_Ail_

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The imps fighting +6 opponents can really change affairs.

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That is certainly correct. Happens to you a lot solo, huh? If you often solo against +5's to you and +6's to the imps, I can see why you would like singularity better. This is, of course, a really common solo circumstance isn't it?

Come on here, you are just throwing up poor little defenseless fishies as arguments at this point. Give up already.

Solo, fire/ brings more damage in the form of hot feet and the imps, and offers comparable control to gravity/.

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My individual experience isn't necessarily a useful data point. Neither is yours, to be frank.

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Yes, but I think it would be relatively easy (where is Starsman when you need him ?) to show objectively that fire/ is a faster solo set than gravity/. I am surprised you are even arguing the point, to be honest, as you seem fairly level-headed in most of your other posts.

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because of fire imps if nothing else.

[/ QUOTE ]*shrug* They scatter around, they don't focus fire, and they need you to control more actively to keep 'em alive. Singularity controls and doesn't do a lot of damage. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

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*shrug* I guess I will just agree to disagree. I would encourage you actually to roll up one of each though if you don't have them and time how long it takes you to get through missions to compare them. fire/ definitely kills faster I think. Imps have a relatively easy time staying alive solo, since you don't run into the massive team spawns that kill them.

Okay. I still think fire/ significantly outpaces gravity solo, because of fire imps if nothing else.

My non-permadom fire/fire 50 dom will clear missions SOLO faster than my accoladed permadom 50 grav/nrg, and this goes beyond an issue of /fire being better than /energy.

There is always hot feet anyway if you want to slow.

Note that I really like gravity, but this doesn't mean I think it is best.

I think solo all of the doms sets are MUCH closer to each other, but fire/ is still above gravity/ that's for sure.

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The -recharge and -slow can be really meaningful when you're trying to layer on a rough boss.

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You're right, I was thinking of the -speed elements alone. Since that's what I actually want out of it, it's cool by me.

(Not that I have a Grav/)

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Why not just immobilize the boss if all you want out of things is -speed? I am confused, unless you are talking about the rather rare immobilize-protected bosses. In any case, fire has a slow in hot feet that is pretty damaging and ice has plenty of slows that also have various other effects as well. I would have a real hard time considering gravity to be the best solo set because of its slows.

And if your argument is that gravity is "certainly as good as fire" solo because it has an immobilize, well, umm....

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But if you solo about 90% of the time is it really good?

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It's okay. Probably the others are all still better than it for a dom, but solo they are all pretty close and you should just go for concept. For a controller, propel is nice with containment and comes pretty early, but this is not relevant to doms.

Basically, it is a fun, quirky non-optimized set. If you played Trick Arrow or Energy Aura before they were buffed, this is the set for you. It has some fun quirks that are not really all that good but that make things more interesting and keep you awake as you play.

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After you get Wormhole and Singy, it's all gravy and it becomes one of the best control sets in the game.

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Erm, no.

After Wormhole and Singy, the set is merely adequate. It is surpassed in every way by all the other sets.

[/ QUOTE ] How?

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Every single other set has an "up every fight" power that doesn't piss teams off with the knockback, unlike wormhole:
Fire : Flashfire
Earth : Quicksand+Earthquake or Stalagmites
Ice : Ice Slick
Mind : Terrify
Plant : Seeds of Confusion

It's really hard to get by this unavoidable fact. I play my Grav/NRG a *lot* since she is both accoladed and IO'd out, but I often simply can't use wormhole without making the situation worse.

Aiming in a corner is often not desirable as it splits the spawn and confuses people. Aiming straight up or flying up and aiming straight down still scatters, and will confuse people unless you do it right at where the spawn already is (and in that case how did you survive getting there with the presumably uncontrolled spawn.)

Let's face it. Gravity is UNQUESTIONABLY the least desirable team set. There is not even any remotely debateable issue about this. It is hands down the worst, and this is even if you don't use its deliberately team-antagonistic powers like dimension shift.

I enjoy gravity and have a lot of fun with it, but it is really, really weak in teams.

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Pros, cons, what is good in the set, what to avoid, etc.

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Good in the set: Lift (note recent increase to its damage), Gravity Distortion (have to take the ST hold if you want any worthwhile ST control), Wormhole (AOE stun which is up reasonably often but has some drawbacks as well as some advantages), Singularity (control heavy, sturdy pet)

I think you could just take those 4 and call it good.

