EricHough

Stony, one problem I have noticed with both this update and the last one or two is that all your options are reset in some way. This is what caused UnicyclePeon's problem with pop-up's and it caused some confusion for both myself and my brother in doing some damage comparisons until we realized that for some reason the effects/maths setting for targets had been changed from our usual PvE to PvP settings. I also have always had to reset the level up mode from level up to dynamic the last 2-3 times I have installed updates and change a few other options.

It looks to me like the update program is overriding any existing user options with whatever options where set when the update was built/compiled. I am not sure how easy/hard this would be to change but I know that older versions of the application did not do this and many of the options are not obvious for even an experienced user - it took me 5 minutes of messing around to figure out that the target settings had been changed to PvP and I suspect an inexperienced user would not be able to figure that out on their own. If you could fix this for the next update that would be awesome, if not you might want to at least make sure that whatever settings are forced on the user are fairly basic and/or standard (and PvP damage/effects are not the standard).

On my plant/storm I slotted mine to cap recharge, get a little damage boost and slot a couple of procs - he's level 36 and his current slotting is:

L34 det dam/rech
L34 Positrons blast dam/rech
L34 enfeebled operations acc/rech
L30 common recharge IO
Positron's blast chance for energy damage
Explosive strike chance for smashing damage

Obviously this is not an end game/L50 slotting but I get almost 50% damage boost, some accuracy just in case and 95% recharge.

Count me in - I will probably bring Midnight Carnage, my bane spider huntsman although if we need it I can run my SS/WP brute, Obsidian Bruiser instead.

EDIT: Wow - you folks like to start early, thats a 9:45 am start time for me since I am on the west coast.

If you are looking for pure damage output and carnage redside I would suggest dual fire/rad or fire/dark corruptors. My brother and I played a pair of fire/rad corruptors way back when and they tend to steamroll over everything. With the new difficulty settings it would be even easier - turn off bosses, crank up the number of players to 3 or 4 once you get a decent amount of AE damage and go to town.

The key here is to pick up rain of fire and either fireball or firebreath (or both) as early as possible. Then with rad get RI, EF and AM so you stack buffs/debuffs. With dark you can stack fearsome stares, darkest night and alternate tar patch. Rad will be safer early on as stacked RI's will pretty much floor to hit but dark will be better at holding things in the rain as tar patch is pretty awesome.

One question about Noxious Gas - what is the duration? None of the usual resources list a duration, just a recharge. I checked mids, RedTomax and the in game numbers at the MM creation screen (which show nothing about the power beyond the base stats - end cost, recharge, activation). Does the power last until the pet is dismissed/dies or does it have a fixed duration? With a 5 minute recharge it needs to have a decently long duration to be worth much and without it the set strikes me as kind of blah.

I saw this pretty regularily after the change to pet zoning went in to the game. I found that if your pets are already summoned when you enter a mission the first elevator/door you go through will cause them to run off randomly - almost like they got stuck outside the walls or something like that. If you summon your pets inside the mission I don't see this happening. Now, I haven't played my MM's recently (like, not for a month or two) so I don't know if the issue is still prevalent but it was pretty regular right after the zoning update.

The only time I didn't see it was on some arachnos lab maps - if the pets go through a different elevator door than you they sometimes skip the bug. It seemed to me at times that it had something to do with space inside the entrance door - if you where all squeezed in to the same tight area the code that 'pushes' pets out of the way got messed up and pushed them outside the wall. I don't know why that would only happen to pre-summoned pets so at the moment this is just a WAG as to the cause.

So far the only reliable method I have found for getting them back is to dismiss them and re-summon. I have tried group TP but that didn't help. Just waiting until they decide they are to far away and 'port' back to you might do the job but I am not sure how long that will take and never had the patience to wait around for long, especially on mayhem missions when I go in a door and have just generated a longbow ambush.

To the OP: it looks to me like you are making the mistake I made when I first tried playing dominators: playing them like they are a controller with an attack secondary. The trick to dominators is playing them like a blaster/blapper with a control primary. This means that the primary focus of a dominator is damage, even though their primary powerset is control. I think it was Castle who noted in the dom revamp that dominators basically have 2 primaries.

What this means is early on most of your slots need to go in attacks to boost damage, with just enough going to control powers to keep them up often enough so that you can keep the spawns from killing you before you kill them. In the case of mind control because you start off with such good, long duration controls this means you don't need to slot the primary up very much. The exception to this is levitate which is not a control so much as it is a ranged blast that does smashing damage with knockup as a secondary effect. Whether or not you take levitate depends on your secondary - as others have mentioned having levitate to deal with psi resistant enemies (who tend to be VERY psi resistant - robots are 50% psi resistant) is very nice.

It wasn't obvious from your original post if you are already fairly high level and are looking for IO set slotting advice or if you are working your way up. I think you have gotten a lot of decent high level IO slotting advice so far, so I will add some leveling advice. First, you get excellent single target control from mind by taking mesmerize, dominate and confuse. You don't even need to add slots to these as they are perma out of the box (or better in the case of mesmerize and confuse) and have better than base accuracy, although dominate benefits from a little extra recharge and all of them can benefit from end reduction.

