Prepping Controller OR Dominator for new update. I want Plant/AoE secondary to make use of taunt from Spirit Tree!

[Mindrivet]

Lads, its in the title. Let us brainstorm some good secondary AoE powers for Controller (ideally) or Dominator (will do as well). Having a taunting pet sounds amazing and I want to make use of it with some powerful AoE!

Incarnates and such are allowed in the brainstorm but note I have never hit level 50 so don't expect me to know anything about that part of builds.

Storm seems nice for Lightning Storm as always, but what are some less obvious answers? Or obvious ones I didn't think about lol

[Vinceq98]

Storm then Marine then Trick Arrow for damage.

 

 

[Mindrivet]

5 minutes ago, Vinceq98 said:

Storm then Marine then Trick Arrow for damage.

 

 

Marine does notable damage? Interesting. Or is it just boosting the plant abilities mainly?

[EnjoyTheJourney]

For a dominator earth assault has a damage toggle, a PbAOE, and a shorter range targeted AOE. The PbAOE and the targeted AOE can take force feedback +recharge procs, which would help to get primary controls back more often. You can probably take another AOE from your mastery as well, if you'd like.  

As one caveat, all those knocks in earth and the hold in seismic smash would get in the way of letting confused mobs hit each other, in case that's important to you. 

[Mindrivet]

3 minutes ago, EnjoyTheJourney said:

3 minutes ago, EnjoyTheJourney said:

For a dominator earth assault has a damage toggle, a PbAOE, and a shorter range targeted AOE. The PbAOE and the targeted AOE can take force feedback +recharge procs, which would help to get primary controls back more often. You can probably take another AOE from your mastery as well, if you'd like.  

As one caveat, all those knocks in earth and the hold in seismic smash would get in the way of letting confused mobs hit each other, in case that's important to you. 

Not particularly as the goal would be to use the taunt to cluster them up and destroy them.

 

[Mindrivet]

The toggle damage is mud pots from Earth? It looked minor to me initially

[EnjoyTheJourney]

Mud pots does about 13 DPS on my grav / earth dom with just two slots in it. That works out to about 130 DPS every 10 seconds at the cost of a manageable amount of endurance, no animation time, and one slot.

Mud pots also slows and can immobilize mobs. Plus, it activates every 2 seconds and it will take out mobs with a sliver of life left without needing to spend time targeting them. It's quite a good power if you take earth assault and you can find a way to manage the endurance cost. 

Mud pots will annoy mobs and make some of them eager to kill your dom. But, as a dom you have tools to deal with that and making mobs hate you more seems to fit with your goals for your troller / dom.

Edited June 11 by EnjoyTheJourney

[Mindrivet]

28 minutes ago, EnjoyTheJourney said:

Mud pots does about 13 DPS on my grav / earth dom with just two slots in it. That works out to about 130 DPS every 10 seconds at the cost of a manageable amount of endurance, no animation time, and one slot.

Mud pots also slows and can immobilize mobs. Plus, it activates every 2 seconds and it will take out mobs with a sliver of life left without needing to spend time targeting them. It's quite a good power if you take earth assault and you can find a way to manage the endurance cost. 

Mud pots will annoy mobs and make some of them eager to kill your dom. But, as a dom you have tools to deal with that and making mobs hate you more seems to fit with your goals for your troller / dom.

Fascinating, thanks for the suggestion

[evetsleep]

3 hours ago, Mindrivet said:

Marine does notable damage? Interesting. Or is it just boosting the plant abilities mainly?

 

Specifically Whitecap (proc'ed) and Shifting Tides.  I haven't tested it personally, but from what I recall in other threads shifting tides can do Hot Feet level damage in the right situations.  If you have a taunting pet that brings things in, I suspect that damage could rack up quickly.  Add into that a confuse to keep them from damaging the tree or yourself...it does look to be quite the nice combo.

 

Really I'm honestly surprised Marine didn't get tuned in this patch.  If you like a more active Controller, marine is really in a league of it's own almost. 

 

I love me some storm, but it's damage is a little late blooming and doesn't offer any self buffs\heals like Marine does.  Basically throwing caution .. ahem ... into the wind.  I like storm with less active primaries like illusion personally..so I can focus on throwing out tornadoes and thunder storms, but it is quite amazing with plant.

