Vysires

From my point of view Electric Armor and Dark armor have some strong similarities. I find it better to compare the differences. Both are Primarily resist sets with some extra stuff. Both have a damage aura. Both sets have good resist to most damage types, unlike Invuln for example which is more of a resist/defense hybrid IMO.

The differences between Electric and Dark are that Electric has better base resists, it's strong vs Energy and weaker vs Negative, which is the better option IMO, and it has some offensive utility in lightning reflexes and better end management tools. Dark has a much better heal, a little bit of defense, and some defensive tools, like Cloak of Fear and OG. One note on the Dark heal. While if you look at the numbers, Dark Regen is hugely better then Energize, in a lot of ways it's overkill. It is a great heal, I won't argue there, but the fact that it can heal huge amounts is a bit wasted since you only have 100% of a health bar.

Both are very strong defensive sets when combined with IOs. It's not super hard to get capped or near capped S/L Defense on both sets. Basically the question I see is do you want some defensive utility, or some offensive utility.

I basically have two questions. Does confuse count for the pseudo-containment damage from the control hybrid. Secondly, assuming confuse does count, if you assume most things are controlled most of the time, would the containment bonus damage be more then the bonus damage from assault. If it is more, is it enough more that it's worth going control if you can't get the bonus on a lot of AVs/GMs.

I wanted to comment about Dark Assault. In the thread I've seen a couple responses stating that it's damage is low. I'm confused as to why anyone would think that. It does require you to be in melee range to get the best damage out of it, but it's got great damage, plus a heal in life drain, plus a bit of -to-hit. To be honest it's now my favorite assault set.

Not all of the powers in DA are great, but Engulfing Darkness is one of the best AoEs in assault sets. Smite, Midnight grasp and Gloom are all very good dpa/damage. Life drain is a bit less awesome damage, but makes up with the heal.

All in all I think Dom's are in a pretty great state. One of my favorite ATs.

I'm not sure that disappointed would be the way to describe how I feel about Hybrid. That would imply that I didn't know what was coming, but since I got a pretty good idea what the Devs were doing from the beta forums, I knew what to expect.

That aside, I'm not a fan of the Hybrid. I really don't like low uptime powers. I almost never take t9 powers from armor sets. While some of the hybrid powers are ok, they aren't that great for a 50% uptime. Some of my incarnates will eventually unlock hybrid slot, and I'll slot something. I expect I will be slotting Assault of some form on just about every character. This is because 50% uptime on a damage buff is ok, but 50% uptime on a defensive buff is mostly useless for me. Especially at the levels that hybrid gives.

So ultimately, a few of my characters will get Assault, and I'll stick it on some corner of my bar and I'll fire it off when the AV/GM shows up in a trial. All in all, Hybrid is fairly underwhelming. All the other incarnate slots are significant, even Lore with it's lower uptime is worth having simply due to the dps the pets can put out. Hybrid not so much. Add in the fact that only one trial can unlock hybrid currently and I expect it will take me quite some time to unlock it.

Single target damage may be mostly useless for farming, however bosses give the best results, so its good to have bosses. It's also good to run on a higher difficulty setting. This means bosses have a fair bit of health. They tend to die a lot slower then other mobs. Since it's fairly difficult to have a 100% AoE chain, then you will have open moments in your attacks. KO blow is one of the best single target attacks in the game, so not slotting it is kind dumb in my opinion. I could vaguely see an argument for not taking it, if you wanted to fit something else in the build. But not slotting it makes no sense. Heck, at a minimum stick one slot in, and put 2 lvl 50 damage IOs, or a couple Nucs.

Just a few comments on the 2nd build. 3 lvl 50 IOs isn't needed in Hasten, two is good enough. I tend to prefer a Damage IO in Carrions creepers rather then the explosive strike proc. As far as the Roots slotting, roots isn't bad damage like most AoE immobilizes, but most Dom's have plenty of damage, so I tend to not slot it for damage. I've found that it's a good place to put the ATIO set. The 5 non-proc ATOs gets 8.75 or 10% recharge. You can then put the Grav Anchor proc in the 6th slot. The ATIO proc is really nice in Midnight grasp. Gives it a very nice proc rate. Just put a 6th slot into Midnight grasp, plus the proc also have a bit of recharge enhancement.

The reason to put the ATIO in roots is then you can get another 6.25 set somewhere. One way you could do that is put a decimation into life drain. If you want to keep some heal enhancement in there, you could pull a slot from Stamina and put a heal IO into a 6th slot in life drain. If you boost a lvl 50 heal IO up to 50+5 it gives 53% heal enhancement. Means your getting 15% heal instead of 18%, but those changes, ATIO in roots, and decimation in life drain gives another 8.75% global. Is it needed, maybe not, but it's an option.

