Arsenal Control vs +3x8 Ice Mistral SF

[Frosticus]

+3x8 Ice Mistral SF

No Insp/amps/temps/click accolades

No deaths

 

Arsenal Control seems to have little issue with CoT as it plows through the hordes of Death Mages and Succubi that this TF throws at you.

While lots of primaries can handle a x8 spawn it's the ambushes that really show off peak control capability and can very quickly overwhelm.

 

Why is this TF important?

Ice Mistral sets you to lvl 40, so that means it is a close as you can get to your full build without having access to incarnate powers and a level shift (both accessible at lvl 45). So you get to showcase what your full build can do before ridiculously OP incarnates skew the picture.  The AV ensures that you can't just bring a pure survival based build because he has healing flames and twilight grasp. You need a lot of dps*

*you'll see I stalemate him at +3

 

What about other dominators?

Here's my earth/psi, which was only capable of passing this at +1x8 and not for lack of trying! The same spawns that I can stroll through with arsenal at +3x8 were hit and miss for the earth/psi and even +2x8 could quickly go south.

Spoiler

 

 

Strategy

Try to stay out of line of sight. There are way too many enemies once the ambushes start stacking. You have to thin them out quite a bit before it is safe to engage. A regular x8 spawn is no issue.

 

Note

/psi app is just because I like it. I'm strongly considering going with /fire in a future version as I think the current build is a bit too defensive.

Dominator (Arsenal Control - Savage Assault).mbd

 

[EnjoyTheJourney]

Perhaps best filed under the "pretty good, definitely fun, but fire may be mechanically better" could be leviathan mastery. 

These days I'm playing an ice / savage / leviathan dom for whom water spout is proving very helpful. Uptime for water spout is about 60 - 65% of the time without external buffs such as speed boost. The soft cc it adds makes getting into the middle of spawns noticeably safer and tougher mobs get chewed down to zero hit points faster with water spout throwing them up in the air and generally ruining their day. Also, while hibernate can fail to save your dominator at times it's still a decent self protection button if RNG turns against you. 

 

For AOE damage fireball is clearly better than water spout. Heat metal has no equivalent in leviathan, as well. But, water spout works well with control sets which can slow down enemy movement by quite a bit because feared mobs will generally not be going anywhere fast anyways. 

FWIW, written knowing that you may have already experimented extensively with leviathan mastery and found that it falls short. 

Edited July 2 by EnjoyTheJourney

[Frosticus]

8 hours ago, EnjoyTheJourney said:

FWIW, written knowing that you may have already experimented extensively with leviathan mastery and found that it falls short. 

 

I like leviathan quite a bit. If they changed the cone into a taoe I'd use it often as it'd check so many boxes for me.

 

For arsenal specifically I find you want to keep applying aoe damage pretty consistently to keep smoke canister active. It will suppress without activity after 15 seconds which isn't very long for a mob to go unchecked during the multi-spawn ambushes because so many enemies are swarming. Taoes are just easier (and less risky) to use.  Against a normal x8 spawn it is much less of an issue and I'd have no qualms about using an epic cone and/or flock of birds cone.

 

Properly leveraging smoke canister is imo the key to getting this set to perform well. 

[EnjoyTheJourney]

That makes sense. Thank you for explaining.