Weighing primary choices for a domper for all content, up to all melee 4* ITFs

[EnjoyTheJourney]

I'd like to come up with a domper (melee range dom) build that's fun to play and also versatile enough to be comfortable in all regular content and that would also function well in all melee 4* ITFs.

The secondary and mastery are already picked (radioactive assault and fire mastery). A heal is highly desirable for all melee 4* ITFs because there's typically nobody on the team playing a support character. And, radioactive assault has a heal that activates fairly often, even though it's not as reliable or hefty as the heal in savage assault. Fire mastery is desirable for fireball, heat metal, and the self rez. For all melee ITFs being able to self rez can be very helpful and bringing resistance debuffs to such a team is quite desirable. All builds will also include the leadership powers maneuvers and tactics, and probably vengeance as well. 

One candidate build I've already put together is attached. It's an illusion / radioactive / fire domper. Having invulnerable pets along can confuse hostless and also add to DPS, even though they don't taunt. Other candidate primaries include plant, gravity, and electricity.

The reasoning behind taking plant seems clear (creepers, seeds). Gravity may seem like an odd candidate, at first glance. But, being able to move a group of mobs wherever you'd like with wormhole about every 25 seconds or so can really help the team out. Also, lift procs out to do high damage. Plus, lift has such high knockup magnitude that it should (hopefully, admittedly not sure) overcome the built-in knock resistance that mobs have in 4* ITFs. The case for electricity has to do with endurance drain limiting incoming damage and hampering EBs from using T9s. 

For regular content the attached "illusion primary" build seems like it should be quite capable. Spectral terror has a native -15% to hit and the fear effects if causes are usually quite effective at limiting incoming attacks. Spectral terror can help to at least partially mitigate the challenge of getting by with the fairly low defense totals for the attached build.

Thoughts and suggestions are highly welcome. Thank you in advance. 

 

Dominator (Illusion Control - Radioactive Assault - Fire Mastery)Domper,SelfRez,HeatMetal.mbd

 

Edited January 17 by EnjoyTheJourney

[EnjoyTheJourney]

I'll add some sample builds for consideration into this post. Will edit to add more builds later.

The gravity build has noticeably less control capabilities than builds for the other primaries under consideration. But, damage is particularly good for the gravity build and wormhole is potentially helpful. Not sure whether the intangible power in gravity has a good role to play in the clear majority of situations. Perhaps it can help if we need to temporarily block a chokepoint, a bit of time and space to rez teammates, or for some other niche situations. 

The attached "plant primary" build should also do absolutely fine in regular content. 

The attached "ice primary" build should have slightly increased damage from the secondary because of more recharge in fusion and an extra damage proc in X-Ray Vision. Also, occasional +damage procs from the dominator set put into arctic air should boost secondary damage a bit more. But, ice control doesn't have indestructible damaging pets like illusion control and it won't mess up enemy AI as well as seeds and creepers from plant control do. The case for ice control ultimately rests on how well arctic air tends to function in hard mode content, which I don't know at the current time. 

Dominator (Gravity Control - Radioactive Assault - Fire Mastery)Domper,SelfRez,HeatMetal.mbd Dominator (Plant Control - Radioactive Assault - Fire Mastery)Domper,SelfRez,HeatMetal.mbd

Dominator (Ice Control - Radioactive Assault - Fire Mastery)Domper,SelfRez,HeatMetal.mbd

Edited January 17 by EnjoyTheJourney

[Mezmera]

Illusion is quite a strong set.  I'd take everything but the t1 immob and the t9 pet (he's tissue paper and I found I'm better served with the Fortunata pet since I'm already in the Soul pool). 

 

As far as a dom that mixes it up in melee yeah the heal in Rad is quaint but highly unreliable like you say.  If you're needing to rely on a gimmick heal of your own from a dom in 4* content you're already dead.  I'd either go all out with the best dps set for meleeing doms like nrg or if you really want a heal go dark.  

 

For epic pools doms get access to so many good ones, I personally like Soul to fill in my Nrg's low aoe and utility.  

[MoonSheep]

plant/energy/ice would be my vote

 

powerful confuse, powerful ST and powerful -def/-res debuff 

[Uun]

Savage and Dark Assault also have heals.

