EricHough

I see two problems here. The first is shivans - they do all energy damage AND they have a ton of def debuff which means that they will be hitting you a lot. Since you don't have Heightened senses yet the only real defense you have against their attacks is your regen - and which won't be high enough at this low level to deal with the much larger number of attacks than normal that will be hitting due to the def debuff.

The second problem is your attacks and a bit your slotting - you have way to many pool attacks that, while ok for brutes, are far inferior to the claws attacks and you have far to many attacks overall, which waters down your slotting. I don't know if you can respec or not but you might be able to use your alternate build to redo things, if so I would recommend a build like the following:

Villain Plan by Mids' Villain Designer 1.601
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Level 19 Mutation Brute
Primary Power Set: Claws
Secondary Power Set: Willpower
Power Pool: Flight

Villain Profile:
Level 1: Strike -- Acc(A), Acc(3), EndRdx(5), EndRdx(13), RechRdx(15)
Level 1: High Pain Tolerance -- Heal(A)
Level 2: Slash -- Acc(A), Acc(3), EndRdx(5), EndRdx(13), RechRdx(17)
Level 4: Fast Healing -- Heal(A)
Level 6: Spin -- Acc(A), Acc(7), EndRdx(7), EndRdx(11), RechRdx(15)
Level 8: Air Superiority -- Acc(A), Acc(9), EndRdx(9), EndRdx(11)
Level 10: Indomitable Will -- EndRdx(A)
Level 12: Mind Over Body -- EndRdx(A)
Level 14: Fly -- Flight(A)
Level 16: Rise to the Challenge -- EndRdx(A), EndRdx(17)
Level 18: Focus -- Acc(A), Acc(19), EndRdx(19)
Level 20: Quick Recovery -- Empty(A)
Level 22: [Empty]
Level 24: [Empty]
Level 26: [Empty]
Level 28: [Empty]
Level 30: [Empty]
Level 32: [Empty]
Level 35: [Empty]
Level 38: [Empty]
Level 41: [Empty]
Level 44: [Empty]
Level 47: [Empty]
Level 49: [Empty]
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Fury

This is very similar to the build I used to level my claws/wp brute. While this build skips followup thats because, like most brutes, it relies on fury for damage - a high fury will dwarf the damage bonus from followup and while the to hit bonus is nice you can take follow up after L20 when you are more likely to be fighting high level opponents. In these early levels the goal is to get a decent single target attack chain to build fury, then leverage your fury to get maximum damage from spin. The problem with folloup is that is has a long recharge so it doesn't fit will into an attack chain without a lot of recharge reduction, plus it costs a lot of end as well. With the above slotting you should have a good attack chain in Strike+Slash+AS which you can fill in with brawl as needed. End use should be fairly low.

You will also note that I only slotted end reduction into defenses. DO's give you such a small boost and end is such an issue prior to getting quick recovery that I find it is more usefull to slot end reduction until L22 and you can get SO's in the powers.

Against anything but shivans you will generally find your defenses to be pretty good - especially against anything that does lethal/smashing as MoB will reduce the damage enough to let your regen keep up. Once you get HS you will still have good protection even against enemies that do all exotic damage (energy, NE, fire, cold). Against shivans prior to HS your best defense is a good offense - kill them fast.

MutantX is correct that this is an effect of the new SSK system. You may not have noticed it but if you switch between different character misions you will also change level frequently as every time a mission is selected the group is side kicked/exemplared to match the mission holder and when no mission is selected they match the group leader. Probably the best way to deal with it these days is to stick with one character picking the missions and give them the star - that will cut down on frequently order changes in the group AND on frequent level changes as the group leader/mission holder will always be the same.

Best soloers, in a rough order and mostly IMO and not including VEAT's and HEAT's:

Masterminds
Scrappers/Brutes/stalkers (about equal)
Dominators
Controllers (certain sets and all post 32)
Blasters
Corruptors
Tanks
Defenders
Controllers (other sets, generally pre-32)

Others will argue the exact order but I suspect most folks will agree that the best soloers are the damage focused melee classes (which DOES include some tanks) and masterminds, who are a group unto themselves.

If you want to solo a controller I would recommend mind, illusion or plant - any other controller will have trouble either doing enough single target damage or won't have AE control's up often enough and early enough to solo well, however every controller solo's fairly well after 32 and pets.

What you can solo a depends a lot on the style of play to which you can adapt. For example, I find blaster solo really well up until the mid 20's - after that I either have to play a very defensive blaster (/device or /ice) or stay at heroic level or I die a LOT, which pisses me off so much I tend to give up on characters. I just can't adapt to the kill or be killed nature of most blasters. But prior to that point blasters are one of the easiest AT's to solo - they just do SO much damage and are one of the most end efficient classes. If you want a ranged class but don't want to dance on the ege of death all the time a dominator is now a nice alternative - not as much AE as blasters but a lot more control.

