Obitus

That's a good slotting scheme. I was kinda pigeon-holed into 6 Thunderstrike on the Mind Dom, but would definitely want to toss some kind of hold enhancement in the power if I didn't have other goals.

You're absolutely right about the practical differences between Dominate and Char.

Yeah, it sounds to me like the build you posted earlier in the thread is probably the best bet for your play style. Or maybe a build with no DEF bonuses at all (to speak of). The RES could carry you pretty well when layered with your control.

Truthfully I looked over your build for quite awhile before the melee/ranged idea occurred to me; I couldn't think of a good way to improve what you had, so I went in a different direction. I'll give it more thought though.

FWIW, I roll with +95% in global recharge (not counting Hasten) on my Dom and it works just fine. I use a movement-key bind to switch the auto toggle back and forth from Hasten to Domination. YMMV. I obviously can't tell you what you'll be comfortable with. So many of these decisions are subjective, which is why it's hard to make a build for someone else.

Sure. You don't even need Spiritual or Destiny. You just need to get Rage's cycle time (that's recharge + activation) down to 65 seconds.

Personally I don't think it's worth the penalty -- double the crash frequency -- but different strokes for different folks. For 55 out of every 65 seconds, you sure do nice damage.

I remembered this thread of yours when I posted here.

With all due respect -- and with the understanding that you didn't intend to come off this way -- I don't think your reply is quite fair. Your own personal anecdotes are obviously as valid as anyone else's, but you're painting with a rather broad brush when you ascribe mechanical complaints about Ice Control to the lack of skill of its players. I could just as easily suggest that you're playing Earth wrong, with nothing but my unverifiable anecdotal experience to back me up. That conversation leads nowhere, though. If you truly believe that Ice is superior to Earth in practice, then you ought to be able to explain why.

Heck, from what I've read of your opinions on the matter, we don't even seem to disagree all that much. I don't see you advocating for Earth buffs, so how can you argue on the one hand that Ice could use (albeit small) improvement, but on the other hand that it's superior to its closest analogue (Earth)?

I have as much experience with Ice Control as the next guy, and way more than most. I don't have any particular problem playing the set, and especially not since the advent of IOs, but I don't think it measures up very well. It should either have more (more diverse) control, or higher damage. Jack is perhaps a smaller issue, but he is rather obviously and inexplicably inferior to analogous pet powers.

None of these are pressing balance issues. Doms and Controllers aren't exactly weak ATs, after all. In the former case, the most glaring disadvantages for Ice Control are indirectly filled by Secondary/Inherent powers. I just don't see how anyone could think that having a bajillion slows is an asset, in a game where most of the combat is centered around relatively short fights. Ice Slick's knockdown and Arctic Air's confuse are obviously great assets, but the former is functionally equivalent to Earthquake, and the latter takes a bit of time to work too. (And has its own attendant issues, at least on Controllers who don't take Psi Mastery.)

Back before I-13, I could at least hang my hat on Ice's superiority in PvP, but nowadays, PvP is a ghost town and I'm pretty sure the Diminishing Returns mechanic throws Ice's slows into the crapper.

Agreed. The great thing about adding DEF bonuses to Doms is that you're effectively layering mitigation, except instead of stacking DEF with resistance or healing, you're stacking DEF with control. Frankly, I do think that DEF does more for Ice Control than for other control sets, but that's neither here nor there; soft-capping one position or two types ain't gonna suddenly turn your ~1200 HP Dominator into an invincible Juggernaut if he doesn't also use his control powers effectively.

DEF just gives you more time to act.

32% melee, 32.6% ranged, and within two small Lucks of the soft cap to everything else. Lost 24% recharge from Silas' build, which may or may not be a deal breaker depending on how apt you are to juggle Hasten/Domination. Personally I use a bind to alternate them more or less automatically.

End use is high; I'd have to run some numbers to see how long it's sustainable under various circumstances. In big crowds, that shouldn't be a problem because of Consume.

Will have to revisit this later.

