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I will consider that, though what swallowed up the bulk of my spawns, realistically speaking, was my secondary slotted for damage. I'll try to gravitate more slots towards the hold, but I'm afraid life would be really hard without damage 
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A lot of that can be made easier by focusing your slotting efforts. Gravity distortion was likely the *only* thing from your primary and pools that needed slots before L26.
[Except GDF, if you took it.]
If I quote #'s, they're from City of Data.
Global: @Kazari
It was either Taunt or Purple Triangles of Doom. I stand by my decision!
-BackAlleyBrawler
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ractically speaking, it's a function of recharge and duration
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Not really, no. The only thing that counts in real gameplay is reaching mag 4+. Everything else is just safety margin, unless you're talking about PVP (and I never am, PVP is a joke).
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As Dominator holds are both seriously inefficient in terms of damage per endurance and endurance per activation, filling up an attack chain with too many of them as a source for damage has the effect of butting out attacks that, overall, do more damage and cost less endurance.
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In practice, however, you ARE going to throw that Single Target hold, and you're going to throw it a lot. You're going to stack holds on bosses to build magnitude, and you're going to hold lieutenants and minions to stop them attacking you. You're going to hold enemies that have avoided your wormhole. And in almost every case, the lifespan of your target is going to to be far shorter than the base duration of your hold. And if you slot that hold for damage, you get a half of your basic blast free with every application of your hold. Or you can slot duration and have a hold that last far longer than the lifespan of the target, in 80% of cases.
I love my Dom. I play it alot, and I've tried it both ways. And slotting for damage just works better for me. YMMV.
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You'll be able to stack 3 Holds without Domination up, and you'll be able to do it consistently with that slotting.
For a L50 Gravity Dom with 2 L50 Recharge Common IOs and 2 L50 Hold Duration Common IOs [u]without[u] Hasten, GD recharges in 4.36 seconds and lasts for 32.8 seconds.
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Perhaps you missed the "uses SO's, avoids IO's" bit.
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No, I didn't. He doesn't like IO Sets; he seems to have no problems with Common IOs, because he talked about using them a few posts up.
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You'll be able to stack 3 Holds without Domination up, and you'll be able to do it consistently with that slotting.
For a L50 Gravity Dom with 2 L50 Recharge Common IOs and 2 L50 Hold Duration Common IOs [u]without[u] Hasten, GD recharges in 4.36 seconds and lasts for 32.8 seconds.
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Perhaps you missed the "uses SO's, avoids IO's" bit.
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No, I didn't. He doesn't like IO Sets; he seems to have no problems with Common IOs, because he talked about using them a few posts up.
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Back-to-front:
Yes, I indeed have no problem with Common Inventions. My problem with Sets is availability and, ultimately, cost, be that cost in money, cost in time or cost in playing the market. Common Inventions, though they still have a considerable cost, are still easier to get as availability is high, if not for the items then for the salvage to make them, and though they may cost a lot, the cost is relatively static and easy to plan for, as well as actually HAVE to spend on them.
So, Sets no, but Commons yes.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Dude, having just spent a day buying full sets of IOs for 50s, I have to say: Sets are cheaper.
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ractically speaking, it's a function of recharge and duration
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Not really, no. The only thing that counts in real gameplay is reaching mag 4+. Everything else is just safety margin, unless you're talking about PVP (and I never am, PVP is a joke).
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Stacking holds is a fairly simple equation of duration divided by recharge. If you have a 10 second hold on a 10 second timer, your stacking ends up equalling 1.0, meaning you're always going to have one hold on the enemy, assuming lack of distractions and no animation. If you want to increase that to a constantly double-stacked hold, you need to either double your duration (so duration*(1+100%)) or half your recharge (so recharge/(1+100%)). You're either going to end up with a 20 second hold on a 10 second timer, or a 10 second hold on a 5 second timer. Either way, you now have stacking of 2.0, and you're able to constantly maintain double-stacked hold, or maintain single hold on two enemies. In fact, ignoring animation time, as far as stacking is concerned, duration increases and recharge reducers are functionally IDENTICAL.
The difference comes in the areas of cost and utility. A one-shot, extremely long duration hold taxes you with endurance cost and animation delay once, and pretty much not again for a very long time. On the other hand, a single, slow, powerful hold isn't going to let you hold multiple enemies for short amounts of time, essentially trading utility for a lower cost. On the flip side, a very fast, very short hold is going to cost a LOT in endurance consumption and animation delay, and in fact a Gravity Distortion slotted for 100% recharge reduction is going to take away HALF of your total time spent in combat just activating that one power. However, a power that recharges so quickly will allow you to hold multiple people in pretty quick succession, though maintaining that group held has some serious overhead.