Masterminds are insane soloers IF you are content with debuffing mobs and/or buffing, healing and directing your pets instead of actually attacking the mobs yourself. A well played mastermind will always be busy but generally not attacking the enemy directly.

If you want something that is easy to solo go brute or scrapper - you really can't miss with these two AT's. You can even farm well with some builds. Which one will depend on playstyle again. If you want to constantly fight non-stop, dashing from group to group without a break you probably want a brute. A scrapper CAN play that way but it isn't a requirement where a brute needs to keep fury up. However a brute with fury up is pretty awesome. The flipside if that is a scrapper - better damage out of the box but can't hit quite as much of a high as a brute.

Looking at it from a pure melee attack perspective an Ice/Electric or Ice/Energy dominator would work well also - possibly better than fire or psi as electric and energy both have better melee attacks. Fire really has no good melee and psi assaults is ok but not great.

EDIT: keep in mind that ALL dom's come with an end replenishment tool - it's called domination. Fire and Psi effectively get two end tools - domination and consume/drain psyche. Now that you don't need domination up to do decent damage you can save it for either end recovery, mez resistance, extra mez magnitude or you can still go for perma-dom and get full end recovery every 90 seconds.

Thanks, I will do that

I am trying to make the final push to 50 for my DM/SR scrapper. She will make my first hero side 50. I can probably PUG or just solo paper missions the rest of the way (she is partway through 49) but I would love to do an ITF as I have never done one.

So if anyone is going to be putting together an ITF team on this DXP weekend and can use a scrapper you could post here or send me a tell in game to either Midnight Mystique (character) or one of my two globals: @Cold Fuzion or @Magik13.

Thanks

Blazing Arrow vs Fistfull: Take both
Targeting Drone vs Aim: Take both

Seriously though - you NEED blazing arrow if you want to have a decent chance of finishing off hard targets (LT's or higher). Snap shot and aimed shot are nice and build fury decently, but don't hit that hard. If you skip any attack early on I would skip explosive arrow - it costs a lot of end and has a huge recharge for about the same damage as fistfull. Yes, it is easier to use but pre-stamina end is a big issue. Snap Shot+Aimed Shot+Blazing+fistfull will give you a solid attack chain early on and ok AE damage. You need to keep in mind that Archery's AE damage isn't really mature until you have Rain of Arrows slotted up fully - prior to that you need to rely on your single target chain. So take those 4 attacks right off, slot them up, then fit in explosive arrow when you can afford to slot it (usually mid 20's).

As for TD vs Aim, I like having both on my archery/dev blaster and depending on your level you will get more use out of one or the other. Prior to SO's the fact that TD is on all the time AND the fact that it's +to hit bonus combined with archery's high base accuracy means you don't need to slot ANY accuracy if you are just dealing with normal level mobs (+0 and +1's) and a single DO will let you deal with +2's fairly safely. This means you can focus on just slotting damage in your attacks. If you have access to Mr. Yin's store in faultline and you go with natural origin (not unusual for a archery/dev) you can slot damage SO's starting at level 10 - which means you can easily cap the damage with just 3 slots in each attack.

TD will serve you well until you get RoA up often - while RoA does inherit your current buffs it only gets them for the duration they have remaining when you activate the power. Because the to hit buff from TD doesn't last long enough to cover all 3 rains from RoA you are better off at this point with Aim as its 10 second duration will cover the entire rain, plus you get the damage boost. By the 30's or so you will probably be slotting IO sets in your attacks and most of those have a ton of accuracy anyway, so TD really is overkill at that point. While I DO like the way it allows you to laugh at CoT to hit debuffs, the worst ones are the chill of the night fields that the spectral daemon lords put out and those guys rarely close with you as long as you sit on a caltrop field.

So, if you can I would recommend taking TD initially then respec'ing out of it in the mid 20's/late 30's. Personally, I like to have both and my archery/dev blaster does have both but I could see giving up TD for hasten or something like that, which I don't have.

Timebomb: I have never used it, can't say if it will be usefull however as other posters have noted I suspect you will never get to use it in a group. While you might get to use it solo I have found that as cool as it may be to plant a huge minefield and lure mobs into them it is actually SLOWER than just unloading your mobile AE into them. I do use tripmine on my character but more for the defiance bonus (a whopping 25% defiance bonus) and as a melee deterent - plant it at your feet, throw out caltrops then open up on the mobs with aim+RoA+Fistfull+Explosive and if anything survives that it will slowly close with you only to get blown away by the trip mine.

