Machariel

By and large, I enjoy the trials we have now. I find them to have a reasonable mix of challenges that require and/or benefit from different archetypes and feel they are a good break from the strategy that more or less dominates the rest of the game, which is "don't die, stay together, and put down as much AoE DPS as possible." I think the pacing is pretty good as well, overall.

However I understand the problem that others have raised, which is that for a team of up to 24 incarnate-powered beings, we sure seem to encounter threats that would be way easier in normal content (f.ex Marauder in the Lambda vs. Marauder in one of the Maria Jenkins missions). There's also the fact that you have to come up with some... interesting gameplay mechanics ("gimmicks") to threaten a league of 24 incarnates.

Accordingly I like the idea of a smaller trial which as varied, nontypical objectives, but which is designed for fewer people so you need fewer "gimmicks," your strategies for dealing with it can vary based on the composition of your team (when you have 24 people one league isn't that different from another), and to improve coordination as I know some people have expressed frustration that one guy who doesn't listen can threaten the experience of 23 others. Personally I feel that that's part of playing an MMO and that an idiot-proof trial would be extremely boring...

You really can't go wrong with Plant. As far as I'm concerned, it's so good that I will actually never make another dominator since Plant has spoiled me something fierce.

I can also vouch for the laughably strong ability of plant/fire, especially plant/fire/fire... mine sounds similar to Vysires, heavily IO'd, permadom (with hasten though), low 30s defense (but ranged, as opposed to S/L), incarnated (protip: take Intuition, it's amazing on Dominators and +range is incredibly useful on Seeds of Confusion and your AoE immobilize because you can start kiting mobs with it).

AoE Immobilize and Rain of Fire play really nice with each other. Embrace of Fire boosts basically all of your damage by 80% for 30 seconds which is incredible. Seeds recharges fast enough that it's really the only control power you need on a regular basis. Creepers, Fire Ball, Rain of Fire, Fire Breath, and Roots are all very strong powers. You will burn (heh heh) through a ton of endurance though and you even get Consume to recharge after you blow your load of patches and high-endurance control powers all over a mob.

Worth noting that if you damage cap the Dom as well with the power of team buffs, they unquestionably out-damage the damage-capped, wildly-skewed Controller with whom they are already competing.

no really what is an enhancement catalyst D:

What's an Enhancement Catalyst?

A note about AoE Immobilize on teams - unless you're Gravity, your AoE immob has knockback protection which your team might find useful (or frustrating if you actually need mitigation and it's being provided by something other than you).

But yes, I definitely wouldn't open up with it unless you have really high defenses.

These are really fixes for controllers. Gravity's shtick was already single target damage (and obviously way more so now) and on dominators, your secondary more than covers that.

The real issue with Gravity is that wormhole is clunky, dimension shift is almost completely worthless, and it wastes two power slots that could be decent control powers on ST attacks that 'control' with a one-time knockback effect.

Unfortunately I don't have strong hopes for them to go back and revise it since after all this time the only thing they could come up with was "just give it more damage, that is obviously the problem."

It would be nice if Impact was granted to more powers than just the single-target hold, and was relevant to more than two single-target attacks. I guess maybe chaining Gravity Distortion, Lift, and Propel will be a decent ST chain... if you're a controller.

Wormhole and Rain of Fire would have good synergy of the radius of wormhole were in any way comparable to the radius of rain of fire.

Slot 3-4 damage procs (you'll need the expensive PVP one if you go for 4) into Crushing Field and spam it hard.

Lift is a fast activating attack with decent damage, albeit delayed slightly. Don't bother with Propel.

In any case I agree.. if you want more damage really just go for fiery assault and the fire APP. You will probably need more damage to take things out before the stun from wormhole wears off because Gravity doesn't get a convenient AoE mez with a decent recharge... you can open with wormhole but using it mid-combat is finicky at best.

If I had built my Plant/Fire/Fire for recharge instead of ranged defense, it'd probably look like that.

Though I would have put the obliteration damage proc in consume instead of something else, for ever so slightly more damage.

Enjoy your steamroller

To answer your question about the slotting of Stamina - 3 plain old Endmod IOs will get you to 127.2% endmod, which gets hit by ED down to 99.08%. Using the Performance Shifter IOs leaves you with 91.78 after ED, which, while indeed less than 99.08%, comes with the set bonuses with performance shifter which includes a 2.5% recovery bonus, which comes out...

