Gilia

The comparison I've read that I've taken most to heart is this: When an AV/GM/whatever does their purple triangles, the dominator does sub par damage and nothing else, while the controller does more damage and buffs/debuffs.

The flip side is a perma-dom dominator can waltz through incredibly difficult missions by his or her self...

So anyway, my prediction is of the doms, we'll see more fully IO'd (like in their early 30's even) dominators, and fewer dominators that are not IO'd, or even IO'd in their late 40's. Perma-dom dominators can seriously show up controllers, and give any other AT a run for their money. Under every other circumstance, the controller is better though...

I saw it reported in the beta logs for issue 17. A lot of temp powers do it now too. The performance shouldn't be affected though. Plus, with the endurance cost so high on ninja run you may want to just turn it off before you attack.

These are in a really close race. Because of your goal to team/TF, I would recommend Thermal. Heat Exhaustion is an AV debuff. The -regen and -dmg will seriously contribute.

Melt Armor and Anguishing Cry are close... but I seriously prefer Melt Armor because you don't have to get in the middle of the group.

The trick to make the buff botting more bearable is to only buff people who are actually taking damage. Seems strange, right? Reactively buffing is a little weaker. I'd rather get a resist buff after I take a couple hits than have our MM lose his sanity and run off into the hills on her own.

I realize this isn't that helpful, but the short of it is "it depends."

Rain of Arrows and Full Auto are awesome for teams that are steam rolling or farming, because you can fire off a big AoE attack every 30-60s. However, Fire (a favorite of many for AoE) has Fireball and Firebreath... both of which do considerably more damage than the cone and targeted AoE of Archery/Assault Rifle.

Energy Blast, which has stock damage and all the standard attacks, has a crashing nuke. Energy Torrent and Explosive Blast both do AoE knockback, so a well played Energy Blaster will rarely get into hot water. She can use knockback repeatedly to keep any threats either flying or struggling to stand. So on my Energy Blaster, I basically only use Nova when someone else herds or during a overwhelming ambush. It's just not worth it otherwise.

So anyway, they all have to be weighed against their own set and what you intend to do.

Psychic is an often frowned upon primary. However, I personally think this is in large part because it's more solo friendly than team friendly. What you have basically is a sleep, st knockback, and st disorient power, an AoE with knock up, and a nuke that disorients. All of this with the -recharge secondary.

That actually doesn't sound so bad, right? I mean, if you know how to use knockback/knockup and sleep you can easily mitigate all the damage from a small mob. There's two problems though. The sleep and disorient are only mag 3. That means you have to hit bosses twice. Fortunatas on the other hand get scramble thoughts and theirs is mag 4.

Anyway, there's good and bad to mixing it with /mental. Mental has those two extra AoEs, which makes up for a shortage in Psychic/ and its tier 9 Shockwave would be really good to fire off before the nuke Wail. Together they have mag 5 stun, so anything that survived wouldn't be hitting back.


-Recharge is... okay. It will never stop an alpha strike, as in when you first run in you'll get hit for the same whether they are slowed or not. Over time though, anyone slowed will do considerably less damage. So when it does come time to team, Psy Scream and Tornado combined will help mitigate damage for the team.

Also keep in mind that having a primary and secondary doing the same damage type means if you run into something that resist Psi they're going to just be a big pain in the butt. That's like all robots besides Clockwork, and I believe all the armored Rikti have ~30% resists to psi as well.

MM also has a cone and PBAoE attack, which makes it nice for sets that are lacking in AoE. Dual Pistols has one real cone, one targeted AoE, and the tier 9 is a PBAoE. The Cold Ammo's -recharge would stack nicely with mm's -recharge.

On the other hand, Assault Rifle has one more AoE and nothing to stack with /mm.

If those your two choices, I'd go with DP. There are probably a lot of other sets that would synergize better. Like Ice/ or Sonic/ might be. For your theme though, DP should work just fine. Just keep in mind there's three attacks in /MM. You'll be putting away and drawing your pistols a lot if you use them. You could get by without them, though.

Keep in mind that DP/ was created after the redraw penalty was compensated for. It shouldn't lower your damage at all to have to redraw the pistols. Some people claim the penalty still exists with some powers/sets (Trick Arrow being one people on here mention often), but I have not experienced it as at all an issue with DP.

My wish is that people would realize Brutes are more like Scrappers, they are NOT more like Tankers.

A follow up would be that people be happy with with their Tankers .

Seriously though, I think Tanker's possibly the only AT with a well defined role that just fills that role better than any other AT. Yeah, perhaps there's some mild variation on that point. Tankers are good enough at what they do to be boring in my opinion. Making them more fun would mean making them more like some other AT... then what's the point? Just play the Brute or Scrapper if you want to give up some survivability for damage.

1) You are correct. A Bane's combat training is against ranged attacks, and is a defense power (not resist).
I recommend 1 slot for defense, and anything after that for procs. There are a few really good procs for a passive defense power.
2) Defense debuffs are your weakness, for sure. If you take both your passive armors that'd give you about 10% resists against them. Pack inspirations or be extra sneaky!
Just to note this part of why ranged defense isn't such a bad thing. There are oodles of defense debuffing ranged attacks in pve.
3) I love the pet AI. The Disruptors you get (call reinforcements) are an awesome thing to summon right before you alpha. They will fire wide area web grenades and ball lightning with you. On top of that they have a hold and a ST attack. They are just awesome.
Crab's spiderlings are a little less useful... they're not as bad as Imps, but three little guys running around can spread out your enemies more than you'd like.
4) CT: Offensive sucks. The Res ToHit is about all its good for :-/. I would recommend you take a look at a couple cheaper sets that have global to hit instead. For example, you could put 4 pieces of Crushing Impact in two of your melee attacks, and you'd get more than CT: Offensive offers.
If you were not considering doing sets anyway, I would take a look at just doing +tohit sets. They are often times cheap and only take 4 slots. I would not recommend only doing 1 accuracy in each attack.
Typically, I do SOs (w/ 1 accuracy) from 22 - 27 then switch to sets. The levels leading up to 27 can be obnoxious just because of how much I miss.

Well their max is 400%.
-100% (base)
-95% (SOs)
-15% (assault)
190%

Small reds are 25% right? That's 7.6 small reds.