Neogumbercules

I'll risk sounding like a broken record by posting my thoughts on Domination. Put simply, I believe it's one of the strongest powers in the game. A permadom Dominator is the closest thing you'll get to a tankmage in this game.

Not only do you completely negate the single biggest stumbling block squishies face, you also get to have essentially unlimited endurance, and 1 shot mezz entire spawns, including bosses. You turn every fight into a cake walk.

This is on an AT that is at the top end of the damage scale,can choose to play ranged, melee or something in between, and has access to pets, and has access to some of the best APPs in the game.

I'd go so far as to say that Permadom is even more powerful than perma eclipse. Who needs damage res when the enemies can't fight back?

I think if the OP had played one of the primaries that benefits a bit more, he would not think poorly of it.

Personally my superdom is a plant/psi/ice and the level of damage, control and chaos she can create is ridiculous. Her APP caps her HP with hoarfrost and that only has a downtime of 20 seconds. She has a ton of SL defense and two purples cap her to everything, she can cast what is possibly the strongest AoE debuff in the game, and has a really good AoE damage power in ice storm.

Bottom line: doms are awesome.

Here's a Dark/Dark/Ice dom build I tossed together that I feel would be very capable in a lot of the criteria established. Probably can't solo GMs. This is a build that I didn't really spend much time on (just a "throw purples at it" approach) and using very non-ideal powersets.

Perma dom means total lock down of any spawn at the user's whim. You don't need to tank an alpha when nothing can attack you to begin with.

But let's just say you had to. Almost all powers have a -tohit debuff. The build already has 45% to S/L, and around 30 to E/NE and Ranged respectively, and around 19% to F/C. Between Fearsome Stare and the other AoE dark powers, most foes will have a hard time hitting me. The ones that aren't totally locked down, anyway. One luck to just about cap E/NE and two to cap everything. In a x8 solo situation you're never wanting for inspiration drops.

Life Drain as part of your attack chain helps prevent AVs and the such get lucky with 2 shotting you through your defense.

Hoarfrost caps my HP. It isn't perma, but it's near enough to make me happy.

Fears and Stuns won't reduce XP rewards like Confusion would.

Possess should make AVs doable.

Engulfing Darkness cycles fast enough to make for an efficient farmer.

Might I derail the conversation by suggesting an actual contender?

Plant/Psi/Fire?

Alternately, Fire/Psi/Ice?

I'm gonna have to echo some of the sentiments for trying out a Stalker. I have a STJ/EA Stalker (EA recently got overhauled) that is totally berserker with ST damage. Like ClawsandEffect said, the ATIO Proc for Stalkers will fire every time in AS so you can open every fight with BU>AS>Crushing Uppercut. That also puts your combo level at 2 and with a guaranteed crit from CU, you're going to utterly destroy anything short of an EB in a matter of seconds.

AS itself on STJ has an activation time of 1 second (unless they have since changed it) when being used outside of hide and cannot be interrupted. That change has put Stalkers firmly on or near the top of the ST DPS charts. KM's AS has an activation time of 0.67 seconds, which is so fast you can barely blink before it fires off, and with every Stalker attack having the potential to add a 33% chance to crit, up to a 99% chance, you can get those AS crits popping off constantly and follow them up with guaranteed crits from your big hitters immediately afterwards.

Thinking about my rant last night I figured I would add something constructive/useful to the discussion.


Serum: The Super Soldier serum is designed to amplify the inherent abilities already found in an average soldier. Because every person is unique, the Serum has a different effect depending on who it is administered to.

Duration: 120 seconds Recharge: 300 seconds

If administered to...

Soldier: When the Soldier is exposed to the serum, he gains a large boost to his damage and damage resistance. Additionally, all of his powers recharge in half the regular time and he unlocks the ability to use a flamethrower attack. He becomes a one-man firing squad. Other mercenaries in your command will be so emboldened by his actions they gain a bonus to their attacks in the form of Assault and Tactics. When the Serum wears off the Soldier is left so exhausted that he must dismiss himself to recover.

