudocooldown to the power. It also makes it so that you don't get so severely punished if you are only a couple seconds off of refreshing Domination, as a few seconds of downtime is hardly an issue compared to losing your whole bar.

 

[Carnifax]

I'd agree with this. Seems weird it doesn't work this way already and forces everyone to chase the perma-dom dragon instead. 

 

I mean my Illusion controller chases perma-PA and is a few seconds off but unless I'm fighting an AV there's little disruption to the fact I'm 1.5 seconds out. I just do without them for 1.5 seconds. 

On my Warshade when I was levelling the fact that Eclipse wasn't perma didn't unduly penalize me by adding another artifical "bar" which I needed to start refilling once it had expired.  

 

Domination seems to be the only power which punishes you for "Not quite being there yet". 

[PainX]

pretty much something im reminded of everytime i level a dom imo the single best thing on dom bar none is mez protection before 50

[Coyote]

9 hours ago, RabbitUp said:

is there a purpose in playing a dom if you don't have perma-dom? At that point, it's like playing a bad blapper

 

Sure. When leveling up, I have Hasten, Domination, and often a Power Boost - like effect, that allow me to alternate them to have some good buff up every fight. And I usually get a nice early AoE mez that can be leveraged with Domination to mez everyone in a spawn, or with Power Boost to mez everyone but the Bosses for a really long time and then the Bosses get controlled with single-target controls. I don't have to wait until 38+ to have meaningful controls, and I have layered controls... say a Stun, Knockdown, and long-recharge AoE Hold. A Blaster can take incoming shots a lot better, but can't stop incoming shots nearly as well. The playstyle is different but it is still quite effective before perma-Dom levels.

 

Also, especially while leveling up, if a team is having problems with a tough mission, adding a Dominator often makes a big difference. Adding a Blaster often doesn't, because it's rare that a team is failing because it doesn't have enough damage... it may go a little more slowly, but rarely fail. However, there are many enemy groups that can mess up teams if allowed to do their thing, and shutting that down with controls has major effects.

 

In the end game with so many characters with mez protection, Contempt of Court powers, and capped defenses... controls are less important. But there is still a lot of game before that, and in any case, at the end game when compared to such characters, Dominators will have permanent Domination in any case and be very powerful. And if we're looking at teams with everyone on SOs, then even in the end game defenses won't be so strong that control is irrelevant.

[CFIndustries]

Color me confused on this a little, maybe my memory is fuzzy since live was so long ago:

 

Doesn't dom build faster on Homecoming than it did on Live?

 

The second alt I rebuilt here was my Mind/Psi dom, but I was too broke to use his MIDS build into permadom until after he hit 50. But my one surprise was that I could have dom up for almost every fight in mid-level play. I had this memory for Live that dom seemed like it took forever to build and yes, that was tedious. But on HC, it hasn't felt like a big deal.

 

So either HC has already made it easier or I got alot more aggressive in my playstyle (because I'd done it once and knew how it worked) and build dom quicker because of it. Either way, playing without permadom was quite fun (and team-useful). I plan to rebuild an Earth dom and he won't have permadom, and I expect to have fun with him.

 

On a side note, I'll also argue against "CC being useless in the higher levels" Just because the team didn't notice you saved them from themselves doesn't mean it didn't happen and had the effect of making play faster and safer. 🙂

[Coyote]

I don't think it builds faster automatically, but perhaps Endurance management is easier here with cheaper IOs? That allows for faster attacking, and thus building it up faster in practice.

[Mr. Vee]

Dom builds much faster when teamed, maybe you do that more on HC than live.

[Riverdusk]

21 hours ago, RabbitUp said:

Supposedly the game is balanced around SOs, but is there a purpose in playing a dom if you don't have perma-dom? At that point, it's like playing a bad blapper, especially if you take the new blaster secondaries into consideration (the ones with the 90s aoe stun/hold). Basically you trade the burst damage and nuke for some mez protection uptime.

 

Of course, there's the whole topic of the role of CC in the endgame, but that's for a different time.

 

Without a large scale rework, why not make it so that the bar empties when you activate Domination, instead of when it expires? For a permadom, it won't change anything, but for any other build, you can start building your bar up again asap, instead of adding another pseudocooldown to the power. It also makes it so that you don't get so severely punished if you are only a couple seconds off of refreshing Domination, as a few seconds of downtime is hardly an issue compared to losing your whole bar.

 

Sort of the same in the end, I've made the suggestion before of getting rid of the dom bar entirely.  I'd rather they just do away with the 2-step process of it and  get rid of the whole "build up the bar" bit, leave the recharge the same.   Then, like you suggested, the AT is no longer perma dom or bust as being a few seconds off perma then wouldn't be a PITA.  No dom bar at all would also be more friendly to those like me that sometimes have to go afk for family or other reasons.  

Edited October 21, 2020 by Riverdusk

[tidge]

21 hours ago, RabbitUp said:

Without a large scale rework, why not make it so that the bar empties when you activate Domination, instead of when it expires? For a permadom, it won't change anything, but for any other build, you can start building your bar up again asap, instead of adding another pseudocooldown to the power. It also makes it so that you don't get so severely punished if you are only a couple seconds off of refreshing Domination, as a few seconds of downtime is hardly an issue compared to losing your whole bar.