Moreover, Rain is not a terribly good single-target attack on its own merits. It has a longish activation and the damage isn't really anything special when compared with the various alternatives you have at your disposal. The only reason you'd really want to spam Rain against AVs is that the Reactive Interface proc turns Rain into a near-nuke-level power. That's only been true since the most recent patch, and I don't expect it to last. (It is hilarious right now, though )

Oh, and just to clarify: Rain doesn't have higher innate accuracy than Fireball. Or it didn't, the last time I paid attention. The real numbers display (and IIRC, Mids') is misleading; it shows you the accuracy of the power that summons the rain, at 100%, not the accuracy of each individual attack the pseudo-pet Rain directs at its targets.

I might be off by a handful of mags. I think I forgot to count the first activation as free (in other words, the stacking timer starts only after the first hold lands). Still, an unslotted char is gonna leave you well short of perma-holding an even-level AV.

As for whether it's worthwhile to slot Char as a hold, that's a matter of preference. I'm biased because I prefer a ranged playstyle. The character I've spent the most time on recently is a Mind/Fire/Fire Dom with soft-capped ranged DEF. For her, slotting Dominate as an attack is a no-brainer, because Dominate's 1/3rd of her ST attack chain. Even if I do come up against an AV that I want to permanently control, I can switch to Confuse stacking.

A Fire/Fire would have a more up-close-and-personal play style, and more damage overall. The fact that you can slot a relatively cheap purple set in Char is another factor. To make a long story short, it wasn't my intent to second guess you. There's no right or wrong answer.

Heh, well I'm pretty good at Mind/Fire Dom builds. I'm probably a little less recharge-hungry than most Dom players, so I don't know that what I'd come up with would suit you, but I'm happy to give it a shot if you like.

That's kind of a Catch-22 though. When you're trying to figure out your endurance sustainability, the amount of endurance each power costs is obviously important, but what's more important is how often you use each power.

In this case, you're saying that you want to put more end enhancement in Blaze because it uses more end per cast, but in switching out the Apocalypse set, you're also making Blaze recharge slower, which means that the end cost you're improving won't come up as often. At the heights of global recharge we're discussing, that's not going to be a huge factor for single-target attacks, but it is worth considering. For instance, using Silas' build above, the switch you advocate results in the following difference:

Blaze Before: 7.137 Endurance, 3.097 seconds recharge.

Blaze After: 6.72 Endurance (-0.417), 3.331 seconds recharge (+0.234).

Assuming you use Blaze every time it's available (which won't always be possible, but which you generally should try to do), the former slotting yields an end consumption of 7.137 / (3.097 + 1.188) = ~1.66 EPS. The latter slotting yields an end consumption of 6.72 / (3.331 + 1.188) = ~1.48 EPS.

That's a savings of 0.18 EPS, which is pretty good, but wait: you're also losing end reduction in a different attack. You mentioned Char, but I'll use Fire Blast since it has the same cooldown and endurance cost as Char --and because slotting Char as an attack would cost me a little global recharge in my copy of Silas' build. Let's assume that you use Blast at roughly the same rate that you use Blaze: (4.834 Decimation end cost - 5.133 Apocalypse end cost) / (~4 seconds) = -0.07 EPS.

So our net savings is about 0.11 EPS. Again, that's not terrible, but not quite as impressive as we might at first have thought. In practice, I'd be tempted to say that Blaze will probably be used more than the other ST attacks, because you're gonna have other stuff going on -- mezzes, utility powers, AoE attacks, etc -- and when you're only attacking sporadically, chances are you're going to lean on your heaviest hitter. I know that on my Dom I'll frequently wait out the latter part of Blaze's cooldown rather than use a different ST attack because I know that one Blaze will kill the target. But that brings up another point: If you're going to be using Blaze more often in practice than your other ST attacks, then you will use more endurance with the Apocalypse set, but you will also do less damage with the Decimation set (no purple damage proc).

The fact is that the best theoretical Fire/Fire ranged ST attack chain -- Blaze-Blast-Char (or Blaze-Blast-Ring) -- is all but impossible to run seamlessly, because of the cooldown on Blaze (12 seconds, versus Blasters' 10, a small wrinkle that tripped me up when I first started playing Doms). You need to get it down to about 2.77 seconds. Silas' build has obscene recharge, and yet his Blaze only clocks in at ~3.1 seconds.