Other abilities:

Crush: ST Immobilize. Maybe useful for a controller to up containment, but this is not relevant to dominator. With recent improvement of Lift's damage, I would really strongly recommend taking Lift over Crush at the beginning of the game.

Propel: Slow-[censored] pointless attack for a dominator to have.

Crushing Field: Somewhat useful to apply after wormhole, but by no means required.

Dimension shift: Team pissing-off power if for some reason you want to quit but don't want to press the quit button. Just use this a lot and maybe you'll be kicked. Look at you! A master/mistress of manipulation!

Gravity Distortion Field: Somewhat useful AOE hold only hampered by its long recharge.

Note: Gravity immobs do not have -knockback but gravity holds do.

Pros of the set: Solos relatively well. Since there are only 4 good powers, you have lots of room to devote powers to secondary or pools. Wormhole is very cool in concept and does have its unique uses.

Cons of the set: Only 4 good powers. One of the good powers, wormhole, has knockback associated to it that angers teams. Knockback can be mitigated by aiming in corner (which will often split the group), or aiming straight up or straight down (but they will still spread a little).

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I think Fire/ isn't the best fit because of hot feet and the imps not going well with knockback.

Similarly, with earthquake and ice slick I am not so sure about Earth/ and Ice/.

All of Gravity/, Mind/, and Plant/ don't have anything in particular that would mind the knockback (although maybe if you knock them back into another spawn confused foes can present problems.)

I think it is something you have to consider now that power push is your single best DPA attack, because it has 100% knockback.

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I have a Fire/Energy Dom, and I don't feel this way at all. Fire goes awesome with Energy actually. Ever see what a boss KB'd into a nearby corner turns into when he's pegged there and being burnt to a crisp by 3 angry fire imps? LOL, bascially, he does quite fast.


Using Fire/Energy simply means you have to use your "head" every once in awhile too, do that, and the build is a monster.

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Cool! Nice to know.

I think Fire/ isn't the best fit because of hot feet and the imps not going well with knockback.

Similarly, with earthquake and ice slick I am not so sure about Earth/ and Ice/.

All of Gravity/, Mind/, and Plant/ don't have anything in particular that would mind the knockback (although maybe if you knock them back into another spawn confused foes can present problems.)

I think it is something you have to consider now that power push is your single best DPA attack, because it has 100% knockback.

It's okay. I don't think it's really a "high damage dominator" combo though. You probably still want fire/ as the primary for that.

/energy is now pretty good for a secondary, but I am not sure how well it meshes with fire/ as the knockback might not go well with hot feet and the imps.

Just wanted to thank the devs for the dom buffs.

I have a 50 permahasten, permadom Grav/Energy (with actually good powers and ones slotted for use and not for hasten), a non-perma 50 Fire/Fire, and a lowbie Earth/Thorns dominator.

They all feel better with the buffs. I am glad that they were received and appreciate the dom revamp.

Thank you Castle and any others who worked on it. It is very much appreciated.

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Good advice Evil Ryu.

It very clearly is a buff (on my 50s of GRav/NRG and Fire/Fire but also my lowbie Earth/Thorns.) That some people still aren't satisfied, even after Castle reinstated the low-damage puffball Tier 1 attacks so that you can feel busy even if you aren't really doing anything, shows that you just can't please everyone.

Do people REALLY want to spend a little less end at the cost of taking one-and-a-half times as long to kill something (as some of the recent complaints seem to indicate)? Weird...

I think the changes were pretty well balanced and reasoned out and an honest attempt to make almost everyone happy.

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This is why i never take fish powers as an epic.

That and it rarely fits any theme I have (darkness, Electricity and technology are much easier to bind to existing concepts than fish powers)

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I beg to disagree. What power isn't complemented by fish? It goes with everything, plus is low in fat.

Looks fine to me. You can always replace the Kinetic Crash stuff with better more useful things when you get more infamy.

Since you mentioned affordable, the Miracle and Numina uniques that you have are pretty pricey. I think they are nice to have, but they will cost you.

Best of luck!

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My question is, is there something cheaper than this build that I'll only get complete if I win MegaMillions?

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Over 60 views and no responses? I'll take pity...

You don't have the snipe, which is an easy 7.5% recharge with sting of the manticore.

You can also take bonfire and whirlwind (already have prereqs of hasten and s.s.) and slot both with kinetic crash.

