Any experience with Fire/Dark controllers?

[Dusty Longshot]

Is Fire/Dark a powerful combo?
Is it better or worse than Fire/Kin?

 

What is your experience when playing solo with this combo?
And when in a team?

 

[roleki]

Fire/Dark is an amazing combo and does perfectly fine whether solo, on a team, or on a league.  As a /Dark you are encouraged to follow your Imps into melee, where they get the full benefit of Twilight Grasp, Shadow Fall, and Fade.  You may not be able to buff your pet damage, but you can debuff their targets' Resistance, ToHit, and Regen.  On top of that, you get Dark Servant, who is a mini-you, chunking out buffs and debuffs all over the place.  

 

As to whether Fire/Dark is 'better' or 'worse' than Fire/Kin, that is almost completely subjective.  There are a TON of Fire/Kin out there, and people seem to like running them.  Me, I am a huge fan of the Controller AT - look at my sig for a partial list of my fleet of controllers - and out of all billion of them, my least favorite is probably Fire/Kin.  It just feels so... one dimensional (?)... to me.  Don't get me wrong, if a pairing is going to be a one-trick pony, it helps a TON if that trick is as impressive as Fire/Kin's; I just don't like having so much of my gameplan tied to whether one power hits or not.

 

Regrettably, I resolved early on that my only Fire/Dark would be a witch-themed character that only comes out in October to run ToT/GM-hunting leagues; other than an occasional maintenance login, I've kept her in dry storage the rest of the year.  Threads like this kind of make me rethink the idea of keeping her in hock like that.

[Corythia]

As roleki said, Fire/Dark is very strong, both solo and on teams.  Like /Kin you will be following your Imps into the middle of things, and have enough to hit debuffs and defense buffs to make your team very hard to hit.  Damage output isn't what /Kin is, but it's a VERY safe build, and you can toggle pull groups to stack them up at a corner for the aoe debuffs and hot feet, and to keep your imps together for heals.  With epic pool aoe attacks, you will clear groups of bad guys pretty quickly. The Dark Pet heals often enough and well enough that I mostly use my heal as another debuff rather than really needing to heal.   I would definitely recommend it, it doesn't play like anything else really.

[Nemeroff]

On 7/20/2021 at 5:54 AM, Retrobytz said:

Is Fire/Dark a powerful combo?

Whenever I ask in General/Help channels what's a good Secondary for Fire/, BESIDES /Kin that was my Main on Live, it's always /Dark first, then /Time. Majority can't be wrong 😉

 

Edited July 28, 2021 by Nemeroff
EDIT: I haven't done Fire/Dark yet; altitus. I'm working on Ice/Rad corruptor build.