There's also another factor that does come to play when short-recharge powers are slotted for recharge reduction - animation time. When you see statistics measured "per activation," this accounts for both recharge AND animation time, and while you can reduce recharge, you cannot affect animation time in any way, shape or form. Gravity Distortion is, normally, on an 8-second recharge and has a 1.88 second animation. Reducing that recharge down to 4 seconds sounds like you reduced the power's cycle to half of what it was, but you actually reduced 10 to 6, so it was more like a reduction down to 60%. The faster the attack gets and the closer its recharge time gets to its animation time, the less recharge reduction actually does for you, because the part you can reduce becomes that much smaller a part of the overall cycle.
A long time ago, playing Blasters, I learned a lesson which holds true for Dominators as well. You cannot out-control the enemy. You can slow them down, even stop them for a while, but eventually they're going to overwhelm you. While you're spending lots and lots of time controlling the enemy, they are spending lots and lots of time killing you, and the one who wins is the one who kills the other guy before he goes down, himself. Control helps, but control alone does not win battles. It doesn't stop it from tying your hands for a good bit of time, though. The idea I run with, now as before, is that I need to get as much control as I can from as little an overhead as I can manage. At the end of the day, I need to KILL that stuff, and the less time I spend controlling and the more time I spend blasting and smashing, the better off I will be. That's assuming a static level of control, of course - I live on control, so I can't afford to control less. But I CAN afford to spend less time controlling while still providing just as much control.
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As Dominator holds are both seriously inefficient in terms of damage per endurance and endurance per activation, filling up an attack chain with too many of them as a source for damage has the effect of butting out attacks that, overall, do more damage and cost less endurance.
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In practice, however, you ARE going to throw that Single Target hold, and you're going to throw it a lot. You're going to stack holds on bosses to build magnitude, and you're going to hold lieutenants and minions to stop them attacking you. You're going to hold enemies that have avoided your wormhole. And in almost every case, the lifespan of your target is going to to be far shorter than the base duration of your hold. And if you slot that hold for damage, you get a half of your basic blast free with every application of your hold. Or you can slot duration and have a hold that last far longer than the lifespan of the target, in 80% of cases.
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Practically speaking, this is where playstyles differ. Playing Blasters and Scrappers has taught me one thing - if you hit what you hold, you just wasted the endurance you used to cast that hold. There's no point in holding something for 10 seconds if you kill it in 2. So it has been my practice to hold things and then NOT attack them, potentially holding them again as they wake up or, ideally, BEFORE they wake up. This allows me to both save myself some incoming fire AND get the most bang for the buck out of my controls. If that means levitating a lieutenant the entire fight, then I'll levitate a lieutenant the entire fight. If that means leaving the boss for last, then so be it. If I hold something and then kill it immediately afterwards, I consider that a wasteful mistake on my part, no different from using Total Focus on a Rikti Monkey with 1 HP left. If I'm going to kill something in two seconds, then I may as well hit it with Lift - it costs less, it does more damage and it buys me just enough time.
I'm going to be using that hold, this much is true. And you have a point - as long as I'm using it, why NOT slot it for damage? The answer, though, is that it compromises what I actually want out of the hold - holding things while I kill their buddies. Without Set Inventions, damage slotting simply monopolises too many slots that I want to use for other things - more hold, less recharge, less cost, more accuracy. What I want out of the hold is the hold itself. It's a large part of what I live by. I have enough damage and more than enough powers to deliver it with, all of which as significantly more efficient, effective and reliable than the damage found in my hold. See, the immobilize... Maybe. I haven't found that useful enough to want to 6-slot for immobilization, but then again I'm not using it much and it would be better to use Power Bolt, instead, anyway.
To me, this is like the dilemma I had a while back - should I slot Soul Drain for damage, or do I stick with lots of recharge? At the end of the day, I decided it wouldn't be doing much damage anyway, and what I really wanted out of it was the buff, as often as possible. So even though it does relatively good damage, I never slotted for it. To me, this is the same deal - I want to use my holds for their hold component as much as I can, and rely on other powers to do the damage.
