Darkness control, pets, and melee questions...

[biostem]

So I've kind of fallen in love with dominators lately, and have been trying out a bunch of different power combinations and builds.  I'm also a big fan of pets.  One combination I've been pondering is darkness control and earth assault.  The former offers plenty of soft and hard controls, not to mention several tohit debuffs.  The latter seems to have some great close-in powers and soft control in the form of knockdowns and knockups.  With that in mind, can anyone tell how these two sets work together, and are pets summoned from "haunt" permanent?  If not, how difficult is it to make them permanent?  Thank you all so much!

[blayzemaster]

Haunt can be made permanent but it is quite difficult to do, equally you have a lot of recharge anyway to get perma dom. On my build its 1 sec off perma which is fine for me. They don't do masses of damage, but they apply fear, help split the spawn'a attention and look cool. I can't talk about Earth Assault though.

[Coyote]

If you're going for perma-Dom, then Haunt can easily be made permanent or nearly so, as already said.

Earth Assault is melee- range only (the ranged attacks are really bad), so you have to plan on that. Fearsome Stare and Living Shadows are useful powers which you won't be able to leverage well except at the start of the fight. Living Shadows is useful to spam for -ToHit and with the Fiery Orb ATO to try to summon a lot of Orbs, but you can get by without it. Fearsome Stare is a must-use, but its ToHit debuff does last for 20 seconds, so it can be used as an opener and then you go into melee.

Heart of Darkness is a PBAoE Stun, but more interestingly to me, it can take PBAoE damage Procs. This can turn it into a mini-nuke (it gets 64 damage from each non-Purple Proc as long as you don't put more than 55% Recharge Enhancement into it), as 4 damage procs get it to about 256 damage. With good global Recharge it can be up (once) for every fight and also adds in a nice Stun and -ToHit effect.

So it looks to me that Darkness/Earth should be a reasonable pairing. Darkness can work well as a ranged build using the cones and ranged attacks, or as a melee- range build opening with the cones and then going in with Heart of Darkness.