HacknSlash

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hack bud, you sort of need to stop. Anything I reply to, you will rebut without taking into account what I've already posted in this thread. So please, look at a few of my previous posts, figure out what I'm saying, and stop taking things ridiculously out of context.

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Whatever. You're free to stop replying at any point, you know.

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I'll leave it at this:

I am not using the RSF as the example. I've tried to point out how it is NOT the dom's inability to contribute on the RSF that I have an issue with. Rather it is a fundamental flaw in the AT's design that is only magnified by the RSF.

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I disagree, because AFAICS, the only thing that's "magnified" by the RSF is the artificial shutdown of the control primary.

That shutdown is not a "normal" situation in the vast majority of the PvE game, which is why I will continue to insist that the flaw is not with the archetype but rather the mechanism of the purple triangles (and breakfrees in PvP).

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And yes, the controller would not be controlling. That's the point. Dom's should be able to do more than they currently can when hold's are negated.

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That sort of statement is unreasonable to me, from a game balance perspective. No archetype should have half their powers negated in that fashion.

It makes no more sense to me than the following one:

"Brutes should be able to do more than they currently can when attacks are negated."

I see no reason why that "should" be the case.

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Being able to perma hold an AV is not what I would call fair.

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Nor would I, in a typical 8 toons-on-1 AV fight.

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And as far as who contributes more - stalker or dom - in a team environment - a lot would depend on how you define contributing - I would imagine youd factor in control, which in my experience is not as important as you might.

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The problem is that you have made comments like this:

"I honestly think if the RSF were EBs a corruputor, brute, or MM would still be a better choice. Stalkers - I agree that there are some effectiveness issues in this type of encounter but I don't think the vast majority of people would get onboard the "stalkers are underpowered" bus."

Which appear to separate "underpowered" from "team play".
So I pointed to an example of "power" and asked what you mean by "underpowered"...

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Wrong. You are (inexplicably) reading "team play" as meaning RSF and/or hypothetical "EB-RSF".

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No, not really. That is, however, an explicit example of 'team play' used consistently in this thread.

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While I feel stalkers are optimal solo, good ones do quite well in a team environment.

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I feel that it's a poor dominator who doesn't contribute as much as a stalker in a team environment.

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My opinon that an all AV/EB encounter doesn't play to their strengths has nothing to do with how I feel they are able to contribute to a team.

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So why continue to use the RSF as an example of how _dominators_ are unable to contribute to a team?

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It's not about choosing a dominator *over* one of those.
It's about making it a reasonable alternative.

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If you want to assume that dominators are fine and it's just the RSF that's broke you're welcome to do so. But I would point out that I would happily bring a controller on the RSF.

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A controller who very explicity would not be "controlling".
Again, it's not the RSF that's "broke", it's purple triangles.

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Carry it further. Pretend it was 15 bosses. 25 LTs. Anything not involving triangles. In my opinion, in any of those scenarios you're better with an AT that can flatten the difficulty curve. A dominator spikes it.

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I disagree. A dominator can perma-control part of that group.
That is a flattening, not a spike.

Same thing with a non-triangle elite boss.

Even assuming there is still a difference in overall value, at least removing the purple triangles mitigates that difference enough to where the players could reasonably choose between the archetypes.

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We can agree to disagree on this. I do not think Perma-holding AV's (which a removal of triangles would allow) is what I'm looking to be able to do.

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It's not necessarily what *I* am looking to do. I am simply suggesting that it makes the playing field a *lot* more fair than it is now.

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I didn't.
I pointed it out in response to a comment that dominators are "underpowered".

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if you read the entire post you'll see I make it clear that it was in reference to team play.

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The problem is that you have made comments like this:

"I honestly think if the RSF were EBs a corruputor, brute, or MM would still be a better choice. Stalkers - I agree that there are some effectiveness issues in this type of encounter but I don't think the vast majority of people would get onboard the "stalkers are underpowered" bus."

Which appear to separate "underpowered" from "team play".
So I pointed to an example of "power" and asked what you mean by "underpowered"...

