Muon_Neutrino

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<Sigh>

Martial Arts, you elude me so...

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Well of course Martial Arts is eluding you. All the MA toons have super reflexes secondary.

Play a peacebringer.

Seriously, they don't have quite the same damage, but you get a heck of a bag of tricks at the same time, even if you stay human only. And the blasts and melee attacks look just amazing - and imo, they look a lot like light attacks. I so can't wait to get a hero level 50 so that *I* can do that.

Well, I'm sad that we don't get illusion again, but this is definitely a worthy placeholder. Now I just have to wonder which powers will be in the set...

Somehow I doubt seismic smash will make it in - that would probably singlehandedly give castle a migraine (or else it would get nerfed, and I don't want to open that door for all of the poor stone melee tanks/brutes). But the two mallets are obvious choices, as is tremor. Fault would be just a little bit absurd on a dom, but maybe we'll get that foot stomping ground spike attack that some mobs have. Really, though, I almost don't care, as long as there's plenty of screen-shaking visceral BOOM sounds and smashyness. Seriously, those are among my favorite effects in this game - the slow lift of the mallet, and then BAM it sounds like they just got hit with a whole planet. As long as the set has plenty of *that*, I'll be happy.

In general, you'll want most of the shield powers. The only ones that are ever really skipped are grant cover and, sometimes, one with the shield. Grant cover doesn't give *you* any defense, and its short range means it doesn't usually give *anyone else* any defense either. It does give you defense debuff and recharge debuff resistance, but you have to balance that with the cost of a power and the end. One with the shield is a relatively weaker godmode - it compensates for this by having a much milder crash and through being up more often, but some don't care for it. Everything else in shield is essential - even phalanx fighting, which many don't realize has a base defense boost even if nobody's next to you.

From stone, in my opinion the must-haves are the mallets, seismic smash, and fault. Between the mallets, stone fists (which is actually a decent attack) and seismic smash, you have a ridiculously damaging single target chain, and fault is just absurdly good AoE mitigation between the stun and knockdown. If you have the extra slots, buildup, taunt, and tremor are also worthy powers, but it depends on your preferences. I would take them, but that's me.

I am using 'empty' as the enemy group for the first map, so maybe that's the cause of the 'generic' tag - and ditto, crey aren't actually used as a base enemy type. That 'generic' tag (imo) makes it look like the arc is bugged or something, so I'll do something about it. The objective points that are used for the patrol/etc objectives are also the ones where normal enemies spawn, right? It seems to me that if I set 'crey' as the enemy group for the first map but fill up all the possible patrol/etc objectives, it would stop any normal crey from spawning. Would that work?

And, yeah, the level 51 and 52 AVs are from the STF - arbiter sands and wretch. Annoying that they don't scale. Wretch isn't really important, I can remove him, but sands kinda is. Well, I guess it's time to see how close a facsimile of an arbiter I can make in the character creator....

I *thought* that one of the features of I15 was supposed to be the ability for the MA to scale down higher level foes to the level of the mission. However, it doesn't appear to be working correctly, or else I'm misunderstanding how it's supposed to work. In a story arc I'm working on, at various points there appear a level 40-54 AV, a level 51-51 AV, and a level 52-52 AV, for a story that is supposed to be level 40-54. When I test it on my level 50 dominator, it seems to work correctly. But when I tested it on a lower level stalker auto-SK'd to 40, the 40-54 AV scales properly, but the 51 and 52 AVs are both their natural level (i.e. extremely, extremely purple) - it seems that issue 15's scaling ability isn't working for them. Somehow, it doesn't seem right that the MA allows you to make missions that could send characters up against a +11 AV/EB. Is this a known bug, and if so, does anyone know if it's going to be fixed anytime soon?

Regarding maps, for the second mission I've got a rather specific set of requirements in mind - it has to be an oranbega map, it has to be small and linear enough for that to not be hugely annoying, it has to have only one room where 'back' objectives can spawn, said room has to allow for 3 floor glowies and an ally rescue, and the room should be small enough that all 4 objectives spawn in sight of each other. Right at the moment I'm using 'COT - city of villains set', size 'small', map number 22. This works (at least once I realized that on this map the 'back' and 'middle' positions are reversed for glowies), but has a couple annoyances. First, the last room isn't very impressive looking (small square room with sunken water pit), and second, the room is small enough that when the ally rescue spawns on completion of the glowie objectives, the guards often start out inside aggro range of the player. If anyone happens to know of a better map for this, I'm all ears.

