D0mbegone

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if any set can deal with high end costs it is /psi. People just might have to make sure they hit more than one target with DP.

Young /psi doms should be fine alternating domination and DP.

and plants.

So do corrs...

Solo'ing AV's is largely dependent upon your secondary.

Powers like lingering rad and benumb make it so you need to produce a mere 25 dps to hurt an AV (more is obviously better). Traps makes it so you need 1 dps heh.

As for ranking, fire does heaps more damage. Last time I looked it does about twice as much damage as sonic (before -res) and sonic is certainly higher than rad blast.

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Increasing recharge is okay as long as the DPS in total remains about the same.

Inbetween your gaps in your attack chain, you can throw out controls. Remember that doms have a pure dual purpose now: Damage and Control. Do both. All the time.

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Not sure if this was directed at me, but my dom's have always played dual purpose. Isn't that how they were and are supposed to play?

That said there are innumerable encounters where you use 2 seconds to control and then have no further need to interject control again and just go into pure damage mode.

However people seem to be suggesting that even in these scenarios doms should continue to spam control powers?

I wonder if these people realize that control powers are extremely taxing on the end bar (ie st immob/hold are very poor endurance for the damage they produce).

I'm not ok with the idea that casual players are magically going to know they should use chilbain to fill an attack chain. And if/when they do that they should be slotting it for damage or else deal with even higher endurance spent for damage produced.

If I get around to it I'll post some numbers on what happens to a live dom with a fluid low end cost assualt chain compared to a test dom that interjects an unslotted st immob as a filler into a high dpa, gaped chain.

A sneak preview: it makes end consumption go through the roof and makes the shiny new damage buff start to rust.

Whenever Castle indicates he's looking at something I like to play this goes through my head:

1-2 Castle's coming for you
3-4 Nerfing somethin' you adore
5-6 He says it's a fix
7-8 Start to feel the hate
9-10 Here comes the rage again

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Doesn't sound like a buff to me.

[/ QUOTE ]Let us consider this:

The devs state their goals, and do things. Then those goals - at least according to you - are massively not met.

What the hell do you think they're doing? Do you honestly think the goal of these changes was to weaken the archetype?

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I don't think that was their goal and I don't think that will be the result. However, the goal of "increasing popularity" was also a driving force behind pvp2.0. I don't think they set out to make that area of the game perform worse than it did before, but here we are

That said, I do believe part of his goal was to weaken some of the fringe builds ie /psi's aoe dominance with a single power and /elecs st potential. Starsmans charts (if you subscribe to them) show that while the bottom end was indeed raised, the top end was also lowered for a narrower spectrum that on avg has been raised a respectable amount.

I can assure you my /fire feels weaker now that I am consuming endurance as fast as a high recharge stone melee. I have numi+miracle+perf shifer+stamina+perma dom and I still think I'll need a well slotted consume and powersink to fuel this beast. That's two powers (and a patron change) that I have to fit into the new build. I'm just thankful there is a way for me to overcome this "buff" for the toon and keep on rolling.

I appreciate the slightly elevated damage potential this toon has, but I'd trade it back for my smooth and silky high damage /fire on live. I don't team with kins often enough for me to care that my peak potential is a fair amount higher under extreme buffing. When I team I pull out an aoe beast like my fire/cold, who's potential with a kin is about 6x as good as even the new dom

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This doesn't not help the overall performance. You took a smooth running sleek AT, and tried to turn into a slow playing end heavy AT.

Taking the damage bonus away from domination and giving a weak overall damage bonus still cuts down on the overall potential of dominators. Overall performance is degrated.. when the overall performance is degraded that is not a buff in my book but a nerf.

Saying you are going to give powers a damage boost then making it barely noticible in comparison. Then increasing recharge time so having to wait on powers and an costing and arm and a leg to cast... Doesn't sound like a buff to me.

I move through a very fast and rapid damage over time attack chain. Continuous DPS is the key not this ohh I hit a little harder and now lets wait for the power to come back.