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The majority of your post was opinion. Since it *was* clearly opinion, I felt no particular need to respond.

e.g. "What if RSF's last mish were 8 EB's? Triangles aren't the problem with dominators. I wholeheartedly agree that the triangle mechanism is foolish but to pretend that if they went away or were modified in some sort of way to benefit control functions that suddenly dominators would be fine is naive at best."

What more would you like me to say, other than "I disagree"?

<Shrug>



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perhaps why?

Pretend the last mission was EB's. I'm making a team to attempt it. Why would I choose a dominator over a Brute, MM or a Corruptor?

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It's not about choosing a dominator *over* one of those.
It's about making it a reasonable alternative.

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Carry it further. Pretend it was 15 bosses. 25 LTs. Anything not involving triangles. In my opinion, in any of those scenarios you're better with an AT that can flatten the difficulty curve. A dominator spikes it.

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I disagree. A dominator can perma-control part of that group.
That is a flattening, not a spike.

Same thing with a non-triangle elite boss.

Even assuming there is still a difference in overall value, at least removing the purple triangles mitigates that difference enough to where the players could reasonably choose between the archetypes.

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If you try to discuss the subject reasonably people take it as either a personal attack or an opportunity to proclaim how great they are because they can solo some arbitrary obscure situation that occurs at most in .01% of typical gameplay.

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Presumably, that was in response to my Ballista comment.

The *point* of that comment was to get you to clarify what you meant by "underpowered", to which I have not seen a response.

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I wasn't referencing your particular comment as it seemed no different than at least 30 other ones that were rampant a few months ago. However feel free to feel included. you've essentially made my point.

FWIW I've posted numerous times what I feel are the basic flaws with this AT when in a team environment. I generally put quite a bit of time into them too, so I'm not going to reiterate them for you, since when you point out how well you can solo X in resonse to my team-effectiveness comment,

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I didn't.

I pointed it out in response to a comment that dominators are "underpowered".

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you cleary are only paying attention to your half of the conversation anyway.

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Out of curiosity, would that be the sort of comment you described earlier, where you are "discussing the subject reasonably" and someone "takes it as a personal attack"?

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As someone who enjoys playing a dominator very much but has trouble dealing with the fact that it is just simply not very good, I'm tired of reading post after post from people who refuse to admit something is wrong with this AT when you put it on a team.

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I am sure there is an equal, if not greater, number of people who are "tired of reading post after post from people who refuse to admit that there are no serious problems with this AT when you put it on a team."

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While you might be right, not only does my personal observation lead me to concluse that that person would be incorrect; Waiting patiently for that person to disprove it with something other than an opinon hasn't worked either.

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Again, I'm sure the "other side" feels exactly the same way about your position.

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It's interesting that in that entire post, those were the two comments you felt compelled to respond to.

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The majority of your post was opinion. Since it *was* clearly opinion, I felt no particular need to respond.

e.g. "What if RSF's last mish were 8 EB's? Triangles aren't the problem with dominators. I wholeheartedly agree that the triangle mechanism is foolish but to pretend that if they went away or were modified in some sort of way to benefit control functions that suddenly dominators would be fine is naive at best."

What more would you like me to say, other than "I disagree"?

<Shrug>

With regard to the two sections I did respond to, both were attempts at denigrating the "opposition" - which I felt was uncalled for.

Insisting that the other side is "in denial" in some fashion does nothing to support your position.

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If you try to discuss the subject reasonably people take it as either a personal attack or an opportunity to proclaim how great they are because they can solo some arbitrary obscure situation that occurs at most in .01% of typical gameplay.

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Presumably, that was in response to my Ballista comment.

The *point* of that comment was to get you to clarify what you meant by "underpowered", to which I have not seen a response.

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As someone who enjoys playing a dominator very much but has trouble dealing with the fact that it is just simply not very good, I'm tired of reading post after post from people who refuse to admit something is wrong with this AT when you put it on a team.

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I am sure there is an equal, if not greater, number of people who are "tired of reading post after post from people who refuse to admit that there are no serious problems with this AT when you put it on a team."

