Obitus

Eh, if you heavily emphasize the word situational, then I agree. The problem with recovery buffs is that they tend to encourage all-or-nothing build strategy. Though it's true that infinite endurance sustainability is rare, it's also rarely necessarily or even desirable in practice. Being endurance stable is, I think, a far lower standard, especially for Blasters, whose single-target attacks are generally very endurance efficient.

Basically all I'm trying to say here is that you should try, if possible, to give your build generally good-enough recovery without Drain Psyche. If you wanna use the recovery buff in an odd situation, then go for it; just don't build around the recovery buff, because there's really no other good reason to use Drain Psyche every time it's available.

The nuke thing is a very minor point, IMO, overrated on this forum. You can use Drain Psyche to get around the recovery debuff, but it's somewhat awkward to do (basically requiring that you hit DP before you nuke) and by no means foolproof. Assuming you hit all ten targets and assuming you enhance the power for heal instead of recovery (which you should do), DP alone will only nullify 3/4ths of the nuke's debuff. You have to have another +150% in recovery from other sources to get on the positive side of zero, which is -- oddly enough -- another argument in favor of not putting all your recovery eggs in the Drain Psyche basket.

Yes. Drain Psyche is significantly stronger on a Dom, both by itself and in combination with Dominators' other powers. It's still good on a Blaster, but it can tempt you to make sub-optimal build and combat decisions.

Choice of primary also, obviously, influences the conversation. I think a lot of people (including myself) have a bit of an under-estimated view of Drain Psyche because we've paired it with Fire Blast. When you really think about it, almost every other Blaster Primary has a good deal more mitigation, and it doesn't take a whole hell of a lot of layering mitigation to make all the difference for a high-order regeneration buff. Anything that slows the rate of incoming damage even the slightest bit can be the difference between death and functional immortality.

Both Drain Psyche and World of Confusion benefit so much from high-end IO bonuses that they're scarcely recognizable. Adding DEF bonuses has an obvious effect on the former; adding the Coercive Persuasion proc to WoC turns a terrible power into a very potent melee-range control power in crowds -- and that melee-range control power just happens to make Drain Psyche more effective, too.

In any case, Drain Psyche definitely needs slots. It's gonna suck at 20; it's gonna get much better as soon as you can six slot it. It's gonna get much much much better if and when you can pair it with IO DEF bonuses. As a regen buff, it's rarely going to be worthwhile against fewer than three targets.

So with all of that said, it's dangerous to build around Drain Psyche's recovery buff. It's a nice perk, but you don't want to pigeon-hole a Blaster build into closing into melee unnecessarily as a matter of course. It's not like Mental Manipulation is particularly good for Blappers; Psychic Shockwave is nice, and Mind Probe is passable, but you're generally not going to see a signficant increase to your kill speed by playing a Mental Blapper. There's a reason Mental comes packaged with a long-range cone attack (Psychic Scream).

Drain Psyche is best used as a situational survivability buff, and/or a situational regeneration debuff. On teams, you're probably best off ignoring the power almost completely, melting spawns from range with Primary attacks and Scream.

It's a matter of semantics, then. I don't consider my Team 2 example to be less than a "high-end team" in the grand scheme of things. Generally, I consider anything with that amount of buff/debuff to be in the very upper echelon of possible team compositions. You may not personally wish to run that team. Hell, ideally, I'd want to tweak it too just to account for user error -- but at the end of the day what matters is that team is capable of doing crazy things, in principle.

Fair enough; I've been too strident at times in this thread too.

(Also, as an aside -- the last time I checked, anyone with Hover and a means of holding Recluse's attention can tank him. Poor AI FTW.)

Yes, with a minor quibble: Rains are just pseudo pets with an very wide-area damage aura that ticks every 0.2 seconds. Or so I understand. Blazing Aura would be no less broken if it ticked ten times faster than it does now. (Or would have been no less broken, before today.)

