Tsuji

I think warshades have an in set stealth too, but it's been a while since I played mine.

I don't think doms will be having any problems...Actually they might get more popular.

I really don't see why; ice barely benefits from domination. I think Illusion would benefit from domination more than ice does, and ice is already a dom set. If I remember correctly the immobilizes already affect bosses with one hit, so dom is pointless there. Without those for ice you have 4 domination-able things, but most of your control comes from ice slick, which can't be boosted by domination.

I remember my mind control dom buddy always being pissed off at me because I didn't need domination to mess with bosses, heh.

Back when the changes went in Starsman made some nice charts of the relative ST vs AoE damage for all of the sets.

http://www.foundersfallshigh.com/mod...showpage&pid=5

That's the link.

This doesn't take into account utility, but it does give you a good idea of which sets are strong ST and strong AoE.

I pretty much agree with what everyone's said, but one thing you should keep in mind is that ice is actually a really good dominator primary, so you'll see it a bit more if you're a villain.

You don't have to really focus as much on control so you have more time to damage, you don't need the AoE immobilize for containment so you don't really lose much by not using it, and pretty much every set has melee attacks, so you're going to get a lot out of arctic air.

I'd imagine if/when they alter superspeed to be customizable they'd give you the option to have synapse's effect, which is pretty muted. Maybe even a nofx option....

Seems like a lot of people I know are having trouble distinguishing powersets with the new colors. I haven't had too many problems, so I'm wondering if maybe it's something with graphical settings. Resolution or that kinda thing. I'm on a reasonably high end machine and my friends are on low ones, but that's a pretty low sample size.

On a side note, I wonder if anyone has posted in the suggestions forum an idea to be able to disable effects for buffs from other players locally. That way they could still see the neon lights so they'd know when to rebuff, but you wouldn't go blind.

Or you could do what I did on my Dominator and soft cap S/L AND get the 30% ranged def in addition to that. My blaster's not that high yet, but I'd imagine you can do the same thing if you pick up the ice shield, since it seems pretty much the same as the black scorpion shield.

Fire or Energy are my favorites for earth.

Fire for damage. Earth already has more mitigation than you really need, so might as well go full damage. You can also say you're a lava monster.

Energy has power boost. You can power boost your -def effects, which would help against stuff like night widows and enemies that have hit a defensive power. You can also do that in PvP, although defense is a little bit of a joke right now anyway.

Thorns has good AoE, but it's single target damage isn't all that great.
As for the redraw, I've never been able to take a redraw character past 12 or so, but my friend took one to 50 and said by the time he hit about 25 he didn't even notice the redraw anymore.

One thing you should know is your plan for super procs might not be very noticeablel; if I remember correctly there's only one proc you can put into quicksand and two you can put into thorntrops. I know I had 5 of them in arctic air and never noticed them, but then again I was psi with the old PSW.

I have a Grav/Sonic too, but I specifically made it to screw up other teams in PvP. Having access to two intangibilities and also resist shields for the team made it pretty decent.

But for PvE...It's probably the most boring but cool looking character I have. The worst part is that it IS actually an effective support character, it just FEELS useless since most of its ability effects are a little low key. Most of its control is based around using singularity in creative ways. Someone above said use the resist shields on sing, and they're right. You can use singularity w/ recharge to quasi tank that way. Another trick is wormhole enemies into a corner with singularity blocking the corner. It's a ton of effort for returns that aren't really better than average control, though.

As for sonic, the resist debuffs do actually help if you stick the aura on a boss damage dealer and then hit any bosses they're attacking with the single target resist debuff. The resist debuffs really do make a difference, even if they're not obvious. Defensively, the resist auras aren't as great as FF's powers, especially since you can't use power boost on them, but you can shore it up a little by getting aid other. And with the APP shields you can get pretty high S/L resist numbers, which is nice. I'd have something to say about liquefy if it I could use it more than once a play session (heh heh)

Damage for this combo, however, is always going to be low and depressing to look at. You can't use your aura debuff while solo because singularity knocks everything out of its range, and as cool as propel is, it's terrible for actually fighting things. The single target resist debuff makes things a little more tolerable, but since singularity is a low damage pet it's more like being brought closer to the damage the other "offensive" sets do normally.

Any of the major AoE sleeps with dom up can knock out AVs at least for a little while. Ice and Earth both have AoE sleeps, but both have double the recharge of mass hypnosis, so I don't know if you can actually keep the AVs perma slept.

The other issue with their sleeps is that they both will be dangerous to use. Ice's sleep does damage, so when the AV busts out of the sleep it'll attack you. Earth's sleep is PBAoE. But you can use them to stop AVs for a little while. I've used the ice sleep to knock out the freedom phalanx to stop them from killing someone a few times. But mind is, to my knowledge, the only set that can keep a group of AVs perma slept.