Lastly, the arc currently uses the enemy groups crey, arachnos, circle of thorns, and three custom groups containing different mixes of standard enemies (no customs). Yet, the arc description says: "Enemy Groups: Generic, Circle of Thorns, Arachnos". Does anyone know where 'generic' came from, and why the crey aren't showing up?

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Putting the Kismet unique in PFF may not be the best choice, Since it's one of the ones that buffs you for 2 minutes after using the power - in other words, you don't get the buff unless you're running PFF (and can't attack), or you have to turn PFF on every 2 minutes.

I'd but a Karma and/or LotG in it.

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Whoops, yeah, forgot about that. Don't put the kismet 6% tohit in it, unless you like turning PFF on and off every 2 minutes to keep the buff. Stick that IO in something you'll be running all the time like combat jumping or dispersion bubble.

From what I know of the set, there aren't any *huge* stinkers. Thorntrops strikes me as probably skippable, but I don't have any firsthand experience with it (I would if the visuals and animations weren't so fugly ). For plant, on the other hand, you can definitely skip both spirit tree and spore burst. Skip just one more power between the two sets and you've got the empty slots to fit in stamina and a travel power without pushing stuff into the 40s.

Well, interesting thing here: /ice's end costs remained almost untouched in the recent changes. ISC was the only one that changed, and that was a measly 1.7 end increase, which doesn't have much effect on a longer-animating slower-recharging attack like ISC.

Ice/ice simply has *always* been an end hog, especially pre-stamina, and especially if you took certain powers too early. I had plenty of experience with this when I took my ice/ice through those levels. You just don't have the recovery early on to sustain powers like ISC, arctic air, and frostbite, and even the ST attacks can drain you considering the rather quick animations. This isn't an artifact of the dominator changes. You just have to adapt to it - slot end reducers, use dom strategically (which is even easier now), and make sure you conserve end by not using a big power where a small one will do the job.

Oh, if I'm interpreting her comment correctly, I believe Ditzy's referring to this thread that I made a while back. Long and short of it is, the dom changes don't do much to boost damage before the late teens, assuming that dom was used to boost damage at least some of the time. The base modifier increases mostly start having an impact post 20 when better enhancements are slotted and the modifiers have settled into their final values. So, your friend is playing a naturally end/intensive combo which was not changed, and is not only below DO level, but is also below the level where the changes start to boost overall damage (and thus, overall end efficiency). The dominator changes aren't to blame for his end woes, and it ought to get better.

Personal force field gives 67.5% defense to a controller, unslotted. That's 22.5% *more* defense than you need to hit the soft cap and floor everything's chance to hit. So, it definitely doesn't need slotting for defense - it would literally do nothing against 99% of the enemies in the game, and most of the remaining 1% simply ignore defense in one way or another anyway.

Personal force field also grants 40% resistance to everything except toxic. This is far below the cap, and thus would make sense to enhance - except PFF doesn't take resistance enhancements, and the resistance effect is tagged [Ignores Enhancements & Buffs] anyway. So, no dice here either.

On the other hand, it does take 15 seconds to recharge after you turn it off - sometimes you might need it to come back up sooner if a boss gets in a good hit or two just after you turn it off. Thus, sticking a recharge in the default slot certainly isn't wasted. If you really want, you can stick a second in - that cuts it down from about 11.25 seconds recharge to about 9s recharge. A 3rd is kinda wasted as it only drops you to ~7.75s.

Similarly, endurance reduction is not very important - it only costs 0.26 end/second, and given that you can't attack while you have it active, turning on PFF is likely to *lower* your endurance use, not raise it.

Finally, in PvP you will gain *very* little defense from personal force field no matter how you slot it. For a point of comparison, in a PvP zone my dominator has about 15% defense from scorpion shield, and turning on PFF raises that to a whopping 20%. Such is the harsh reality of diminishing returns. While turning on PFF in a PvP zone will likely help a little bit, it sure as heck doesn't matter what you have slotted in it (for an experiment, I stuck a defense SO in my dom's PFF and it added a total of like ~0.2% defense, or something absurdly small like that). So, for PvP it also doesn't really matter what you put into it.