The debuff duration is a discrete, secondary effect of the aura. It just happens to have a duration that (at least on paper, see previous post about the bug) outlasts the pet by 15 seconds. The debuff's duration had nothing to do with Reactive before today's patch, and has nothing to do with Reactive (or any proc) after today's patch.

The fact that Reactive only stacks to 5 was basically irrelevant because fully stacked Reactive is really effing strong, delivering something like 5 * 50 damage over a handful of seconds. As you can imagine, a full 15+ seconds of fully saturated Reactive (3-4 cycles of fully stacked DoT @ ~250 damage apiece) is plenty enough to turn any old Rain power into a quasi-nuke. (A level 50 minion only has about 430 hitpoints. A level 50 Lieutenant only has about 850 hitpoints.)

The intention was pretty clearly that a single player, even one with really fast attacks and the Tier 4 proc, would find it nearly impossible to stack Reactive to the limit consistently, and very hard to stack Reactive much at all in an AoE. As it is, a single application of Reactive is a pretty nice boost to a given attack, and FWIW, I prefer it stays that way. (Edit: To clarify, what I prefer is a stronger DoT that's very hard to stack, as opposed to a weaker DoT that's much easier to stack. Before today's patch, what we had was the strength of the former, and for some few builds, more than the ease-of-stackability of the latter.)

It's a fair assumption in principle. It's just that the number you chose to represent that assumption is arbitrary.

And as Arcana notes, you make no distinction among different builds, which is understandable, but by the same token you haven't proven anything. The very premise on which the bulk of your assumptions are derived -- that survivability can never be an issue before the Tank's inclusion -- is designed (intentionally or not) to marginalize Tankers.

I believe it's fair to say that a really high-end, heavy buff/debuff team will have survivability well under control for the vast bulk of the game's content. I believe it's fair to say that such a team, generally, doesn't benefit much from adding a Tank, and will probably even lose some sliver of efficiency in the deal. Again, through most content.

I don't believe it's fair to say that all high-end teams are necessarily degraded by the inclusion of a Tanker, or that no high-end team can benefit more from a Tanker than from a hat-picked DPSer. I don't believe anyone here has argued (as you asserted in a previous post) that a Tanker would necessarily increase overall team speed, just that there are instances where a Tanker can increase overall team speed.

By this point, the starkness of your original statement (which may not have been fully intended) has degraded into a rather tepid position, over which it's hardly worth arguing. We're down to splitting hairs. All I will ask is that you consider the following two team loadouts; look at them and think about whether the one without the Tanker is necessarily better-suited to run something like, say, the Lord Recluse Strike Force in a good time.

Team 1

2 Kinetics Defenders
2 Storm/Sonic Defenders
1 Rad Defender
1 Fire Blaster
2 SR Scrappers

Team 2

2 Kinetics Defenders
2 Storm/Sonic Defenders
1 Rad Defender
1 Fire Blaster
1 SR Scrapper
1 INV/SS Tanker

Both teams satisfy the general offensive requirements of your calculations. Neither one has a whole lot of buff/debuff-derived mitigation that translates well to a fight against multiple level 53 AVs. The task is certainly possible for both teams, even easy depending on the specifics of each build and the skill of the players -- but one team has a distinct, and potentially very important, advantage. The other just has imperceptibly more damage.

Team 2 might actually finish off the Phalanx faster because it has an easier time bunching them together.

Eh, I think your first reaction was more or less appropriate. Sleet can be double-stacked, but it takes awhile to get there -- and there is (or was, last I checked) a bug with the power that ends the duration of the debuff upon the rain's end if the target is still in the area.

Heat Loss can be used by Cold characters to stack another -30% RES, but that debuff is only available about 1/3rd of the time, best-case.

Then you've got Storm, which has a Sleet analogue and no other -RES. And Radiation, which can't double-stack Enervating Field. Then you've got Dark, which can double-stack Tar Patch pretty easily, but again it takes awhile to get there. Then you have Empathy, Force Field, and Kinetics, which have no -RES at all.