Okay actually after taking a closer look at it they end up very nearly identical - on my build its 3.25 end/sec with the performance shifters and 3.24 end/sec with the vanilla endmod IOs. Performance Shifters give you a slight run speed and HP bonus though.

Upon closer investigation I would probably save the 40mil or so (guessing) for those 3 performance shifter IOs (keep the proc of course) and use the way cheaper vanilla IOs instead.

What you could do is swap Flares for Incinerate and use Crushing Impact instead of Decimation. Crushing Impact would get you another 5% recharge and you'd be losing the unnecessary 6.25% from Decimation.
EDIT: disregard that you obviously have to take flares
but if you could find another power to take you could take crushing impact and put the slots from flares into that instead... maybe super jump? i get by with sprint and ninja run and I'm not that much slower than other people.

Incinerate is a better attack anyway... would much rather have it slotted than Flares.

And yeah I am amazed you got to level 40 without slotting stamina... this is by far my most endurance-heavy character.

I have Numina's Convalsecense +regen/recovery and Miracle +recovery slotted in Health, and Stamina 4-slotted with Performance Shifters (endmod, endmod/acc, endmod/rech, and the +end proc).

Granted I'm not popping domination quite as often as you are (75 seconds instead of 70) but I do need the endurance when it comes up, and using ageless pretty regularly (every 3-4 min or so).

I would probably take the damage/range HOs out of Blaze and Fire Breath - Blaze is still going to have noticably less range than a lot of your stuff and Fire Breath already has a range enhancement from the Positron's Blast. I'd also take a slot from Strangler (4 slots is really plenty, it doesn't need to be heavily enhanced and you don't need the 5% status resistance if you're a permadom) and from Rain of Fire (that 6th positron's blast is not really doing you any good, get rid of acc/dam or acc/dam/end). That frees up 4 slots - 3 for Stamina, 1 for Health - that you can use.

As for status resistance, you don't really need that last enhancement in Fire Shield either.

I don't know why you're saying "with the 6.25% recharge gone"... since you're over the cap, it's already gone, and you're not getting any benefit from it. That means you can take two slots out of Rain of Fire (IIRC the power doesn't benefit from accuracy that much) and reassign them.

Really quickly on Creepers- I've been informed that putting enhancements from sets isn't that good in creepers, since using targeted AoE enhancements will only benefit their own targeted AoE attacks and not their ST ranged or ST melee (i think they have those). Therefore I'd recommend swapping out the positron's blast acc/dam and detonation acc/dam for a generic acc and generic dam IO, or for acc/dam Hami-Os (expensive probably).

Why haven't you slotted health or stamina? get some recovery in there; you're going to need it.

LotG +7.5% recharge is treated as a separate bonus from the 7.5% recharge from sets so you could have, say, 5 LotG and then 5 sets that give 7.5% rech (2 basilisks gaze, 1 snipe, 2 kinetic crash f.ex) and then end up with 10 instances of 7.5% recharge without hitting the cap.

EDIT: the other thing is that you don't really need to fix your slotting since 113% recharge is easily good enough. Mine runs at 96.5% recharge which gives me plenty of time and has hasten about 1 second off being perma.

I don't really know why you're taking Aid Self, as you should be killing things so fast that you'll always have greens when needed. Ditto for Aid Other (everything should be dead anyway, who cares if your teammates died).

The Coercive Persuasion proc is gold in Seeds, because seeds will occasionally miss a guy and having contagious confusion in there makes it way easier to keep an entire mob confused.

I didn't bother slotting Flares as Fire Blast and Blaze recharge plenty quick enough to use for ST damage. Then again my chain is Blast -> Incinerate -> Blaze and you might prefer the all-ranged chain that uses Flares.

After playing this char for a while I don't really like slotting Roots for damage and would rather just slot it a bit for acc/end and put the other 3 slots somewhere else.

I would 5 (or 6) slot Vines and 4 slot Strangler rather than the other way around. If I needed to use Vines that means I got a bad Seeds and I really want Vines to count, and with Seeds you don't really need to cycle your ST hold around that much (read: at all).