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With my mind/psi, I can take out a red-conned Ballista, solo, without using a single inspiration.

IMO, that does not suggest "underpowered".


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Wait a freaking minute.

How the hell are you soloing red Ballistas w/ Mind/Psy and not using ANY inspirations.

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A lot of patience?

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What level are you doing this at?

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40, but I'm pretty sure it could be done earlier.
L29, probably (though with even _more_ patience).

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Are you using temp powers/pets (i.e. Shivans).

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No. Geez. That'd be _real_ easy.

[Note to self: My level 19 dom has Shivans... why doesn't my level 40?]

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I'm sorry dude but I very much doubt your claim. I can solo Ballistas as well, but I sure as hell cant without using inspirations. I AT LEAST need to bring some Blues along.

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The strategy:

Spam dominate *and* confuse (safety net; odds of him breaking both are next to none*).

Hit drain psyche when it comes up.
Hit domination when it comes up.

Other than that, simply keep an eye on your endurance bar and toss attacks whenever you have endurance for them.

The way I have dominate and confuse slotted, I can spam them indefinitely (no hasten, no recharges in confuse) while actually gaining (minimal) endurance.

Drain psyche flatlines his regen for 30 seconds, plus gives me back enough endurance to attack.

Domination is, well, domination.

Overall, it's enough to overcome the regen on a +1 Ballista.

<Shrug>

If I were trying it at a lower level, I'd probably want drain psyche slotted for endurance, and recharges in mind probe and subdue - to make up for the missing shockwave during domination/drain psyche periods.

What I *didn't* do is rush.
I knew I had all the time in the world.


Edit: Oops - forgot to add the * note regarding the safety net.

* He broke loose from dominate once, and started wandering around. Freaked me out.

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Dominators are underpowered. I wish they were not. But they are.

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With my mind/psi, I can take out a red-conned Ballista, solo, without using a single inspiration.

IMO, that does not suggest "underpowered".

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If that is the metric you use - solo viability - to determine how the AT compares to the other 4 then sure, you might think doms are fine. However IMO your statement means nothing. In fact I said the same thing when there was a vid of a fire/fire dom soloing Johnny's Soul.

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What metric should we use for "underpowered"?
The term seemed fairly straightforward.

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Let's say you had 200 hours on your dominator. How many minutes total have you spent soloing EB's?

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About 24. Two red-conned ballista.

How many minutes total have I spent running the Recluse SF? None. Yet, the archetype is apparently being judged by it.

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I state in almost every post I make that my observations about dominators are based on their effectiveness in team PvE situations. If you come into a mission, and I can finish it just as fast (sometimes faster) by leaving you at the door, IMO there's a problem.

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IYO, do masterminds and stalkers "have a problem"?
By that standard, I'd say they do.

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Dominators are not unique in having a part of their damage mitigation rendered ineffective against AVs.

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Technically true, but rather misleading.

AV's have an accuracy bonus that affects all AT's.
Debuffs don't care if the target is a +4 minion or a +4 AV.

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The problem is that dom's simply aren't bringing enough of everything else to make them useful when it happens.

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Why doesn't "it" happen to all archetypes? ... or none?

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Dominators are underpowered. I wish they were not. But they are.

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With my mind/psi, I can take out a red-conned Ballista, solo, without using a single inspiration.

IMO, that does not suggest "underpowered".

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Just as a point of reference, my Stalker can solo a purple-conning boss of any type.

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Umm... just so we're clear here:

1. A Ballista is an "elite boss", not a "boss".
2. Can you do it without using any inspirations whatsoever?

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Also, I bet your dom had to be level 39, with slotted-out psy shockwave, before it was able to solo even a red-conning boss.

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If you mean "elite boss":

Generally, I never even thought about soloing elites with *any* of my toons. It was always an AV SO party for me. It seemed like more fun than potentially pounding my head against a wall of hit points and damage.

So... the first time I ever tried (and succeeded) soloing one was just prior to my respec. That was in the late 20's/early 30's. Well before shockwave, in any case.