 

It would make Dominators play like Brutes (having to race to refill a bar), which is not appealing.

[Coyote]

13 hours ago, tidge said:

It would make Dominators play like Brutes (having to race to refill a bar), which is not appealing.

 

As I understand the suggestion, if you're a perma-Dom, your bar would empty as you activate it... but unless you don't fight for 90 seconds, you should have it filled easily by the time Domination is recharged, so you can continue Domination permanently. The point is that if it takes you 100 seconds to recharge Domination, then when it's recharged, you most likely have a full bar so that you can re-activate it immediately after a 10 second downtime, rather than being able to start refilling it only after it drops, which would cause it to have a lot longer downtime than 10 seconds.

[Dark Current]

So basically every dominator starting from Level 1 would be 'permadom' if your bar refilled after you clicked Domination instead of the current mechanic.

 

Isn't that OP? On a large team you can refill the bar with about a dozen attacks, which would take less than a minute of fighting just spamming your T1 blast.

[tidge]

14 hours ago, tidge said:

It would make Dominators play like Brutes (having to race to refill a bar), which is not appealing.

 

46 minutes ago, Coyote said:

 

As I understand the suggestion, if you're a perma-Dom, your bar would empty as you activate it... but unless you don't fight for 90 seconds, you should have it filled easily by the time Domination is recharged, so you can continue Domination permanently. The point is that if it takes you 100 seconds to recharge Domination, then when it's recharged, you most likely have a full bar so that you can re-activate it immediately after a 10 second downtime, rather than being able to start refilling it only after it drops, which would cause it to have a lot longer downtime than 10 seconds.

I can only share my experiences, but on my lvl 50+ Dominator: When playing solo I spend time traveling between missions and watching cutscenes/NPC dialogue in addition to visiting my SG base, vendors, AH, etc. There are significant in-game mechanisms that prevent a character from constantly "fighting". On team missions, sure the bar can refill faster, but on most PUGs there are also periods of just 'standing around'.

 

As I wrote initially, from my PoV 'fighting constantly to maintain a bonus effect' feels much more like a Brute. I don't like that part of the Brute AT, and so porting that effect to another AT (Dominator) does not appeal to me. I am not unsymapthetic to characters that don't have perma-Dom; I especially feel on my Controllers as they are leveling up.

[RabbitUp]

33 minutes ago, Dark Current said:

So basically every dominator starting from Level 1 would be 'permadom' if your bar refilled after you clicked Domination instead of the current mechanic.

 

Isn't that OP? On a large team you can refill the bar with about a dozen attacks, which would take less than a minute of fighting just spamming your T1 blast.

Domination has a 200s cd, bar or no bar.

[Riverdusk]

8 hours ago, RabbitUp said:

Domination has a 200s cd, bar or no bar.

Exactly, it'd still have the recharge if I'm reading the OP right, so not even close to permadom at level 1.  Not until you built up to the 125%+ global recharge needed (or about 75% + hasten).

[tidge]

Achieving Perma-Dom (in the current HC game) is one of those incredible sweet spots that I think folks should be incredibly reluctant to interfere with. I believe that almost all of the suggested 'small tweaks' I've read risk upsetting what I see as the delicate balance that gives this AT its flavor.

 

One of the least stated synergies between having the Global +Recharge necessary for perm-Domination is that with so much Recharge, a Dominator can be spamming clicks fast enough that the Endurance bar refill provided by Domination becomes an incredibly important method of Endurance management. For my Dominator, refilling the Endurance bar is my Endurance management strategy.

 

Yes the control boosts and the mez resists are awesome, but for my money it is the in-battle twin cycles of Recharge -> Domination -> +Endurance and Recharge -> Attacks/Controls -> -Endurance that really make the AT click for me. I can play it like a madman if I have to, but I don't have to keep up the constant fight if I don't want to.

[oedipus_tex]

The answer to the question in the title is "Partly, yes."

 

Dominators were one of the least played archetypes because they originally had very low base damage. This is back when Domination provided a Damage boost and the design idea was you were supposed to beat stuff down while Dominating and hang back the rest of the time. Needless to say Dominators outside of Domination at the time were... very bad. But when IOs came out, players figured out you could maintain that Damage boost at all times, and the class was playable.

 

When the developers rebalanced Domination, Dominator base damage was increased and the +Damage was removed from Domination. The idea was for permadoms to remain at their strength, and the class to still be playable outside of permadom. So, the balancing was done with knowledge of how permas would play.

 

Personally I still don't think that went far enough. I've posted elsewhere about why mezz protection (or perhaps just a part of it) should be available outside of Domination mode to help further close the gap. Mainly for me its just a factor of Dom builds being too tight because they are pushed so hard to hit a magic number for Recharge. Another option that would improve non-permas generally but not significantly impact perma is to lower the recharge on Domination by around 33%. Then you'd still be able to permadom with IOs but you'd have more build flexibility.