I'm not sure of your Plant/Thorn build, but I can think of one thing that might bring a Plant/Thorns Dom on par with a spines scrapper as far as damage is concerned. Leo_G mentioned it, but it got included in the general list of AoEs and really needs it's own catagory. This is Sleet from the Ice EPP. Sleet is a huge boost that is available to Doms, and not scrappers or brutes. Once you add Sleet + Ice storm to the AoEs available to a Plant/Thorns Dom I expect the Dom will solo kill groups just as quickly as a scrapper. Plus be more beneficial to a team thanks to the -res in sleet benefiting the whole team.

I'm not saying that scrappers are bad. Scrappers and Brutes are very fun and effective ATs. However if your just looking for better damage numbers, a Spines/Fire scrapper might be a little bit better, but ultimately the difference will be very minor.

I had some trouble in the early levels with my TW/Elec brute. I was finding Momentum to be too annoying. However I decided to push a bit further on, because I figured that momentum would be less impacting once you have more recharge and a better attack chain. At lower levels momentum is annoying because any pause in attacks is a larger loss then other sets, at least any pause in the momentum period. Now that he's getting a bit better slotted and more global recharge it's not as bad. I expect once I get him into the upper 30s and he's finally got everyone moderately slotted, it should work out fine.

I have tested the proc in Ice Storm and it only procs when you first cast the power and otherwise not at all.

I'm kind of annoyed that you have to have all 6 pieces to get the recharge bonus. I'm likely going to move it to BiB, but would much rather have been able to leave 5 in Ice Storm. Just have to use Posi instead, and I'm not a fan of that set.

I have some unfortunate news firespray. The build you posted isn't actually softcapped. The issue comes up because of powerboost. PB is great and I would recommend it to any /Time or Time/. However when planning a build with it in mids you have to be careful. When you have PB toggled on, it will impact all of your defensive powers. This is fine for Farsight since as long as you cast it before PB wears off you keep the boosted defense. The problem comes up when it boosts the rest of your defenses, like combat jumping and weave. The build isn't a lot short of softcap, but it's a bit short. When using PB what you have to do is turn on PB, and look at Farsight to get it's Power Boosted value. Then you have to turn both PB and Farsight off.

For example the build you posted, without PB or Farsight, has 18.4/19.7/16.5 M/R/A defense. Then you take the PB value of Farsight, 22.14 and add it to those numbers, giving a final value of 40.54 melee, 41.84 ranged, and 38.64 AoE defense. It's close, but not quite softcapped. I know it's possible to have perma chronoshift and softcap, I thought I had a build I could post, but reviewing it, I realized that it's just a tad bit short of softcap as well. I think I had planned to come back to touch it up and forgot.

Not sure if you were aware and decided against it, or if you just didn't know, but power buildup and power boost both affect farsight. This increases the amount of defense from farsight significantly. It makes it very easy to softcap pretty much everything. Because of this, it allows you to avoid slotting for defense bonuses with IOs. However when planning builds using PBU or PB in mids, you have to be careful about how you figure your defense values. I tend to toggle on PBU, and check how much defense farsight is giving me, then I toggle both farsight and PBU off. This allows me to see my total defenses for the rest of my powers, then I just add them together manually.

Just to give you some totals a slotted PBU boosted farsight on a defender gives 32% defense to all positions. If you add in Weave, CJ, Maneuvers and the Steadfast defense IO, your at 51% defense to all positions. It's actually not hard to push it up to the incarnate softcap if you want to go for that.

One idea is to use Scorpion Shield to give you S/L/E softcap fairly easy. Then you could try working up some of the others to levels you are comfortable with. If you got Ranged and AoE to cap, those two plus S/L/E from SS would give you rather good values vs most things. There might be a couple holes, but not much.

My preferred primaries are Plant, Fire and Dark. Well, Plant is my Fav, but Fire is nice, and Dark isn't bad, and it's new. For Secondaries I would suggest /Fire or /Dark. The new Dark Assault is very nice. The cone kinda sucks, but Smite, Gloom, and MG are very nice single target, the PBAE is quite good, and it's got a heal in Life Drain, and LD dps isn't terrible. That plus Midnight Grasp will take the ATO proc, and that is very good.

Ok, just reread your comment about IOs. In that case I would say Plant/Dark is my main suggestion. Seeds and Carrion creepers are very nice, even without an IOed out build. Dark Assault has plenty of good attacks, and it's AE is one of the better ones. Though you can't really put together a good range attack chain, so if you want that, then I would suggest Plant/Fire.

One comment about the Epic pools. Obviously you can do what you want, but the Fire and Ice pools are very very good for Dominators. Fire just has a ton of damage, and Ice gets a great debuff in Sleet and some extra damage from Ice Storm.

In my planned dark/dark build, I was figuring to put 5 of the ATOs into Heart of Darkness, but I want the Proc in Midnight Grasp, which it will fit into because MG has an immob on it. The Proc buff lasts 10.25 seconds according to mids. It should have a 100% chance to proc in MG. I've speced out a few builds with varying amounts of recharge and S/L defense. I do admit that I had planned on using two purple sets, Confuse and Immob, which were cheaper in the past, but who knows what they will end up costing once converters are out.