Blaze is so freaking good that it's hard to make a credible argument for not reducing its recharge as much as you possible can, honestly.

FWIW, I'd lean towards the same approach with Fireball. Rain of Fire has a longer base cooldown, and thus will superficially benefit more from the extra recharge enhancement in the Ragnarok set, but I regard Fireball as more generally useful/spammable. Ball animates much faster, and doesn't require the targets to remain in a given area for 15 seconds to deliver its full damage. Given the duration of Rain's DoT, changing the slotting to gain 3 or 4 seconds isn't gonna suddenly turn it into a more than once-per-spawn power.

(The present state of the Reactive Interface proc might make Rain more attractive to use on a near permanent basis, but even then you're looking at a few comparatively rare situations -- AV fights -- in which you'd want literally spam Rain as soon as it expires, and frankly I expect that Reactive's interaction with Rain powers is gonna be fixed sooner rather than later. YMMV.)

A 2.1 second recharge timer gives you a 2.1 + 1.32 = 3.42 second total cycle time. Char doesn't cast instantly, after all.

So 17.9 seconds allows 5 hold effects to stack, for 15 mags. 26.82 seconds allows 7 holds to stack, for 21 mags. 21 + 15 = 36, which is way short of the 50+ you're gonna need. If you pick up the Meglomaniac Accolade, you can brute force your way through a +0 AV's protection for a little while -- and generally I tend to agree with your approach of slotting Char as an attack, but then again I'm rather burnt out on solo escapades like soloing AVs.

Don't expect your slotting to hold AVs consistently.

LOL, score one for blind faith in new features based on ambiguous phrasing.

There are breakdown recipes. There are conversion recipes. Up until this point, the phrase, "of your choice" has meant that you select the appropriate recipe from a list of options -- just like the list of options pictured in the OP, in fact. It has never meant, and there's no good reason to assume it means, that you'll get an entirely new window to pop up with a list of further options -- only after you've tossed your Very Rare component and 150 threads into the ether, no less.

Unlike a breakdown, the term Sidegrade doesn't unambiguously convey that you'll be using the target component to exchange for another. If the blurb wanted to be totally clear, it would have said something like, "Converts a Living Relic into another Very Rare Component of your choice." Preferably, it would go on to lay out that there would be another menu later.

Would that make the description pedantic? Perhaps. But it would also ensure that people weren't taking a leap of faith on the vague assurance of a three word phrase ("of your choice") that the devs had introduced an entirely new wrinkle to the crafting interface. Regardless, after years of reading these recipes, there's an understandable tendency to skip straight to the requirements. The blurbs have never been terribly elucidating. Power descriptions in general have been notoriously inaccurate, vague, or outright misleading in the past. (Go, go, four-year-out-of-date Unyielding-roots-you description.)

My only claim to the moral high ground in this case is that I didn't start by insulting everyone who disagrees with me by saying that they aren't using their brains. After you opened the door, all bets are off. You can claim that you didn't call anyone a moron, but your contempt-dripping examination of the Sidegrade recipe's laughably sparse blurb could hardly be interpreted as benign, and your protestations that you're accusing people of not using their brains, rather than accusing them of not having brains, is a meaningless distinction.

Your entire premise in your first post was a distortion of the opposition's viewpoint -- that we're all so terribly befuddled by the Incarnate crafting system in general. Not once, to my recollection, have you even attempted to defend or even explain why there have to be multiple redundant components within the same tier, why those components follow no obvious naming conventions, why choosing the wrong one should incur a penalty that means nothing in the long run -- because there aren't any meaningful choices with the Incarnate crafting system; given enough time, you can craft every single power if you so desire.

I didn't fail at reading comprehension. I laughed at first glance, muttered at second glance, and said on the very first page that the picture in the OP was just another counter-intuitive wrinkle in an Incarnate crafting system that is needlessly complicated to begin with.

Is there any other example in CoH crafting of a recipe that offers as its target the components required to build it? Are other conversion recipes presented in that format? Is there any precedent for having multiple outcomes for a given recipe?

If you wanna tell me that your on-first-glance reaction to that window was to read it exactly as intended, then that's one thing. If you want to tell me that anyone who reads it incorrectly, given years of contrary precedent, is an illiterate moron, then I am perfectly justified in telling you that you're an arrogant jerk.

