Morganite

Eh. I think my Elec controller does pretty good damage. (Although this is based on procs in the AoEs plus Rad debuffs, I think this actually does things for Elec that it doesn't do for other primaries.) Got an Elec Dom too, which is faster on small numbers of enemies, but can't handle as large a groups... yet, anyway. (Though I might consider my Elec/Earth my flashiest character, since she crushes enemies with The Power of Love. That's kind of an acquired taste though...)

-Morgan.

That isn't what he's suggesting though. OTs idea refreshes things as long as the receiver gets close to the caster sometime before the duration runs out. They don't have to stay there to keep it. (And anyone who doesn't stay somewhere you can find them wouldn't be getting buffs under the current system anyway.)

What do you do when you're playing a controller?

This, I think, really hits it on the head.

Yes, as others have noted, a lot of things do come down to hitting the same buttons repeatedly. The variance seems to come up in what's required for maximum performance. For the single-target buffs, this may vary with team composition, but is essentially static for the life of the team - the maximum is to have everyone who wants the buff to have it, and everyone who doesn't want it to not have it, all the time.

On the other hand, unless you're capable of consistently defeating entire spawns in x clicks regardless of circumstances, things do get a little more complicated. When my Dark Melee/Regen scrapper fights a Master Illusionist, there's a big difference between when I fight smart and when I fight stupid, in that the latter involves trips to the hospital. My Elec/Rad controller to maintain survivability has to avoid using some parts of her AoE damage chain in order to maintain survivability. My Katana/SR scrapper... okay, that gets pretty repetitive. But even then there's at least a question of "Do I go for the bosses first, or the minions?" and if I should have gone for the minions first, I will regret not having done so.

As for the "If you find single-target buffs tedious, why don't you play a set without?" line... What if you didn't know? I didn't team much with my /Kin controller until the late 30s. Speed Boosting the Imps (during the period where this was potentially useful) for a hard target fight was no big deal. I had no idea that trying to keep SB up on a team would drive me so crazy. So now I do, in fact, avoid the shield sets, because as noted elsewhere, I don't think twice the powers half as often would be an improvement. Not entirely due to this, but in large part. I'm wary of even doing a FF or Thermal mastermind, even though my biggest issue would not come up much in solo play.

(My biggest issue? Not having to reapply SB every two minutes actually. More how often I'll be trying to apply it and my target will have either gone out of range, or around a corner. And once I catch up with them, the next person will have gone off. Sometimes it feels like everybody's playing "Avoid the Buff". If the actual application was less of a hassle, the duration wouldn't bother me at all.)

-Morgan.

This, I think, points to one of the big advantages of Elec - it's control is incredibly sustainable. From level 13 on, with some cheap sleep set IOs in Static Field, I could go up to fairly sizable groups of even level mobs and (as long as none of them were Fortunatas) keep them controlled essentially forever. I sure couldn't do that on my Fire - Flashfire has too short a duration and too long a recharge, and once it wore off I'd be out of options. Even with my Fire at well-enhanced levels, I think my (much lower level and less-enhanced) Elec probably equals if not beats it in mitigation.

Maybe that's not such a good comparision, with Fire generally being considerd a bit low on control? Perhaps. But Elec's non-binaryness goes a long way. If an AoE hold or stun misses, that's *it* for that power until it recharges, which is going to be a while. Static Field gets to try again in two seconds. And, if you're like me and put it at your feet, anything that misses is going to be getting regularly drained by Conductive Aura, so enemies still aren't likely to get a chance to attack. And if more enemies wander in, they just get absorbed by what I'm already doing. It's very rare that I need to think of using a "panic button" power. (Which is a good thing, because I don't have one yet.)

Probably Elec's biggest disadvantage is the delay between my opening Static Field, and when full control is established. I don't find this to be a major issue when solo, and it's not bad on small teams either. Large teams, yeah, it's going to do a lot less. But that's about how I feel on my Fire on a large team too - minions go down so fast, it's hardly worth the effort to try to control them a lot of the time. So more of my focus ends up on keeping particular nasties out of the picture and using my secondary. Not that it'd be bad to Flashfire every spawn.... but most of the TFs I've done have been at levels where I don't have that much recharge yet.

As for things to pair with Elec... Well. Looking at the numbers, I'm not too thrilled by Cold. A lot of it seems to be -recharge, which feels redundant with end draining - by the time they get the end to attack again, something's probably going to have recharged regardless. Rad I'm finding to work quite well so far. Elec's end recovery makes the toggles much more managle, and the toggles reduce the chance that any gaps in control will amount to anything meaningful, as well as improving damage. Trick Arrow looks like it'd do more for damage output, but maybe a bit less for mitigation. Less risk from mez though. Storm looks like it could be a lot of fun if you're good at leveraging knockback.

I'm a level away from it yet, but it sure looks that way. If it misses, you get nothing, but I'm under the impression that if it hits (and you have enough accuracy), it essentially *will* hit everything that's standing close enough together to chain. And if I'm reading the in-game numbers correctly, it doesn't notify enemies to your presence. Combined with the quite short recharge... Well, it's not the be-all end-all of confuses, but it still sounds like a power I'll enjoy using whenever possible.

Some can be that expensive, if they've got interesting set bonuses. But a lot of useful stuff isn't. Also, make sure you're looking at recipes, not crafted enhancements.

... Yeah, it's kind of hard to miss a bunch of mobs suddenly stop attacking because their end has flatlined. >.>