Then take mass hypnosis when you can squeeze it in for AE control - it doesn't need much more than 2-3 slots total until you decide to put an IO set in it. You won't really get another good AE control until terrify, which doubles as AE damage as well although it is very inefficient at that. AT higher levels (32+) you want to get both total domination and mass confusion and slot them up for as much accuracy, recharge and hold/confuse duration as you can so you can alternate between the two of them as often as possible.

As for psi assault, I would certainly skip TK thrust and take levitate instead - while lev does less damage it is ranged and has a faster cast time so you don't have to let things close with you and whack you before bouncing them. Mind probe is a perfectly decent melee attack and you can take it if you find yourself in melee a lot but you can build a fairly good ranged attack chain from psi dart, levitate and mental blast, adding in subdue if you want to later on, so it can also be skipped if that is your preference. On the other hand, when slotting for +recharge it's a nice place to stick a set of crushing impact.

I think the lowest I have seen is a L8 DO. You get it by doing a safeguard/mayhem mission at L5 and getting the burgle the jewelry shop/stop the burglary side mission. If you successfully complete the main objective (burgle the shop for a villain, free all the hostages for a hero) you will get a random DO at your level +3. The hero side version is sometimes bugged though - I have done the side mission hero side several times and failed to get the drop but villain side it always work if you get into the safe and get both the glowies.

Now, the DO drop itself is random and more often than not is pretty useless, although it will be one that matches your origin. The side missions you get tend to be randomly selected and most folks don't do bank/safeguard that early, so it is not commonly known.

I also believe that L12+ enemies have a chance of dropping DO's, since this is the earliest level you can slot them. If they do drop them the DO will be the level of the enemy, so you can get other DO's that are lower then L15 but it is even more random and the DO will match the enemy type, not your origin. I don't know exactly when enemies start dropping DO's but I know I have seen them on mobs that where lower than L15.

While I am probably to late for this saturday I would like to link up in the future - what is the name of the matinee global channel? I haven't been able to find it on a search.

The one thing I would recommend is to take soul extraction so you can slot all 4 of the pet aura IO's - an extra 20% resistance and 10% def on top of the zombie's native resistance and shadow fall is going to go a long way to pushing up your survivability. Necromancy is one of those lucky MM sets that has a power that accepts the recharge intensive pet sets (soul extraction) so take advantage of it.

Specifically you want to get slot the following IOs:

Sovereign Right: Resistance Bonus
Edict of the Master: Defense bonus
Call to Arms: Defense bonus aura
Expedient Reinforcement: Resist bonus aura

The first two can be slotted in any of your pet summons powers and in soul extraction, the second two can only be slotted in soul extraction.

On my necro/pain MM I found provoke to be VERY usefull in keeping aggro off my pets and on myself when in bodyguard mode. Pain, as it is primarily a reactive set, has less ability than many other sets to allow the pets to absorb an alpha strike so making sure I took the initial alpha and kept aggro for most, if not all, of a fight was very usefull.

With it's shields, thermal is not going to be quite as reactive as pain but if you find your pets taking more damage than you like early in a fight provoke can go a long ways to relieving that and cutting down on the amount of healing you have to do.

I have one currently at 25. I only have two of the cones taken and slotted up so far (howl and psychic scream) so I could fit in all 3 single target attacks (I solo so much I needed the extra single target punch). My only problem currently is that the cones activate SOO slowly and I haven't been able to slot any KB protection yet so any groups that have a good chance to do KB will knock me on my *** after the first cone, letting everything close up and wail on me. Freakshow are the worst currently - all their ranged attacks do KB.

Once I can squeeze a -KB io in my build (in combat jumping at L26) things should even out. The basic premise looks sound - get in cone range, open up with howl, psychic scream then shockwave (once I fit it in). Once you have drain psyche well slotted you can open with sirens song, move in for DP (which should not wake them) then back out and unload cones - lather, rinse, repeat. At high levels you can probably add psychic shockwave to that - if you are good at hopping out of mobs you can sleep, DP, shockwave then bounce out for the cones. Slotting up DP for heal will increase survivability so even if you take a little extra fire this way you should still be good.

I think energy assault is a great choice for all ranged. Its about the only set that can build up a decent ranged attack chain by level 10 (power bolt, power push and power blast) and you add in power burst at 38 to finish that off. You do sacrifice AE though, which is probably why Min doesn't like it as the only AE is PBAE so you have to close to melee range.

Fire is a nice set but you are going to be leaning on fire breath a lot until you hit L38 and get blaze. This isn't exactly a bad thing as fire breath does decent damage even for a single target but your end efficiency is going to suck.

So, if you are enjoying energy assault stick with it, ultimately that is the only reason to play a set anyways - if you don't enjoy playing something it won't matter if it's more effective.