Making the AT go from a fast moving hard hitting AT to an AT that has to take rests and breaks.

Like putting a monster truck engine in a racing car.. it does not work.

You can put a dress on a pig but it doesn't make it any less of a pig. You can say buff all day long but this is is a nerf of dom's overall potential.

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I'm an /nrg, so I wouldn't know what you're talking about. >.> Yes all the powers are slower and cost more but it's manageable and Relentless now feels like Vicious did thanks to all the damage. They didn't just buff the attacks, remember, they buffed our AT mods too. That means damage buffs mean more on top of us doing straight up more damage. My dom plays faster than ever now.

I never did get permadom, though.

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/eng seems to be amazing now. Almost perfect imo. It has three fast st ranged attacks by lvl 10 that all do good damage and gets two nice blaps. The tier 9 hits like a freight train and allows a full ranged attack chain of assault powers with very low recharge requirements (which allows one to focus on offsetting the end costs more easily). /eng is just a sweet st set now.

The rest of the sets... not so much. They require high recharge and high end reduction unless you of the mind set that "gaps are good".

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Longer recharge helps this how?

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One of the common complaints about Dom assault sets was that with controls mixed in with attack chains, they got saturated easily which created a performance cap. Longer recharge, harder hitting powers allows Doms to make optimal use of gaps when locking down spawns. Sure once you've got them locked down and are just attacking you may need a bit more recharge to get the same flow, but that's better than the alternative.

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My complaint is the /fire seems to be borked. It's endurance consumption wen't up about 33%, but its damage only went up 10-20% for various chains.

It is now exactly as much of an end pig as high recharge stone melee!

I'd go /elec for late game pvp and arena. But I'd go /eng for Sirens call if that is your thing.

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I've never had a /Psi Dom before, so I never experienced PSW at its fullest.

So, is it still viable?

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sure. /psi is still the most effective aoe set for doms.

though if you are looking for some st damage too then /fire is what I'd go. It has aoe on par with /psi (both have to use their cone and pbaoe to do decent aoe now) and has single target damage that eclipses /psi.

A high recharge /fire with FE up a lot will probably mow through most spawns as quickly as /psi, but will leave /psi in the dust vs bosses. Just watch out for the end drain of /fire it is on par with stone melee now lol.

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Well combustion isn't quite on par with psy shockwave, it has a longer animation time and recharges a bit slower and also has a smaller radius. But does gain extra power from fiery embrace if you decide to take that, its pretty good. I would say the top dominator secondaries would be, fire, psi and thorny assault for farming, tf's, mishes or pvp. (Although psi isn't in pvp much)

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both are 15 ft now (well combust always was).

Combust is slower and delivers its damage slower. I think firebreath and psyscream are about the same now except psy scream is on the melee table so hits harder and debuffs and instead of 3 ticks is upfront damage.

hmm, something isn't quite right in balancing land there lol.

At any rate FE fueled hotfeet and firecages adds a fair amount and the st damage is crazy for /fire.

They are both capable of mowing through things quickly. I'd proly still take /psi just because of DP and because psyscream+psw = 100% -rech, so between dp and the -rech "hard" control is much less necessary. Also because it will be a powerful AV build.

I've run a storm/sonic/power up to 50 and heavily IO'd it. And I've run a fire/storm/psy up to 50 and heavily IO'd it.

the troller is significantly stronger in st damage and aoe damage, has higher personal safety, and brings more safety to a team.

However, the storm/sonic makes teams just vaporize spawns with FR+howl and on teams AV's melt faster too.

The storm/sonic leveled easier (pre 32) with earlier storm powers and sonic is light on endurance.

The fire/storm stalled in the late 20's for months because it was such an end pig, but once pushed through and IO'd has become a monster toon.

I much prefer the fire/storm to leverage storm *now*. I usually two nados whipping around behind me most of the time so the aoe -kb is golden.

