So what's new?

Since, say, I12 or so?

Since issue 12, huh? There have certainly been some chances since then. (Of course, there were more changes than just what I'm listing. I'm just listing the changes that affected doms.)

In issue 12, of course, doms got earth control and electricity assault. After that, there weren't any real changes until issue 13 came out.

In issue 13, villain patron pools were changed to no longer be locked. You can take any patron pool on your villain, no matter which actual patron you chose, and you can change your patron pool with a respec. This issue also gave us the option for multiple builds, and added a 5th power to each of our patron pools. It also brought a complete revamp of PvP (which most seem to have disliked - I wouldn't really know as I don't PvP).

Somewhere in here, all melee powers had their range buffed from 5 to 7 feet (if they weren't already better). A fairly minor change, but it's surprising just how noticeable a difference it made, IMO.

Issue 14 brought the Mission Architect, which is a feature that could take up an entire post in its own right. Suffice to say, it's a way for players to write their own story arcs and play the story arcs of others. As you might expect, most of what people have written is either horribly bad or a farm, but there are a lot of real gems in there too, if you can find them.

Issue 15 brought the biggest changes for us doms - this issue included the long-awaited Dominator Archetype Revamp. Basically, the biggest change was to domination. This power no longer boosts damage - instead, the archetype's base damage modifiers were increased so that you now do the damage you used to do in domination, *all the time*. Aside from that, a whole host of individual assault powers were changed, in general to make them harder-hitting but longer recharge. Energy assault got a large buff and is now one of the better assault sets. Psi shockwave got the nerf everyone had been waiting for since CoV first came out, but the rest of the psi assault set got enough of a buff that it's not '37 levels of suck' anymore. Some of the assault sets are slightly more endurance intensive than they were before (notably psi assault, because psi shockwave was so broken before), but in general the change was hailed as a very nice buff by nearly the entire community. Castle described the changes as 'giving the dominator AT two primary roles - damage and control' (paraphrased) - meaning, basically, that even though our damage sets are our secondaries, they should be as effective as if they were a primary set.

Issue 16 brought us a feature that has been requested since the start of the game - Power Customization. So far, you can alter the colors of all primary and secondary powers, along with occasionally picking between multiple animations or graphical themes. They have said that they want to expand this to pool and epic powers, but that hasn't come around yet. Issue 16 also brought us 'Super Sidekicking' - basically, every player on the team is sidekicked/exemplared to the team leader (or mission holder if inside a mission) at all times. To go along with this, while exemplared players can still earn XP, and retain access to powers up to 5 levels above the level they are exemplared to. Gone are the days of playing 'mentor tetris' to ensure that all the lowbies on the team could be sidekicked. (As a nice side effect, you shouldn't ever be bothered with 'bridge' requests anymore.) Issue 16 also had another round of powerset proliferation - this time, doms got Earth Assault, a not uber-powerful but fun and smashy assault set. Lastly, issue 16 also revamped the difficulty system - now, you can choose what level you want your missions to be (from -1 to +6, I believe) and how large of a team you want them to spawn for (1 to 8), along with choosing whether to fight bosses or AVs solo, all independently of each other. So, now, those psychotic scrappers can set themselves to +6/8/yes/yes and go slaughter stuff to their homicidal little hearts' content. It was an awesome issue.

Nowadays, all I'm waiting for is for doms to get illusion control.

[Edit:] Seeing as you have an /energy dom listed in your sig, you're probably going to want to respec him/her. Specifically, power push is now a beastly attack - it does more damage than power blast used to do, and still has the high accuracy and guaranteed knockback - all with the same quick animation and no increase to end cost or recharge time. Power blast now does even more damage than that (push used to be scale 0.4, blast 1.32 - now, push is 1.64, blast 1.96). Power burst went from scale 2.12 damage to scale 2.6, bone smasher went from scale 1.64 to 1.96, and total focus went from scale 3.56 to 3.88, as well. Layered on top of the changes to the ATs base damage modifiers, these changes literally double (or more) the damage of several powers (power push does about 6 times the damage it used to!). Most of these changes were accompanied by somewhat longer recharge timers, but you have enough individual attacks that making a coherent attack chain shouldn't be a problem.[/edit]

Thanks for the synopsis.

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Originally Posted by Muon_Neutrino Seeing as you have an /energy dom listed in your sig, you're probably going to want to respec him/her. Specifically, power push is now a beastly attack - it does more damage than power blast used to do, and still has the high accuracy and guaranteed knockback - all with the same quick animation

As always it will come down to straight damage of "just an attack" vs knockback control vs the knockup I get with levitate. While in the distant past I was always a proponent of the control offered by power push, it is a redundant choice for a mind/energy. I really have to choose between positioning ability (power push) or the ability to control w/o relocating (levitate) if I feel that I need either.

And with all other things being equal, I tend to choose the one that I think is the funniest at the time. Power boosted fully slotted levitate + rikti bosses = one helluva good time.



So were there any changes regarding IOs, set bonuses and other related stuff? As in does my old permadom build still work? You'd think I would try on my own.

You would be wrong. But hey,Min..... don't feel bad.. isn't the first time you were off the mark nor will it be the last.

Peace Man//woman. No offense intended.

Oh WOW!! Min was wrong AGAIN!!

HUGS!!!!**smirk**Happy hunting!

The advice you gave the grav//psi guy was pretty bad. Don't worry. I am going to rework his build in mids and post it in the morning.I got your back!!

Stop trolling yourself, Southern.

