Silencer7

I'm probably going to go premium before long, and I was wondering if somebody could tell me how IO licenses work.

Are they applied from the moment of purchase, or do they sit in your email waiting to be claimed? And if so, can you buy a few in advance and sit on them until the previous one runs out?

You could use the extra slots to add more procs or more damage to roots. Its damage is high enough that you might find it worth enhancing.

I understand the desire to keep the set bonus in fire shield, but the status resistance IO is pretty pointless, because with domination up very few status effects will affect you anyway.

There's no reason to five slot your holds with basilisk's; the 5% status resistance isn't doing anything for you, and they'll perform just fine at four slots. You could also consider whether the third slots in hasten and embrace are worth it for you; you're only getting 5s and 2s (respectively) faster recharges out of them. The sixth slot in seeds of confusion is also fairly pointless.

There isn't much reason to take or run tactics with as much IOing as you're doing. You have a ton of inherent accuracy anyway, and it's endurance you could use for other things (replace it with assault if you want, for the damage bonus.) A five slot obliteration in consume would give you a lot better bonuses and a more useful power. One too many 6.25s means you can unslot the decimation in flares and use those slots for something else.

I would also take fly trap; it is pretty great.

You're on the internet. The image you present to people is all they have to go on.

If that image says "I'm an *******," you shouldn't really be surprised that people think you're an *******.

that statement about illusion really doesn't say anything.

can't decide how interested I am in dark control for dominators. I don't like that the immob is a cone or that they get another hold-field pseudopet (especially without a slow or something to lay down underneath it.) Single-target confuse... eh. Feels more like filler than anything.

On the other hand heart of darkness and haunt are interesting. I wonder what kind of recharge time haunt will have.

Propel is terrible in every way except being visually interesting/funny. The animation time is just completely awful, especially considering how often you fire it at an enemy that's dead before it hits. Even soloing, it compares unfavorably to just spamming crush > GD > whatever APP attack you want.

Crush and GD don't do any more damage than any other set's ST immob/hold, and smashing is resisted more often than some other damage types. I'm also not sure why lift needs to do half as much damage as levitate.

Dimension shift is pretty much useless. Either remove it and replace it with the aoe lift power that people always suggest, or maybe make it into some kind of aoe buff/debuff power. Wormhole is the most interesting power the set gets and it is pretty cool, but it's just not as easy to use or as useful as aoe controls that other sets get much earlier. In addition to difficulties with the teleport/knockback components, t's radius is quite a bit smaller than most other sets' aoe controls.

I tend to think that propel ought to be changed too; it's a neat idea, but even if you tuned the damage/activation time in a way that makes sense, I'm not sure how much a control primary needs two of it's powers to be straight ST attacks.

Gravity has the five standard powers that every set has, which are fine. The problem is that in the slots where other sets have more controls, more damage or useful utility powers, grav has propel and dimension shift. Both are terrible. As a whole the set doesn't do very good damage (neither lift or propel do enough damage to make them attractive) or do anything else that sets it apart from other sets.

It's also laid out in kind of an obnoxious way. You're forced to take either crush or levitate in the first slot, where most control sets can get their ST hold, and you don't get wormhole until 26.

Sorely, sorely tempted to reroll my fire/rad as a fire/time.

I don't wanna level him again, though

It is much easier to build a blaster for typed defense (smashing/lethal, energy, etc) than for positional. It usually requires fewer slots to get typed bonuses, and the APP/PPP defense shields are all typed.

Hitting the S/L softcap will require some toggles (certainly weave, combat jumping or hover, and possibly also maneuvers), and you'll have include a few kinetic combat sets. Kinetic combats area little expensive, but it's by far the most efficient way to spend slots for defense.

S/L will cover a lot of incoming attacks, but you can softcap for energy too. Using scorpion shield and some thunderstrikes in your ST blasts makes it pretty easy to do this.

I don't think it's blasphemous to call G-d "magic," in the context of the game. But regardless of your feelings about the Magic origin, it seems pretty clear that divine inspiration is not covered under Natural (unless the concept is maybe that the character only believes he's divinely empowered.)

Why would you respect a villain? I mean, they're villains; their MO is pretty much to use their power to gain advantage over others.

In fiction, we pretty much "respect" villains for one of two reasons:

1) They have incredible personal charisma and/or intelligence (Lex Luthor, Dr. Doom, etc), which makes them appealing. This isn't really 'respect,' though, it's just a cult of personality.

2) We're conflicted about whether they're actually villains; either their ambitions are noble, they are at least somewhat honorable, or have some other sympathetic quality (Magneto, for example.)

Obviously a lot of the time these overlap.

I actually think Recluse is a really good example of a villain who deserves "respect," it's just that he's gone kind of under-developed lately and the game doesn't do a great job of bringing home the "smart, charismatic, ruthless" part of the character.

The game doesn't really have the kind of third person exposition that's common in other media (since the focus always has to be on the player), so it's tough to really develop NPCs fully.

