Slotting for a Mind/Psi Dom

I recently decided to try and pick up my first Dominator, and have been exploring a Mind/Psi build, but I've run into a bit of a problem: Slotting. The plan is to take every primary power excluding levitation, and six slot them, while leaving out telekinetic thrust, subdue and psionic lance from my secondary. In addition to two requisite travel pool powers, I'm also picking up three fitness powers, stimulant and aid self, and power sink to top it all off.

Now optimally, I would six slot all my primary powers, along with power sink and aid self. If I do this though, I run out of slots to put into assault. Does anybody have any advice on how to juggle slotting in this situation?

Why would you 6-slot all your primary powers? Even many of the better powers can get by with 5 slots.

Many of them simply don't need it and you'll wind up with no slots for your secondary.

[The following rant consists of slotting advice / philosophy from the perspective of a newish dominator playing through the early/mid game "normally" - that is, leveling up solo or on equal-level teams through the traditional lowbie contacts / papers. If you plan on rushing through to the mid/end game, disregard most of this post.]

On my mind/psi dom, I put far more emphasis on my primary than my secondary as a lowbie, both in power picks and in slots, relying on an attack chain of Levitate, Dominate, Mezmerize, Mind Probe, and Confuse until I got access to goodies like Subdue. The ST Mind controls worked fine as straight attacks, if a little heavier on the endurance than conventional blasts would have been. However, he was born before the great dom revamp of Issue 15; now that the low level /psi blasts don't suck, using mesmerize and dominate as the core of your damaging attack chain is no longer desirable (levitate still works though).

Were I to reroll him now that they completely redid /Psi, I would take and slot Mind Probe, TK Thrust, and Mental Blast early on, in addition to Mezmerize, Dominate, and possibly Levitate. They will be your heavy lifters for damage and control for most of the game, so give them some love early. I know you said you were going to skip TK Thrust, but they did make it almost as powerful a melee attack as Mind Probe, which is your heaviest hitter in the set, and it's half Smashing damage. Not taking TK Thrust or Levitate is going to be brutal when you come up against robots.

Mass Hypnosis is the only AoE control you'll get until your 20s, so I'd take it early and possibly respec it out later if you aren't getting much out of it. Confuse is always a good tool to have, but it can probably be pushed back a few levels. If you level up through the conventional lowbie arcs rather than SKing up with a friend or doing some AE arcs, Mooks are irritatingly resistant to confusion, for what it's worth.

As far as slotting goes in general, Mezmerize and Confuse work very well with minimal slotting; they both get luxuriously long base durations, and inherent bonus accuracy. If you have spare slots they both can take really good, really cheap IO sets, but slotting them can be postponed until later on in your career. Feel free to load up on pool powers in the late teens / early 20s, since you will want to divert your slotting to your main controls/attacks for a while, and low slot requirement pools like travels and medicine are perfect for this. You seemed fixed on 6-slotting everything; I generally shoot for 4 or 5 slotting everything first, and then adding on a 6th later on in the game if I have extras to pass around or I'm hungry for a six-slot set bonus. 5 slots, esp. if you're willing to at least frankenslot some set pieces, is normally enough to work with, and of particular interest to dominators, tends to be where +recharge set bonuses are placed.

Some other powers, like Telekinesis (if you choose to use it; it's totally an individual preference) need very little slotting at all; Telekinesis just needs 2-3 endurance reducers to be happy. You can likely skip Total Domination altogether; AoE holds sound amazing in theory, but it's 4 minute base recharge paired with low accuracy and low duration outside of Domination mean that it needs to be sixslotted to be halfway decent, and Terrify tends to get the job done on 1/4 the cooldown and 2x the duration.



Since your crunch seems to be a slot shortage, not a power shortage, this may not be as useful, but my dominator has gotten by just fine WITHOUT the fitness pool. Drain Psyche is wonderful, and with just a couple of slots in it, popping DP or Domination as needed can keep your endurance bar sitting pretty most of the time. The only part of Fitness I missed was Hurdle, for combat mobility. Tag on Power Sink, as you said you intend to, and endurance should be a total non-issue.

