Dominator - Help!

[Bear Voges]

I'm trying to learn to fall in love with a dominator.  However, I may just be playing them wrong.  I've now found out some of the sets are designed for melee and some for ranged and I just pick whatever without knowing what I'm doing.  I never manage to play it to 50 (although I have sat in some fire farms to get to 50 to see if it plays better, but it again think it's my play style and not understanding the different assaults).  

Can someone, please, help me with pyrotechnic/ice assault build and some tips on how it's supposed to be played.  I saw in Lizard guide, it would be a melee dominator? So I'm thinking it would need good defenses and things.  Some tips and help would be greatly appreciated.  

[MonteCarla]

Hi Bear!

You can build for defences, but you don't need to. 
As a Dom you can lock your enemies down from range before entering melee, and only engage them once its safe to do so.
 

With Pyro, Glittering Column makes a great opener, since it will taunt anything, including bosses. While it's active, use your control powers to lock down the enemy and then start damaging them. You can do this at range if they're particularly hard hitters, but closing to melee will be more effective with 3 sword attacks in Icy Assault.

 

If you're soloing, learn your tools, like stacking Dazzle and Explosive Bouquet on a boss to double hold them. On a team, let the melee types bunch up the enemies and draw aggro and then use your various group mez powers before wading into combat yourself. (Or use Glittering Column to take the alpha strike)

 

For build goals, I always recommend building for Recharge as much as you can on Doms, in order to achieve that hallowed state of Perma-Dom, where Domination recharges faster than it wears off. 
 Here' my guide for that: 

You can build up decent defence as well via the Fighting pool, which helps if you're ambushed or start a fight not on your terms. But your primary defence is always active defence. When Domination's up you can mez a whole group of bosses with a single attack, something most Controllers can't do!

On that topic - it's really easy to save Domination for when you really need it and thus never actually use it. I recommend putting it on auto just to get out of that habit.

 

 

[EnjoyTheJourney]

I don't have a pyro / ice dominator build handy. But, to provide some ideas I'm attaching builds for a pyro controller and a mind / ice dominator. Mix and match as you see fit and/or learn from any shortcomings you see in the builds attached. Either works, and hopefully this helps.  

Incendiary Storm - Controller (Pyrotechnic Control - Storm Summoning - Psi mastery).mbd

Dominator (Mind Control - Ice Assault - Fire Mastery).mbd

Edited 8 hours ago by EnjoyTheJourney

[MoonSheep]

i wouldn’t think of any alt in terms of “melee” or “ranged”, it’s fairly meaningless. play wherever is best suited for that moment in time

 

and as others have said, your best defence is a mezzed enemy. when you start noticing which enemies cast the most impactful debuffs or attacks you’ll learn to lock them down first - that’s where dominators can really shine

 

with that in mind, you have two options in any combat situation: mez or damage. you may not always need mez and can simply focus on damage if the team is permanently at full health. if things are looking spicy, you’ll want to throw out some targeted lockdowns, or some big AoE lockdowns for the “oh no” moments