 

Another suggestion for primary would be Ice. Between Arctic Air (which is now affected by Domination) and Ice Slick, not much is touching you in melee range. I just leveled an Ice/Savage that's a lot of fun. 

[EnjoyTheJourney]

Thank you all for the input. It is appreciated. 

Across a number of test server builds radiation siphon has kept health topped up quite well for pylon fights and in trapdoor runs. With a recharge of about 4.4 seconds for radiation siphon and lots of opportunities to activate the contaminated condition it seems to activate fairly often. I haven't formally measured the number of activations. But, it seems like there are usually at least several activations of the healing factor for radiation siphon per minute.  

A key drawback for the savage assault heal is that it's available about every 50+ seconds (or thereabouts) and unavailable otherwise. Fairly frequent and smaller heals are probably better for 2* and 4* content because they will generally keep health topped up better against chip damage than a larger, but more intermittent heal. This is probably true because the more time a character spends in melee range in a "hard mode" run with less than full health on a lower health AT, the more frequently they seem likely to end up faceplanting. 
 

Life drain is clearly a better and more reliable heal than radiation siphon. But, a key drawback with dark assault is that it's a bit challenging to take less than 6 or 7 powers from that set if you'd like a well rounded single target attack chain, the PbAOE, gather shadows, and life drain. In contrast, radioactive assault only needs 5 or 6 powers to provide similar tools. For a tight build radioactive assault has a noticeable edge in that regard. Also, radioactive assault seems to offer better proc opportunities than dark assault, which makes it a bit easier to do good damage. 
 

Edited January 16 by EnjoyTheJourney

[EnjoyTheJourney]

6 hours ago, Uun said:

Savage and Dark Assault also have heals.

 

Another suggestion for primary would be Ice. Between Arctic Air (which is now affected by Domination) and Ice Slick, not much is touching you in melee range. I just leveled an Ice/Savage that's a lot of fun. 

I'll ponder more about ice control. It's a primary that doesn't usually need many powers taken to function well, which is helpful. Plus, the tools it brings can work very well for a melee-focused dominator.

I don't have any experience using ice control in hard mode ITFs. Does it perform well there? 

Edited January 16 by EnjoyTheJourney

[MoonSheep]

as others have said, if you need a self heal: omae wa mou shindeiru

 

focus on having a strong, game changing primary - powers like seeds of confusion (plant), mass confusion (mind) and a solid, heavy hitting secondary - energy, earth

 

in 4*’s you’re either alive or dead

 

i wouldn’t go ice - you want as little aggro on you as possible. my ethos is big AoE control powers and heavy hitting ST damage to knock out the most troublemaking foes in a mob to lower the danger asap

[Arcadio]

I'd advocate for Ice. My Ice/Psi/Ice is still one of my most fun characters and also among the first I got to 50. Arctic Air really does keep you safe in melee in most content, even more so now with the buffs. It's an even safer set now with the fear in frostbite to open with, I was playing around with a Ice/Thorns on the test server and taking on 4/8 missions pretty comfortably even without completely understanding the playstyle. 

 

With that said, if you're thinking about soloing ITF mobs, once they start screaming it'll be hard to get confuses on them so you're in a lot more danger. But the slows should do some work still if you can get a decent amount of life recovery and play more scared.

[EnjoyTheJourney]

The skepticism about rad assault single target damage and the value of healing in hard mode content has been noted. 

Still, with fairly shambolic execution the illusion / rad build given further up, with a couple of minor tweaks, got 369 DPS on a pylon test. It can probably do at least 10-20% better with better execution, even with multiple choices that could have leaned toward more damage instead leaning toward better defenses. Phants help the DPS test results, as does melt armor. But, rad assault procs up well. Single target damage is not a problem for rad assault. 

If you're going to play a dom in melee range and you can put healing together with strong single target damage then that's probably a win, even in hard mode content. 

Edited January 22 by EnjoyTheJourney

[EnjoyTheJourney]

Getting back to ice control, has somebody used it often in hard mode content and how did that go?