Pain Domination can (AFAIK) only stack about -20% RES. Thermal can only stack about 22%. So you're left with Traps, Trick Arrow, and Sonic Resonance.

It's certainly not a stretch to argue that the ability to stack 60+% in RES debuffs in a gameplay-relevant length of time is comparatively rare. Then again, if you're cherry picking every team, it's also not a stretch to argue that the -RES debuffers you recruit will have that ability.

Sleet has a 15 second duration. The debuff lasts for 30 seconds, or at least it's supposed to do. The last time I checked, there was a rather persistent bug with Freezing Rain and Sleet that randomly cancels the debuff on the rain's end if the target is still in the area.

FWIW, on the subject, I have always disliked the 10s-per-proc standard. I think limiting the proc rate of auras/pseudo-pets is a fine idea in principle, but once per 10s seems like too low a limit. That objection is almost purely subjective, though; I have no good numerical argument for any particular value below 10s. Any change I'd suggest would be arbitrary.

Edit:

That might be nice, but it's not clear that the game is even capable of distinguishing between auras emanating from players, and auras emanating from pseudo pets. They have always, AFAIK, been treated as the same by the devs.

Yeah, I think F2P gets a bad rap to some degree because the model is so new, and therefore it tends to attract previously subscription-based games that are desperate for something, anything, to improve their situation.

They fail because they were failing regardless.

There does seem to be a loose consensus among MMO players that the conversion to F2P spells doom, because it often does spell doom. But that's little more than a widespread post hoc fallacy; there's no clear evidence that the conversion to F2P is the direct cause of failure in most cases.

Whatever your opinion on the merits of the F2P model, changing mid-stream from subscription to F2P is a big deal; it does represent a large risk. Publishers are understandably reluctant to take that risk when they have any choice at all in the matter. The trick is in the timing and in the execution.

As far as CoH goes, it already has a kinda-sorta, quasi-F2P model. We have trial accounts that can get a taste for the game and (in theory) improve low-level population volume. We have Booster Packs. We have a (minor) population divider in Going Rogue. It isn't a stretch to think that CoH could move farther down the F2P path, either incrementally or in one big go. It isn't a stretch to think that such a move could be successful.

FWIW, I think it's gonna happen eventually no matter what we say. Hopefully it'll be done right. Hopefully the game will survive in one form or another for years and years to come.

To be clear: I'm not questioning your personal decision to code a program to resolve these calculations. You're obviously entitled to do with your time what you wish, and as you say you were working towards a far more complex operation than what you ended up with in this thread.

All I'm saying is that the calculations are not so difficult in principle that they can't be explained, or summarized with an example -- like the one you provided in a subsequent reply to me. A 10 year-old math student could do the long-hand calc in my post (probably faster than I can, these days). Invoking the complexity of the program (perhaps unintentionally) glosses over the simplicity of the math, and frankly, the inherently arbitrary and simplistic assumptions on which the math is based.

Numbers that simple, used in a public forum, should not be justifiable only in private. And just for the record, it would have taken me far less than two hours to work through those 12 calculations even by hand. Let's not get too pompous about efficiency.

You don't think that, over the course of seven years, I might have experienced a buff/debuff stacking team? Even in the PuG ghetto, believe it or not, really spectacular team compositions occasionally come together by accident.

What you're doing is no secret. It's also not so unreservedly fool-proof as you've implied in this thread. I suspect you understand that, because you mentioned running a Stone Tank through the first few runs of the Incarnate Trials.

If you wanna speed run TFs with cherry-picked team, presumably at +0, then that's great. More power to you. But there are situations -- perhaps very rare situations, but they do exist -- wherein a squishy-heavy team, even buffed to the gills, can be vulnerable. What a Tanker can bring to a absurdly high-end team is a redundancy that is arguably much more valuable in practice than the miniscule DPS advantage another DPSer would. Over-kill is going to be the rule rather than the exception in such a team, regardless.

