Dominator APP Pool - Ice Mastery vs. Dark Mastery

[SeraphimKensai]

I'm wondering how people are deciding currently between Ice and Dark.

 

For years Ice Mastery has given us a frozen armor (def), sleet, hoarfrost, hibernate, and ice storm. With the new Dark Mastery we can get Murky Cloud(res), Tar Patch, Darkest Night, Umbral Torrent, and Soul Consumption.

 

The new Dark Mastery looks pretty good on paper sans Umbral Torrent. You can get additional resistance to some exotic resistance types, tar patch which doesn't have the avoid sleet has (but also doesn't have the -defense), darkest night gives a ton of mitigation not only to you but your team (subject to enemy resistance and purple patch voodoo). Otherwise it gives you Soul Consumption, which despite the super long recharge seems like an interesting power that gives you more max HP/end based on the number of mobs around you while reducing their max end/HP, and regen.

 

How does Dark Mastery stack up in your opinion? Can it dethrone Ice Mastery or at least reasonably compete with it?

[Uun]

It looks very strong to me. I haven't respeced any of my doms yet, but I have experience with all the powers (except Soul Consumption). You are correct that Murky Cloud, Tar Patch and Darkest Night are all very good powers. Don't dismiss Umbral Torrent. Even though they nerfed the range and recharge, it does solid damage and with a kb>kd IO provides outstanding soft control. 

 

You should also be aware that Melt Armor in Fire Mastery got a significant buff (mention of dominators missed in the patch notes). It now provides the same -res as Sleet and Tar Patch.

[Luminara]

I respeced my Dark/Martial into Dark Mastery and did some street sweeping to get a feel for it.  The only powers I wanted were Darkest Night and Tar Patch, so I'll confine my comments to those.

 

Animation times on Darkest Night and Tar Patch are long, but there's no aggro until the animations finish.  That makes either good openers.

 

Since this character has ~26% Defense to Melee/Ranged/AoE, Darkest Night's slotted -ToHit is sufficient (with Musculature Radial Paragon) to hit the soft cap.  Not only can I open a fight with it, I don't even have to look at my controls for most content, and that means I'm spending less animation time keeping the character upright than I was before.  The endurance cost is a little higher than I'd normally consider acceptable for my builds, but Tar Patch compensates for that.

 

Tar Patch, I like better than Sleet for /Martial.  No risk of stacking KD and sending things flying is a big plus.  It also has no Avoid, and a stronger Slow, so keeping everything in melee range is much easier, which means more enemies hit with AoEs/PBAoEs, directly leading to a reduction in the amount of endurance I have to spend over time.  And the -Res amplifies that, so it's paying for Darkest Night and giving me back some change.  The recharge time is longer than I like, even with over 180% global +Recharge, but the duration is long enough to pull the next spawn into it, which makes it an every fight power (about 10s total down time on my build, slotted with 6/6 Ice Mistral's Torment).

 

These are just rough first impressions based on what testing I could manage before the tip spam made me log out, and I'm not playing traditionally (this is a petless build and i play it like i play almost everything else, like a scrapper on crack), but I'm liking it.  Still need to do more work on the build (and add Dark Mastery to Mids' so i don't have to substitute powers with comparable slotting options to give me a visual representation of the end result), but even without any further tweaks, I think it fits my build better than Ice Mastery.

[tricon]

I think it's quite usable and more options are always good, but it's absolutely not perfect. I created a few AR domintor chars on the test server, so a few points.

 

 

Murky Cloud - Res Shield, this time without S/L but with F/C/E/N.  Fire/Cold are usually not a problem, because with the Winter and 50 IOs have that in abundance but E/N is very helpful, even more that some of the NPC changes can hurt you really there. No S/L res is not so great but you can still pickup Tough for it and several IOs adds some extra S/L res.

 

I decided to go with +45 range def as a base and see how this would go with this shield. Did work better then expected if you keep an eye out for the heavy melee hitters

 

Tar Patch - Resist location.  Good points are, it has a 15ft radius that is better then Sleet/Melt Armor with 10 and has with 45 sec the longest duration. All have the same -22.5% dmg resit. However it has a 180 sec recharge timer, thats worse then the 120sec from Sleet but still better then the 200 sec from Melt Armor, However the other 2 can debuff defense too and that means the can add a Achiles Heel proc for extra - resist.  Sleet is IMO the most powerful of the 3 and I don"t think with our hard control the avoid there is a problem but this is still a very good power. If it was up, I would go Smoke Canister->Liquid Nitrogen->Tar Patch->Feral Charge works like a charm

 

Darkest Night - Never picked up. We have a lot of hard control in our primary powersets so I found no use fo it. No idea for what kind of normal/incarnate +4/x8 content you could use it that would give you otherwise a headache. Maybe against the full groups of Incarnate Cyclops/Minotaur. However you could create a char with less defenses as a base and then use this to still floor the enemy to hit chance to 5%. 

 

Umbral Torrent - I dislike cones, sorry. Plus points, it has - to hit and you can slot a FF proc in it. Maybe pick it up if you need some extra aoe, I would chose Fire Ball everytime of something like this but Ice Mastery has only Ice Storm as a extra power, so maybe this powers sound not so bad after all

 

Soul Consumption - Oh well certainly not the MVP of this set. Maybe there is a chance that the devs make it better in some of the next phases. Somebody from the beta patch notes suggestes the turn this into a group buff, now that would be useful, we have something like Link Minds, so IMHO this would be cool.

 

Sooo this power has a 600sec recharge, ouch, with the extra heal from my Savage Assault set. it had a few good moments. You can slot a Theft of Essense +end proc in it and that make this power less forgetable. So if you have still some mobs around you, you get some hps, back, can fill up your blue bar and for 60sec you got a bit of extra max hp/end but Hoarfrost has a 540 sec cd and last 120s and you can use right away. 

 

The debuff is tiny, If you need just more endurance you have way better options with Power Sink. Turning this into a pbaoe team power would fix this a bit. I skipped my aoe hold for it and I am not sure this was a good trade.....

 

 

Not a bad set but you need to decide if this works better for ya. The picture gives an example how the def/resist can look 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited February 23 by tricon

[MoonSheep]

On 2/23/2024 at 2:23 PM, Uun said:

You should also be aware that Melt Armor in Fire Mastery got a significant buff (mention of dominators missed in the patch notes). It now provides the same -res as Sleet and Tar Patch.

 

fire mastery is the way to go for dominators now - i’m sadly respeccing out of ice this weekend

 

fireball, fire shield and melt armour are a bunch of powers to have

 

edit: are a good bunch of powers

Edited February 24 by MoonSheep

[Uun]

6 minutes ago, MoonSheep said:

fireball, fire shield and melt armour are a bunch of powers to have

With my play style, Rise of the Phoenix gets a lot of use.

[Seed22]

On 2/23/2024 at 7:52 AM, SeraphimKensai said:

How does Dark Mastery stack up in your opinion? Can it dethrone Ice Mastery or at least reasonably compete with it?

Dethrone? Not a chance in hell even if Sleet was gutted. Sleet is just that much better than Tar Patch, and with TP having a whole minute more recharge than sleet, its worse as a pick from a minmax perspective. Overall I like the shield far more than Ice's but the rest of the set's good while Ice, being carried by Sleet, is great.