Dark Miasma/Storm Summoning - Are They Powerful Sets?

So a discussion in another thread was ensuing comparing Pain Domination to sets.

Apparently someone thinks that Dark Miasma and Storm Summoning don't bring anything of value to a team.

I tend to think otherwise, I would like to know what you, Defenders, Controllers, and Corruptor players think of this statement.

Are they strong? Listen bud, they've got knockdown, status effects and to-hit debuffs!

You have to first recognize that many players are ignorant of exactly how certain sets work and what they do for them. People can easily see little numbers floating over their heads that means they are being healed.

Dark Miasma has a very powerful heal although it is based around a target.
It has a sizeavle -resistance power making all foes take more damage
\Darkest Night reduces a foes ability to do damage as well as a good to hit debuff.
Howling Twilight can rez an entire team and is a nice -regen power as well
Shadowfall is a team buff for PSI !!
Fearsome stare is a fear power which many foes do not resist
And the Pet alsp heals and debuffs as well..

That to me is quite a lot...

A Stormie can do quite a bit in the right hands...

Snowstorm will slow a mob to a crawl and reduce their recharge time by 63%
Steamy Mist is another nice team buff
Freezing Rain is a staple It reduces the targets defense AND resistance..
Hurrican if used right can be used to herd mobs into corners. It can debuff accuracy quite nicely and definitely is very helpful in AV fights. I have even see Stormies take alpas quite well.
Thunderclap kinda blows but IF combined with another stun power can be quite useful,
Tornado is known to blow mobs all over the map.. This is an problem BUT it can be used as an OH CRAP button and against an AV it can become a little buzzsaw of a power.
Lightning Storm.. yeah.. a big cloud that zapps the crap outta foes.. My Ice/Storm can get two of these out on the regular...Sweet....

Its noy what you have.. as the song said..

Its in the way that you use it...

And by the way I will take a dark on a team in a NY minute every day of the week and twice on Sundays...

I played a Dark/Dark Defender to 50... and that character was very good at increasing the survival of the team.

Did I get scoffed at when my heal missed? Certainly. But when I teleported the corpses of like 5 team members and simultaneously resurrected them WHILE debuffing all the enemies that had just killed us, they had a different tune to sing. Not to mention all the other things that make me love Dark Miasma (like the singing tentacles ).

It's unfortunate that I have been playing other characters a lot lately... perhaps I should dust him off. (He may just go Rogue.)

You can never have too much Freezing Rain.

Short answer: Yeah.
Long answer: &$@% yeah.

Two reasons PuG leaders don't hold up a mission to recruit a stormy or dark miasmist. 1) Stormies and dark miasmists are not common, a little hard to find, and often already snapped up by another team, and 2) PuG leaders are kind of dumb.

Dark Miasma is, in my opinion, one of the strongest defensive sets there is. It has considerable crowd control capabilities and very strong debuffs. It's a set full of very powerful tools for neutering enemies in a variety of ways. From my experience, it can take two roles:

Primary Defense- in which the user is the primary means of team defense. Fearsome Stare, Darkest Night and Tar Patch are often used in conjunction to effectively neuter a single group of enemies. Dark Servant simply makes everything easier.

Secondary Defense- in which the user is complementing other defense sets. Tar Patch and Fearsome Stare are often used on the group being engaged. Darkest Night is saved for tougher foes or additional aggro. Dark Servant is saved for additional aggro (plopping him in the middle of an unintentionally aggroed group will take them out of the fight). Fearsome Stare can also be used to deal with additional aggro. Howling Twilight, too, is useful for this. The main role of the set here is to suppress additional aggro, something Dark Miasma is exceptionally good at.


The role of primary defense is usually taken in teams, especially smaller ones. When groups of enemies can be locked down and debuffed many times over, a team can take on some very tough enemies.

The role of secondary defense is most often taken in TFs, especially speed runs. Dark Miasma can lock down and take out of the fight multiple groups of enemies by spreading its assets around. It has multiple ways to deal with unwanted aggro. This is also why I think Black Hole is useless; the set already has many ways to achieve such an affect.

A lot of people still think they're playing Everquest and heals are the be all and end all. They're idiots. I'd take a good Storm or Dark over a typical Emp or Pain any day.

I've never been able to understand why so many people think that healing damage back is better mitigation than never taking damage in the first place.

Dark > Storm > Pain

You could replace the word 'Storm' with the words 'Freezing Rain'. It's just that good. Not quite what Dark has to offer, but excellent nonetheless.

There is a reason */Dark Masterminds are often considered Easy Mode, even above and beyond other Masterminds.

My Dark Defender has often been the tipping point between success and failure on a team....not to say that other AT's also haven't been...

One example of success with rarely played defenders(in comparison to Empathy) was a Khan TF I recently ran. The team consisted of a Dark Defender(me), Storm Defender, TA Defender, WP Tank, Two scrappers, and a Blaster. For the most part, this team steamrolled...the debuffs were crazy.

I'll take a skilled Storm defender, and a relatively unskilled Dark Defender over an Empathy(or Thermal) any day.