But I wouldn't do that, because it's irrelevant even if it is true -- just as most of your contributions to this thread have been. All I'm saying is that if I didn't have forum-derived confirmation that the blurbs in those recipes are accurate, I'd have a hard time committing a Very Rare to what looks like it could be a mistake in the design.

Hey, you can spin it however you like. Based on all of the existing precedent for crafting Incarnate components -- or really anything at all -- mine is not an unreasonable reading of the situation. Quite the opposite.

We know that a window pops up when you hit the create button in this particular case, asking you what you want to convert your item into, but you've an uphill climb if you seriously wish to argue that the window in the OP's picture isn't counter-intuitive. The text in each recipe option is vague at best:

You're hanging your hat on the phrase, "of your choice," which might be clear enough under different circumstances, in a different context, but any user who's accustomed to crafting in CoH can be forgiven for scratching his head.

Look closer.

Hint: The game is telling him that the recipe for, say, a Living Relic, requires a Living Relic.

I did.

Got impatient and already had the Very Rares I needed. My bottleneck was always Commons -- or if you prefer, threads.

E-Merits are worth more than their thread breakdown value, because earning them is time-gated. I don't believe it's fair to gauge their value based on the thread cost of high-end components, though. Surely there's a good middle ground between 10% of 600, and 10% of 1300+.

I think your original idea -- charging 10% of the thread cost for sideways conversion of components -- is very a good one for components that people are actually likely to buy with threads. It's just a matter of figuring out what the most appropriate value for high-end components should be, given the most common methods for earning them.

I don't personally have problems with Windows Vista. Doesn't mean it's well-designed. Just ask Windows 7.

Are you capable of thinking on a level that extends beyond your own personal problems? Can you examine something rationally without having an emotional stake in the outcome of your examination? Oh, wait:

Obviously, you can't. More oblique personal attacks. Later dude.

I can't log into the game at the moment, but if I recall correctly, the equivalent thread cost in Empyrean Merits for a Very Rare is 600 (30 E-Merits * the 20 Threads you can get for an E-Merit).

That seems like a more reasonable starting point to me, given that the system seems designed purposely to discourage the pure-thread approach to Very Rare components. The presumed price should be based on the presumed method of advancement, which is running trials.

Truly, you have a dizzying capacity to proclaim the irrelevant. I'm sorry that you missed your flight, but frankly, your story doesn't even rate as a decent analogy. You're comparing a functionally meaningless choice in a game to a reservation you made with a real-life service. Honestly, I get a little tired of people dog-piling on how everything in their life should be perfect, irrespective of the effort, skill, or inconvenience that goes into providing the various, often-times freaking miraculous services in question.

You made the wrong reservation to ride in a cushioned chair, in a climate-controlled room, in a giant metal contraption -- through the freaking sky at blinding speed. If you arsed up the flight you wanted to take, even if it was the fault of the airline's website or whatever, it's still just a tad understandable that they might not have been able to fix it for you in time.

This is a game. No one else can possibly be inconvenienced if I happen to hit the wrong button in a mandatory reward screen that pops up at the end of every endlessly repeated trial. More importantly, choices in a game should be meaningful, but they should also serve some useful purpose. There is no depth or true complexity to the Incarnate crafting system. What passes for complexity in the Incarnate crafting system is entirely a contrivance, based purely on misplaced and over-important flavor text. For all that you and others want to criticize me (as proxy for anyone who may have picked the wrong option), on the basis that I'm too unfocused or too lazy to deserve the reward that the game saw fit to reward me -- I could just as easily accuse you of being naive and shallow for accepting the arbitrary flavor-text distinctions among crafting components as if they add richness and depth to our long-awaited end-game system.

Neither of those is a reasonable or relevant rebuttal in this discussion. You have once again proven unresponsive. You refuse to answer the important questions, and instead content yourself with oblique personal attacks. The only reason I even bothered to respond to this post of yours was that I wanted to get that airplane rant off my chest.

And ... you prove that you're only interested in talking about how well you deal with the Incarnate crafting system, rather than talking about whether it's well designed. You get an A for extraordinary unresponsiveness.

