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My understanding is that you can take Kick or Boxing then straight to Weave, but before you choose Weave or Tough you must have either Kick or Boxing.

I'd gladly trade off the unkillable PA for a buffable PA, but I'm coming from the bias of playing an ill/kin.

Generally, I'd say no. Spectral Terror really doesn't need much enhancement at all. But you've butted up against that 6.25% recharge bonus a few times in manipulating this build.

I was about to suggest moving those slots to Howling Twilight, but Mid's indicates it can't take the WotC. That kind of strikes me as odd as the stun is one of my primary uses for the power.

You've chosen to focus on the specific nature of the power as a control, to which I will concede drawing a parallel of Spirit Tree : Quicksand or Shiver and Spore Burst : Salt Crystals or Flash Freeze would have been a much better comparison. However, my point is that all of these powers are incidentals that do not make up the core control of set. The effectiveness of the sets, by and large, is not dependent on these. People citing skippable powers as a defense of another's strength are erring in two aspects: Plant is not alone in its skippable powers and when they are omitted it only speaks louder for the strength of the tools remaining when a powerset remains a top performer.

He also said "[EM Pulse and EMP Arrow] are merely as good as SoC when slotted with 1 Hold SO. However, each has a 300 second recharge", the very section you quoted with your rebuttal citing Aura of Confusion. You did not quote the segment regarding two IO performance. I refuted what appeared to me to be addressing the duration with a single SO, in which case, Aura of Confusion cannot match Seed's base duration with a single SO.

I agree that Seeds should be addressed in comparison to powers that fit a similar role. That is why I have drawn the parallel to other every spawn controls and raised the question of why it has better accuracy, recharge, and duration than powers that fulfill the same role. I think the comparison of Seeds to Mass Confusion, though unavoidable in conversations, isn't necessary. The fact that Seeds surpasses other every spawn controls is evidence enough.

As Tex pointed out that is a significant difference when level scaling comes into the picture. Against +4 enemies those durations are cut nearly in half, leaving Plant with an easily permable mez and others without. Additionally, you need to compare the portions of these mezzes that are mag 6: 22 seconds of mag 6 stun for Stalagmites with a 23 second recharge and 55 seconds of mag 6 confuse for Seeds with a 16 second recharge. That, to me, spells out an enormous difference in these sets ability to lock down bosses and elite bosses.

There is a non sequitur in your reasoning here. How does a change to Seeds warrant a change to Mass Confusion which, by your own admission, does not fulfill the same role as Seeds? Furthermore, how does that dictate a change to the single target confuse powers which do not at all fill the same role as Seeds?

I think you've summed up many points pretty well here.

Even then Plant is not alone in having two skippable powers. Fire has Bonfire and Smoke. Ice has Flash Freeze (which suffers from having a damage component for some ungodly reason, delaying the sleep and interfering with Interface) and Shiver. Gravity has Dimension Shift and, for doms, Lift.

Aura of Confusion still falls shy of Seeds of Confusion base duration with a single SO. A level 50 IO just pushes it beyond Seed's. And it shares the same recharge as Mass Confusion, 4 times that of Seeds. So every other confuse power is either single target, has 4 times the recharge, or is prone to catastrophic failure if it misses the first target.

There are those and then the chunky elemental swords that look more rocky than icy.

I don't think I could resist rolling a stalker with some mention of "when the cold creeps in".

There's a certain degree of cognitive dissonance in that statement. One cannot state that Seeds of Confusion is overpowered without drawing comparisons to other powers. For SoC to be overpowered, it has to have more relative power than other abilities.

Additionally, while Rowdy makes the one to one comparison, the rest of the thread expands that comparison so that it is one-to-many. It is not just a comparison of SoC vs. MC; Tex and I have both pointed to how Seeds compares to the other AoE controls that fill the same role, and how seeds excels in recharge, duration, and accuracy among those similar powers.

Considering the strength of an entire powerset is a necessity in discussing balance. That, however, is not a consideration that favors Plant control. It provides faster recharging, longer control than most sets along with more damage than most sets. What offsets this superior performance? Some will quickly point to confuse resistant mobs while forgetting that Fire struggles just as hard when it encounters mobs resistant to stun. Others point at the skippable Spirit Tree while forgetting about Salt Crystals, Flash Freeze, Bonfire, or Dimension Shift. Since Plant's performance is comfortably above average, it is necessary to make comparisons to discover why.

After such comparisons, there are two questions I pose. Why does Seeds of Confusion boast a superior mixture of accuracy, recharge, and duration compared to, not only Mass Confusion, but to most every spawn AoE controls? Secondly, why does Roots do superior damage at a reduced endurance cost than any other AoE immobilize?

I speculate that even if those two anomalous powers were brought in line with their peers Plant would not fall from above average performance, the gap would only be shortened.

