Dark as a primary

I'll start off by saying I'm a bit of a noob. I want to play a toon with dark as a primary, I was looking at a brute or corruptor. Anyways, in both instances dark seems very under powered, compared to the other things sets I've tried.

Is dark meant to be more of a support role than a damage dealer?

Do it's powers get a lot better?

Or is it just a under powered set?

As a general rule, every set in the game is very well balanced.

Is dark blast going to kill as fast as fire blast? Probably not. Does fire blast have useful debuffs and controls? No.

To be honest, if you're looking for concept, but really want DPS out of the deal, go with the powerset that looks most "powerful" to you, and use customization to make it look like darkness powers.

Neither Dark Melee nor Dark Blast are underpowered. I can't say I have much experience with Dark Melee, since I rarely play melee characters, but Dark Blast is actually one of the better blst sets. While it doesn't have a third single-target heavy hitter skin to Blaze or Bitter Ice Blast, it does have two exceptional cone attacks, one of which is also an immobilize.

It's hard to compare Dark Blast to other blast sets. It's a completely different animal from most of them. Most sets get a single-target mez, either a stun or hold. Dark Blast does not, but gets a low mag AOE stun. Most blast sets get Aim (or a clone) for +tohit and +damage. Dark Blast does not. Most blast sets get a medium-range heavy hitting blast to complement the tier 1 and 2 blasts. Dark Blast does not.

Dark Blast is the only blast set that includes a self heal.

Dark Blast is relatively weak against single targets, but has strong AoE. It's not the best at AoE, and not being the best at AoE while also not being the best generalist means it gets ignored by a lot of people. It also has the same problem that +defense has in it's -tohit secondary effect. It's binary, either you get hit or you don't. It tends to be streaky, and at low levels of -tohit, it seems like it's doing nothing.

Dark Melee is the opposite of Dark Blast in a way. While Dark Blast does best against multiple opponents, Dark Melee is a single target specialist.

Dark Melee is definitely far from underpowered, nor is it a "support set". You probably won't create a farmer with DM, you can create an AV soloer though.

You get a quick animating (except for one attack), quick recharging attack chain that hits hard.
An exotic control that debuffs to-hit (Touch of Fear).
A potentially massive damage and to-hit buff (Soul Drain)
Blue bar refiller (Dark Consumption)
A heavy hitting attack... that heals you!
On top of all that, the attacks all debuff to-hit.

Full disclosure - my only DM character has just hit level 12, so my hands-on experience is limited. At level 12 though, I'm very satisfied and can see things just getting significantly better.

I do have significantly more experience with Dark Blast (50 Def, 50 Corr) and have no complaints.

Both of these have a good synergy when paired with powersets that
a) have no self-heal (Shield Def, Super Reflexes, Cold Dom, Traps for example)
b) have +Def and/or -ToHit debuffs (see above)

So, again, nothing underpowered to see here.

All the 'dark' powersets are generally considered oddballs compared to other sets in their category. They're also all considered good sets that bring a variety of effects to the table. They'll need a different mindset but you will be rewarded.

You always try a Dark Miasma defender - Dark Miasma is awesome.
Or a Necromancy/Dark Miasma Mastermind

I'll add that both sets are a little late-blooming. Dark Blast needs both cones to really start laying down the AoE pain and debuffs heavy enough to be noticeable, and Dark Melee's damage takes off once you hit Soul Drain.

Dark is far from underpowered.

Dark Blast is not very effective at single-target DPS. However, it offers significant debuffs, some atypical levels of control (an AoE immob in a blast set is excellent), and really very excellent cone damage.

Dark Melee is fairly monstrous single-target DPS when fueled by Soul Drain. It also offers extremely atypical levels of debuff and control in a melee powerset.

Dark Armor isn't easy to build and play well, but it has survivability with its heal that's actually comparable to other mitigation sets running their "god mode" tier-9 clicks, like Unstoppable. IOs are extremely gracious to this powerset, because what it demands more than anything is more endurance, which IOs can provide very well.