This is if you wanted it cheap.

Other notes:

(1) Cinders is not really necessary (nice, yes, but certainly not remotely necessary.) You will have flashfire + fire cages up often enough if you are permadom.

(2) Acrobatics is not necessary since you have status protection while in dom. Also, the kinetic crash slots provide some knockback resistance.

(3) 3-slotting super jump is overkill IMO.

(4) Take the chance of knockback IO out of flashfire (it is beyond pointless and probably actually aggravating) and replace it with a lvl 50 recharge IO.

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I suggest that if you did a bit of research into what OCD actually is you'd realize that there really is no comparison.

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Correct, but I do wonder if there's some other pathology there.

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"Reward maximizers" maybe, that's all.

There's this amusing paper which unfortunately I forget the reference to where I believe they have a computer program with a donkey that spits gold out of its mouth.

It has been several years, but I believe people had to keep pressing buttons to get the donkey to spit out gold. And the more gold is spat out, the more they got to see of a movie (or videos or somesuch.) At first the donkey would spit out a lot of gold, but after a while it would pretty much run dry and you would really have to keep hammering that key to get a chance that it might spit out a little more gold.

The study had some other clever features which I entirely fail to remember, ones which made it at least somewhat even more advantageous (less wasted time I believe) not to be a reward maximizer.

Some people still of course just kept pressing that key hoping to get just a little more gold spewing out of that donkeys mouth, even if it took (figuratively) forever.

I remember looking at that and thinking it typified most "end game" MMO players who are out to replace their already good +6 hauberk of awesomeness with a much harder to get +6.5 hauberk of awesomeness. FFXI players seemed particularly partial to this mental attitude, but I am sure it's everywhere.

Note that I'm as guilty as anyone with some activities and some games, so I'm not claiming to be innocent...

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While I understand the "anti-farm" people...how many times do I have to go through the same content over and over and over to get a character to 50?

That being said...I also partially agree AE is ruining the game to an extent. Here is an example. Last night I was in a TF and the leader says he has a guy coming that sounded "new" the guy didnt know what a TF was. Sad.

If you wanna get people away from farming (at least the people who wanna do things other than farm at higher levels) CREATE MORE END GAME CONTENT! Makea REAL raiding systems..make differnt mobs to raid. Instances of raiding...make it for 2, 3, 4 , 5 teams whatever that have to work together. Make them need some kind of strategy to beat the mobs.

What else is there to do at 50? There are only so many times I can do the same ITF, TF etc etc before bordom sets in and I decide...mmm...I saw x with a right handed laser firing with exploding popcorn toon...wonder what it would be like to play one of those. Im tired of the grind...lemme farm one to 50...spend money on it and try it out. So here I go again on a farm...

The other problem I can see is if you need a ton of money for purples, pvp sets, whatever... how do you get that money...farm farm farm (80% of the people anyways) or manipulate the market (i.e. rip people off (ok that may be a TINY BIT extreme so sue me)

IDK what to do...jsut voice my opinion on what I see. I dont think Im wrong...but hey as my wife had told me Ive been wrong 3 MAYBE 400 times this week.

/e takes podium down and walks away

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Just wanted to say that this post is pure win on a lot of levels.

QR

Take a look at _Brev_'s Permadom FAQ in the guides section. He will answer your question.

...If you look at my original post in this thread that you had issues with (just look at the top of this page, for easy reference, as your reply is right there and included my post), I stated that I *did* have experience with an Ice/Ice brute in CoV beta.

In a typical spawn, the magnitude difference between Cloak of Fear (affects Lieu's and below) and Chilling Embrace (affects all) is negligable, because there will be only 1 boss which you can affect with Touch of Fear. Oppresive Gloom only affects minions, so needs more work from say EM to get things going.

*You* on the other hand are "amusing" by your "total dismissal" of the 5 cap limit in ice patch, since this very clearly is relevant in teams.

Also, although AOE attacks make fears less useful (though they still seem significantly slowed down in their attack rate), AOE immobs make ice patch equally useless. Each has their faults.

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Ice Armor, but more specifically Ice Patch and Chilling Embrace, is far more effective at mitigating attacks from all foes in melee range than Cloak of Fear and Oppressive Gloom combined due mostly to magnitude limitations on the latter two powers.


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Brute Cloak of Fear affects Lieutenants, by the way, so I am not sure what you mean by mentioning that and magnitude restrictions.