Why would you want it? Traps IS essentially devices done for corruptors, anything else closer to devices would not have enough buffs/debuffs in it to work for a corruptor.

Now, I wouldn't object to seeing time bomb be replaced by gun drone or something similar - I think a corruptor would get a lot more use out of that power than time bomb and probably even more use than a blaster gets as combining gun drone with acid mortar would be quite effective, but I can't see porting anything else over from traps without seriously weakening the set.

Ok - my previous reply was a bit harsher than it should have been so if you feel offended, my apologies - however the reason I brought algebra into the issue is that the operations you where describing are basic algebra. Removing any 'business' practices from the example, look at the following two problems:

1) Joe and I both have some money. I have 25% more money than joe. If I have 125$, how much does joe have.

2) Joe and I both have some money, joe has 25% less money than I do. If I have 125$, how much does joe have.

The correct answer to 1 is 100$, the correct answer to 2 is 93.75$. The reason the answers are different depends on WHICH value to which we apply the 25% modifier. In the first problem I am applying the 25% modifier to the amount JOE has (X), in the second problem I am appying the 25% modifier to the value I have (Y). In the original, incorrect example you calculated Y using the first method, then tried to go back to X using the second which is incorrect.

As I noted above if anyone asked me to figure out 25% profit on value X I would pretty much always assume that you multiplied X by 1.25 and if someone asked me to reverse the process I would do exactly that and divide the result by 1.25. I seriously doubt even the weirdest business math assumes that a 25% profit means that the cost to the seller should be 75% of the retail price - I would amost always decribe this as a 33% profit. If you can produce some authoritative source (like a business math reference) that works differently, I will stand corrected on how a seller describes their profit margin - but not on how the math works.

EDIT: Corrected typo

I map my costume changes to shift+numpad keys. I have several files that hold all the binds and I can load up the one i want for a given character - here is an example of one of the bind files I use:

I think the problem here is the fact that NO mastermind combo is gimped in the sense that they are not playable or even in the sense that they are not better soloers than just about any other AT. However there are some primaries that take more WORK to use effectively than others and there are some primary/secondary combinations that do not synergize as well.

Because of the way the AI works the two melee primaries (ninja's and necromancy) are harder to work with than the ranged primaries (thugs, robots, mercs). The melee pets do have ranged attacks and the AI frequently can't decide whether it wants to stand back and spam the ranged attacks or attack at range, then close up and use melee attacks - worse, you will frequently have some pets close up and melee and others hang back and blast which means for those sets that need pets in close proximity for heals it may be harder to manage them. However if you CAN control the melee pets reasonably well they tend to be VERY hard hitting.

Also, within the group of ranged pets some are better than others. For example, while mostly sharing a damage type (lethal) thugs tend to do at least as good single target damage as mercs but have better AE and do some fire damage. Merc's get slightly better damage mitigation at low levels (good smashing/lethal resists) but by high levels the +def from thugs enforcers beats this out. So overall, thugs tend to be a little better than mercs. However, mercs are still a completely viable primary.

Then there are some secondaries that are very powerfull - dark for example with its nice mix of debuff, control and heal tends to make any primary easy to manage - the only problem dark faces is the small radius on its heal. Trick Arrow on the other hand has very little damage mitigation and so plays best with a primary that is highly defensive, like thugs or robots.

So while pretty much any mastermind will be at least 'powerfull' as other AT's within the MM AT some combinations don't compare as well as others or require more management. As folks have mentioned - mercs/traps or merc/dark is a nice combo that should be fun to play even if it doesn't have the pure damage output of thugs. If you want to go melee Ninja/dark will do well although you will have to work hard to group your ninja's together for the heal. Ninja/thermal might also work well - the wider area on the AE heal + the single target heal, combined with the res shields might work as well as dark but I haven't tried a thermal MM yet so I am not sure how well the combo will work.

I can't comment on AR, never done it as my /traps is an archery but a note on tripmine - I find the best use for tripmine is to plant one at your feet to open each fight. This buys you the following:

1) You get a 26% defiance boost to damage from it - about the best you can get short of time bomb.
2) Melee deterence - any enemy that closes with you will be blown back when the trip mine goes off. If you are doing things right you should have shredded them with your other AoE attacks and the tripmine should finish them off.

My archery/dev's standard tactic is to stealth into cone range, drop a trip mine, throw out caltrop's then unload the AE's on the mobs. Anthing left alive will either not make it to me through the caltrops while I finish them off with single target attacks or get blown up by the trip mine.

I also can't over emphasize the defiance boost you get from trip mine. I love it on my archery blaster and she at least has aim - on a AR blaster it is going to be a huge benefit. Even if you can't afford to slot up trip mine, see if you can fit it in just for the defiance boost and the KB. Just laying one at your feet takes very little time and is well worth it.

