Fear themed AT

[OdinAZ]

Hello,

 

  I am looking of making a fear/horror themed AT.  Are there any AT's that have a lot of fear effects?  Or maybe a fear aura?

[Troo]

https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Fear

 

while I am not a MM fan, Necromancy/Dark Miasma Mastermind might work for you.

 

 

[tidge]

I went with a Claws/Dark Scrapper, and leaned into the Presence Pool. I want to note that I delayed Cloak of Fear until level 41. (pre-i28p2) YMMV if you want it earlier now, but by leveraging KB protection pieces/set bonuses I still don't think it is a necessary power to take early. I suppose I could have taken it as early as lvl 30 (I skipped Soul Transfer) but that is when I took Unrelenting, followed at 32 by Hasten.

 

I took Pacify at 12, Intimidate at 14 and Invoke Panic at 24. The only Claws attacks before level 22 are Strike, Spin and Followup. Claws fit the theme of my character.

[Doc Spectre]

It's hard to beat Fearsome Stare from Dark Miasma. Mind and Illusion Control also have fear powers.

[arcane]

I’d just go Dark/Dark melee toon as a nicely

colored Cloak of Fear aura feels like the closest you’re gonna get to a toon all about fear.

[Uun]

While Cloak of Fear is a fear aura and likely has the look you want, it's a bad power (not quite as bad after the recent buffs). It has an accuracy penalty and only affects minions.

 

The fear powers that work well are Fearsome Stare (Dark Miasma and Dark Control), Terrify (Mind Control), Spectral Terror (Illusion Control) and Cold Snap (Ice Control). Dark Control also has several pets with fear powers (Haunt and Umbra Beast). For your purposes, I think a Dark controller or dominator would work best.

[OdinAZ]

22 hours ago, Uun said:

Dark Control also has several pets with fear powers (Haunt and Umbra Beast). For your purposes, I think a Dark controller or dominator would work best.

 

  This works for what I am envisioning.  As a side question, why don't yo see many Dominators?  I've played controllers before and thought,  "I wish I had more damage."  But, in play, Dominators seem pretty rare.  I may go Dom this time around, but wanted to see if there was anything obvious I was missing.

[Uun]

9 minutes ago, OdinAZ said:

  This works for what I am envisioning.  As a side question, why don't yo see many Dominators?  I've played controllers before and thought,  "I wish I had more damage."  But, in play, Dominators seem pretty rare.  I may go Dom this time around, but wanted to see if there was anything obvious I was missing.

I happen to like dominators (I've got 5 lvl 50 doms). While rarer than controllers, I still see dominators pretty often. Most people build doms with the goal of making Domination permanent. (Domination doubles the strength of all your mezzes and allows you to control bosses in one application.) Perma-Dom generally requires making sacrifices in defense and resists and results in a bit of a learning curve in keeping them alive. In contrast, controllers have support sets for their secondaries and tend to be sturdier.

[EnjoyTheJourney]

A dark / storm controller might be exactly what you'd enjoy, given your thematic focus and a desire to do good damage. Dark control has fearsome stare and 2 pets with fear and storm summoning has two powers that inflict quite a bit of fear on enemies (tornado, lightning storm). Freezing rain in storm can also make mobs want to run.

 

If you take storm summoning build for recharge and endurance recovery to have as many freezing rains, lightning storms and tornadoes out as you can. Consider putting "knockback to knockdown" IOs into tornado and lightning storm, along with force feedback +recharge IOs. You'll be glad you did and your teammates will be even more glad. Also, consider not taking hurricane. FWIW, I don't have hurricane on any of my stormies and I don't miss it in any way, whatsoever, not ever. I don't need to bully mobs with hurricane to enjoy the storm set and I like it when I and my teammates don't have a massive swirling hurricane fog making it hard to see what's happening. Dark control and storm summoning are both strong sets and there will always be other tools available to manage any situation in which using hurricane might be tempting.

 

Finally, take the AOE immobilize in the primary because all those fear effects might just make mobs run all over the place otherwise. 

Edited July 6 by EnjoyTheJourney

[Magnificus]

12 hours ago, EnjoyTheJourney said:

A dark / storm controller might be exactly what you'd enjoy

right on great idea thanks. Gothik is born.

[EnjoyTheJourney]

There are plenty of ways to build a stormie controller, of course, and your build may reasonably look very different from what's below. Still, in case it helps, here's a build for an earth / storm / psi controller that's intended for teaming.