Rain of Fire is a really good place for a Posi proc since it gets 2 chances to trigger and you are slotting it for over 100% damage anyway. I dropped the Acc/Dam/End enhancement for it.

I don't like 5 slotting Tactics personally (and didn't take it, electing for Maneuvers+Assault+Vengeance).

You may also be interested in my build from a month and a half ago. The thread and resulting discussion is located here.

Mine is slightly different from the others in that I went for high ranged defense (ended up with 32.5%) so I have slightly different priorities.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=271923

I skipped Fly Trap because I do so much AoE damage that it seemed unnecessary. Also, concept reasons.

Not super satisfied with the slotting of roots or creepers on this build as the former needs more accuracy and the latter needs more recharge.

I would also like to remark on Chocolate Bacon's statement about consume.
Personally I found that after going Seeds (15 end) -> Roots (13) -> Creepers (26!) -> Rain of Fire (32!) [end costs unslotted of course] at the start of a fight puts a BIG hit on my endurance even when those numbers are more like 12, 10, 26, and 26, and with the +10 endurance from accolades.

While you won't be using these much more than once per fight (roots really is the only one that gets used more than once because it misses so often, hence why I need to reslot), plant/fire/fire kills SO QUICKLY that you will be starting a LOT of fights, and you use a fair bit of endurance with blaze and fire ball (which cost like 12 and 18 respectively, unslotted).

While Domination recharging in 70-75 seconds helps (really I think it's necessary), I still find myself running low on endurance every other fight, which is why I run Ageless. EVEN THEN, I still run out of endurance sometimes and I think I'll probably be swapping combustion for consume (as they can both take Obliterations anyway and Combustion is a totally worthless attack anyway.)

On the other hand I keep leadership, combat jumping, sprint, weave, and tough on pretty much all the time and I know other people aren't running that many toggles.

On the subject of Combustion - I hate it. It animates slowly and feels very weak, and trying to position myself in the middle of a mob to use it is actually difficult because if they're tight enough to make combustion worth using, they're actually too tightly packed to fit yourself in there . Plus, combustion, being PBAoE, doesn't get along with Fire Breath (a much better attack) or Seeds (which you probably won't need to use twice in one fight, but still), and imo makes it harder to intelligently target with Fire Ball.
The only good argument I've heard for Combustion is that you can put it on autofire to build domination (slooowwllyyy), but I would rather take a snipe power to do that (by activating the power and interrupting it). This is much faster, you get the benefit of having a snipe power (occasionally useful), you get better set bonuses (sting of the manticore has a 7.5% recharge bonus to obliteration's 5%, and they both have the 3% damage bonus), and sting of the manticore is MASSIVELY cheaper than obliteration.

Finally on the subject of incarnate powers -
Alpha: I've run Musculature Core Paragon for a while, purely for damage, but I'm working to try out Intuition - slightly less damage, but a 20% range boost is a major help to seeds (when mobs are slightly more spread out), and lets you do silly things with Roots (immobilize mobs from out of their range, use your superior range to kill them). The latter is made moot by the fact that you can just seeds and kill everyone, but still, it might help.
Interface: Reactive Radial Paragon. Thinking about trying out the confuse one (to cover Seeds missing) or the Immobilize one (Roots missing) but I think those problems are better solved with better slotting. Also reactive does fire, and you're fire, so...
Destiny: I like ageless just for endurance; a case can be made for the other ones as well.
Lore/Judgement: Whatever... I go Rularuu/Pyronic.

Leveling my plant/fire/fire dom I had Seeds 6-slotted as soon as possible with 2 acc, 2 recharge, and 2 confuse, which helped a LOT.

I would say either Fire or, depending on your playstyle, Soul. Fire mastery does add a lot of raw damage via Fire Ball and Rain of Fire, and Rain of Fire plays nice with the AoE immob you are probably spamming a lot (assuming you've got it proc'd out).

If you like to mix it up in melee a lot, Soul Drain and Dark Consumption can add a fair bit of damage if you slot them as such, which I like to do - Soul Drain adds enough tohit without being enhanced (and you can't enhance the +damage, but you can increase the damage of the attack), and Dark Consumption gives you a hefty 20% endurance for each guy you hit so you don't really need to slot it for endmod imo. Running in and going soul drain / dark consumption gives you a decent bit of damage to start up a fight.

Fire is probably the stronger choice though.