As a bit of information that may be relevant, I have an earth / ice / fire dominator who has participated in many hard mode runs. She's a bit too light on damage, overall, and I'm looking to replace her with another dom that does more damage and still (like her) survives well in hard mode content. But, chilling embrace seems to help more than it causes problems because the movement slowdown and recharge debuff it inflicts on mobs have made it easier to spot and react to mobs that are trying to target her.

My initial hypothesis is that arctic air from ice control would function similarly to chilling embrace in that it probably helps more than it causes problems. Perhaps I'm wrong, though.

Edited January 16 by EnjoyTheJourney

[Mezmera]

4 hours ago, EnjoyTheJourney said:

Life drain is clearly a better and more reliable heal than radiation siphon. But, a key drawback with dark assault is that it's a bit challenging to take less than 6 or 7 powers from that set if you'd like a well rounded single target attack chain, the PbAOE, gather shadows, and life drain. In contrast, radioactive assault only needs 5 or 6 powers to provide similar tools. For a tight build radioactive assault has a noticeable edge in that regard. Also, radioactive assault seems to offer better proc opportunities than dark assault, which makes it a bit easier to do good damage. 

 

Yeah on my /Dark I go with Primal (think this is its name) Epic.  Energy Transfer rounds out the lacking ST damage real nice and Life Drain alleviates some of the danger of the damage done to yourself.  Energy Transfer has the highest dpa of all dom ST attacks, which is likely factoring some of the self damage, accounting for that even with its animation the dpa has to be just below Blaze and Power Burst.  

[EnjoyTheJourney]

I'm hoping to find that I can drop the miracle or numina procs and still have endurance in a good place. If I can, then I'll put an extra slot into boxing and then put two superior blistering cold IOs into boxing. Then I'd feel comfortable replacing the superior blistering cold IOs in contaminated strike with a generic damage IO (boosted to +5) and a D-synch efficiency IO (boosted to +3). That puts contaminated strike at 400 DPS without any further buffs. Since the achilles heel 20% -res proc will be activated a high percentage of the time it will do fairly close to 480 DPS without fusion activated. With fusion activated and the gaussian build up proc activated contaminated strike would do 469 damage, which is close to 565 DPS. When the achilles heel proc is also activated that works out to fairly close to 670-ish DPS. That level of damage isn't consistently available. But, it's good burst damage when it happens and even when everything isn't at its peak damage is still very good. Contaminated strike recharges in just under 3 seconds, so it has good availability. 

Procs do very good things for rad assault's single target damage. 

Edited January 17 by EnjoyTheJourney

[Uun]

16 hours ago, EnjoyTheJourney said:

I don't have any experience using ice control in hard mode ITFs. Does it perform well there? 

I haven't run the Ice/Savage in any hard mode content.

[EnjoyTheJourney]

I've settled on trying out illusion as the primary, at least as a first attempt. 

After the nudge to give more consideration to dark assault, I put together an illusion / dark / fire build. Making a few tweaks to power picks and slotting led to about 343 DPS in a pylon test, while keeping a fairly defense oriented set of selections for incarnates. I also did another pylon test for an illusion / rad / fire and got 375 DPS total.

 

The rad assault build relies on frequent achilles heel -res proc activations to get damage as high as it does. In contrast, the dark assault build gets damage boosts by frequently activating the superior ascendancy of the dominator +damage proc (slotted into midnight grasp). Since -res procs can boost pylon damage a little more than they often do in-game, and the heal from life drain (dark) is more reliable than from radiation siphon (rad), I'll try out an illusion / dark / fire build and see how it goes. 

In case somebody wants to look over the illusion / dark / fire build that was tested, it's attached.

PS: Thank you all for the input.
 

 

 

Dominator (Illusion Control - Dark Assault - Fire Mastery)Domper,SelfRez,MeltArmor.mbd

Edited January 18 by EnjoyTheJourney

[Nintova]

I've yet to play a Dom but like Mind from a long long time ago :0 It's not meta but I sure did love the lock down. Has it improved any since live?

Edited January 21 by Nintova

[Voltak]

On 1/15/2024 at 3:24 PM, EnjoyTheJourney said:

I'd like to come up with a domper (melee range dom) build that's fun to play and also versatile enough to be comfortable in all regular content and that would also function well in all melee 4* ITFs.



Thoughts and suggestions are highly welcome. Thank you in advance. 