There are no hard and fast rules. You prefer bringing an Illusion controller to provide that redundancy; that's fine, but who's to say that you couldn't achieve the same level of team offense by replacing the Illusion by a higher-DPS buff/debuff build*, and a Scrapper with a Tanker? Your calculations certainly can't, because they treat all broad categories of build as monolithic, unvaried.

And even if we accept your numbers at face value -- ignoring that we can change them drastically with a plausible reinterpretation of the underlying assumptions -- they really don't make a strong case.

My pointing all of that out (and more) doesn't make me desperate to prove you wrong. Actually, you've done at least a good a job of disproving your own initial position wrong as I have.

[* - Illusion's pets are nice, but they're largely unfocusable, and Illusion doesn't have a whole lot of AoE, nor any reliable means of setting up Containment against a hard target, on its own. Ill/Cold and Ill/Rad are widely reputed to be perhaps the two most uber character builds in the entire game, and with good reason, but that reason has more to do with their solo capability and their flexibility in team play, rather than any particular advantage in an otherwise ideal team.]

Mental Manipulation. Notable for its enhancable regeneration debuff (Drain Psyche). If you have a build that soft-caps DEF, then a */mental Blaster should solo some GMs rather easily.

Yup. He also goes on to say in his second post that the lack of challenge in the I-20 game makes him less and less enthusiastic about logging on. Take from that what you will, but it's not reasonable to argue that all of the responses ostensibly directed at the thread's title are entirely irrelevant.

Your calculations are not real data, or proof of anything, unless you have something far more behind them than the rather simple assumptions you described. If your assumptions are as presented, then your math is not only arbitrary; it appears to be incorrect, as noted in my previous post.

Either way, you ought to be able to articulate what you did without resorting to the lame excuse that your code is too complex to share on the forum. Your two hours spent coding a program from scratch don't even appear to be justified by the rigor of the calculations; your stated assumptions lead to grade-school math that could more easily be done in a spreadsheet or even by hand. Like it or not, your insistence that your numbers are somehow simultaneously inexplicable and unassailable only reinforces the impression that you're an albeit competent person with a vastly inflated sense of the difficulty of the tasks he performs.

From the beginning, you've been assuming your own conclusion. The only reason people have been willing to entertain your tautological premise that Tankers' greatest strengths (aggro control, survivability) are necessarily undesirable on high-end teams is that even if we accept that DPS is all that matters, your case still isn't strong.

Since you haven't shown your work, all I can do is try to verify your calcs by using your own assumptions (bolded above for reference). Unless you've misstated those assumptions, or unless I'm misreading them, something doesn't add up right. So let me take the above example using your assumptions as I understand them and try to work it out long-hand.

The specific DPS numbers aren't important. The relationships are all that matter.

DPS toon (Scrapper) = 100 base DPS (capped at 500, 500% of original)
Kinetics toon = 40 base DPS (capped at 120, 300% of original)
Generic debuff = 60 base DPS (capped at 180, 300% of original)
Tanker = 66.6 base DPS (capped at 266.4, 400% of original)

(A Tanker's base damage is 2/3rds of a Scrapper's, by slainsteel's own acknowledgement here in this very thread. Regardless of how you weight crits, that's a fair approximation.)

Opponent is +3 relative to player characters, so all offensive powers except for Bruising are 65% effective. With all of that out of the way, let's try to work out the above-quoted comparison:

4 de/buffers (2 of them Kins) and 4 Scrappers: ((2 * 120) + (2 * 180) + (4 * 500)) * 0.65 = 1690 DPS w/o resistance debuffs.