In fact, at the time, I didn't have drain psyche or levitate either, but did have mental blast (woot!). Needless to say, I did use inspirations in *that* fight.

If you really meant "boss":

Gah... I've been fighting those since passing the fortuna in Mercy. I run all my toons on vicious out of the box.

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Dominators are underpowered. I wish they were not. But they are.

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With my mind/psi, I can take out a red-conned Ballista, solo, without using a single inspiration.

IMO, that does not suggest "underpowered".

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The RSF isn't an unfair encounter, it's simply a magnifying glass to show what the ATs are capable of.

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No, it's not. The purple triangles artifically limit what one archetype is capable of.

Would it be 'fair' if the purple triangles prevented debuffs or criticals while they were up?
Would it still be a magnifying glass to show what corruptors and stalkers were capable of?

No, it wouldn't.

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Lets just say it...Corruptors are Broken! Just like Controllers are broken in high end CoH. Why the devs would make another AT like this after seeing what Controller's became is beyond me.

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I wouldn't go that far.

Despite how well buffs/debuffs stack in general, corruptors don't seem to be borken in the same way that controllers are.

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Because they can't do very good damage, debuff, buff, heal, mez, and control at least one pet-on many builds....wait, which one was I refering to Corruptors or Controllers?

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I thought you were talking about a mastermind.
... or a brute with PPP's plus the medicine pool?
... maybe a stalker with the same?

There's degrees to everything. I don't think corruptors are nearly as bad as controllers as far as min/maxing goes.

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Lets just say it...Corruptors are Broken! Just like Controllers are broken in high end CoH. Why the devs would make another AT like this after seeing what Controller's became is beyond me.

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I wouldn't go that far.

Despite how well buffs/debuffs stack in general, corruptors don't seem to be borken in the same way that controllers are.

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It's too bad -- if there were a way to pull 1 or 2 heroes at a time, then a team could succeed without having to have 2 Brutes and 5 debuffers.

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I wonder if 2 Brutes and 5 Dominators could mitigate enough of the Damage while doing enough to complete the TF.

How may holds does it take to to hold all of the AVs. Holds are the key to Hammi. What if the team was 6 Doms and 2 kin or Rad Corruptors. 6 AOE holds and each man focusing on a ST might hold all the AVs the whole time, but could they do enough damage?

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Not gonna happen under normal circumstances.

Against +4's, a non-dominated dominator can _almost_ keep mag-9 indefinitely (there are occasional slips).

So 6 dominators, stacking single-targets = mag-48.
Not enough to perma-hold _one_ AV.

If they start hitting power boost, hasten, domination, and/or megalomaniac? Then it's anybody's guess, but it's by no means a long-term solution.

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I can't complain about Levitate. It's better damage and better soft control than its /psi analogue, TK Thrust.

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It's air superiority on steroids... with range.
What's not to like?

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What I meant was it's easy for you to avoid this reaction by adding range enhmts and wormholing out of line of sight. The way it is now once you innitiate a wormhole they agro on you and can get a shot off on you. But if you are not in line of sight they can't hit you. I agree it's silly they get that free shot if they can see you but that's the way it is. Try wormholing standing with a wall or corner between you and the mobs.

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FWIW: Wormhole's not the only power with this issue. Eagle's Claw for martial arts stalkers has the same sort of problem. Occasionally I'll get hit before I damage a mob, even though I was hidden when I started the attack.

Heck, TP foe might as well. I never tried using it from within range/LoS (and I no longer have it on any toon).

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Solo, I can fight, but it takes me a full run-through of my chain (Dominate, Bone Smasher, Total Focus, Power Bolt, Power Blast) to kill an even-level Longbow minion. It's safe, but slow.

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That makes no sense to me. It doesn't take my mind/psi that many attacks to drop an orange-con ... and I don't have total focus.

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On a larger team, my AoE controls don't recharge fast enough to keep entire spawns locked down, and like it's been said, if your team can get by a spawn without you, they don't need you at all.