 

Dominator (Illusion Control - Radioactive Assault - Fire Mastery)Domper,SelfRez,HeatMetal.mbd 44.73 kB · 11 downloads

 

This being my specialty , especially the ITF 4 stars, having done so many I frankly lost count ....

But as far as primaries go...

PLANT is still the king , way way far and away ... 

Creepers is just amazing for parts 1 and 2 , nothing like it for Doms 

Seeds can be stacked and recharges reasonably well and frankly two plants in same team are stronger than any other Dominator primaries in twos. 

The sleep in spores to handle ambushes and allow for getaway or buy some significant time is pretty nifty 

The immobile in plant , if you want to sue it, is still the highest DMG immob in the game
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Illusion is incredibly strong , just far and away not nearly as strong as plant for the ITF , specifically for the ITF. 

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Earth , 60% of the time when doing Domper runs for the ITF 4 star, I go earth.  The defense debuffs are super important in the ITF 
Quick sand is a weapon that Cimerorans have no answer, no solution for
The sleep is great for ambushes (blend that in with INvis like I do) when they coming, you  go ahead and get close to them ,  jump in mid pack and cast it.  The only ones to worry about are the EBs, that makes it a lot more manageable for your team to handle them. 

Earth AoE hold blended in with the ST hold should make short work of even the EBs and especially of the Hostess Nictus.    

_______________________________________________________

For pure Domper, Psionic assault secondary simply has to bow out of this race because for domper everything beats Psi and also beats Fire because there are just not enough great options to be a Domper here.  

Having said that,  

1. ULTIMATE SMASH -- EARTH assault 
2. Savage because melee is very nice and so thematic 
3.  Energy assault with energy Epic only, not one without the other.   Energy assault without Energy Epic feels like there is a lot missing.  
4.  Radiation assault and Dark assault but these are your secondaries that are resisted the highest in the ITF. 
5.  Thorn assault with the new changes  , OH YEAH OH YEAH ... 🙂 


 

Edited January 21 by Voltak

[EnjoyTheJourney]

Each primary considered has its strong points. Earth is a very reasonable pick for the reasons you give. I particularly like quicksand on the ITF because it slows down everything by quite a bit, making it easier to react when something nasty is making a beeline toward a character. 

Plant surely does rock for the hard mode ITF. I already have a plant / fire / fire dom intended for hard mode play, though (although incarnates still have a ways to go to be revised for hard mode play). I'd get tired of plant if it's all I played. I've never tried out an illusion dom, as well, and wanted to give it a go. 

For illusion, the phants are good for taking hard alphas and will sometimes confuse hostless. Also, deceive can be stacked on whatever. My initial plan is to stack it on surgeons and get them working for us. Fortitude from the enemy is still fortitude, after all. I'll try to figure out other ways to make the most of illusion as I get more experience playing it as a dom in the ITF. 

For secondaries, I like the dark single target attack chain and find the PbAOE to be quicker and easier to use than the PbAOE in other sets. Life drain also heals up chip damage and even the occasional medium hit quite well, which in my experience can be problems in hard mode play. It's unfortunate that it's one of the more resisted sets, but I'll see how it goes. 

I like the single target skills for thorns quite a bit. But, I've never enjoyed the AOE. If the revisions being made to the set make the AOE more fun to use, then I'd be likely to give it a go at some point. 

[Voltak]

27 minutes ago, EnjoyTheJourney said:

For secondaries, I like the dark single target attack chain and find the PbAOE to be quicker and easier to use than the PbAOE in other sets. Life drain also heals up chip damage and even the occasional medium hit quite well, which in my experience can be problems in hard mode play. It's unfortunate that it's one of the more resisted sets, but I'll see how it goes. 

I like the single target skills for thorns quite a bit. But, I've never enjoyed the AOE. If the revisions being made to the set make the AOE more fun to use, then I'd be likely to give it a go at some point. 

Dark assault is THE MOST heavily resisted dmg in the iTF 4-four stars.  

Thorns after the changes is very good, enough melee and enough range for balanced and still enough to play as Domper. 

Illusion second behind Plant for four stars, no question.   Psi dmg is TOO GOOD for the ITF.  
Phantom army at the cysts is super good. 
Phantom army vs hostess is par excellence. 

