Miladys_Knight

It's going to be kind of ugly until you hit level 29 and have 4 slotted static Discharge.

I'd recommend 6 slotting Seeds (or 5 slots with frankenslotted IO sets), 4 slots in Strangler, at least 2 slots in Roots and then even distribution in Charged Bolts, Charged Brawl, Lightening Bolt, and Havoc Punch. Stealth would also be helpful to get in decent position for Seeds.

Play on -1 or 0 / x4 or x5. Open with Seeds, pause for a few seconds to let the spawn self herd (this also frees the non-confused mobs from the herd) throw in Roots to lock them all in melee range with each other and to damage them all so that you get maximum exp and drops. Deal with any loose non-confused mobs first then finish off what ever remains of the confused ball of mobs.

By the time you get that done Seeds should be recharged again even without Hasten.

I have an Ice/Earth/Ice Dom and it was a slow and difficult time leveling.

If I were to do an elemental theme Dom I would go with Earth/Fire/Ice (or perhaps Earth/Ice/Fire) to relieve the tedium.

My Plant/Fire/Fire is a Fey of the Unseelie court. She delights in growing forests simply for the fun of burning them and her enemies down.

(Also if you color it right spirit tree looks like a burning bush)

Doh! Didn't realize that. That makes the longbow pets quite a bit less useful.

It's even better when you add the Fire APP and get Rain of Fire and Fire Ball.

EDIT - And just for grins and giggles - the immob duration on roots is fine without slotting even better when you are a perma Dom. Before level 50 I usually slot Roots with 5 pieces of Posi including the proc and a Crap of the Hunter proc. Much more carnage ensues.

This is excellent advice. I would also add that if you wish to both CONTROL and DEBUFF a controller is an excellent choice. Plant/Trick Arrow and Plant/Storm would be top contenders in my book.

Arch/Dev would be an excellent choice.

1) I have Aid Self on a majority of my blasters. It has 2 purposes that I use it for. One is the stun resistance granted by the power the other is to heal damage taken after combat.

Will the sustain power be roughly equal in utility to Aid Self? (I guess the real question is, will I regret dropping Aid Self to pick up sustain? If they aren't roughly equal the answer is probably a yes).

If they are roughly equal would you consider adding the same amount of stun resistance to sustain so that we can pass up the medicine pool and take our secondary powers instead?

2) Myself and blaster players like me see mez as the single most debilitating issue for blasters and it is by definition NOT FUN because while you are mezzed you don't get to play.

The worst possible time to get mezzed is at the beginning of the Alpha response because you are much more likely to be defeated by the alpha response and follow up if you get mezzed immediately after you make your first attack.

A common tactic is to hit Aim + Build up and launch all of your AoEs. This allows you to take out the majority of minions in the spawn allowing Offense to be the Blaster defense. The remaining mobs are damaged and if you are mezzed you "may" still be able to take out the remainders using defiance.

Would you consider adding a mechanic (if it is possible) that grants a blaster 5-10 seconds worth of "break free" at the time suppression begins? (this would allow us to finish unloading our Alpha strike and reduce the follow up threat) I think if that were possible it would solve a majority of the alpha mez issues.

ST focused would be the problem of course. It makes the road to perma rocky enough that none of my /energy Doms have ever made it there. Doms are the only AT that has access to energy blasts/melee that this is true of.

Yes and I'm aware of the cast times and recharge values. The difference is that WH is a 30% chance for a mag 2 stun.

Tremor is a 50% chance of KD which can affect Bosses in one application.

Ice Sword Circle is a 100% chance for -10% recharge and -10% movement on every thing not resistant/immune to slows.

No doubt in my mind which of the 3 is the low performer.

You can Hit 23.4% with 3, even level Hit Buff SOs. The problem of course will be finding enough slots. I'm not sure that it will be worth it with tier 3 powers getting their range increased. Without reduced animation times on quite a few powers our issue will still be having too many attacks and not enough utility.

Mez = end of hectic playstyle.

Logic changes to halt chain mezzing might be helpful, of course not having programmed so much stinking mez into the game would have solved that problem before it appeared.

I'm not talking about melee level of mez protection. I am talking about mez avoidance in the first place. That =/= break frees because that means eating one EVERY spawn in a high mez environment. The Alpha mez on top of Alpha damage is the problem. The blaster needs enough time to unload their AoEs before being mezzed. That would allow offense to be their defense. If you can AoE a spawn you can take out most of the minions. At that point sure using a break free if there are too many survivors is a viable option or if you eliminated enough of the spawn to get to a less deadly level, defiance might be enough to finish.

I would prefer it be done right this time instead of being back here in another 11 issues wondering why blasters still have the same unaddressed issues.

This, and also if you go farther into the pool you can help team mates, slot more LotG, and pick up phase shift which is also a handy tool.

I excepted thorns because it has a very short ranged cone (Fling Thorns), A PBAoE (Thorn Burst), a TAoE patch power (Thorntrops), and a melee cone (Ripper) that has the identical Arc that Fling thorns does making it quite easy to line up and providing no operational clunkyness. You don't have to give up AoE with Thorns because there are more than 2 choices and they dove tail better than any other assault set.

I also forgot to mention that Energy Assault lacks a cone but Whirling Hands is such a dud that it plays almost as if it had no AoE at all.

You have a perception problem. If you want to talk in golf terms PAR is the average that all players should be able to make. That you and a few other players can Ace or Eagle holes consistently doesn't change par at all. No magic about it what so ever.

People didn't play doms because the mechanics were (and still are to some extent) clunky. ALL the assault sets (except stone and thorns) feature a cone and a PBAoE for AoE. This means you have to jump back and forth from PBAoE range to cone range to make them effective and if your primary has an offensive mitigation toggle lose the effect of that toggle that you may depend on for that time.

There would have been no issue there if the cone had been a TAoE in all those sets.

The other reason that few people played Doms was the entire Jekyll and Hyde concept that Doms were designed with. Most players don't like being really powerful for a short time and really sucky the rest. They want to smooth it out more and be powerful most of the time and decent the rest of the time. That's pretty much what the Dom revamp did.

BTW I played CoV from release and an Ice/Ice Dom was my main. I didn't care for Red side for a variety of reasons and stopped playing red side when I ran out of content (which was pretty quick actually). I've been happy with Going Rogue (at least once we could create villain ATs hero side to start with) since it lets me play the villain ATs on blue side and avoid the things that I don't like about red side. That gave me quite a few new things to tinker with and I am just now starting to run low on new ideas.