To me it's much more a question of how you want to play than what the different sets do.

Do you want to play in melee? elec/, ice/ and fire/ primaries do a good job there. If you'd rather play more of a ranged, blaster-y kind of dominator, earth/, mind/ and to a slightly lesser extent plant/ are what you want.

In the secondaries, earth, thorns, elec and energy make their living in melee range. Fire is the most ranged-heavy, and psi and ice are mixed.

As with most other ATs, fire will pump out the most raw damage. Mind/fire is great for reasons discussed; plant/fire seems pretty great too, and my earth/fire/fire is a terror at killing large groups.

People seem to like elec/earth and elec/ice a lot, and fire/ also pairs well with the more melee-oriented sets because hot feet is great.

edit: illusion (probably) hasn't been ported to dominators because it's kind of an ill-fitting set for what a dominator does. Only three of it's powers would even be affected by domination, and it lacks a lot of the harder control that dominators rely on for survival in the absence of a buff/debuff secondary.

I'm holding out hope for a dominator light/illusion set whenever the new one comes out, though

If anybody out there is sitting on the name Mirage, I'd really like it. I'm prepared to negotiate for its release; PM here or ingame is fine.

Brutes' damage cap is really high; you're rarely going to hit it on teams, and you'll never hit it solo unless you're popping more reds than hunter thompson.

What you can do is truck along between 300 and 400% +damage pretty consistently between AAO, stacked rage and a 3/4 fury bar. Footstomp, shield charge and a patron pool provide plenty of aoe, and SS can pump out solid ST damage as well.

End consumption is an issue (/shield has a lot of toggles to run and SS drinks blue bar), but the sky is the limit for SS/SD if you're willing to spend on it.

People have basically three problems with DP's damage output:

1) it's animation times are atrocious.

2) it doesn't get Aim.

3) it's not fire blast.

Not having aim is (imo) not a huge deal on a corruptor. Assuming you are tired of playing fire blast and don't mind DP's animations, DP is fine. The crashless nuke helps it do competitive damage, too. Redraw is an issue, but not a big one; DP's redraw is pretty quick and if you're noting playing a heavy click secondary you probably won't notice it much.

My DP character is a blaster, and I use fire ammo pretty much all the time. The debuff numbers are better for corruptors, but probably not by enough that you actually want to use cold or toxic against anything but the few enemy types that heavily resist fire. If you're interested in enemy resist types you can just craft a power analyzer temp and use it on stuff you're curious about.

There's nothing wrong with ST knockback powers. There's still potential for people to be obnoxious with them, but they aren't a big deal.

It's aoe knockbacks that are problematic.

you're making an open ended discussion thread in a subforum to talk about how nobody reads that particular subforum?

punch is a knockdown. Haymaker is a knockdown. KO Blow is a knockup that rarely moves mobs out of melee range. Foot stomp, duh.

Most of those fire/ss farmer threads would tell you you're doing it wrong if you're doing anything with hurl other than using it as a set mule, and if you're taking hand clap at all.

mine can almost chain blast-blaze. At %210 or so recharge there's a short gap before blaze goes off again. If I get a speed boost or something it works.

But you'd never buy a car that had hammers where the windshield wipers would be, would you? That's energy blast.

So okay, you're the ******* Leonardo of Knockback and you've labored to get a spawn clumped up on top of the tanker... now what? Do you fire off your aoes like every other set does? Maybe just energy torrent, since at least then they all go in the same direction.

ed: and SS is the poster child for what everyone in the thread is saying: it doesn't have knockback, except a very short distance one in knockout blow. It has knock down, which is tremendously useful.

these threads always go the same way: some people who play KB-intensive sets think KB is useful, everyone who doesn't thinks it's terrible.

There was a time when KB was valuable on some teams (mostly back when mobs lacked ranged attacks), but in the game as it exists today, it's awful. Every other gameplay incentive in the game encourages keeping mobs in a nice clump so that they can be debuffed, aoe'd and otherwise managed, and then there's the one guy with knockback who scatters them all over.

I personally wish KB were removed from every aoe power or replaced with KD, and that one or two single target powers in each offensive set had a KB proc attached to them. It does feel really cool and super-hero-y when you knock a guy over a railing or ragdoll makes a guy do something funny, and it's too bad that's currently banished to a few under-played power sets.

Well, obviously there's more work involved than simply cutting and pasting the power names into a spreadsheet or something

Still, it seems like we constantly hear that art and animation are what require the most time and expense, and most of that you would think could be reused by dark assault (and to a lesser extent, dark control.)

I also kind of think we're less likely to see dark/dark because they just got done giving it to blasters. Kind of boring if every other none-melee set that comes out is just another proliferation of dark.

/dark assault seems like a no brainer to me, but I would think that if we were getting it we'd already have it. All of the powers and animations exist already, so it'd just be a matter of cobbling the dominator grab bag of powers together and throwing it on the market.

I personally am hoping for a light/illusion themed control set, although they'd have to rework the controller illusion substantially for it to really make sense for dominators.