hemmingway3

The "honest way" of getting PvP IOs will take you years of constant PvPing to actually slot a toon. The drop rate is that bad. I have gotten maybe 6 or 7 drops since I started actively going into RV on Freedom several months ago.

Dear SuckaFish,

You are not the co-captain. Take a seat, please.

Love,
Hemmingway

It was all you bro.

Even so, poison controller is still a great disruption toon.

Sonic or fire blast, IMO. I have heard good things about a therm/son combined with buffed lore pets. By good I mean that I heard it was near impossible to beat.

Pain is bad for duels. Psy is bad for duels. But dont let the man keep you down, mannnnnnnnnn!

You get a resist toggle with Leviathan, which means you don't need fighting pool. You also get a pet which is great for the Soulbound +HP bonus and it messes with people's ability to lock in 8v8s. Sleet is not useful at all in 8v8s, but great in zone. Hoarfrost is great just to have a heal, but one should be able to rely on their emps and insp tray for the duration of a 10 minute 8v8 match. You don't need stalagmites by -any- mean for earth/fire to be an effective spike team composition. I saw it with Conquistadorks in the CAPE league and now WARE has it down pat in the current Freedom league. Blaze > Fossilize from a team of 5 Earth/Fire doms will just kill a target outright unless they were already playing evasively. It is a spike that can totally catch you by surprise and it is also very fast paced. Call a target, blaze, fossilize, if they arent dead, someone is probably finishing them or they are being healed. Next target. There is a span of possibly less than 5 seconds. Playing against WARE, when they do this properly, They kill the first target, kill the emp's AP, then kill a second target before the respawn timer even cycles. With a psy/em team the cycle of spiking targets is definitely slower, as there is more time spent in animation and waiting for recharge of one's attack chain. tl;dr Earth/fire is a sick toon for a spike team. Spikes do/should not take as long as even a standard mez, let along stalagmites.

The defender HE is actually much better... if Mid's is reporting 200%, it is wrong. Check the number in game. Defenders also do significantly better damage due to the new(er) version of vigilance.

Poison troller have better debuff numbers in general, as I recall. I think the -special is notable much stronger on controllers. Also, I think that poison is a better disruption set than a set for a member of the offense. As such, controller primaries are much better at disruption than corruptor primaries. See: Illusion, Grav.

Psy is the go-to damage type for any spike team. The delayed damage is pretty OP. Fire is great for small teams or damage spam in zone. Therm on a defender is sick, but not the end all be all. Poison on corruptors is very strong, on controllers even stronger. Again, psy is the damage type for large spike teams for the delayed damage, but not so great for small teams or 1v1s. dark blast blasters are quite strong, but they dont quite measure up for the 1v1 prowess of debuffing sets. There are generally three kinds of viable melee: stalkers who can AS (or do a 3+ shark spike...), KM scrappers (since Concentrated strike does almost as much as AS), or a big fat taunt bot tanker who never dies. Oh.. and stalagmites is definitely broken... that stun lasts long enough for the dom to kill you solo. Note that stalagmites is not even the best part of earth/fire... its just a great toon all around. Rad defenders are still very useful.

What kind of toon you play is really up to your preferences. If you want to fit right in with 8v8s like kickballs or joining the supplementary draft for the ongoing league, psy/em is typically what teams will expect you to have. If you want to zone, anything works really. fire/em in particular is very strong, especially if you have your incarnates. With blaster builds, you dont need recharge.. just get HP can and some Acc bonuses, but an expensive build adds extra fluff onto that. If you want to build up that dom, I would say you want the build to be pretty expensive because the build goals are more demanding. 41 KB protection is the minimum, 48 is ideal. You want to use the kismet +tohit proc if possible. You want to have as much stealth as possible. You want as much perception as possible. I would recommend having speed/leaping/leadership pools on every pvp toon (maybe other than emp or pain since you dont need perception to target your team.. duh) the other 2 pools are either fighting or concealment depending on if you have hiber in your epic or a resist toggle.

Arcanaville's DR calculator

With DR, you really need to over-slot your travel powers if you want to get near the travel cap (for SS especially). About recharge bonus: with DR, after about 200% bonus recharge (this includes the bonus from the diminished effect of enhancements), you are only getting less than 1/2 the amount of recharge you think you're getting.

Cardiac gives a lot of range. Depending on what team a healer is emping for and against, either one may be better.

Hot trolling isnt polite.