 

 

Controller (Earth Control - Storm Summoning - Psi mastery).mbd

[Magnificus]

thank you again enjoythejourney, and the rest of you old timers. all have been helpful in the past

[twozerofoxtrot]

14 hours ago, OdinAZ said:

As a side question, why don't yo see many Dominators? 

 

Might be a shard-specific thing. Doms are really common on Everlasting. 

 

It might have to do with the damage/speed meta, which Doms can keep up with but never excel at and don't enable (the way a /cold or a /kin troller might).

 

It might also have to do with the tightness of a good Dom build. When I build a Dom, there's always at least a certain challenge in balancing recharge, end use, and damage (often with some powers being proc bombed). With a Controller it's a lot less stressful because your secondary often brings the tools you need to enable your goals.

 

Just some thoughts. But much the same as Uun, I love Doms.

 

[tidge]

20 hours ago, OdinAZ said:

 

  This works for what I am envisioning.  As a side question, why don't yo see many Dominators?  I've played controllers before and thought,  "I wish I had more damage."  But, in play, Dominators seem pretty rare.  I may go Dom this time around, but wanted to see if there was anything obvious I was missing.

 

As noted by @Uun, in order to really maximize Dominator performance it is necessary to achieve perma-Domination.

 

Writing only for myself: I find it somewhat tedious (and repetitive) building for perma-Dom... at which point I've got great controls but damage can be a bit of a dog's breakfast. This leads to me being somewhat bored by them.

 

One of the things about perma-Dom is that depending on the approach to achieving perma-Dom it may not scale down well for any given build. In high-level/endgame content, there are (or were) some places where a Dominator could really shine, but it feels like this is far less common (to me, anyway). Confuses in particular used to be top-notch, mileage varied for other controls.

[EnjoyTheJourney]

In a sense, dominators are too good at what they can do better than any other AT, which is to shut down mobs and turn them into punching bags that can't hit back. So, to avoid having higher end content trivialized, a lot of higher end content, and especially AVs / GMs / higher star content, can mostly shrug off the usual ability of dominators to shut them down in large numbers with a single press of a button. 

Dominators can bring good debuffs and good damage to a team and so they can still contribute well. But, other ATs will outshine them in at least one of the buff / debuff / damage categories and will often be preferred by players over doms. 

The point mentioned by others about how tight dominator builds tend to be is also totally valid. They are expensive to build and not easy to build well. Also, even when you build them well there will tend to be more compromises or weaknesses left in the build than for most other ATs. 

I really like doms and have more of them than any other AT. That's probably an unusual preference, though. 

[Nemu]

This might give you some more ideas.

[OdinAZ]

  Thank you all!  I am going to build my first Dom: Dark/?  I am picking between /ice, /thorny or /martial.  I may head over to the Dom Forum to get a better vibe.

[Riverdusk]

On 7/5/2025 at 8:30 AM, Uun said:

While Cloak of Fear is a fear aura and likely has the look you want, it's a bad power (not quite as bad after the recent buffs). It has an accuracy penalty and only affects minions.

 

 

 

Slotting Cloak of Fear for fear now enhances its magnitude instead of duration (another change that was made). 

 

From the testing I did, even one SO worth of fear slotting in it now affects Lt's (tried at level 30  vs +1 in level, higher may take more).  If you can get over 100% fear enhancement in it (through overslotting fear enough to push it through ED penalties (tested and it worked vs +1 boss) or taking Vigor alpha (not tested but should work)), it affects bosses.  Not sure going for bosses is worth it, but the possibility is there.  Vigor isn't a bad choice for dark armor anyway (healing, fear, accuracy, endurance reduction all good stuff for dark armor).

 

Anyway, I find it quite a worthwhile power now myself.    Tested on beta server for an ice/dark stalker and I think it'll work very well for a kind of stalk-troller experiment I was planning.  Will see how it goes for sure, nothing beats actually playing it for real for testing.

 

A dark/dark melee I think is a definite option for a fear heavy character now. 

 

6 hours ago, OdinAZ said:

  Thank you all!  I am going to build my first Dom: Dark/?  I am picking between /ice, /thorny or /martial.  I may head over to the Dom Forum to get a better vibe.

 

Also a great choice of course, good luck on it.  /Thorn probably lend itself to more a horror theme than the other two, imo.

[Uun]

9 hours ago, Riverdusk said:

Slotting Cloak of Fear for fear now enhances its magnitude instead of duration (another change that was made). 

 

Good point, I hadn't focused on that change. Still requires a hefty slot investment to be useful. Probably still a skip on my tanker, but I can see taking it on a scrapper/stalker.

[OdinAZ]

So I went with Dark/Thorn, because it really did fit my theme.  And I really am loving this character, "Bone Calling"