The best use for slots in personal force field, in my opinion, is to hold special IOs. It takes defense sets, and thus you can put in special IOs like karma knockback protection, kismet +6% tohit, luck of the gambler 7.5% global recharge, gift of the ancients runspeed, etc. Since it doesn't really need any slotting *anyway*, it's not like you're gimping the power by slotting these IOs that don't improve the specific power they're slotted in.

If you have a metric ton of spare slots, you could also stick one or another defense set into the power, just for the set bonuses. However, given that you have at *least* three other powers which not only take defense sets, but can actually benefit from the enhancement bonuses themselves, I wouldn't bother.

Short and long of it: either toss a recharge in the base slot and call it done, or use it to slot special IOs like LOTG:rech, karma -KB, etc.

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I'm not a fan of the immobilizes, they set up containment for controllers, but in general they don't do that much for doms.

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Again, allow me to present a counter-argument. 5 pieces of Positron's Blast, plus the Trap of the Hunter proc give you two procs, a nice chunk of global recharge and a quick recharging attack with a huge area and a 16 target limit. Solo, aggro is a non-issue, you've got it anyway. Grouped, wait for someone else to draw the alpha, and apply your controls to anyone who's unengaged. Immobilizes are great in groups. Immobilized mobs don't get loose and splat your squishies. They stand helplessly and melt in burn patches. And Plant's AOE immob actually has respectable damage output in its own right, independent of procs.

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This is true, for the most part, at least for plant's immob. Doing twice the damage of the rest of them makes it a pretty good attack, not to mention the synergy between it and seeds in that it prevents a confused mob from running off after a different spawn. The rest of them, though, I'm not as sold on, mostly because of the very low damage. If you've got another control power that works with it, such as an AoE stun, it can be useful, but by themselves I've found them mostly to be a good way to get dead on a team. If you take it, have a specific role in mind (whether damage for plant, stun control for grav/earth/fire, whatever) and don't just spam it for no reason.

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Doms require a very unique "blapper" type of playstyle. You'll constantly be moving in and out of melee range.

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I don't know that I'd agree with that. Time moving in and out of melee is time when you could be simply standing and firing more ranged attacks. The times when you should be using your melee attacks is when your target is a boss or bigger. The rest of the time, stand off and burn, you'll drop your targets faster. The numbers may be smaller, but the results are better, and you spend the fight in more safety.

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This, however, I completely disagree with. Not only do melee attacks often have a higher damage scale than ranged ones, the dom's melee multiplier is higher than their range. By not taking or using them, you are leaving a large chunk of damage on the table. The other issue is that, without melee attacks many sets have trouble building a complete attack chain, at least not without large amounts of global recharge. Given the recharge increases to /fire, about the only set where I think you can realistically get away with all range nowadays is energy, unless you have single target attacks in your primary like grav/ or mind/. So, skip the melees and you'll still likely have times where you're not doing damage. And you don't actually need to jump in and out of melee and waste time unless you're trying to line up a narrow ranged cone - ranged attacks work perfectly well in melee, after all, and the target you're attacking should be locked down anyway so you don't have to run out of melee to stay safe (and dom HP are low enough anyway that if your enemy slips your controls, you're quite possibly screwed even if you're at range).

And all of that goes double for /thorn, which has some really nice melee and short range attacks. If you're hanging out at 40 feet, you can't use lunge, fling spines, thorn burst, or ripper - which includes *all* of your AoEs. If you wanted to live in complete safety, this is the wrong AT. You can lock down everything, but one slip and you're in a world of hurt. This is an AT which lives on the edge. If you're not one mistake away from becoming a greasy stain on the nearest wall, you're not pushing yourself hard enough. Take the melee attacks. Embrace your inner blapper. Come to the dark side - we have cookies.

Two even level SO's worth, approximately 65%, will cap your chance to hit at 95% against +2s, as long as you have no tohit debuffs on you and they have no defense (and you're using a normal base accuracy power). That's my personal aim point, as I don't go for super high-end builds, and I figure if I'm fighting something higher than +2, I'm probably on a team and thus it isn't as critical to cap my CTH out of my own resources. On the other hand, its possible to run into +2s solo even if you're not playing on the highest difficulty, so I want to be able to hit them.