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If the team can get by a spawn after the corruptor has faceplanted, they don't need him at all either, right?

Locking down a decent number of mobs - even temporarily - with an AoE, then hitting priority targets makes a big difference in how difficult a fight is.

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Which is why very little improvement has been seen. They've already turned us into veritable golden gods while running Domination, and most of us still aren't happy.

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Who is this "us"?

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If you don't have Domination running you do sad damage and can't hold bosses (until 18 at earliest, and then there's the slow recharge rate of your AoE hold to contend with).

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You can't hold a boss without domination or your AoE hold?
I can see why you don't like dominators...

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Out of curiosity, does this tweak include the ability to fire off domination when mezzed?

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Not initially, but the patch following should have it. I forget to stick that in on the original change, and QA helpfully pointed it out, but not in time to reach the version going out.

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Thanks for the response.

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We've got a nice tweak to the Domination ability coming down the pipe (it will crank up your Mez resistance while it is active), and are currently data-mining PvP to see what effect our last set of tweaks to the AT have had.

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Out of curiosity, does this tweak include the ability to fire off domination when mezzed?

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When I eventually rolled my Gravity/FF controller... Oh yes. Seriously, my low level controllers most certainly out-damage my low level dominator.

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That makes sense. Damage scaling hasn't set in yet, and the dominators don't have a large number of good attacks at that point.

At level 10, the controller is getting about 1.5 blaster damage out of containment. The dominator has maybe one _good_ attack by that point. Plus, the controller can buff/debuff.

Yup, containment's borken.

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I've heard a number of quality solutions proposed to the problem of early-game performance problems for Dominators, including:
[*]Messing with the AT modifiers so they START at, say 0.8 and slowly work their way down to 0.65 by level 25 or so

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Um... we already have higher damage scales than that.
We drop to .65 at 25, but start at .93 (ranged).

Damage Scalars

[ QUOTE ][*]Having some or all of the +100% damage from Domination tied to the size of the Domination bar instead of the clicking of the Domination button (more helpful early game because the +DMG buff is a bigger deal in early levels before SOs)

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AFAIK, that's 75% (37.5% after SO's), not 100%.

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Why couldn't there have been an option for mez protection like controllers get, or a buff of some sort. Those are things that would really help round out alot of dominators.

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I really, really get the feeling they hate what Controllers have become, and are very paranoid about sending Dominators down the same route in any way.

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Except that dominators aren't, and can't be, what controllers are. No fulcrum shifts here, sir.

In any case, if they are leery about "armoring up" dominators, they could add at least mez _resistance_ to dominator PPP shields.

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It seems kind of off to factor in the inherents that way.

Scourge only kicks in 12.5% of the time, on average.
How often is a brute at max fury?
A stalker gets one critical every how many hits?

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Which is exactly my point. The other AT's don't need their inherents to function, regardless of how often or not they kick in or how good they are. They're just icing on the cake.

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I don't see dominators as being any different.

In fact, with regard to reliance on the inherent, I'd say stalkers and brutes "need" them far more.

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We just cant defend teams the way controllers can.

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That should come as no surprise, since controllers have two support powersets.

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I don't find them particularly long either, but by comparison, if we use your number that assume you've got it up every three fights you're still only running at maximum effectiveness 33% of the time. Not great.

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It seems kind of off to factor in the inherents that way.

Scourge only kicks in 12.5% of the time, on average.
How often is a brute at max fury?
A stalker gets one critical every how many hits?

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Most Stalker players just don't know how to play their AT. There are a hundred and one bad ways to play a Stalker and only one right way: Play a Stalker like a Stalker.

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I think that a number of posters here would say the exact same thing about dominators that you are saying about stalkers.

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WARNING-WARNING-WARNING-DANGER WILL ROBINSON!

If you ever think of exemping down, though, be aware that you'll either still NEED those temp powers to get around, or some variation of the idea presented here. Otherwise, you could find yourself constantly asking your lowbie teammates 'Anyone got a port for my slow level 50 ex'ed down butt?'

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... or simply unexemp when moving between missions, if it's that far.