[TygerDarkstorm]

I'm just going to throw it out there not to expect the Spirit Tree to perform like a full tanker. I haven't been able to test the newest beta build, but Spirit Tree's taunt has been pretty poor and not really doing anything to hold aggro. If you haven't, I highly suggest jumping on the open beta to test the power. It also has a limited duration, but that might not be as much of an issue now that they've removed the mob changes that increased mob regen and was making Plant slow to kill things on beta.

 

Definitely don't discount Marine as a secondary; it's quite powerful. For Doms, most of them don't really have strong AoE, but Fire and Savage are good Plant pairings. Ice and Earth might also be alright.

[Vinceq98]

8 hours ago, Mindrivet said:

Marine does notable damage? Interesting. Or is it just boosting the plant abilities mainly?

Marines damage is from shifting tide and it's procs. Each time a player or pet does damage it can activate the cold damage proc of shifting tides. Plant has carrion creepers frequently attacking and thus frequently activating the cold dmg proc. Whitecap with a fury of the gladiator proc can reduce res by up to 33.25. finally tidepool and shifting tide can increases damage% of you and your pets significantly. It's very offensive power set.

[Uun]

55 minutes ago, TygerDarkstorm said:

I'm just going to throw it out there not to expect the Spirit Tree to perform like a full tanker. I haven't been able to test the newest beta build, but Spirit Tree's taunt has been pretty poor and not really doing anything to hold aggro. If you haven't, I highly suggest jumping on the open beta to test the power. It also has a limited duration, but that might not be as much of an issue now that they've removed the mob changes that increased mob regen and was making Plant slow to kill things on beta.

Spirit Tree is much improved since Build 5 (the last one I tested) compared to the earlier builds. Now holds aggro pretty well and my attacks don't peel aggro away. It's also substantially sturdier. It works well as an opener dropped in the middle of a spawn before using Seeds. 

[TygerDarkstorm]

2 hours ago, Uun said:

Spirit Tree is much improved since Build 5 (the last one I tested) compared to the earlier builds. Now holds aggro pretty well and my attacks don't peel aggro away. It's also substantially sturdier. It works well as an opener dropped in the middle of a spawn before using Seeds. 

Thank you! I thought I had seen notes improving it, but I haven't been able to get in and test it again. Real life kicking my butt. I'm glad it functions more in the way they intended now.

[Mindrivet]

4 hours ago, Vinceq98 said:

Marines damage is from shifting tide and it's procs. Each time a player or pet does damage it can activate the cold damage proc of shifting tides. Plant has carrion creepers frequently attacking and thus frequently activating the cold dmg proc. Whitecap with a fury of the gladiator proc can reduce res by up to 33.25. finally tidepool and shifting tide can increases damage% of you and your pets significantly. It's very offensive power set.

Thank you all, going with Plant Marine it sounds pretty fun 

[Mindrivet]

Plant/Marine also sounds low-key like a mastermind and I play those too much so it works for me.

[MoonSheep]

12 hours ago, EnjoyTheJourney said:

Mud pots does about 13 DPS on my grav / earth dom with just two slots in it. That works out to about 130 DPS every 10 seconds at the cost of a manageable amount of endurance, no animation time, and one slot.

Mud pots also slows and can immobilize mobs. Plus, it activates every 2 seconds and it will take out mobs with a sliver of life left without needing to spend time targeting them. It's quite a good power if you take earth assault and you can find a way to manage the endurance cost. 

Mud pots will annoy mobs and make some of them eager to kill your dom. But, as a dom you have tools to deal with that and making mobs hate you more seems to fit with your goals for your troller / dom.

 

with mud pots and similar powers generally have a 2 second tick rate as noted the damage would be half that amount surely

 

damage (base, before slotting) would be 7.59 x 5 = 37.95 over a 10 second period

 

else you’d need it to cast 26 damage per tick, which if procced heavily could be achievable 

[EnjoyTheJourney]

Perhaps mids is wrong. But, it does list almost 26 damage per damage tick, which happens every 2 seconds. 