Welcome back Ditzy, we had an unfinished discussion about this. I'd really love it if you could give a short (3-line) summary of what exactly were the negative consequences of the recent Dominator changes. Or perhaps a list of 2 or 3 separate short points. If you're having trouble expressing it in so little space, then you could PM me something longer and I'll try and reduce it down to a few lines. I'm actually quite serious because I'm interested to understand your perspective. (Pretend that I haven't read all of your previous posts.)

That said, from memory the negative consequences were:

• Dominators who typically had the Domination buff stacked for a significant period of time, and didn't have any damage buffs.
• Players lost a high end-goal to aspire to.

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Originally Posted by Southern_Comfort You would be wrong. But hey,Min..... don't feel bad.. isn't the first time you were off the mark nor will it be the last. Peace Man//woman. No offense intended.

If you don't intend offense, then you'd be best not acting offensively.

Point 1. Any dominator in a full team with subpar recharge( hasten + 20%) experienced periods of domination overlap( stacked double dom) prior to the changes.
Point2. Any dominator in a team with permadom 1 or 2( 160% or 180%)experienced periods of triple stacks with a higher damage ratio than the current domination formula. This basiclly means that any dominator in a full team or in a 4man team with a kin on board contributed more damage without the end penalty.

Dominator's used to be the end game.They aren't any longer.

I apologize for being rude to Min but the comment about " exploit crowd" hit me the wrong way.
Point 3. I don't really care about the adjustment to psw. Bottomline is outside of pvp dom's got less powerful in the hands of a fast paced player. The fact that you all view the dumbing down of dominator's a GOOd thing baffles me. THE whole inherent of the archetype was changed after over 3 years. They aren't dominators anymore. Might as well come up with a new name for the archetype.

There's your answer,Lilli.

edited to add that the general consensus was nonbuffed doms( few took into consideration the team buffs experienced in a prior issue)performed too poorly for the casual player.. It was a frakken witchhunt for people that exceeded the "norm".The funny thing to me is that if any of the protestor's had made minimal effort they would have been right there with the players that had . To explain ... a teamed dom could surpass a solo dom easy breezy in terms of outright damage in pve. I find my dominator's endsucking whores now. Don't yell at me for saying I don't like something either.Sure.. I can slot for recovery... at the price of not slotting damage... or hp .. etc..The performance is lower. I said this back during the initial arguements... YOU KNOW.. back when SOME doms were out farming brutes.Not going to rehash this ,Lilli.
I'll play plenty nice and be sweet if you all will.But don't goad me or ask me for an opinion if you REALLY don't want to hear it. There's your little summary.

Thanks for the summary Ditzy, it helps a lot.

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Originally Posted by DitzyBlonde Point 1. Any dominator in a full team with subpar recharge( hasten + 20%) experienced periods of domination overlap( stacked double dom) prior to the changes.

This reminds me of another unresolved point. You spoke of a buff to Domination's recharge based on team size. Now, I have zero recollection of such a buff, I only remember a buff to filling the Domination bar based on team size. I cannot believe that I would forget about such a thing, nor that I would not notice it or consider it in my builds. So, I have no choice but to deny its existence without further proof. Could you find some sort of reference to it?

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Point2. Any dominator in a team with permadom 1 or 2( 160% or 180%)experienced periods of triple stacks with a higher damage ratio than the current domination formula. This basiclly means that any dominator in a full team or in a 4man team with a kin on board contributed more damage without the end penalty.

The big thing here is that previously Fulcrum Shift was wasted, but now the Dominator can really take advantage of it. The optimum playstyle has definitely changed.

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Dominator's used to be the end game.They aren't any longer.

This I can sympathize with, and is mostly to do with the change to PSW.

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I apologize for being rude to Min but the comment about " exploit crowd" hit me the wrong way.

Fair enough. He was being inflammatory.

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Point 3. I don't really care about the adjustment to psw. Bottomline is outside of pvp dom's got less powerful in the hands of a fast paced player.

This is within the confines of points 1 and 2 above, right?

I think you're right in that exploit is a bad word to use. The word "exploit" has some bad connotations and a specific legal meaning in the context of the EULA, but I simply don't have a good term for describing this sort of behaviour.

I also agree that Burn Tanks are also a bad example to use because, as you say, there was no clearly nothing unintended about that feature; it simply wasn't tested enough in terms of balance. A far better example IMO would be the L44 Rikti Communications Officer AE farms. Do I think double and triple stacking Domination for the damage bonus was equivalent to the Rikti farms? No, not at all. But what term would you use to describe leveraging such an obviously unintended feature as the main focus of your character?

Perhaps the difference is one of a little-e exploit as opposed to a big-e Exploit.

I don't think stacking domination was obviously unintended. I think that because most of the aspects of the power are set to "does not stack from same caster" except the damage bonus and the mez protection.

If it was obviously unintended then that restriction would have been added to the rest of the power.

I don't think the devs expected players to multi-stack domination on their own, but they have historically missed the obvious. However, the fact that it could be stacked was known to them. It is a tough road to prove that something that is ok with a single teammate buffing you from a game balance standpoint suddenly becomes overtly "exploitative" when achieved solo.

They may not have liked that doms could do it by themselves, but then again they haven't changed that aspect, there is just less reason to stack the power now. Usually when the devs decide something is too good they crush it like Lightning Storm, they don't just shift the power around.

What would I call people that took considerable time and inf to fully maximize the potential of their dominator within the confines of designed and implemented game mechanics? The same thing I call them now - Min/Maxer.

The number of actual exploits that players have had the opportunity to take advantage of in terms of player powers are very low. They don't slip through very often and when they do they don't last very long.

Castle did say it wasn't "Working as Intended" but he also never said it was an exploit. Sorry no reference, too lazy to track down something that old.