As you said, it's not a matter of right and wrong, but rather a matter of preference. And I just can't justify slotting my hold for damage over the other things I can slot it for because of how I prefer to use it.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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A long time ago, playing Blasters, I learned a lesson which holds true for Dominators as well. You cannot out-control the enemy. You can slow them down, even stop them for a while, but eventually they're going to overwhelm you. While you're spending lots and lots of time controlling the enemy, they are spending lots and lots of time killing you, and the one who wins is the one who kills the other guy before he goes down, himself. Control helps, but control alone does not win battles.
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As Gravity it is more difficult, but this simply isn't true for Doms as an AT. In about 30 missions solo yesterday I think I took 3 hits, maybe 4. Enemies do not spend any time killing me, they simply spend time waiting for me to kill them. Ambushes run in, pop a shot and are promptly AE controlled into statues... But I play Mind. Anything that doesn't have PToD loses without a fight, whether it's 10 minions in a pile, a Lieutenant or 2, or an Elite Boss. If I fail to control, I probably fail to live. That is the AT as I have played it for 18 vet months, and Krya (50 Mind/Thorn) is the only character I really love to stay with in this game. Control or Die. Know your targets, know the situations, and keep it all locked down.
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Playing Blasters and Scrappers has taught me one thing - if you hit what you hold, you just wasted the endurance you used to cast that hold. There's no point in holding something for 10 seconds if you kill it in 2. So it has been my practice to hold things and then NOT attack them, potentially holding them again as they wake up or, ideally, BEFORE they wake up.
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My practice is Control or Die. On my low level Grav I use Crush on one, lure the rest down away from that target, then start using Lift, GD and Crush to lock down. Once controlled I pick off survivors. I never took her past 21 however, so YMMV.
I personally feel that your issues are a combination of not really liking Control, and choosing Grav as a Dominator. Grav is the lowest Control set on an AT that lives or dies by Control.
I honestly can't imagine how it's even possible to keep a spawn of, say, five minions and one lieutenant (I seem to see a LOT of these for some reason) permanently incapacitated such that they cannot respond. Perhaps a fast-recharging confuse power could be able to do that, paying off for itself with marginal loss of experience, but beyond that? Gravity aside, how would, say, Earth control perma-lock an entire spawn of range-preference enemies such that they cannot fight back, and in such a way that it's sustainable past, say, 30 seconds or so?
Maybe Gravity is at fault, I don't know, but I simply cannot even conceive of the notion of controlling all enemies all of the time, if for no other reason than because a succession of developers have pronounced that as broken and based the I5 controller cutbacks on just this argument. I can see this doable occasionally, between Domination and perhaps a slotted-up AoE hold (and even then it's short-duration), but all the time not taking a hit? How does that even work?
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Plant has Seeds of Confusion which will easily permanently lock down a very large spawn. Seeds will recharge before it's duration with only 2 Recharge SOs and 1 Duration SO.
Earth does it with Stalagmites to get an initial stun and then follows up with Earthquake or Volcanic Gasses. Earthquake is not complete lockdown, but it's pretty close. Gasses is just brilliant. And both Stalgmites and Earthquake recharge quickly.
Mind does it with Mass Hypnosis, Terrify and Mass Confusion. Depending on build and circumstances you can also add Total Domination and Telekinesis to the mix, but the limitations of those powers makes the former superior. Mind also has the brilliant Mesmerize, a Mag 4 ST Sleep, which will Sleep a boss with one application.
Ice uses Ice Slick, which is the highest % chance AoE knockdown power in the game and then uses it's myriad -recharge and -slow to lock them down from there. Again, like with Earthquake, it's not complete lockdown, but usually enough to handle spawns for a team of 6 solo pretty much indefinitely.
Fire is probably the weakest Control-wise because it relies on a single decent AoE Control (Flashfires) which has a reasonably short duration. It's big advantage of course is the extra damage from the most damaging pets and Hot Feet, which is now slouch in the control stakes as well.
Gravity also has to rely on a single decent AoE Control, but it can be fiddly to use and the knockback is really annoying. The upside is that your pet really makes up for your lack of Control abilities, and who needs pets for damage when you have a good Assault set?
As has been said earlier, Gravity is on the low end of Control. Most other Doms can easily lock down entire spawns pretty much indefinitely.
Ah, I get it. This is through the use of more reliable control balanced by other means (confuse being balanced by experience loss, sleep being balance by breakability, etc.) and fire-and-forget patches. OK, that makes sense.