Heres a data chunk for one of them, it has 108% global recharge without hasten and if you add in the agility alpha it's got 45% S/L defense. It's a bit low on end recovery, but I find that permadom helps with that.

The Iron-man spider suit looks like the one Spider-man got during the main line civil war arc when Spider-man was working with/for Stark. Now I don't think it allowed him to fly or shoot energy blasts, but the colors and style match up.

I have to say all the tech gimmicks do seem a bit off putting. I also second the hope that there isn't too much chibi. I will likely watch it at least for a bit, but my expectations are low at this point.

I'm not super knowledgeable about this subject, per the wiki purple triangles adds mag 50 protection. I'm not sure if this is added to the base 3, or if it overwrites it. With the numbers posted, you would have a 4.588 cycle time and a duration of 61 s of mag 3 base, then dom gives 92 seconds of another mag 3. Not sure where the 10x comes from, you would either need 9x mag 6 or 17-18x mag 3. Adding in the purple patch, that gives 29.28 base mag 3, and 44.16 seconds of dom mag 3.

So I think the best way to look at it is to look at the tail end. 44 seconds after your first cast, the last 3 pts of the dom mag will fade. So you have to get over 50 or 53 before that. Of course latency will impact, but first I'll figure without that. In the 44 seconds, you could cast possess 9x. So you would have 30 mag worth of confuse from the domination mag 3 casts, IE first cast, plus the next 9 within 44 seconds. That make sense? Then we figure how much mag we have still sticking from the base mag, which only lasts 29 seconds. That means at the 44s mark, you only have the base mag remaining from the last 6 casts. So this gives another 18 mag of confuse. Total is mag 48 confuse. Not quite enough. If you managed to get the cycle time down under 4.4 seconds, it might be enough, though I'm not sure since I don't know if the required mag is 50 or 53. If it's 50 then 4.4 seconds cycle time is enough. If it's 53 then you need it down to 4.14. This all assumes no latency, which is somewhat unlikely.

Reviewing the numbers again, I now see where Blue_Fenix's 10x comes from. 9x isn't quite enough when you add both partial base and domination mag. 10x is enough, if you include the full dom value, and partial base mag. So his comment about casting it 10x before the first wears off is assuming permadom and using the full domination duration. Modified by purple patch of course.

So using his 10x number, and 4.588 cycle, you would need to get the duration of possess up to 96 seconds with domination. Or you need to get the cycle time down to 4.4 seconds. Or some combination of those. I have to say that looking into this has helped me learn a bit more about how these things interact.

Well, Currently I'm sharing Peter's opinion that he's not in his universes. Too many things changed, and not enough did if that makes sense. Because of this, it's important to keep in mind that while there are a lot of similarities the people are not the same as the ones from the original universes. Examples are Walternate and Nina Sharp.

I do have to agree that the show is great. It's one of my favorite shows and every time I hear that it might get canceled I cringe a bit.

Thanks for posting that. It was just so far outside what I expected, I had to ask for proof My first guess is that the defense boost is schedule A, rather then schedule B. I expect they didn't plan for it to be enhanceable, so they didn't bother to change it to schedule B or whatever it might be. If you can get ahold of enough HOs on test, I would be curious to see if ED kicks in on Schedule A or if it does at all. If it does stick to schedule A, then you could get the boost up to 150% or so. That plus slotting pushes Farsight up to 28.6% or so. With Clarion added it's up to 36.1%. All of this is give or take a small amount.

It gets even bigger for defender or controller numbers. Defender because their power boost and farsight both have higher base values. Controllers because while their Farsight is the same as Corruptors, their PB has the highest bast value for some reason, 125% boost.

Just FYI, Mid's makes it easy to tell if your over the cap on any set bonuses. If you hit the View Active Sets button in Mids, under effects breakdown it will have a red warning if you are over the rule of 5 on any set bonuses. Then scroll down the list and the bonus that is over the limit will be in red.

As far as the Dom vs Controller damage issue, once Dom's got access to fire and ice APPs, they pulled ahead. Especially ice IMO. Sleet is just stupid good to give in an APP. A /kin controller might be able to keep up, but that is it. Add in the fact that a Dom can get permadom, and so get better controls, and mez protections, and I don't really play controller much anymore.

I have to agree with the others, the damage comparison Commando did was terrible. You can't count a capped fulcrum shift, but not allow for enhancements. You didn't include Fire Breath, one of the highest damage AEs in the game, and for the plant/fire/ice you don't include sleet, which is huge. Basically take all the Dom damage numbers, multiply them by about 2.5 for the plant/fire/ice and 1.95 for plant/fire/fire, and that doesn't include Fire Breath. And of course the fact that he just took power damage and added it up irrespective of what kind of power it was, what the recharge was like etc.