Medic: When the medic is exposed to the serum he abandons his offensive abilities and devotes himself completely to supporting the Mastermind and his fellow Mercenaries. He gains the ability to cast ST and AoE heals, as well as Empathy based buff powers like Recovery Aura, Adrenaline Boost and Fortitude. He also gains the ability to summon a force field generator that will protect the entire team for as long as it is active. When the serum wears off the Medic is left exhausted and drained of all endurance, but he will not have to dismiss himself.

Spec Ops: When the Spec Ops Soldier is exposed to the Serum he gains a multitude of controlling and stealth strike capabilities. Spec Ops stealth will allow opening attacks to deal critical damage as long as he attacks from a hidden state. Under the effects of Serum though, the Spec Ops soldier will prefer to use stun grenades, AoE glue Bombs that slow and immobilize foes, as well as Venom Grenades that eat away at enemies' armor, reducing their damage resistance and defense. When Serum wears off the Spec Ops soldier is left tired, losing half of his endurance, but is able to carry on immediately afterwards.

Commando: When the commando is exposed to the serum he becomes an offensive juggernaut and fearless leader. His attacks gain a large special bonus damage (mechanically identical to fiery embrace), and a large defense bonus seems to make enemy attacks bounce off of him. Additionally, he gains powerful versions of the Leadership abilities Assault, Tactics, Maneuvers and Vengeance, emboldening his fellow mercenaries and avenging those that fall in battle with righteous vengeance. Additionally, enemies targeted by the Serum boosted Commando may be cower and be overcome by fear. The commando suffers no penalties when the Serum wears off, but he will be unable to accept another dose for 60 seconds afterwards.

All of these ideas sound great but I'm starting to feel completely hopeless about anything ever being done about Mercs or MMs in general. Mercs have remained completely unchanged, at least to my knowledge, since Issue 6.

How many more years will it take to do something? They were poorly designed then, continue to be poorly designed right now, and the only change they ever received was a nerf when the devs decided to remove recharge enhancement from pets.

It's beyond the point of contention that Mercs are woefully underpowered compared to other primaries, it's beyond the point of contention that henchmen AI is broken and Mercs suffer the most from it, and it's completely ridiculous that absolutely nothing has been done about it.

It wouldn't even require a complete overhaul of the powerset just to give them -some- love. Reduce some recharge numbers, widen some cones. Call it a stop-gap until they can revisit Masterminds. That's all it would take.

Instead they'd rather spend their time churning out premium powersets, which makes sense for them, but how long are these broken elephants in the room going to be ignored?

Probably forever.

I tried with the Issues and Problems thread but it never caught any traction and I haven't received a single peep from any devs about it, nor has any dev posted in it. It's clear that they are completely ignoring Masterminds save for the release of the largely underwhelming and creatively bankrupt Beast Mastery powerset. Apparently not enough people care about Masterminds for them to ever address any of these concerns that we have been bringing up for years now. At least if they came out and said "we're not looking into doing anything with Masterminds" we could all just shut up about it and go play something else.

Just so no one feels jealous, here's my baby. First Warshade. Gotta say, I'm liking it so far!

Someone beat me to it, but Assault Rifle is my pick.

The quickest and easiest change I would say the set needs the most is to frontload or "midnight grasp" Flamethrower. Frontload 70% or so of the damage upfront would give the set the oomph it lacks. Other than that, I'd give Full Auto a 16 target cap, change the KB in Buckshot and M30 to KD, and try to make the ranges and cone sizes of the various powers a little bit more homogenous so they require less jumping around to line stuff up.

It could also use a big aesthetic improvement.


I have a huge AR rant that I've repeated over the years but I'm too tired and too sick to type it all up right now. Perhaps tomorrow I will come back and elaborate.

I'm not familiar with any locking cases. Sorry to hear about the burglary btw, that really sucks. You may have to drill some holes and lock it up yourself. Just make sure you clean out all the shavings before installing hardware.