Pre Lightning storm nerf I prefered the storm/sonic for maximizing storm because heaps of -res plus a rapid fire LS was awesome. Since that is lame now the best thing is FR+howl, which a cold/sonic can do as well and be better than storm imo.

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Defenders have nothing to complain about until Corruptors are addressed. They have a ranged damage primary and are the lowest damage AT redside.

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They're also the Defender equivalents for redside. Keep in mind that Castle has told the players repeatedly that whether a power set is primary or secondary has no bearing on its power. All that the primary/secondary disparity serves to do is alter acquisition level.

Something else to keep in mind about Corruptors is that, thanks to Scourge, their higher damage cap, and use of Blaster primaries, they're actually capable of better damage than Dominators (which are being brought up to rough equivalence with the I15 Dominator buffs).

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You can eliminate every single thing in your list except for Scourge - which is often overkill. The higher cap is meaningless at the damage modifier they have.

1.05 (melee modifier) * 4 (Dominator cap) = 4.20
0.95 (ranged modifier) * 4 (Dominator cap) = 3.80
0.75 (ranged and melee modifier) * 5 (Corruptor cap) = 3.75

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This, and to further the disparity many dom powers have a higher damage scale than the corresponding corruptor power.

For instance, fireblast is a 4 sec attack for corrs, but an 8 sec attack for doms and as such has a much higher damage scale before even applying the higher modifier.

That said, I'll still take my fire/cold corr over any of my doms for team play as the corrs aoe damage is about 60x better and it has uber buff/debuff. The corr's st damage is also right up there with the dom w/ debuffs. I'd also take various corr builds over any dom builds for AV solo'ing as well. Of which my fire/cold is very capable of doing as well.

Meh even with the changes doms are still going to be the last, or second last, kid picked for dodgeball. Solo monsters though (minus AV's for most doms though heh).

IMO corrs and fenders could get a 0.05 to 0.1 modifier increase and it would appease most people without getting anywhere near blaster territory (excluding /kin corrs).

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I've never had a /Psi Dom before, so I never experienced PSW at its fullest.

So, is it still viable?

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sure. /psi is still the most effective aoe set for doms.

though if you are looking for some st damage too then /fire is what I'd go. It has aoe on par with /psi (both have to use their cone and pbaoe to do decent aoe now) and has single target damage that eclipses /psi.

A high recharge /fire with FE up a lot will probably mow through most spawns as quickly as /psi, but will leave /psi in the dust vs bosses. Just watch out for the end drain of /fire it is on par with stone melee now lol.

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I finally got to test my high level fire/fire dom (was bussy testing every set's early level experience) and I was easily able to sustain a full attack chain with just Flares, Fire Blast and Blaze. No need for extra powers and that was without activating Hasten.


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On my fire / fire, at 50, with 120 global recharge + Hasten, I could chain Incinerate> Flares > Blaze > Flares > Incinerate. Live, I can do Incinerate > Flares > Blaze > Incinerate > ad nauseum. The total DPS, just guesstimating, isn't all that different between live and test. And I was pleasantly surprised at what happened when I ate a bunch of reds.

But ...

Exemped down to 16 with 67.5 global recharge, no hasten, things were different. With Flares, Incinerate, and Char, I couldn't get a good ST flow going. And that's with /far/ more recharge than any lowbie / newbie would ever be able to get in CoV. I HATE standing around waiting for powers to recharge. HATE it. One of things I like about CoX is that, by the teens, most of my toons always have a button to click that does something useful, but I'm losing out on that.

The extra damage out of dom nice, but ... Fire's quick animations seem out of place when you're sitting around with nothing to do. And, crikey, that time not spent dominating is time not spent on building domination.

Well ... that's not quite true. I could fill time by using Cages, but that power has a massive end cost, and is, frankly, a death sentence on lowbie teams due to its ability to grab aggro. Keeping mobs out of melee's a nice idea and all, but if you want a decent Fire Assault attack chain, I'm pretty sure that Incinerate went from "nice" to required, and that makes immobs a pretty mediocre way of reducing incoming damage.