Dark Miasma is a very strong set. It's more of a jack-of-all-trades than a master of any one. That means its strong in a wide array of situations, but not your best choice for very focused goals like soloing Giant Mosnters. Like other Dark sets, it has unusual capabilities that find powerful uses in unusual situations - it's incredibly gratifying to have a Dark Miasmist turn around a wiped raid because they rez 20 people who were defeated in a pile. Despite their generalist nature, their strong debuffs - particularly Resistance, Regen and Damage - are still excellent for aiding others in AV and GM takedown.

Dark sets are often called weak by people who are looking for peak performance in a very narrow band of play. Dark sets generally aren't good in those ways. Dark sets have lower peaks, but more of them.

I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who's NOT a 5-year vet and a numbers geek. This is hard for me. Hope I'm not too patronizing.

When you get to level 22, the game starts looking considerably different. I'm going to start with that statement. You will at some point have more attacks than time to use them, unlike the early game where you occasionally have pauses with no attack recharged, and you start being able to play with things like "slotting recharge into the good attacks" and such.

Once you get into serious powergaming mode, you can do some DRAMATICALLY different things to a power- half or a third the recharge time, full damage and (sometimes) extra bonus pain stacked on there.

In the serious powergaming mode, among people who do stuff like solo archvillains, Dark Melee is one of the preferred sets. It has a couple VERY fast-activating, hard hitting attacks, it does a nonstandard damage type, it's trendy and cool.

I don't like DM because Shadow Maul, one of the signature attacks, annoys me. Mathwise, good attack. Look and feel, I don't enjoy it. But it's a GOOD attack and you get it about level 2.

For Dark Blast- it's a different attack set from most. It's better on defense and slightly worse on offense, in my opinion- but I play a lot of Fire Blast (which has NO defense and a TON of offense.)

A lot of it comes down to feel- if you're not enjoying what you are playing, try something else. This game is not about 49 levels of waiting for the good stuff, it's not about sacrificing your fun for team success. . . play something that makes you happy.

As the local Darkness fanboy even I think my opinion should be taken with a grain of salt but played well, any primary and secondary is good. What Darkness does is sacrifice some power for utility, especially in the Corruptor and Defender iterations.

Eh...Its late and i'm sick. Here, ill just shove some expectations.

Darkblast/Miasma

-You can with good planing have a very powerful crowd DPS chain by lvl 12 with Tarpatch>Tenticles>Nightfall, Pick off boss's and other nasties with Moonbeam/DarkBlast/Gloom

-Skill with positioning is essential.

-Patience. Even though you are not killing them fast, they will not ever kill you. Period.

-Understand how -To hit works.

-Get Ranged defense, its awesome for all sorts of reasons like the fact it make -to hit debuffs even more effective.

-Howling Twilight is one of the nastiest debuffs in the game, oh and it reses crowds of players too. Take this power and use it whenever it comes up, if you are doing your job right you should never actually need to use it as a resurrection power, it is far more useful as a Megadebuff that incluedes such tasty bits such as a mag 2 aoe stun, 40% speed/Recharge debuff, 500% Regen debuff and a mag 3 fear to top it off...the best part is all of that autohits up to 16 baddies.

-Black hole is the turd of the set that is at best a panic power that really should never be used. Skip it, your team will thank you.

-Fearsome stare is a extremely effective control power, it will remove entire mobs of badies from the fight untill you are ready to fight them. Its also the main opening attack for miasma, it lands a instant 25% tohit debuff and gives you time to stack all sorts of debuffs on them before they even begin to attack you.

-Fluffy (dark servant) is your friend, hes like a little clone of you, he has many of your best powers at the same strength of you. However the most awesome part of him is what is not immediately obvious, Chill of the night- A 12ft radius aoe 25% tohit debuff that is allways on, with this power fluffy is able to tank some very very nasty foes and assist you in debuffing.

-There is many things awesome about both powersets that I detail much more in my guide thing.
*edit* http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=189835 <- my guide to Dark blast/ Dark Miasma, Dark melee/Armor sections are not done but I put in a link for a very awesome guide for those sets.