That is, of course, assuming that you don't have any global accuracy/tohit boosts from set bonuses, the kismet unique, or powers like invincibility/tactics. If you do, the math gets a bit more complicated. The base chance to hit a +2 is 56%. If you have any tohit bonuses like the kismet unique, invincibility, or tactics, that simply adds to the 56%. Then, that total is multiplied by your accuracy total. So, for an example, let's say you're using a power with a 0.8 base accuracy (less accurate than usual, most have 1.0), you have 61% accuracy slotted in the power, you have one 7% accuracy bonus from a set, and you have a 6% tohit bonus from invincibility (3 enemies). Your hase tohit against a +2 in that case is 56+6 = 62%, which is then multiplied as 62% * 0.8 * (1.61+0.07) = 83%. You can use the same formula to figure out your chance to hit in a variety of situations.

Heh, I remember being a newb.... I had a grav/storm as either my first or second character (don't remember which), and I'm standing there in atlas fiddling around with my powers when I get invited to a team. Turns out we're going to the 'sewers', wherever that is. So we go in, and looking back on it now it was actually a pretty competent team. We all ran around killing stuff and leveling like mad, but as usual eventually people wanted to get on with the game and the team broke up. One team member told me to go get killed and I would wake up in the hospital outside. To my newbish self, that didn't sound like a very good idea ("why would I want to get killed on purpose?" - it didn't help that at the time, the game I had been playing most often was diablo 2 on hardcore mode!), but I remembered that I had some sort of teleporter power that I had stuck on one of my alternate trays, so I used that.

Needless to say, I spent an awfully long time wandering around pocket D before I found the exit. Then, I had no clue which zone to exit into, so I ended up in faultline. I very quickly figured out that it was much too high level for me, but I couldn't find the pocket D entrance again. So I had to trek through skyway to the train - did you know that skyway is a very confusing zone to traverse on foot? And since it was the first time I'd used the train, I then got very confused as to why it wouldn't let me go in the out door. At this point, the most experience I had with the game was a couple hours watching over my brother's shoulder, which is the only reason I knew to take the train at all. I'm just thankful to the vet who told me that there was a train station in skyway, when I started asking in broadcast how to get back to atlas from faultline!

The thing that always annoyed me about the rep system, and annoys me even more now that PvP IOs are tied to it, is that the rep timer inexplicably starts not only when you kill someone, but when they kill you as well. As an average PvPer at best, I find that I almost never actually get any rep from killing people, simply because the populations are small enough that I'm almost never fighting anyone who hasn't fought me in the past 10 minutes. So now, the only people who will be getting the chance to get PvP IOs are those who always win the first fight they have with someone, which doesn't particularly strike me as fair if it's meant to be a random system like all the rest of the drops in the game.

I think it's high time that the rep system was changed to only care if *you've* defeated the target, not if the target has defeated you. That way, even the most casual PvPer can at least have a slim chance to get an IO.

I think the biggest problem is that you picked the *only* set that does not have a reliable, quick-recharging AoE control available early on - instead it gets some single-target stuff and dimension shift.

At level 8, plant becomes able to confuse everyone in sight for ages, and do it every 60 seconds. At level 12, mind can start putting whole spawns to sleep every 45 seconds, fire and earth start being able to toss out AoE stuns (admittedly poor accuracy and short-duration, but they still weaken the alpha and give you time to start holding/attacking), and ice starts laying down 30 second duration slip-n-fall patches. At 18, earth even adds its own version of ice slick for *two* reliable quick-recharging AoE controls. Grav is the only set that is left out in the cold until 26, with only the extremely situational dimension shift and horrendously long-recharging grav distortion field. Things will pick up greatly at 26 (or actually, 27, since it'll need slotting), when you will finally have something to open with that doesn't take 4 minutes to recharge (alternate wormhole with GDF and you should have *something* up for every spawn. But honestly, if I could recommend any set to a player who's never touched controllers or doms before, grav would be the *last* one I would suggest, simply because it plays so different from the rest. Fire, mind, earth, ice, plant - all are much more straightforward early on.

Also, one thing that I find helps with some doms - don't play on difficulty 2 or 4; instead, play on difficulty 1, 3, or 5. Making the mobs go up one level is actually less annoying than adding more of them, at least for mostly single-target sets. Since you're in the 20s and can slot SOs, you should have the accuracy to play on level 3, which should probably be a lot easier than level 2.

Yeah, I really can't wait until /nin gets ported to scrappers. I'd never roll another /SR again, and my MA/SR would get rerolled as MA/nin in a heartbeat. AoE protection before level 35? An un-interruptable self heal that doesn't require me to burn a power pool or take a useless prerequisite? Two skippable powers instead of none? (For scrappers, I fully expect hide to get replaced with a skippable stealth clone at level 10 or thereabouts.) Cute tricks like caltrops and blinding powder before you get to epics? An in-set place to slot the steadfast 3% def IO?