1690 * (1 + (1.2 debuff * 0.65 purple patch)) = 3008.2 DPS

4 de/buffers (2 of them kins), 3 Scrappers, and 1 Tanker: ((2 * 120) + (2 * 180) + (3 * 500) + (266.4)) * 0.65 = 1538.16 DPS w/o resistance debuffs

1538.16 * (1 + (1.2 debuff * 0.65 purple patch) + 0.2 Bruising) = 3045.55 DPS

So using the same apparent methodology that landed you at a 5.4% advantage for the non-Tanker team (2310 / 2191 = 1.054), I've ended up with a 1.2% advantage for the Tanker team (3045.55 / 3008.2 = 1.012).

Strange.

Anyway, your numbers are only data to the extent that the assumptions are valid, which isn't a given. Personally, i think your assumptions are good enough for an on-paper analysis like this one, but analyses like this one are implicitly over-simplified. The bottom line in this case is that even if your numbers are right, they only tend to demonstrate just how miniscule the differences we're discussing are even in the abstract.

I don't believe that was the conclusion you set out to prove. In practice, it's hard to imagine that such low margins of disparity would be noticeable, much less materially relevant to most any team's (whether low-end or high-end) performance.

Yeah, and even hardcore marketeers (I think) generally compartmentalize their activities; a handful of alts might be dedicated to playing the market, while active combat/leveling characters probably just sell their own drops, only bothering to craft the most obviously profitable recipes.

There is, in short, no firm basis to say that any market slot that's tied up with salvage listings would otherwise have a more profitable crafed IO in it. Crafting recipes indiscriminately can, in fact, lose you money, to say nothing of the added inconvenience.

As a means of playing the market, selling salvage is sub-optimal, but I think MrLiberty took his argument about three steps too far. It is not always silly to list salvage for more than 1 inf. An active toon selling her drops at the market only needs to take an extra couple of seconds to scan the last five, and if it shows a high going rate, type out a value arbitrarily higher than 1 inf to avoid being lowballed.

If the listing price is in the sweet spot, then that salvage generally won't tie up market slots for any gameplay-relevant length of time. There's a difference between farming for dirt, as Liberty puts it, and making quick, common-sense decisions that might nets you an extra few thousand influence here and there for items that you were going to sell anyway. FWIW, I personally tend to bid very high for salvage when I'm outfitting my characters because I can't be bothered to wait. I generally don't list non-rare salvage for more than 1 inf either, but if something's going for 500k, you betcha I'm gonna list for at least 25k.

If that 500k is a trival sum, which it is in the grand scheme, then losing the market fee on a 25k listing sure as hell doesn't matter.

Yes, it's silly to dismiss the point of view of someone who's got a recent registration date. Some of the best players I know are newish. Some of the most long-time vets I know haven't registered on the forums. Hell, I don't even claim to be a great player; I spend a lot of time and effort tweaking builds so I don't have to be a great player to carry a team.

That said, it is also silly to assume that people with old registration dates are incompetent, which is essentially what slainsteel did. He comes into the Tanker forum, seven years after the game's launch, and announces, as if to proclaim a new and great discovery, that force multipliers are the key to the team game.

Well, no sheet sherlock.

What he fails to understand (or at the least, acknowledge) is that after a certain point, a team's force multiplication capability makes the rest of the team's composition almost irrelevant. Even if it's true in theory that a Tanker is less effective than a Scrapper on a given high-end team, the difference in practical terms is miniscule, potentially less important than a player's disk speed, certainly less important than the particular builds in question, and the individual players' skill (and/or familiarity with the content).

slainsteel all but acknowledged that, but still he soldiered on with his transparent bid for controversy. Contrary to his recent martyr act, it was he who opened up with the first attacks on other people's competence.

FWIW, I don't care how slainsteel plays. I'm sure his teams work quite well -- never questioned that they do, in fact. I am, however, forced to question the depth of his expertise, if he truly believes that there's one true way to build a high-end team. You don't need Illusion Controllers; in fact, if you don't have a Controller with Illusion as a primary, one of the more obvious substitutions to make, even at the bleeding edge, is a Tanker instead of a generic DPSer. (That can actually work to your net favor too, if the Controller in question has a higher-damage primary, like Fire, or if you replace the Controller entirely with, say, a Cold/Sonic Defender).