Edit:Minor quibble....I didn't actually run the team myself, just a PuG I happened by when I had an hour to kill...
Edit2: My experience was with Defenders...Perhaps it would be different with a Villain team with Corruptors instead...but I'm thinking it isn't.

C'mon man, you should know thats not at all what she was saying. Out of context quote is out of context.

It looks to me like all she was saying was that while people never say "hey we need a pain corr" they also equally never say "hey we need a dark/storm". Her point was that the only thing most teams request in terms of support is a kinetics.

If things go seriously south, I want a good Dark or a Storm on the team. Of course, if I have a good Dark or Storm on the team, it takes a -lot- of stupid to make things go south.

I play a lot of Storm characters, but I must admit I'm not a -great- Stormer. Takes a lot of practice to get right and doesn't play like any other set, really. Storm gets a bad reputation mostly from that, I think.

It is a little more difficult to convince some players of the merits that either set has, but I personally love dark miasma. It has so many useful tools and it a really strong set. To add to that, it is hard to do it wrong. I don't have quite as much love for storm, however. I admit, this is probably a result of just teaming with too many poor storm summoners. I have not played storm, but I have taken a dark miasma to 50 and I loved the ride. On that note, I am a little cautious of inviting unknown stormies to my teams typically. In the wrong hands, a storm summoner can be quite hazardous to a team's welfare. If i know the person sitting behind the stormie, or if a friend can vouch for them, I have no qualms.

To answer the original question- yes, they are both powerful sets. As someone else said: why worry about healing damage when you don't have to worry about taking it in the first place.

Dark and Storm are both better than Pain or Empathy by a wide margin.

1) Not taking damage is better than healing it

2) See point 1

Most players that MUST have a healer on the team don't pay any attention to what anyone is doing beside themselves (sometimes not even that much)

Green numbers tell everyone that the healer is doing their job, even if their job is unnecessary

A Dark Miasma has very subtle powers, they are not flashy by any means. A lot of players never even see the power effects because they're too preoccupied with watching their XP bar go up. Therefore they think that since Dark's powers aren't obvious, they aren't doing anything.

I'm a little more ambivalent on Stormies. It's an awesome set, IF it's played well. There are a lot of bad Storm players out there who give the set a bad name because they have no clue how to use the tools they have. I cite the type of player that drops Tornado in the middle of a tank's herd as an example.

The good Stormies are an asset to just about any team, the bad ones are a liability more often than not.

A skilled Empath is an asset as well.

The downside to that is: The majority of players who insist on having one on the team have no clue how to tell a good one from a bad one. As long as they see green numbers, they're happy. It doesn't matter if the Empath is afk with the tank on follow, with healing Aura on autofire to these people, because by Jove they're HEALING!!!

An empath who does nothing but spam the heal aura and put Fortitude on the tank (usually the LAST member of the team who needs it) is dead weight in my book. Unfortunately, thanks to AE PLing, those horrible Emps who give the set a bad name are making a comeback.

The "Deflected" pop-ups were a big help in providing some visibility to defense (i.e., those Force Fields are actually helping), but what I'd really like to see is an (optional) mission-end pop-up that provides some metrics:

- Bubbly Bubbler's defense buffs prevented 8625 points of damage to the team.
- Dark Lord Darkity Dark's to-hit debuffs prevented 6988 points of damage to the team.
- Sonicy Joe's resistance buffs prevented 7944 points of damage to the team.
- Healy McAurarocker healed 817 points of team damage.

If those four happened to find their way onto a typical PuG, there are two certainties:
1) No one would be taking any damage, and
2) Since the green numbers would be (mostly needlessly) flying throughout, and their health bars were always full, someone would say "Great heals!"

It would also be nice if heal spam was green only when it actually moved your hit points, and gray or some other color when it was superfluous, and split when it was split (like mixed damage type attacks), so that you'd see a green "17" over your head and a gray or purple "423" if most of the heal was wasted.

To the OP -- I love both DM and Storm. Storm has some of the game's most potent debuffs, although one of them, Hurricane, is hard to use right on teams.

One of the (probably unavoidable) reasons Storm's reputation suffers on teams is that one of the things it does best is to neutralize foes by knockback. This is seldom necessary on teams, but when it is, it can save everyone from defeat -- at the cost of scattering the mobs. The problem with that is that players saved from defeat often don't see the "defeat that never was," but they sure do see the scatter and the messy aftermath of getting the spawn rounded up again or defeated where they landed. On the other hand, of course, a Storm player can use incorrect judgment and unleash the scatter to "save" a team that would have done fine without such drastic intervention.

More than most other powersets, Storm imposes a cost for employing its most potent powers (somewhat reminiscent of Stone Armor and Granite's penalties). This means Storm players can't prosper by just hitting all the buttons in their power bars -- they have to think before using several of them, and the decision to not use their full potential is often a hidden contribution to the team's success.

I honestly can't say much about the Storm set because I don't have enough experience with it, but about Dark Miasma, I can say that there's a reason why Dark Miasma was never given to Controllers!

Dark Miasma is crazy good. First set I ever played to make me go, "Hmm, it's a hazard zone spawn of +2s with three bosses... I think I can handle this."