It kind of goes with what I wanted to say, though not necessarily what I ended up saying. I've been looking at this as an effort to control things via direct, conventional control. AoE control doesn't cut it because it can't self-overlap (by design) and though single-target control MAY be able to do it, the cost associated is such that you're going to run out of endurance before you kill anything. That's probably Gravity Control talking, but I sort of ignored the other means of control just because they never crossed my mind.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Playing Blasters and Scrappers has taught me one thing - if you hit what you hold, you just wasted the endurance you used to cast that hold. There's no point in holding something for 10 seconds if you kill it in 2.
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At no point did I recommend holding a target then killing it. The issue is that the targets you're holding still need to be killed at some point.
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I honestly can't imagine how it's even possible to keep a spawn of, say, five minions and one lieutenant (I seem to see a LOT of these for some reason) permanently incapacitated such that they cannot respond.
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You're not trying to hold everyone forever. You use your AOE control (in the case of gravity, wormhole), to buy you enough time to whittle down your enemies' numbers to the point where you can casually hold what's left with your single target hold.
With your putative 5 minions and a lieutenant, I'll use wormhole to port them all next to me, immobilize the lot of them to keep them from wandering too much (and get a couple procs from the stuff I've got slotted in my Crushing Field), then proceed to use the next 25+ seconds to rip apart minions. About halfway through that time period I'll start mixing in my single target hold, so as to get the minions I know will be left under control by the time wormhole breaks.
By the time I've finished off the surviors and reached the next group of enemies, wormhole should have recharged.
Now if you're not slotting and using wormhole, and trying to avoid using your hold because it's 'not efficient', I can see how you'd get the impression that it's hard to manage a spawn of 6 guys.
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Playing Blasters and Scrappers has taught me one thing - if you hit what you hold, you just wasted the endurance you used to cast that hold. There's no point in holding something for 10 seconds if you kill it in 2.
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At no point did I recommend holding a target then killing it. The issue is that the targets you're holding still need to be killed at some point.
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I honestly can't imagine how it's even possible to keep a spawn of, say, five minions and one lieutenant (I seem to see a LOT of these for some reason) permanently incapacitated such that they cannot respond.
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You're not trying to hold everyone forever. You use your AOE control (in the case of gravity, wormhole), to buy you enough time to whittle down your enemies' numbers to the point where you can casually hold what's left with your single target hold.
With your putative 5 minions and a lieutenant, I'll use wormhole to port them all next to me, immobilize the lot of them to keep them from wandering too much (and get a couple procs from the stuff I've got slotted in my Crushing Field), then proceed to use the next 25+ seconds to rip apart minions. About halfway through that time period I'll start mixing in my single target hold, so as to get the minions I know will be left under control by the time wormhole breaks.
By the time I've finished off the surviors and reached the next group of enemies, wormhole should have recharged.
Now if you're not slotting and using wormhole, and trying to avoid using your hold because it's 'not efficient', I can see how you'd get the impression that it's hard to manage a spawn of 6 guys.
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Yep. Basically both the primary and secondary matter.
You do need to control to be able to be effective. The mentality of only playing doms as a blaster, just isn't going to work all that well.
At least not if one wants to fight spawns of greater than 3. Which doms do easily.
Blazara Aura LVL 50 Fire/Psi Dom (with 125% recharge)
Flameboxer Aura LVL 50 SS/Fire Brute
Ice 'Em Aura LVL 50 Ice Tank
Darq Widow Fortune LVL 50 Fortunata (200% rech/Night Widow 192.5% rech)--thanks issue 19!
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With your putative 5 minions and a lieutenant, I'll use wormhole to port them all next to me, immobilize the lot of them to keep them from wandering too much (and get a couple procs from the stuff I've got slotted in my Crushing Field), then proceed to use the next 25+ seconds to rip apart minions. About halfway through that time period I'll start mixing in my single target hold, so as to get the minions I know will be left under control by the time wormhole breaks.
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Yep. With Mind I use Mass Hypnosis/Terrorize/Mass Confusion/Total Domination to alpha, and lock or kill targets, making sure that anything still alive by the end of the AE control (if there is anything) is ST controlled when the AE wears off. If there's a Boss I Either Hypnotize or Confuse or Domination+AE Control. Grav is different because of the lack of low level controls and some of your high level control coming from your pet (yay AI control decisions?).
On an aside, you must LOATHE Huntsmen.
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I honestly can't imagine how it's even possible to keep a spawn of, say, five minions and one lieutenant (I seem to see a LOT of these for some reason) permanently incapacitated such that they cannot respond. Perhaps a fast-recharging confuse power could be able to do that, paying off for itself with marginal loss of experience, but beyond that? Gravity aside, how would, say, Earth control perma-lock an entire spawn of range-preference enemies such that they cannot fight back, and in such a way that it's sustainable past, say, 30 seconds or so?