There are, in short, many ways to skin a cat. The mark of skill and experience generally isn't to repeat by rote one tried-and-true method; on the contrary, what skill and experience give you is the ability to adjust. For a lot of veteran players, I suspect the adjustment is more fun than simply running roughshod over easy content again and again with approximately the same team composition.

So there may well be a disconnect between a lot of forum posters and slainsteel, with respect to his preferred playstyle. That doesn't mean that those posters don't understand the mechanics, though, or that they don't know how to play. In my experience, the people who understand the mechanics best are actually people who don't run in cherry-picked teams as a rule, people who like to solo or PuG, and therefore desire to make builds that can handle as many situations as possible. Achieving that goal requires lots of build tweaking, lots of calculation, lots of insight. Throwing together half a dozen buff/debuff builds and a coupla token DPS toons really doesn't.

As far as in-game accomplishments go, I'll take Nihilii's 57-minute solo MoITF over slainsteel's [insert time here] 8-man MoITF any day of the week. But wait, Nihilii is a total n00b, amirite?

You're so right, dude. Nihilii obviously has no clue how to play the game.

That much is obvious. You've been all over the place. Your first post (quoted below for reference) in this Tanker thread was clearly aimed at controversy. Ever since, you've been wriggling this way and that, back-pedaling furiously while at the same time tossing potshots at any who disagree with you.

First, you say that Tankers are crutches for weak or middling teams, a waste in high-end teams.

Then you say it's absolutely key that we compare Scrappers and Tankers at the damage cap. When those numbers turn out poorly for you, you emphasize the importance of a Scrapper's ability to solo a Cyst, but you still assume he's at the damage cap. Then you admit that the biggest bottleneck to your speed is travel/loading time, which has nothing to do with AT/build selection. Then you admit that Tankers only lose you about 10% of your speed.

So by your own logic, a player's computer hardware is more important than whether he plays a Scrapper or a Tanker. By your own logic, a so-called high-end team cannot be even the slightest bit slower than record breaking, which is unreasonable on its face. A high-end team must have Illusion Controllers too, apparently.

No one will tell you that your preferred play style is wrong, or that you should bring a Tanker if you don't want one. But it's implausible for you to argue not only that a Tanker's comparatively insignificant offensive disadvantage severely impairs a high-end team, but also that it is impossible for any team with a Tanker on it to match your times. As others have pointed out, the offensive comparison between Tankers and others isn't static; it varies dramatically based on power set selection and IO investment.

I say it's implausible based on your own numbers, your own self-conflicted logic, your own tortuously circuitous thought processes. If you wanna back out now on the basis that you feel a high-end team runs an STF in 28 minutes, and a low-end team runs it in 30, then be my guest. But you know and I know and everyone else knows that that wasn't your original premise. I don't even think you really believed your original premise. Your purpose was, as someone else recently observed, antagonistic.

Tam speaks truth.

I wonder how many people complaining that the game is suddenly a cake walk are running at +0? The game has been trivially easy for quite some time for anyone who made any effort to maximize their build, but the content is still varied enough to slow you down at higher difficulties, especially solo.

Reactive rain powers are throwing the balance off a quite a bit, but meh. I ran +4 Barracuda a coupla weeks ago; that took awhile, even with all of the other goodies. (Before Reactive rains hit the scene, to be clear; those would have made the +4 ambushes a lot easier, but +4 Reichsman would still have been a hilarious bag of HP.)

People like slainsteel are obviously entitled to their preferences; I would never tell him how to play, and in fact I admire some of the times he's posted for speed runs -- but it strikes me as a little disingenuous to admit on the one hand that you've gone out of your way to trivialize the game and then on the other that you've succeeded too well. It's a self-serving argument, though I'm sure slain didn't intend it to be.

Me? I'll just continue to run in semi-PuGs on little old Triumph. Having a ball.

