HellTouched

Earth control is alive, well, respected, capable, and quiet. (As far as commentary goes.) See a recent thread here acclaiming it as the queen of area lockdown. It doesn't have the peculiarities of grav, mind, plant, or illusion; it doesn't have the damage of fire. But it gets the job done very, very well without calling for too much comment.

If you haven't seen earth controllers about, keep looking. They're around, spending time keeping teams extremely safe more than grandstanding.

Roots will negate the continual knockdown control effect of Freezing Rain. So if you really want control there, and you can't get it in a given fight from plant control, you'll want to let Freezing Rain do its work and skip doing the damage with Roots.

If you are getting the control from Seeds or Vines, then go right on, use Roots for more damage and containment and Freezing Rain for debuffing and making even more sure they stay put.

Roots and Freezing Rain both have multiple uses - they're just not all compatible.

If you're soloing, hopefully you can avoid Nemesis and its awful confuse resistance like the plague. The darn jaegers won't even bounce in Freezing Rain as a backup, leaving you with the long-recharge, short-duration Vines and the more situational storm effects for AOE control.

Seeds of Confusion is a hard control available at level 8, with a long duration and a fast recharge. Other sets have for a comparable staple AOE control a disorient with twice the recharge time and far shorter duration.

The Carrion Creepers are a pet-like entity which will be around quite a while with some recharge reduction and cause all kinds of harassment to enemies.

Plant effects in general are simply cool looking for many of us, though the total graphics effect is intense.

I'm not aware of really strong, specific synergies with secondaries. I went with kinetics because everyone likes a kin, I like playing kins, and I wanted Carrion Creepers out and around even more often. Storm Summoning is a common secondary for thematic reasons at least. I wouldn't mind thermal, sonic, force field or even empathy in a pinch for helping keep the Fly Trap alive - the poor thing likes attracting more aggro than it can survive.

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Peeps: No need to take out the shield or bother with the generators, holding the head takes the shield down

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So the hydra is broken, check. I guess everyone should go exploit the heck out of it before it gets fixed, as usual.

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Broken? Because there are ways of doing it that, for once, benefit from single target holds? I take it you don't play controllers or appreciate how much we're just spectators for almost any monster or AV fight. I'm thrilled that we've got ONE such fight in which we can usefully do what we're supposed to do. I'm happy to have at least one sop thrown to us for the near-uselessness of the AT in such epic fights.

Broken? Not the sewer trial. Maybe every other AV or monster fight.