Having lost track of exactly what point Jade and Frost are argueing I think I will go back to the OP's original question and attempt to answer it by taking an overall look at the changes made to all dominators, then the specific changes to psi assault.

First, the dev's made 3 general changes to dominators in general and the dominator secondaries:

1) They removed the damage buff from domination and raised the dominator AT mods to .95 ranged and 1.05 melee. The net result of this is that dominators now do the same or slightly better damage than they did in domination all the time. A side effect if this is that a dominators overall max damage is now higher because your maximum damage is your base damage * your damage cap (400% for dom's). The damage buff in domination counted against your damage cap but a higher AT mod does not, which means the effective max damage is now higher.

2) In addition to the damage change it appears that the dev's noticed the popularity of electric assault and based on that decided that dom's would be better off with slower recharging, higher damage attacks, although it also appears they decided that electric assault was to good. As a result, they increased the recharge and damage of many of the asault set powers which also required an increase in end cost (the exception was electric assault where they reduced the recharge, damage and end cost of the melee powers a little). As a result the DPE of most sets stayed the same but the DPA, overall DPS and EPS went up.

3) Finally, the dev's decided to finally fix some of the clearly broken powers/sets in dominators secondaries. While this involved nerfing the clearly overpowered psychic shockwave it also involved fixing the rest of psi assault so that the path to L32 was not as ugly. In addition they fixed energy assault so that it is now the premier single target damage set, primarily by changing power push from an almost no damage control power into a full attack with normal damage for an 8 second recharge attack. For some odd reason they also slightly nerfed flares and combustion in fiery assault by increasing the recharge/end cost but NOT increasing the damage as much as they did for other powers.

Net result: If you where a perma-dom you won't notice much change except for the fact that you now do higher DPS at the cost of more end and even those attacks that didn't change now do slightly higher damage than you did in domination. If you where not a perma-dom you will now see higher damage all the time and may or may not notice the extra end costs (depends on the set). The exception to this is two powers in fiery assault and psi assault users who had built to rely on Psi Shockwave - this power was clearly broken as it had the end costs and recharge of a single target attack but was an AE with a higher than usual area. Even after the changes it is still one of the better PBAE attacks in the dominator sets - with a cast time of 1.97 seconds, which is better than ANY other AE attack, it still has a higher DPA than pretty much any other AE. Overall you will find that Psi assault costs more end to use but that's because it was relying on a broken tier 9 power. ON the other hand, I am working up a mind/psi dominator right now and I don't find it any more end hungry in the teens than any other dominators I have played since i15, so for new players to psi assault I expect the change was an overall win.

As for domination - yes, many people are using it as an end filler power but I don't think that is everyone - it certainly doesn't include me. Prior to getting stamina and SO's (which means I can frankenslot my attacks to include a reasonable amount of end reduction) I DO use it that way but after 22 I pretty much save it for the status effect protection and boost to control powers. What the change to domination means is that you don't HAVE to use it as soon as it's up in order to do decent damage, you can save it for a specific purpose. As far as I am concerned anything that makes you more flexible is good and NOT having to build a perma-dom in order to make a playable character is full of win.

Most of the complaints I have seen about high end use don't make any sense to me - every brute, scrapper, controller and corruptor I have played has about the same end use as my dominators. Heck, most defenders are actually WORSE on end due to having the lowest damage mod of all AT's and relying on a fairly end expensive secondary to overcome that. Only blasters, who are very end efficient due to having the highest AT damage mod in the game plus defiance, and masterminds are more end efficient than all other AT's, which means they are the exception to the rule. Add in the fact that EVERY dominator has a potential end recovery power (domination) and many of the assault sets also have end recovery powers and I find most of the complaints about end use to be petty whining. I would kill for a power like domination on any of the defenders I have played (which isn't many - I can barely stand defenders). Note I do understand the shock of coming back to a build that worked well prior to changes and now doesn't work the way you liked but in many cases all this requires is a slight rebuild to slot a bit more end reduction in attacks, maybe take stamina if you didn't before and you will find in most cases you now kill faster and more efficiently.

About the only folks who have some justification in labelling the changes an overall nerf are those who had domination double and triple stacked regularly. In this case they did get there damage nerfed overall - but the fact that thier damage base is now higher combined with the fact that double and triple stacking domination meant that you got little to no benefit from external buffs means that even in these dominators have more damage POTENTIAL than before the changes. In fact, from what I have heard it takes a pocket kin to regularly get triple stacked domination, which means that those with triple domination can probably use the kin to cap their damage mod now via siphon power and fulcrum shift and do even more damage than they did with triple stacked domination.