________________________

Earth is a lot of defense debuffs in a task force that is way over the top for defense buffs for the enemies.  

The AoE hold, like I said, can be permanent and it can stack with the ST hold to make quick work of hostless and any other EB in the task force 

___________

If we could get 3 ice control dominators in the team, that would surely rock 

Artic Air Confuse with Domination x 3  = lots of confuse anywhere , even with the EBs 

 

Edited January 21 by Voltak

[WitchofDread]

A random idea, what about elec/psi?

[Voltak]

59 minutes ago, WitchofDread said:

A random idea, what about elec/psi?

In our runs in hard mode, elec control is always appreciated. 
The drain is very strong and contributes. 
The reapplying sleep is good as well. 

[MoonSheep]

1 hour ago, Voltak said:

In our runs in hard mode, elec control is always appreciated. 
The drain is very strong and contributes. 
The reapplying sleep is good as well. 

 

+1 for the end drain on elec control

 

i have an elec/earth dom i play on test, the end drain is really quite effective

[EnjoyTheJourney]

A fairly early report-out on how things have been going for the illusion / dark / fire dominator so far in 4* content. She's still only vet level 27 with T4 incarnates for alpha, destiny, and hybrid and T3 otherwise, so not quite done with her build yet. So far she's done better than expected in a couple of key ways. I still need to work on finding ways to keep her more consistently in melee range while maintaining high survivability, to more consistently get those tasty AOE team buffs such as fulcrum shift. 

Not sure how this particular build works on super fast damage-optimized teams. If a dominator fits there then it's probably a ranged dominator build with the fiery assault secondary and ice mastery. Those builds can push out serious damage and debuff enemies so the team hits harder. 

 

That said, for a hybrid melee/ranged to full melee run, and especially if a "kill most" approach is taken for a significant part of a 4* run, the build seems to work quite well. A brief report-out of some key powers follows ...

Phants are great as distractions and to pile more damage onto hard targets. They can be told to focus on hard targets easily when lores are out because the pet screen is then consistently visible. Edit: It turns out that phantasms can not be given commands by a player. Their AI makes all decisions for them, with no player input possible for such choices. Still useful, just can't be directly player controlled. It was fairly common to see hostless at full health for a fair period of time not target any players, possibly because they ended up targeting the phants (or other pets) instead. 

Deceive has seen less use than expected. Originally it was planned to deceive rather than kill at least some surgeons instead of defeating them. But, everybody targets surgeons out of habit, which is understandable. So, it ended up being simpler to just kill surgeons instead of deceiving them. Maybe I'll find a way to make deceive more useful down the road, though. 

 

Life drain has prevented many, many defeats already, as chip damage is very common in highly crowded screens, especially when laying out AOE controls. Group healing was often not enough to keep up with incoming damage and getting 135 - 200ish healing every couple of seconds was a really big factor in surviving those occasions. As one example, on a 4* just last night this dominator's life bar spent significant amounts of time bouncing up and down like a yoyo, even with plenty of good support from experienced and highly skilled teammates. In the end, with 45-ish defeats for the team this dominator was defeated once. That defeat happened when I didn't notice Rom going down and he re-spawned close by and in plain view of my dominator. Life drain can't protect this dominator from driver brain farts, it would seem .

 

Regarding AOE controls, gleam is really good in many parts of a 4* run, including for council spawns, dark novas and dwarves, and even Cims if it's activated before their buffs are up. It's quite useful for the computer in part 3 because as the romulus phalanx wakes up when the computer is being defeated gleam keeps them drunk-walking most of the time.

 

The single target hold functions very well. Rom and Req are susceptible to stacked holds, with Rom spending a noticeable amount of time held and unable to take action. Cim bosses are also susceptible to stacked holds. Where the hold really shines, though, was when fighting hostless. Once a hostless is held their timer for possessing teammates stops, so I've started early and aggressive hold stacking on hostless as they come up. 

Damage is in a decent place and it jumps a lot (of course) when fulcrum shift or other team buffs are active. It should get better as I learn how to better keep this dominator upright while consistently in the thick of melee, instead of on the fringes of melee or at medium range, even in large scrums and when fighting the AVs.

Edited February 5 by EnjoyTheJourney