Sure, it has less overall defense, less defense debuff resistance, and no knockback protection. It also has psi resist, fear protection, and a *ton* more build flexibility. I can't count the number of versions of my ma/sr's build I've created in mids, trying to get enough defense and still take the primary and epic powers I want. With nin, I feel like I have enough survivability in-set, and I don't have to go through ridiculous contortions to come up with an acceptable build.

For solo? Chilblain all the way. I personally haven't found any real use for frostbite on my ice/ice. It stops the knockdown from ice slick and stops the flee behavior from arctic air, so it interferes with your two biggest sources of mitigation and thus isn't very useful in most fights. You might be able to use it to keep a group of foes at a distance or around a corner while you run away/finish off another pack/etc, but solo you just don't run into enough mobs at once for that to be important, imo.

Chilblain, on the other hand, is very good for immobilizing bosses/EBs so that they don't run up and smash your face in, and requires little slotting given its accuracy bonus (instead of a penalty), long duration, and relatively low end cost. Also, if you can spare an extra slot or two for damage and endredux, it can supplement your attack chain against bosses/EBs who are too dangerous to melee.

For a primarily soloing ice/ice, I would go with chilblain over frostbite every time.

I never interpreted it that way. I agree that it's a plausible way to interpret things, but I don't think it's definitive. For one thing, it's specifically mentioned several times that it's *your character* who is carrying out the ritual, not ghost widow. So, the party responsible for any flaws in the ritual's execution would be *you*, which is (I presume) why Ghost Widow concludes that you've betrayed her. Also, the ritual apparently worked just fine when you tested it on the Red Widow. Additionally, there's the matter of the mission objectives display in that mission (from paragonwiki):

Betray Ghost Widow
* Trap Ghost Widow
* Defeat Ghost Widow!

When you click on the glowie (or whatever you do to summon her, I forget), the chat confirmation message that you get is: "Ghost Widow is now trapped between life and death." Between the line "Trap Ghost Widow" and the confirmation message, it makes it sound to me like that was the plan all along. It can probably be interpreted both ways, but that's the way I choose to read it, anyway.

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Note that people have had similar complaints about the patron arcs wherein you're forced to betray your employer under threat of Arachnos retribution - sometimes there is a good reason to want to stop them apart from what Arachnos thinks (aside from philisophical questions about the nature of free will, if Scirocco succeeds in his plan, for instnace, it will either brainwash you or erase you from existance), but in some cases (Ghost Widow's arc is the perfect example, and a popular one, given how many fan-boys she has) the only reason to betray them instead of helping them is because you're either more loyal to Arachnos than them, or more afraid of Arachnos than loyal to the patron, and a lot of players resent having that choice taken away from them. Notice that as with your exmaqple, there has been a complete lack of anything being done to fix it.

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Yeah, I didn't much care for those elements of ghost widow's arc myself. Arbiter or no arbiter, my dom would hardly be afraid of Daos, especially with the backing of Ghost Widow, and she most *definitely* would not appreciate being threatened. In a perfect world, she would have taken the false crystal from him, promised to do his bidding like a good little minion, and gone straight to GW to warn her and plot how to take Daos down and complete the ritual in spite of him. My dom may be a villain but she doesn't backstab those who she respects (and secretly, she feels a bit sorry for GW too), and attempting to coerce her into doing something would be about the surest means to get her *not* to do it.

Now, the story would still have to come out the same in the end to keep everything consistent, but ideally it would be possible to get there by two different paths - one where you betray your patron, and one where you don't. We now have branching dialogue possibilities in the game - perhaps eventually the devs will be able to design branching *storyarcs* as well. Certainly the patron arcs would be ripe for such an invention.

Maybe someday I'll write a MA arc exploring the possibilities of the player choosing *not* to betray Ghost Widow. I wonder if Arbiter Daos exists in game....?

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Awww, didn't anyone tell you? EM is now "teh gimp" according to some brutes and tanks.

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Honestly, I don't really care if some think it gimp - in fact, the new ET animation is actually the *reason* I want it for scrappers. I just think ET, and the rest of the set too, *look* absolutely bad-[censored], and I want it on my favorite melee AT. I'm going to stick the stun set knockback proc in every attack that can take it, run around smacking face, and giggle my head off whenever something goes flying. I don't expect most teams to understand, but whatever. If I knock it back, I'm killing it anyway, so who cares? (not me!)