I wonder if we'll be seeing doms putting Brawl on auto?

Hmmm ...

What I'm getting is that the increased end drain and recharge times will still push people towards high recharge builds, for perma-Domination, reasonable recharge times on powers like Consume, and for being able to make decent ST attack chains without having to take 4 or 5 ST attacks (or calling cones ST attacks).

The changes are like 2 steps forward and 1.75 back, especially since I don't see things getting better in the lowbie game since the game's not exactly awash in buffs that increase recovery or recharge pre-20.

So ... I dunno. Castle's set out to revamp Doms, but either I'm not quite understanding what his goals are, or he's missed the mark. My dom /might/ be more effective at lower levels, but she feels wrong.

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Starsman is simply incorrect in the statement you quoted. Either he is unaware of 1.5 second pauses, or he was mixing in other powers that he did not include in his statement.

I pretty much agree with everything you've stated.

I've seen the idea of doms using "brawl" posted several times. I think that this idea is even being considered highlights pretty clearly that something is off with the dom changes.

IMO the changes aren't that bad, they just aren't that great either. And they probably have to be "great" to have a meaningful impact on such a low ranked AT.

Sort of makes sense, but at some point you are going to be forced to use:
flares>x>flares

where x = blast or blaze
meaning flares needs a recharge of 1.188 to 1.45 seconds.
2.8 - 1.45 = 1.35 second gap
2.8 - 1.188= 1.6 second gap

That seems very clunky to me, but ymmv. Gaps that big make me feel like I'm playing a low level broadsword character with no slash.

Incinerate certianly can alleviate the gap(s), but you were talking about a ranged chain of the 3 blasts.

Also as I brought up in some other post, if a chain requires the dom to be in melee range then what is the point of having ranged attacks? doms don't have runners unless they want to have runners.
I'd rather have melee attacks with the higher modifier and higher damage if stuck in melee anyway.

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I know this is going to be unpopular, but I never thought Rage should be able to stack - you have to think that wasn't what they had in mind when they put together the powerset.

FWIW, if they made Rage incapable of stacking, I'd hardly consider that a 'nerf'... might be something else entirely.

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If they did not mean for rage to stack then they probably would not have made it so you could make it perma without any IOs.

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It is not a matter of "if" but "when" the dreaded:

"we did not intend" comes knocking on rage's door.

Rage is probably somewhere higher on the cue list than people want it to be.

Sadly, when the "we did not intend" man comes around for rage I doubt the rest of SS is going to get buffed to compensate.

I also doubt kinetics will get buffed to compensate for when fulcrum shift gets gutted.

PSW was an easy one, not many people play doms (comparatively) and it could be burried beneath all the other dom changes.

Rage nerf probably isn't going to come with a revamp of brutes and tanks to hide behind lol. And people will be double stacking rage in rl when it happens heh.

My doom meter predicts the end is nigh for rage in the follow up patches to issue 16 GR.

My boss killing chain on live is
blast>blaze>incin>repeat
requires:
32% rech in fireblast
203% rech in blaze
203% rech in incinerate

consumes:
5.38 EPS

Produces:
512 damage, 114.3 DPS

On test:
That same chain would require:
163% rech in blast
263% rech in blaze
278% rech in incin

So in other words one of the most extreme IO builds possible. So in other words the build now requires an additional fully slotted assault power (flares).
A chain of:
blaze>blast>incin>flare>repeat
Requires:
167% rech in blaze
161% rech in incinerate
45% rech in blast
0% rech in flare

(160% rech is a pretty solid IO build).

Consumes:
6.31 EPS

Produces:
748.24 damage, 131.8 dps

So we are now in a situation requiring a whole additional slotted power, still has unsustainable endurance consumption for a small dps bump.

Like I keep saying, the peak performance is higher for fire, but unlocking it is not easy at all.