Maybe Gravity is at fault, I don't know, but I simply cannot even conceive of the notion of controlling all enemies all of the time, if for no other reason than because a succession of developers have pronounced that as broken and based the I5 controller cutbacks on just this argument. I can see this doable occasionally, between Domination and perhaps a slotted-up AoE hold (and even then it's short-duration), but all the time not taking a hit? How does that even work?
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I think part of the problem is the combo of grav/energy (If I remember correctly that's what you said you where playing) and your difficulty level. Level 2 difficulty results in the following standard groups depending on the RNG:
Even level groups: 1 LT + 5 minsions OR 2 LT + 1 minion
Level+1 groups: 1 LT + 1 Minion OR 3 Minions
The problem with your combo is that you have limited AE control and pretty much only single target damage - so you can't kill the 6 person groups fast enough before your AE control runs out. Gravity is further limited in that it trades that extra control for damage powers that have limited soft control - the KB/KU is nice but with the ragdoll phsyics KB juggling is very hard. I would never play grav/energy on difficulty 2 or 4 until I at least have an AE control up every spawn and probably not until I have my pet. I would play on difficulty level 1 or 3 so that you never got a group bigger than 3 mobs - which you SHOULD be able to handle with a combo of gravity distortion, lift+power push and crush (for those lt's/minions that don't have huge ranged attacks) and killing fast with hard hitting single target attacks.
Almost every other control set has more AE control by the mid 20's or has a TON of single target control (like mind). Even with fire, which tends to be control lite due to hotfeet, you can alternate flashfire/bonfire for a combo of hard/soft control and hotfeet itself has an avoid + slow which gives it some soft control. Plus hotfeet pushes up your AE damage where gravity trades it's control for single target damage.
As an example - my plant/fire dom is currently L26 and runs at difficulty level 2 quite easily. Seeds of confusion is up generally 2 out of 3 spawns (depending on how long it takes to kill them) and now that I have carrion creepers things will get even easier. With the decent AE damage in fire even without seeds or CC I can frequently immobilize small groups and kill them before they do to much damage to me.
I know you aren't into IO sets, which is fine, putting entire sets together can be a pain in the posterior. However you should really consider frankenslotting IO's for enhancement benefit. You nearly double the amount of enhancement bonus you can get with 4-5 slots and get a fairly decent increase with even 2-3 slots. Plus it is cheap and easy, especially for dominators because the common control sets drop frequently and are in low demand so they are always available and cheap. As an example, with 3 slots in gravity distortion if you slot 2 L30 Acc/Rech/Hold IO's and 1 L30 Acc/REch IO from any set that will give you 56% acc, 56% rech and 34% hold enhancements. Compare that to the 34%-38% enhancement to each you would get from slotting an single Acc, Recharge and HOld SO or L30 IO's. Add a fourth slot and you can get even more benefits. Current market price, redside, for the set IO's I mentioned above are:
Acc/Hold/rech: Essence of curare (1k-5k each, 3 for sale), paralytic (1k-5k each, 12 for sale)
Acc/Rech: Essence of curare (1k each, 6 for sale), paralytic (1 inf to 5k inf, 11 for sale)
The triples of the other sets tend to be more expensive - some of them actually cost enough they are a serious investment but most of the double IO's are dirt cheap except for basilisks gaze. Immobilze sets are ALL dirt cheap and many stun sets can be cheap (there are some good bonuses in at least a couple of stun sets so they are sometimes in middling demand).
Damage set IO's are a little more expensive but even then you can probably pick up each individual IO for 20k-50k and do it all in one shopping session if you are willing to pick up things at odd levels. Anything from L25-L35 will give you decent results vs SO's or generic IO's when frankenslotted. It gets harder if you insist on getting IO's with a level that is a multiple of 5 - for some reason this is where everyone bids, so the Level 25,30 and 35 IO's can be going for 50k-100k where the L27 or L31 version is going for 25k.
The only real timesink when frankenslotting is gathering the salvage (which will probably cost you more than the recipe's did). If you have done any AE missions and have a reasonable amount of tickets you can get a lot of the salvage you wil need that way - even with random rolls for commons it isn't that hard and L26-40 common salvage (which most recipes you want will use) sells for a LOT on the market - so may even show a profit this way.
Globals: @Midnight Mystique/@Magik13
Looking over my post I realize I addressed two separate points I thought about when reading this thread, not just the one to which I replied.