The 3570k is the new 2500k, as the guy above mentioned. If you have no intention or care to overclock you can skip the k versions, that should save you some money. The integrated graphics don't matter much since you'll be using a discrete card.

Hopefully my MB isn't effected by the OC problem you mentions. I'll probably do a BIOS update as soon as I have windows installed. I'm going to be putting it into my Asrock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3, which has been sitting on my dresser for a while now waiting for a fresh new CPU. I am a bit put off with the heat issue, so we'll see how that pans out. I'm hearing I should be able to put out a moderate overclock without burning down the house on my Cooler Master Hyper 212+. I considered a ThermalTake Frio with my purchase but I will see how the Hyper handles it and decide later. The SSD seemed like the better choice at the moment (heck, that'll probably make a more noticeable improvement than the CPU upgrade).

I held off on SB long enough to realize if I just waited a few more months I could go for IB so that's what I did. The Asrock mobo supports PCI 3.0 with an IB CPU and has third party SATA 6 and USB 3 compatibility which might not be as good as the integrated Z77 stuff, but the Asrock mobo has absolutely rave reviews and packs pretty much every feature of the much more expensive competitors.

Quick Sync in IB is even better than SB which will make encoding videos a whole lot faster for me. No more 8 hour encodes! Overall I'm pretty excited about the upgrade and I guess I'll report back when I have something more to say about it.

For those it may concern, as of this second Ivy Bridge CPUs are available on Newegg. I was 2 seconds away from plopping down for a 3770k but decided to save the hundred bucks and grab a 3570k and a Crucial M4 128GB SSD instead.

Glad I stayed up late. I wouldn't be surprised to find them out of stock when I wake up.

Edit: You will have to type 3570k (or 3770k) into the search field to find it as it doesn't look like they have the rest of their site updated to find it through the guided or advanced searches.

Fire/Kin can get good defense, but because of better AT modifiers on Defenders, the Defender can get there easier. Plus you don't have to wait till level 38 to get Fulcrum on a Defender. That said, the corr will do much more damage, especially after Scourge starts kicking in.

Also, as it stands on Beta, the Melee tree of the hybrid slot buffs your resistance to all damage types up to 30%. Coupled with high defense and the huge amount of -dam that kin can pump out, you'll be one tough cookie.

I put together a DM/Invul Brute a while back that I believe is unkillable by most normal content if played right. Unfortunately I nuked the build when I did a reformat and lost all of my mids data :'(

I think a SS/Elec or TW/Elec Brute, built for high recharge, defense and +HP would be a force to be reckoned with.

/DA probably beats everything for survivability though. You automatically take minions out of every fight and you can get really good defense and resistance numbers to everything plus Dark Regen is just amazing, especially with the +end proc.

/Cold is among the worst sets to solo with, so it's no surprise you're having a hard time. Unfortunately I don't have a lot of experience with ice blast to help you with, but I'd say skip slotting slows and -tohit. The slows in the base attacks plus snow storm should be enough to allow you to kite. Use the ST hold, infridgidate and benumb to keep the dangerous foes locked down while you work the weaker ones.

Just wait until you get to level 35 and obtain sleet. Between Sleet, Ice Storm and Frost Breath you will be laying waste to entire groups of enemies. At 38 with Blizzard you will be a damage machine. Sleet, Ice Storm, Blizzard, move on.

If you're looking for survivability, you may be out of luck, though with enough IO slotting, weave, arctic fog and maneuvers you can build yourself a good chunk of defense. Manuevers and Arctic Fog will also supplement your ally shields very nicely.

I gravitated from a NB Stalker over to KM and whhhooaa hoooly craaaap.

The AS on that is... blindingly fast. You can't even really see it activate, and it pops off instantly in an attack chain. I just unlocked Concetrated Strike and I've been enjoying opening with BU-CS-BU-AS.