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Because Ice Patch and Chilling Embrace have no limitations.

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Chilling embrace max targets 10
Ice patch max targets 5


Oppresive gloom max targets 10
Cloak of fear max targets 10

I'm not seeing any significant mitigation difference here. In a typical spawn with 1 boss, Cloak of Fear and Oppresive Gloom are going to shut down just about everything. If they are combined with fears or stuns from a melee set, it will be even worse.

In short, I don't believe that an Ice/Ice brute would be any worse off than a Dark/Dark brute as far as significantly shutting down the ability of spawns to counterattack.

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Your addition of Dark Melee serves no purpose, by the way. Yes, yes, "but Touch of Fear!". Won't matter. That power is mostly spot control, so the existence of Dark Melee doesn't matter in your case.

Both Cloak of Fear and Oppressive Gloom have to hit the target for their effects to work, and they both require significant slotting in order to get any kind of appreciable "defensiveness" out of them. In addition, Fear effects break temporarily when the target takes damage, usually resulting in a counter-attack from the target.

Ice Patch and Chilling Embrace require no real additional slotting, don't have to hit the target for their effects to work, and once foes are affected by Chilling Embrace, their ability to fire off attacks can drop so low as to trigger the FLEE! response mobs have.

With that said, I still think the sets should have stayed.

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I mentioned dark melee because of the mag difference which you seem so obsessed about so that bosses could be affected. EM would also work if you wanted to go via stuns though.

In short, I still disagree with you. Having played an Ice/Ice tank to 50 and a Dark/Dark brute to the high 40s, I see no appreciable difference between their abilities to slow down the attack rates of a typical spawn.

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Ice Armor, but more specifically Ice Patch and Chilling Embrace, is far more effective at mitigating attacks from all foes in melee range than Cloak of Fear and Oppressive Gloom combined due mostly to magnitude limitations on the latter two powers.


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Brute Cloak of Fear affects Lieutenants, by the way, so I am not sure what you mean by mentioning that and magnitude restrictions.

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Because Ice Patch and Chilling Embrace have no limitations.

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Chilling embrace max targets 10
Ice patch max targets 5


Oppresive gloom max targets 10
Cloak of fear max targets 10

I'm not seeing any significant mitigation difference here. In a typical spawn with 1 boss, Cloak of Fear and Oppresive Gloom are going to shut down just about everything. If they are combined with fears or stuns from a melee set, it will be even worse.

In short, I don't believe that an Ice/Ice brute would be any worse off than a Dark/Dark brute as far as significantly shutting down the ability of spawns to counterattack.

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Ice Armor, but more specifically Ice Patch and Chilling Embrace, is far more effective at mitigating attacks from all foes in melee range than Cloak of Fear and Oppressive Gloom combined due mostly to magnitude limitations on the latter two powers.


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Brute Cloak of Fear affects Lieutenants, by the way, so I am not sure what you mean by mentioning that and magnitude restrictions.

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I want it on a scrapper/brute/stalker.

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You don't want it on a brute.

It was originally planned to be one of the Brute secondaries. In testing though, it self-gimped itself. Since Brutes build up their fury bar when they're attacked, Ice's -recharge slowed down incoming attacks so much, the powerset literally self-gimped itself when compared to the other powersets.

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I remember testing it on a brute and loving it. I don't know why they took it out, to be honest. They have dark/dark brutes, and that has as much control as ice does. In fact, I can only think of tin foil hat types of reasons for why it was excluded, so I'll just keep my mouth shut. >_>

You said you had tough. Before you buy almost any other special IOs, buy a steadfast prot +3% def and stick it in tough (or permafrost I suppose if you actually took that.)

With that IO and 3-def slotted Frozen Armor, Combat Jumping, Glacial Armor, and Weave, you should be at:
Smashing/Lethal/Energy/Negative 41.8%
Fire/Cold/Psionic/Melee/Ranged/AOE 14.9%

If when you jump into a new spawn you just pop Energy absorption, this should be enough to softcap all of the 41.8% defenses. This is pretty simple and not at all exotic and without lots of bizarre set bonuses, etc.

When you add to the softcapped defenses chilling embrace reducing damage and ice patch at least nullifying a few guys, you shouldn't have trouble unless the all-boss groups are doing fire or psionic damage.

Finally, bosses always get a few lucky hits in every once in a while, so hibernate is worthwhile.