We're not discussing the randomness of component drops. We're discussing the gratuitous penalties for making what amounts to an accounting error on the reward-selection screen.

Do you really feel like keeping track of all the functionally redundant components is, in Uber's words, "a 'challenge' that [players] need to overcome through proper planning, and therefore 'win' by choosing the right thing the first time?" How is the already grindy gameplay of the Trials improved by that wrinkle?

If we both do the same trial, and both get functionally the same reward table, then what purpose does it serve to penalize me for choosing the wrong permutation of the same component? Whether I simply have a brain fart or a misclick or hell, even if I change my mind down the road, how is that penalty gameplay-relevant? Does my ability to use a pen, outside of the game make me a more deserving participant on a given Incarnate trial than the next guy who just plays it by ear?

Said it better than I did.

No it doesn't. It shows you what required salvage you have and what salvage you don't have, for a particular recipe. It doesn't show you whether you need that salvage elsewhere, too. There are four Incarnate powers in play here, for each character you decide to run through umpteen trials. That's why it's infinitely easier to write out a checklist beforehand.

I realize that any time anyone makes a complaint about the design being counter-intuitive or needlessly complicated, it's a lovely excuse for people to pile on and crow about their own mental superiority. I'm not saying that the Incarnate crafting system is beyond my feeble brain to process. I'm not even saying that I personally have any particular difficulty with it; after a couple of Trials, I simply sat down and wrote out lists of the components I need for each power.

My only contention is that Incarnate crafting is designed in a needlessly complicated manner, in the same way that any computer program can be usable without being user-friendly. Are you honestly disputing that point, or is this just a case of talking down for talking down's sake? Your commentary can be summarized as, "It's not that hard." So let's stipulate that you're right about that, but I ask you: Is it good design?

Apparently, the devs even agree with my position to some extent, because otherwise they wouldn't have added sideways conversion at all. I've already conceded that the costs for sideways conversion are much better than I initially thought, just from looking at the OP's screenshot. (See response to Arcanaville.) So now I'm left debating you over the underlying design, the flaws of which the devs have tacitly admitted.

Yes, because clearly, adding several distinct-but-functionally-identical categories to each tier of Incarnate salvage, on top of the multiple currencies we already have, addresses the concern that we have too many currencies.

Invention salvage is an example of good flavor text. Invention salvage drops plentifully and at random, and it's tradeable. Flavor is good where flavor isn't obtrusive, or even better, where it serves some functional purpose. Would the invention system be simpler if we just had three different components (Common, Uncommon, Rare)? Yeah, but having different tradeable types encourages participation on the market, too.

Post-Alpha Incarnate components, by contrast, are only awarded for two specific tasks, are untradeable and (were) basically unfungible (the breakdown rates being what they are, and initially lacking any sort of sideways conversion path). What we have is a system that is grindy by design, which is fine, but then on top of that, the devs decided for some unfathomable reason to add gratuitous penalties -- entailing more grinding -- to each misclick in a mandatory end-of-trial menu.

It's important if the salvage you have is only useful for the Tier 3 you already have. AFAIK, you can't combine two of the same tier 3 to create a Tier 4. Further, you can have a brain fart and craft the wrong tier 2 for the Tier 3 salvage you have.

Ok, after looking at the patch notes, I see that it's 10%. My bad.

Still, it's only 10% of the cost if people are actually paying that cost. The sideways costs for Common, Uncommon, and even Rare range from trivial to acceptable, because it's at least plausible that a lot of people would pursue them through brute-force thread conversions -- but using threads to buy Very Rares seems to be very heavily discouraged. If I got the Very Rare through a reward table or through a straight-up Empyrean Merit trade, then it's hard to look at 150 threads as a minor proportional expense. (Actually, don't E-Merits break down into 20 threads? So 30 * 20 = 600, which means that the sideways conversion can be considered as much as 25% of the cost, if you're using the seemingly approved method for obtaining Very Rares.)

On the other hand, you don't need very many Very Rares, and you probably should be expected to select them carefully.

Frankly, I'm more annoyed with the underlying design that seems to prioritize flavor text over functionality than I am with these conversion costs.