Bluntly, no one cares what you -- slainsteel, specifically -- choose to do with your high-end teams. Your logic here is circular: "Why would I want a Tanker on a team that already has a Tanker's greatest strengths covered?" The answer is that you wouldn't, but not every team has invincible Illusion pets coming out of its ears. Believe it or not, there are even high-end teams that might actually want to have a meatshield for certain encounters.

(The Freedom Phalanx in the LRSF is perhaps the best example in non-Incarnate content; even with 8 buff/debuff sets, support characters can still be two-shotted in that scenario if they're not careful).

All you've managed to demonstrate is that your teams don't need or even want Tankers, or Scrappers, or Brutes, or Blasters, or really anything that isn't a debuff build. That's fine. It's not a particularly interesting observation, though. The game was, I'm grateful to say, designed not to enforce rigid team roles. Of the above list, I'd still say that Tankers are the most generally appealing to teams of all shapes and sizes. You haven't even really tried to make a plausible argument to move me from that estimate.

Patronizing much? You're making my argument for me, which is that in the so-called high-end teams you run, the only time that the offensive contribution of one Scrapper/Brute/Blaster even arguably matters is against AVs/GMs.

The point is not that the Tanker has the overall damage potential of a Scrapper. The point is that in the situations you describe, the Tanker's disadvantage against trash mobs would be unnoticeable, and the Tanker's resistance debuff is arguably a net advantage against non-trash mobs.

You can't have it both ways. You can't put on your my-teams-are-so-much-more-uber-than-you've-ever-seen hat, while at the same time twirling your one-team-member's-offense-matters-oh-so-very-much mustache. All I'm saying is that if your standard is an Illusion/Rad Controller in super-duper-stacking-debuff team, then just about any individual build is gonna pale by comparison. It was just odd to me that you would single out Tankers, which are perhaps the singular melee AT most well-suited to complement otherwise squishy-heavy teams.

Arcanaville said it better than I have, though, so let me recap:

The why is less important than the how, I guess. AA isn't affected by Domination because Domination, itself, doesn't actually do anything to control effects. Each relevant control power is individually set to add a second, stacking control effect if Domination is active on the character.

Domination is just a flag, in other words. For whatever reason, AA wasn't set up to check for that flag. There's a small possibility that that's an oversight.

More likely, though, I think that the devs decided Arctic Air is too freely available in comparison with other wide-area control powers to benefit from Domination. Or it could be simply a quirk of the power's mechanics: because AA's confuse only has a 30% chance to fire, how exactly would you stack a second one top of that using the existing Domination mechanism? If you simply add a second 30% chance-to-fire Confuse, then AA will not benefit in the same way that other powers do from Domination.

Instead of increasing the magnitude of the control, a second Domination-prompted confuse effect would increase the probability of confused targets. (1-0.3)^2 = a 49% chance of mag 3, rather than a 30% of mag 6.

Actually yeah, the more I think about it, the more complicated that sounds from a balance perspective. Suffice to say that AA probably doesn't need to benefit from Domination.

I don't question that there's some value in freebie players. In theory, yes -- the F2P model insulates paying customers against whatever gameplay problems might arise from low population volume. F2P also can attract new customers, either in full or in part (microtransactions).

All of that is fine, but a fully paid customer is unquestionably more valuable than one who doesn't pay at all, on an individual level if not on a collective level. And that's what's tricky: you don't want to alienate your existing, paying customer base by seeming either to give too much away for free, or by restricting the free players so much that the paid customers effectivey can't play with them. Worse still is the prospect of making your paying customers feel like they're volunteer salesman.

And then there are the obvious concerns about introducing a segment of the playerbase that has no stake in the community. RMT spammers, griefers, etc. None of the above means F2P can't work, as I've already acknowledged*, but there are risks involved.

[* -- Hypothetically acknowledged, because we know that the possibility of other games on this plane of existence is about on par with the laughable prospect of a moon landing.]