Personally, I'm hoping for more powerset proliferation in issue 16. We know that the 'big' feature is going to be the ability to customize at least the colors of your powers (and hopefully more). That'd be the art, animation, and costume people's jobs, I think, hopefully leaving the powers people with enough free time to work on proliferation - unlike issues 13, 14, and 15, where the powers devs were hard at work on the MA. I don't expect completely *new* powersets, though, given that we are almost certainly getting dual pistols and demon summoning with Going Rogue.

On the other hand, we don't know how much powers work Going Rogue is needing - *that* may be sucking up enough of the powers devs' time to make more proliferation unlikely.

Me, I just want illusion control for doms and energy melee for scrappers.

Well, for what it's worth coming from a PvP novice, I agree with Dark. In RV tonight, I finally felt like my dom was actually doing the damage she should have all along for a villain side 'blaster' equivalent. Doms still fall down like a sack of bricks if they get hit, and the controls aren't really much to write home about. Like blasters, damage is most of their contribution, and given that they're still much more fragile than blasters I didn't think doing blaster-level base damage (and considering that they still don't have both aim+bu, or two entire sets full of attacks) was that bad. I'm definitely not looking forward to losing most of the buff I just got.

Well I think the villains put up a credible show of resistance that time! Nice to see that with the dom buffs I can actually put a dent or two into a health bar, but I felt like I had a giant 'kick me' sign taped to my back or something the whole time - when you're the only non-(stalker/brute/mm/veat/non-squishy) you sure seem to usually be the first target! Gotta get me a dom with some real PvP sets though - ice/ and /ice are about the farthest from that as you can get at the moment. Still, twas fun, and nice to see enough villains to put up a fight.

(1) Unfortunately, I don't think there is any particular way to monitor the level of dom in the attributes window. That said, it's probably not really needed - I find it pretty easy to keep an eye on the bar most times once you get used to it.

(2) Yes, hasten shortens the recharge time of the domination power and brings it back sooner (as do global recharge boosts from things like speed boost or IO set bonuses). For that reason, most people recommend hasten on dom builds. I personally don't think it's mandatory, but if you have an extra power choice it's certainly useful.

(3) Once your domination bar reaches 90% (not 50%), the domination power becomes available and can be clicked (assuming, of course, it's recharged). While it's active, the dom bar remains full, and yes, this is just window dressing in most cases, to remind you that you have domination active.

However, there is one case where the full bar during domination is important, and that is if you have enough recharge bonuses to allow domination to recharge before it expires. In this case, since your domination bar is still full, you can click domination again and reset the timer. If you can keep the level of recharge up, you can continue this cycle indefinitely and keep domination running forever, attaining what is called 'perma-dom'. As you might imagine, this is a very sought after state - doms LOVE speed boost, and it is one of the reasons that IO sets that grant recharge bonuses are so massively expensive on the villain market. However, this is also a very *difficult* state to attain - without buffs, you have to have hasten and about 70-80% recharge bonuses from sets at a minimum, and that tends to cost hundreds of millions of inf in most cases. As a new dominator player, I would not recommend worrying about permadom for now.

Also, if you're a new dominator player, I have to give one piece of advice. If your primary set has an AoE immobilize, unless you're plant I would seriously recommend skipping it, or at least putting it off until later. The damage they deal is utterly negligible (apart from plant, whose AoE immob does much more damage than normal), they provide next to no mitigation on their own, and they get the user a *lot* of aggro. The immob can be useful to prevent wandering after an AoE stun is used, but that's about it since doms don't get containment. If you take it for that purpose, don't use it willy-nilly - it's nigh useless on its own and *will* get you killed. Overenthusiastic use of the AoE immob is probably the number one cause of unnecessary low level dominator faceplants.

It's not just 'quite good' - it's a flat-out *amazing* attack now. It's more powerful than the old power blast was, has a 40% accuracy *bonus* - no missing at low levels! - and guaranteed knockback. It's like someone took a standard 8 second recharge blast like subdue or lightning bolt and gave it a massive accuracy boost and a powerful secondary effect. Not to mention that it's an extremely quick animation for such a good attack - it is the best DPA attack in energy assault nowadays. Anyone who skips the new version of power push is straight-up insane.