This is with musculature radial and degen radial engaged. It would be less damage with just the two superior frozen blast IOs boosting damage.

Edit: The build is given below ...

Weirdly, the damage shown in Mids is now listed as little over 23 per 2 second tick. Maybe I misremembered or Mids is inconsistent sometimes? So, it looks closer to 11.5 DPS, which would lead to 115 damage per 10 seconds. Still a bargain for what you get, I think. Also, like the OP, I like grabbing aggro with mud pots in most situations because taking some of the aggro is one way I like to contribute while teaming. Everybody's mileage may reasonably vary, though, for mud pots and for other powers.

 

Magnetic Rocker - Dominator (Gravity Control - Earth Assault - Fire Mastery).mbd

Edited June 11 by EnjoyTheJourney

[Psyonico]

COD lists it at 7.5908 damage every tic.  So even if you were at 125% damage from enhancements/musculature you’re only looking at 17.1 damage per tic or ~8.5 DPS

[EnjoyTheJourney]

10 minutes ago, Psyonico said:

COD lists it at 7.5908 damage every tic.  So even if you were at 125% damage from enhancements/musculature you’re only looking at 17.1 damage per tic or ~8.5 DPS

Does degen radial not apply to damage ticks? If not, then Mids is overstating the damage. If so, then it's probably doing just what is says for damage.

Edit: On reflection, I probably should have noted for the OP that having a damage-dealing interface incarnate and alpha is what raises the bar for mud pots damage to a more noticeable level. I so seldom take a non-damage interface incarnate that I tend to forget they exist.

Edited June 11 by EnjoyTheJourney

[Psyonico]

9 minutes ago, EnjoyTheJourney said:

Does degen radial not apply to damage ticks? If not, then Mids is overstating the damage. If so, then it's probably doing just what is says for damage.

Yes, interface abilities apply to toggle damage powers like mud pots.

 

if it is that, then Mids will show toxic damage on mud pots.

[BZRKR]

A thought: Take the Sorcery pool and put Spirit Ward and Enflame on your Tree or one of your other pets.

[Soulsifter]

On 6/11/2025 at 12:44 AM, EnjoyTheJourney said:

Mud pots does about 13 DPS on my grav / earth dom with just two slots in it. That works out to about 130 DPS every 10 seconds at the cost of a manageable amount of endurance, no animation time, and one slot.

Mud pots also slows and can immobilize mobs. Plus, it activates every 2 seconds and it will take out mobs with a sliver of life left without needing to spend time targeting them. It's quite a good power if you take earth assault and you can find a way to manage the endurance cost. 

Mud pots will annoy mobs and make some of them eager to kill your dom. But, as a dom you have tools to deal with that and making mobs hate you more seems to fit with your goals for your troller / dom.

 

I have a knockback / knockback to knockdown in my Farm tankers mud pots. It works a charm. I would imagine it would be as good on a Dom. 

Edited June 18 by Soulsifter
missed a word

[Maxzero]

On 6/11/2025 at 11:15 PM, Uun said:

Spirit Tree is much improved since Build 5 (the last one I tested) compared to the earlier builds. Now holds aggro pretty well and my attacks don't peel aggro away. It's also substantially sturdier. It works well as an opener dropped in the middle of a spawn before using Seeds. 

 

For some reason Spirit tree now has 90% res all that slowly ticks down. By the time it despawned (like a minute later) it was at like 75% res all.

 

1600 HP at lvl 50 plus it regens health quickly due to the regen aura.

 

Basically short of the most extreme damage situations it is not dying anytime soon.

Edited June 18 by Maxzero

[Maxzero]

Chatting on Discord with Player-1 about the Creeper proc nerf.

 

Basically what happened is that the Vines attacks (melee and ranged) were proccing all procs, such as the 3 targeted AoE procs. So that was changed.

 

What that means is you still want 2 procs: the 2 in the slow sets (Ice Minstrel and Impeded Swiftness). Since the Creepers, Bramble Patch and both Vine attacks all slow/have a chance to slow on hit.

 

So you won't get 5x damage procs on everything but 2x damage procs on everything.

 

Its still a pretty damn solid damage power.

Edited June 18 by Maxzero