My point about large spawn control is that with a primary/secondary combo that is mostly single target control and single target damage you need to play on difficulty 1,3 or 5 so you can focus your control and damage on a smaller number of targets.
My second point came about in response to some earlier comments Sam made about not playing above L2 because he didn't like facing higher than +1 opponents due to accuracy. If you frankenslot your powers as I mentioned you can get a lot more accuracy easily than if you stick to SO or generic IO's, which removes the barrier to playing at L3 or higher.
Globals: @Midnight Mystique/@Magik13
Just to add to Eric's comment about accuracy, You can also run your controls with 2acc/2control/2rech and do great. That's what I used to do pre inventions and I never dropped below difficulty 5 unless I was facing an AV. Now I prefer to just stay on difficulty 4.
Honestly, just get off your high horse with sets. Melee sets are overpriced, but there are perfectly reasonable ranged damage sets available by level 30-35, when you should be looking at giving up SOs and buying inventions anyway.
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Honestly, just get off your high horse with sets. Melee sets are overpriced, but there are perfectly reasonable ranged damage sets available by level 30-35, when you should be looking at giving up SOs and buying inventions anyway.
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Thank you for telling me to get off my high horse, but as I mentioned, I'm immune to being convinced, so you will not convince me. It's as simple as that. I specifically did NOT want to discuss that because I know where it goes every time. From here on out, I'm not going to discuss them at all.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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[ QUOTE ]
You're not trying to hold everyone forever. You use your AOE control (in the case of gravity, wormhole), to buy you enough time to whittle down your enemies' numbers to the point where you can casually hold what's left with your single target hold.
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True, but as I'm not familiar with other control sets, I wasn't aware there WERE ways to slow them down more than you're taxing yourself doing it. Typically, if I focus too much on control, my enemies wake up from the AoE control I had on them and become difficult to handle with single-target control if there are enough of them, thus my approach has been to kill as many as I can while they're still group-held and then focus on incapacitating the most dangerous threats only.
I do use Wormhole. I use it a lot. At 90 seconds, though, it's not up every spawn, and even when it is, I can't always pull the whole spawn with it. Even on indoor maps, they're often very scattered, so it's not rare I'll only pull three out of six people or so. This is actually where Dimension Shift helps, as if I don't manage to pull the whole spawn, then at least I can shift the ones I didn't pull and buy myself some time. I... Haven't done that nearly as much as I should have, come to think of it. I'll experiment.
I'm getting to 31 soon, so I'll have a lot of slots to go around, though if I have to be honest, I'm looking to slot up Total Focus first. Something tells me this will give me a lot more of an out, both because it has strong control on it and because it allows me to quick-kill lieutenants instead of having to keep them held. Still needs at least a couple more slots.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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From reading over the problems you're having, I would say Gravity's AoE soft control (or lack thereof) is really the issue.
My mind/fire has little difficulty with large spawns, thanks to Mass Hypnosis. I have the power slotted such that if need be I can keep an entire spawn slept indefinitely. Given the kill speed of /fire, I rarely need to renew it more than once.
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Stacking magnitude is primarily about recharge, not duration.
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Practically speaking, it's a function of recharge and duration. How that balances out between them and it's too late in the evening for me to do the math, but I can't say with any confidence that it's primarily about one or the other. I can, however, say that slotting for duration vs. recharge has the benefit of both endurance efficiency and opportunity cost efficiency. There is a critical mass of powers a player can use, and the more often you use one, the less often you can use the others. As Dominator holds are both seriously inefficient in terms of damage per endurance and endurance per activation, filling up an attack chain with too many of them as a source for damage has the effect of butting out attacks that, overall, do more damage and cost less endurance.
Personally, I'm a person who looks for efficiency over performance, as efficiency is the science of making the most of what you have. I may not build the most powerful builds, but that just makes it more important for me to make the most out of what I do build. I recently did a DPE, EPA and DPA comparison of most Gravity Control and Energy Manipulation powers and came up with some telling results and some expected results. Telling was that Propel is by far the combo's most endurance-efficient attack - it deals a lot more damage than a power of its cost should - whereas lift is a heavily inefficient power. Knowing this has allowed me to pick my battles and determine which powers are worth using how often. I neglected to include Crush and Gravity Distortion into the comparison, but I'll do that some time tomorrow and let you know how they stack up.
Suffice it to say that, as things look to me now, I'd rather build my attacks for damage and safe the holds for control. I'm not saying that's the best option, but it's the one that seems most attractive to me right at the moment.