When I get the proc in AS it'll be BU-AS-(hidden)CS-BU-AS again if I have enough +recharge it shouldn't have a very long downtime. Maybe 1 second after the CS-BU animation.

But damn if you guys don't have me intrigued with Stj now!

I've updated the first post with the latest issues.

I think they could do some interesting stuff with a speedster character. The attack animations can consist of causing your character to vanish then blurry streaks spin around your enemy with multiple punching sound effects and lots of damage numbers popping up. That'll give the illusion of entering into a superspeed state and punch your enemy multiple times.

They could then set it using the DB/StJ/AF combo mechanic that, once you use your first attack, circles all of your powers with orange circles, and as long as you activate another power (doesn't matter which one) during the super speed state, said power will have a bonus range on it that causes your character model to stay invisible, but instantly teleport to your next target, up to a distance of lets say... 15ft.

Alternately they could make the "super speed" ability a clicky power that makes it so that all of your attacks activated in the duration of that power will have the above effect.

That'll give the impression of your character blasting around the combat area at super speeds, knocking the crap outta things.

I've done this and at the end of the day I wished I went for SS/Fire. Claws seems like a good choice, but the redraw is ridiculous and I believe the Claws vs SS for farming debate was put to bed by BillZBubba who determined that Claws only excels over SS at the damage cap.

And here-in lies the problem. If you're going to be using it to tackle tough content while dragging along a lowbie, you can kiss your reliance on inspirations goodbye. Solo you get more inspirations on x8 than you know what to do with. With just one other character on the team you will not be able to get enough of the ones you need to drop often enough to keep your +damage rolling. I find it nearly impossible to crack 300% damage, and usually hover around +200% on my claws/fa brute, and that's with IOs, when I'm using it with another character. The redraw will also have a good chance of driving you insane eventually.

Rage continues to prove itself to be amazing here.

Another thing to consider is that, unless you map the entire mission before joining, you'll be forced to fight bosses. Again, the +dam and +acc from Rage makes that far easier.

That said, it's a good idea and claws is still very capable and will work, but you may find yourself very tempted to drop the $5 on the IO license. During dXP I wasn't using AE because that is exempt from the dXP gains, so I had to to normal missions. You're going to have to use a cherry picked AE map for max efficiency or you if get yourself the demon map you can probably do alright, but against normal content on something like +1x8 on SOs may be more trouble than it's worth.

I have an nb/elec Stalker that I built with inspirations in mind. He has incredible survivability numbers: lots of +hp, ~60% s/l res, capped energy res, high to moderate resistance to everything else including psi, and around 32.5% defense to e/ne/f/c (soft-capped to melee/lethal with DA). So he's tough as nails normally and, if I ever find myself in an "oh crap" moment, 1 small purple away from being nearly unkillable against most normal, non-incarnate content. That's good enough for me, because i would have had to sacrifice too much offense to put in more defense.

So, as to the op, yeah I think it makes a lot of sense to consider all of the "real world" scenarios and figure in inspirations as a fairly reliable source of extra oomph in a pinch.

I've been playing my NB/Elec like crazy. I used to be "meh" on Stalkers having played and generally enjoyed an elec/nin to 50 but totally despising the very concept of resistance based Stalkers. That is no more. This guy is very quickly becoming a favorite of mine. His survivability is through the roof, having capped energy resist and very high SL resist as well as moderate defense to everything and soft-capped defense to melee and lethal thanks to Divine Avalanche. All at level 27. Having slotted Stalker's Guile in AS, I've found a new love for the AT.

The absolute insane ST damage this guy puts out is just jaw dropping sometimes. I open with AS for a free kill then immediately follow it up with a crit from Soaring Dragon on the next nearest enemy for another free kill. Knock out a few quick attacks on the next guy in preparation for an automatic crit from AS which then has a good chance of leading me right back into a free crit from Soaring Dragon.

I can't wait to get it up to a higher level so I can beat down something tougher and see how it fares.

I haven't played BM on beta but everyone who has seems to think it's a real BM.

I'll be here all night folks!