Aside from having no relevance to the discussion, the motivations you attribute to your opponents are off-base. I, for instance, have played and enjoyed Plant control as much as I have Mind (3 level 50 Plant character and 4 level 50 Mind characters). There is not some base of Mind control users lobbying for a nerf to Seeds of Confusion. There are, however, some of us with a concern for closer balance. When one or two options become sufficiently more powerful, people will gravitate toward them which leads to an over all less interesting game.

I would try to get it free first. Like I did back in the day when the Martial Arts set and others came about. I imagine I wasn't alone on this as it seemed like every code was taken in seconds.

If someone traveled all the way from the east coast to California for an exclusive, I would seriously question their priorities. Or try to be their friend, seeing as they have far too much disposable income.

How about this? If people want to feel special, maybe they should try doing something special. Be a great trial leader, be a helpful voice in the din of the help channel, make great stories to share with their fellow players. Heck, maybe they could even trying doing something great in the real world.

Oops, I was thinking of Dark Obliteration. My mistake.

I'd also like to ask if you've tried utilizing procs in Distortion Field. I've found it can contribute a little extra damage especially when you have the recharge to drop 2-3 of them.

With your global accuracy bonuses and a single level 50 IO you're above what two SOs of accuracy would give you. If you don't mind losing the 5% recharge bonus (which appears to make about 1 second difference on PA's recharge) you could frankenslot for more accuracy. I would play it by ear though and see if you're comfortable with that level of accuracy.

One will cover you for most knockback. A few mobs like Fake Nemesis have a higher mag than that, which require 12 points to protect against. Four should do the trick unless you're taking most of the fire from knockback heavy mobs.

Group Invisibility is a click, so it's effects don't suppress when attacked, which allows it to stack with toggled stealth. I've even taken both SI and GI before which does some very funky things to the way you attract aggro. For example, you can sometimes fight in the middle of a mob without aggroing it.

With a quick glance at the new build, I'd recommend keeping your Basilisk's Gaze in Blind and shifting the Will of the Controller set to Deceive. That will let you keep the 7.5% recharge bonus and pick up the 10% bonus where you dropped the 6.25%. You may even want to only 5 slot WotC; the ranged defense is nice, but your defenses combined with Darkest Night are already fairly good.

Arctic Air is a -stealth power, not a +stealth power, meaning it will reveal enemies that are trying to hide (Widows and Knives of Artemis come to mind). So yes, you will be able to run it in conjunction with Shadow Fall.

Tar Patch debuffs the enemies max run speed a fair amount so slows aren't overly necessary. As long as PA is aggroing the mobs, most will stay pretty well in the vicinity.

I also just noticed that you've got both Superior Invisibility and Shadow Fall. Unfortunately, you can't run both at the same time. Since you've already got full invisibility from other sources (SF+stealth proc, SF+SS, or SS+stealth proc), I'd recommend swapping Superior Invisibility for Group Invisibility. This will allow you to keep some defense while running Shadow Fall and add a small amount of utility for granting stealth to teammates.

You may also want to consider Recall Friend over Super Jump. The stealth/tp combo makes speeding through a few TFs much easier.

Pre-IO dominators are separated from current doms by some vast changes, mainly those found in the dominator revamp that rebalanced their damage away from the damage buff in Domination. An SO build now is going to perform much better than an SO build then for that single reason. Citing the pre-vamp days for balance concerns is, to me, some very dubious reasoning. (As an aside, in my own experience, I only ever played one dom to 50 when they were locked to redside. Now that they are available to heroes they have drawn much more of my attention.)

But if we assume a game where the revamp changes occurred and IOs have vanished, as you seem to think IOs are the source of Plant's higher performance, the balance tips even more in favor or a rebalancing of Seeds. As has been pointed out in several threads in which Seeds has been discussed, Seeds has a faster recharge, higher inherent accuracy, and a longer duration than other control options of the same tier, all of which favor it on SO performance it. Even if we prescribe those bonuses due to its cone shape, it has higher values in at least one area (more in some cases) than controls such as Siren Song and Fearsome Stare. If anything IOs only serve to shorten the gap between Seeds and other every spawn controls by compensating for those differences in accuracy, recharge, and duration.

As noted many times in this thread already, controllers can't leverage this as well as other ATs because (and especially in the case of a level 26 controller) they generally utilize their AoE immobilize for damage. Of course, controllers of any level aren't the only concern as this power is available to four ATs. Moving on to dominators, only the use of powers in Fire Control is a very strange condition for testing there, one completely catered to your argument that doesn't reflect actual gameplay. Why would a dominator completely ignore better damage tools from their secondary for one power that negates the protection they receive from this combo? The same conditions would lead one to believe that Earthquake is a rather useless power for a dom when that is not the case.