Dark Melee/Armor

-Level 1-20 is rough. Its pretty much the same with all Melee armors, no SO's/good IO's, no stamina, no bells and whistles. Pre-SO Dark Regeneration will destroy your endbar when you use it.

-Every power in Dark armor is essential except the self Res, Cloak of fear is somewhat redundant and is not as useful so it is skipable, still good though, but if you need another power elsewhere you won't miss its heavy end costs and poor accuracy.

-Despite what I just said, even though having all the toggles is very useful, having all of them on all the time is not, know your enemies and what kinds of damage they deal to save on endurance.

-Like others have said, Dark Melee is a awesome single target set, you will tear through stuff like its made of paper, one at a time, let Dark armors damage aura kill the minions while you focus on boss/stronger foes.

-Defense is awesome, get some. It will save you lots of endurance from not needing to use dark regeneration.

-Endurance is awesome, get some

-Physical perfection is awesome, get some. ((Conserve power while you're at it too.))

-If that was not enough hints, even with the end restore power this set chews up the end bar and requires quite abit of management to prevent suicide by toggle drop. However, it is very powerful once you get the rythm of it.

-Buzzsaw builds was a fad, ignore them, they offer no advantage whatsoever, especially since the major buff to siphon life and Midnight grasp, perhaps even before...

-Dark armor does not have a "god mode" power, but playing it well and having a good build will effectively put you in a perma-god mode against anything, there is no real holes in DA's mitigation, it even has considerable psi-resists (60% roughly).

Desmodos has a VERY detailed guide to Dark melee/Armor -> http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=127590

Dark Melee gets some of it's "weak" criticism from people who like the SMASH feeling of sets like Super Strength or Stone Melee. It doesn't have the massive smack of Headsplitter or flashy effects like Lightning Rod. Heck, of the 9 powers in the set only 3 of them have you actually touch your target, something that's sort of odd for a melee set.

That doesn't mean it isn't doing damage or working just as well as other sets. Unslotted on a Scrapper Midnight Grasp does slightly more damage than Headsplitter as well as being a less commonly resisted damage type. It just isn't flashy about it. It's very much a toolbox set, with it's powers filling gaps elsewhere in your build.

My first 50 was a DM/FA Brute, and yes, you'll feel a bit left out when everyone else is getting a tier 9 SMASH and you get Midnight Grasp. Don't give it a second thought. My Brute is like the energizer bunny. He just keeps going and going. With two heals and two end recovery powers, there isn't much that slows you down. You're the terminator of Brute builds. Pair DM with a defense set and the -to hit makes you even better. Pair it with a set lacking a heal and Siphon Life has you covered. End problems? Not with Dark Consumption around.

If you want SMASH look somewhere else, but for all around effectiveness Dark Melee is a great set.

DARK IS FOR TORMENTORS!

I done many Darks. I know what you mean but it's just how it feels not a performance flaw. The nature of a Darker is more to torment the target lol. I confess I haven't got a Dark blast past 30 but then I haven't got a blaster past 30 I'm an up close and personal killer...fighter so I go for the melee builds.

I have Tanker that's Willpower/Dark Melee Rotten Luck. I must say he's one of the few 50s I still play just to play. The Dark Melee is more fit for a solo I often state when in teams I'm not the best at Argo control. I often have to go from one target to another but I do enjoy it.

My Brute 32 is Dark Melee/Dark Armor. I'm going for a triple dark threat when I unlock Ghost Widow's Patron arc.

Like others have said going for Mass kill is not a Darker's way we like to torture one at a time. So if you seek to have a mass kill farmer type then Dark isn't the best. Take something else and change the FX to the shade you like for a mass or quick killer.

With other Blast types the secondary effect can make it seem more powerful.

Fire for example has the added damage.
Energy has the KB effect causing the target to be on the ground more then fighting you.
Electrical can drain end causing the targets protection to fall.

So the real question is what your comparing Dark to...

Put it simple a Dark whatever might not kill fast but you just keep on killing and killing and... well you get the picture by now. Yeah you might not be a mass killer but your foes will be wetting themselves as they see there friends fall one by one.