Both chains have very high EPS burn, but the live one is thankfully only used on hard targets and is replaced by the much more EPS friendly chain in my previous post. ALL the chains on test have unsustainable EPS burn.

I'm having trouble feeling very "buffed" as a /fire dom. In all likelyhood w/e damage I could gain now has to be slotted for end reduction instead.

Mind posting your build?

*I just used the damage numbers you posted in
damage #'s
The damage is largely irrelevant to the point I'm making, just nice to compare is all.
The chain I'm looking at is:
flare>blast>flare>blaze>repeat
requires:
236% rech in flares
124% rech in fireblast
214% rech in blaze

consumes:
6.14 EPS

produces:
610 damage, 121.7 dps
19.82 damage/end

200%+rech means we are talking perma dom so on live a chain of:
blast>blaze>blast>flare>repeat
Requires:
0% rech in flare
236% rech in fireblast
144% rech in blaze

Consumes:
4.64 EPS

Produces:
507.9 damage, 98.2 DPS
21.16 damage/end


I see several things:
1. test is unsustainable and requires heavy IO's to get the recharge needed and get that insane endurance consumption under control. Impossible for a SO build.
Even at 95% end reduct slotting that end consumption is on the high side.

2. A nice increase in dps that can be attributed to fireblast bottlenecking the live version, but live version gets more damage per endurance spent. If we factor in that test is unsustainable drain well the comparison gets really lopsided.

Ya I'd like to see your build that is "easily able sustain a full attack chain" of the 3 ranged attacks without even using hasten.

At most you get 68% of the necessary 236% in flares from your slotting. I'd really like to see a build that has 168% global recharge!!! (no hasten after all right?)

I'm not trying to aggressively call you out, but your claims don't sound true, and posting inaccurate information as hard data isn't really helping the cause.

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I must admit that I always assumed if the attack didn't go off by the time the Build Up ended, it was lost. I'll have to try this.

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The damage is resolved upon clicking the power: hit/miss, target susceptibility, caster strength.

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If by susceptibility you mean defense I agree. If you also include resistance I don't. I've had Sands of Mu damage ticks lower halfway through the animation when a -res effect dropped off the target. Resistance seems to check when the damage is applied, not when the power is activated.

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agreed, my mistake I was trying to remember how it was for scream and fudged it up in my head.

Heck its damage increases during the attack by its own volition.

Range is an improvement for some, for others it is meaningless.

it is certainly an improvement against team spawns, but at a cap of 10 it is still sort of meh in practice. I have zero issues hitting lots of targets with fireswordcircle on my scrapper, no more issues that with footstomp on my ss tank.

What about in solo, where all the dom changes seem to be pushing them? against a spawn of five that range is almost meaningless in actual use. I'd much prefer the damage.

but ymmv.

again we'll just have to agree to disagree about TS, having used the brute and blaster version they really don't play similar at all, but again ymmv. As for kb vs kd, you might hardly consider that a difference, but you seem to be a bit erratic with your difference meter .

Your idea for how to balance dom version is fine, doubt it will happen as it is a st focused attack for doms and blasters, but maybe.

what about the rest of the pbaoes?

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Anyone else been playing with this?

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I've been playing this way for a long time when I pair up with my /cold friend.

Perma dom+high def is extremely powerful and desirable.

Perma dom is of course still the most desirable state, but once achieved def is a great secondary IO buff to aim for.

Please don't mistake any of my comments as being confrontational, they aren't intended that way.

I think the question to ask regarding snipes is:
(on test) are they attractive enough to warrant most builds seeking their (frequent) use?

I believe the answer for the majority of players will remain - no.

IME it is rare for highly situational damage powers to become "must haves" or even "recommended". Nukes are about all I can think of and they are sought after for obvious reasons.

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I must admit that I always assumed if the attack didn't go off by the time the Build Up ended, it was lost. I'll have to try this.

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The damage is resolved upon clicking the power: hit/miss, target susceptibility, caster strength.