FREEFORM DOMINATION -- A GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE TACTICS
Ideas for players who want a little more action, variety, and joy in their CoH/CoV battles.
I have always imagined that Im just having more fun than the average player, based on my personal approach. I never thought I could really explain my play philosophy very easily, but this represents my attempt to do so. I hope this will help some people shake out all their current notions of what MMORPG battles should be, and helps give them a fresh new look. Im also curious to hear from any of you with similar approaches to play.
This guide, while written with the dominator in mind, should in many ways apply to all archetypes. It is written from my own experiences as a freeform tactics player in general, and as a fire/fire dominator in particular. I have played all ATs to some degree, and many other dominator power sets as well. I love to play in-your-face squishies, so read this with that in mind.
Questioning the Player Guides
The guides have useful information, but digest what you can, then dare to question their assertions. Be bold and try a power they tell you is no good. Prove that they were short-sighted. Learning the synergy between two powers is much more important than just learning the limits of a single power.
Experimentation
Doms require more quick decision-making and more role-switching than any other AT in my opinion. There is no auto-pilot button, so it's important to do some solo work to train your instincts, even if you generally like to team. Forget about death for awhile, and test your limits by taking on groups that will make you sweat. Then experiment, experiment, experiment!
Improvisation
There are many, many ways to take down a group of foes, even given just one particular power set. Don't just find the fastest way, or least endurance-heavy way, or most impressive way... find LOTS of ways. Do them all. Let it become second nature to pull just the right way at just the right time. Invent three new ways of lining up enemies for a cone attack. Become the master of improvisation!
Team settings are unpredictable and chaotic. You never know how much aggro and of what type you will face. If you are the master of improvisation, you are ALWAYS ready for anything. Have some powers you don't use much? Before you respec out of them, get creative, and find three new uses you didn't realize they had.
Dropping the Attack-Chain Mentality
Who builds the better house, the layman with very detailed instructions, or the well-trained carpenter with just the idea of what a good house should be? Be the carpenter, and know everything there is to know about your tools. Don't be a slave to instructions, even if you were the one who wrote them.
Learn to use your WHOLE arsenal, and you'll never be waiting for a power button to pop back up. Instead, you'll be scanning across the powers that are ready to launch, and be able to instantly whip up a new recipe that fits the situation. Once this becomes second nature, you will be creating recipes in advance, based on powers that will be available within the next few seconds. This will do the following for you:
1. Teach you to pull off team-saving maneuvers from the brink of disaster
2. Make you a more versatile player
3. Keep you from ever getting bored
Target Switching & Room Juggling
Team members who tell you to stay focused on one or two targets do not understand Doms. Mastery will come to you when you can juggle a large room of foes, and this means finding exactly the right target at exactly the right time. I use tab/shift-tab/ctrl-tab AND the mouse, and am constantly scanning the room. As the targets cycle, I note the mob type, its remaining health, its status, its hold priority, whom its attacking, etc. Note that you can switch targets immediately after beginning to launch an attack, even if you havent seen the animation yet. You can often sneak in one extra light damage attack on an almost downed enemy, and switch back to your main target for something more substantial, all without a pause. This can take a lot of coordination, and requires a good camera angle, but as you do this more and more, you will be hit less and less. And thats a good thing.
Range Control
More than any other AT, the dom needs to move during battle, especially as things get more out of control on a large team. Learn to use auto-follow, jumping, and the camera to best get in and out of melee range. During battle, my left hand is on the keyboard and my right is on the mouse. I use the right mouse button and the scroll wheel together to set up optimum camera angles and distance at each position change as time allows.
Fitting the Team
You should be the most versatile member of your team. Take a look around at the people you're fighting with, and think about how you might plug the holes. Your job will most likely be multi-faceted: crowd control, damage, distraction, protection, wall-building, repulsion, clean-up, and hat-check girl. Do it all, and turn a mediocre team into a powerhouse. Sure, the guy next to you has been hitting two buttons over and over and gets a Nice heal at the end of a big fight. Let it go. You just had way more fun than he did. As a freeform dom, you probably just had more fun than the anybody else on the team as well. Keep it to yourself. Change your costume, run around in circles and talk silly if you want some attention. No, seriously
it helps.
Being Bold
You are squishy, and can die at any moment. Be bold anyway! Why? Because it's infinitely more fun. Take a long jump over the MM's bots, land in the middle of a pack who are beating on the brute, and cast your PBAOE hold and maybe a PBAOE damage to boot. Bounce off the ground by jumping backwards out of the pack, and getting a good camera view to pick up on any targets with the word "Missed!" above their heads. Before you have landed, have that enemy targeted, assess their health, and have a single hold or damage heading their direction.
Of course, it's helpful to know when the above tactic is folly and death. But its most fun to pull off when youre right on that line
Conclusion
Its your game; you paid for it. Play it the way you want to play it. Blaze your own trail. If its fun, youre doing it right. Keep that in mind when someone tells you your build is gimped. Its not gimped, its challenging. And a challenge overcome is a reward in itself. If you need an answer to the question Why did you pick that weak power?, just tell them Fun trumps damage.
Or if you want to be more mysterious, try Its my secret weapon.