What about something that gives the practical effect of phased, but isn't actually phased? All I can think of is super high acc debuff combined with super high def buff, but maybe too exploitable..

I originally figured it was either Tyrant or Praetorian Ghost Widow. The writing kind of reminds me of those pre CoV journals written from Ghost Widow's perspective. No idea who now, though. Maybe the Dream Doctor...

Energy torrent is a knockdown for tankers. I still think fire pool is better though. As lots of people have said, fire/ss can take out minions in a single volley if you use footstomp, burn, and fireball. For tougher stuff I keep it in burn using ring of fire, which I six slotted for immobilize, also giving me a 5% bonus to melee def.

I'm actually not a big fan of melt armor, given how low the debuff numbers are (-9% resist) and how high the recharge is. I built for melee defense so my global recharge numbers are pretty terrible, something like 10%. Melt armor won't help out much unless you have enough recharge to use it often.

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It'd be nice if they got something added. The selection is quite limited, although darkness mastery is kind of cool. The lack of selection is the reason I haven't actually made a scrapper past level 20 or so; nothing cool like that to look forward to. That and redraw.

I'd imagine the reason the APPs have stayed like this for so long is that while they aren't awesome, the AT as a whole doesn't have anything glaringly wrong with it. You can fix up almost any scrapper powerset combo in the game and get it up to AV soloing levels, so I'd imagine changing the APPs is, unfortunately, a low priority.

I'm a little optimistic that there will be some kind of new option added with Going Rogue.

Main downside for AE would be your AoE is a ranged cone, but hotfeet is melee. In normal teams that's less of an issue since you can use the cone then jump into melee, but stuff on AE lasts longer. If you're really lazy that might bother you, since it means you'd have to move more to get the most out of your AoE attacks.

Don't forget +damage buffs do more for you now than they did before.

I subdued something for over 300 damage today with no debuffs.

Downside is I forget to control sometimes and then die horribly.

If we're going to go into stuff like that, we'd also have to determine which powers he was using, since many of them had flat out damage increases in addition to the general damage buff.

Maybe he's a level 10 /ice dom?

Everybody hates missing.

Fire/psi is still fine. It's not as highly damaging as Fire/Fire, but you are better at surviving than fire/fire and have great end management. It's a good tradeoff, I think. Hot feet didn't get nerfed, and a lot of fire/psi's damage actually came from hot feet. If you don't mind jumping around it's pretty close to what it was before. Single target damage has gone up. Not a ton, but I definitely notice the increase on my Ice/Psi. ST gets a lot better with high recharge, but you'll never be doing the same ST as other doms. But hey, you'll have imps...The ST difference is particularly pronounced at lower levels; I can actually stomach doing ouroboros arcs on my new build.

I think energy is just really popular right now because people always secretly wanted to use energy because it looks cool. Now that it's a decent set they're making tons of builds that use it.

For /psi almost all of the powers are useful now. The only one I wouldn't consider slotting is psionic dart, and I wouldn't take it either if I had a choice. Mind probe is definitely your most important leveling attack. TK thrust is also important now for fighting robots etc. Mental blast is good to take for leveling, though you might consider respeccing out later. Definitely take psychic scream, and take drain psyche at 20.

I think the snipe isn't very useful even with the new damage, but some people like it. I found myself just using it as an IO mule most of the time, so I got rid of it.

Too bad psi doesn't have any endurance management powers, eh. Us poor Psi doms...

Stalagmites is an AoE disorient, and it can be up for nearly every group. You don't have to worry about your KB when using that.

The most important synergy is definitely power boost, though. Earth has a huge number of defense debuffs and even a tohit debuff. Power boost will boost the effectiveness of the def debuffs at the very least, making it easier to hit things. I'm not sure if the debuff affects the -tohit in earthquake, but if it does, there's another reason to take /energy. This is somewhat less useful in PvE given how everyone slots for acc, but in PvP it's very strong.

Power boost does affect -movement speed, but as far as I can tell it doesn't affect -recharge, making it less useful for ice. Everything will be at the -movement cap anyway.

But if they make bizarre changes due to X or Y player who is in the super secret early alpha agents club for testing stuff, you might end up with the same situation. So subjective feed back is really really tough to use. I'd imagine most of the subjective feedback on this set of costumes and TFs will end up being incorporated into I16 and Going Rogue, but may not change anything that has actually been released.

The PvP fixes are a whole other monster, though. I was in a pretty hardcore PvP VG at the time, and a lot of the members were actually in the small group that was doing the PvP testing, and it sounded more like an issue of too many cooks driving the devs nuts.

The real problem with CoH pvp, as I see it, is that the powers were never developed for fighting one or two superfast moving players. The whole game and player powersets would have to be redesigned for PvP to be not completely ridiculous, and is something they should have held off on until around now, when they have a lot more money and devs.