Hasten is tremendously helpful for this and any other Dominator activities in general; everything a Dominator does, they do better with +recharge, and even without Permadom levels, it helps. Even though very few of my other characters bother with it, I would never make a dominator without Hasten, to get Domination and all the AoE controls up faster along with smoothing out my attack chains.

For the end-game, as you don't need to sink many slots in pool powers, it's possible to build a mind/psi with 5 or 6 slots in all your main attacks and controls.. I'd just think carefully about whether or not you actually need all of them in each power.

On dominators, +recharge bonuses are very helpful.

...And luckily for you, mind/ gives some mez sets that are not often used, which means they go for less.

*Call of the Sandman-sleep pretty reasonable, good bonuses.
*Malaise's Illusions-confuse. Good bonuses. I don't bother with the proc.
*Unspeakable Terror/Glimpse of the Abyss-fear. I like glimpse better, unspeakable is cheaper.
*Doctored wounds-heal- put five of this in drain psyche with an accuracy IO, and you'll heal quickly between controls. Gives good enhanced recharge as well.
*crushing impact-melee a good set, though a bit pricier at times.
*Entropic chaos-this one's the affordable ranged +recharge set.

More expensive options:

*Decimation-expensive ranged set.

*Basilisk's gaze-expensive hold set.

*Positron's Blast-Psy scream

*Obliteration-Psy shockwave

I stay at 5 slots for most powers here. Once you get to sets, you can do in 50 slots what you normally do in 6, if not more. The two exceptions I'd say would be Drain psyche, as the 5 slots for doctored wounds doesn't cover accuracy, and Having a 6th slot for contagious confusion's AoE confuse proc is golden. (Admittedly, this takes getting to 50)

Also, if you get to 50 the sleep and confuse sets for purples are actually pretty affordable. I''d put them in the AoE sleep/confuse for maximum effect, with the aforementioned exception of the confusion proc.

*edit* Don't know how I missed the subdue thing-it's an excellent, fast attack. Also, the immobilize is nice. I wouldn't skip it. Psionic lance is good if you can spare slots and put sting of the manticore in it. But I know that's more a matter of taste.

To the OP: it looks to me like you are making the mistake I made when I first tried playing dominators: playing them like they are a controller with an attack secondary. The trick to dominators is playing them like a blaster/blapper with a control primary. This means that the primary focus of a dominator is damage, even though their primary powerset is control. I think it was Castle who noted in the dom revamp that dominators basically have 2 primaries.

What this means is early on most of your slots need to go in attacks to boost damage, with just enough going to control powers to keep them up often enough so that you can keep the spawns from killing you before you kill them. In the case of mind control because you start off with such good, long duration controls this means you don't need to slot the primary up very much. The exception to this is levitate which is not a control so much as it is a ranged blast that does smashing damage with knockup as a secondary effect. Whether or not you take levitate depends on your secondary - as others have mentioned having levitate to deal with psi resistant enemies (who tend to be VERY psi resistant - robots are 50% psi resistant) is very nice.

It wasn't obvious from your original post if you are already fairly high level and are looking for IO set slotting advice or if you are working your way up. I think you have gotten a lot of decent high level IO slotting advice so far, so I will add some leveling advice. First, you get excellent single target control from mind by taking mesmerize, dominate and confuse. You don't even need to add slots to these as they are perma out of the box (or better in the case of mesmerize and confuse) and have better than base accuracy, although dominate benefits from a little extra recharge and all of them can benefit from end reduction.

Then take mass hypnosis when you can squeeze it in for AE control - it doesn't need much more than 2-3 slots total until you decide to put an IO set in it. You won't really get another good AE control until terrify, which doubles as AE damage as well although it is very inefficient at that. AT higher levels (32+) you want to get both total domination and mass confusion and slot them up for as much accuracy, recharge and hold/confuse duration as you can so you can alternate between the two of them as often as possible.

As for psi assault, I would certainly skip TK thrust and take levitate instead - while lev does less damage it is ranged and has a faster cast time so you don't have to let things close with you and whack you before bouncing them. Mind probe is a perfectly decent melee attack and you can take it if you find yourself in melee a lot but you can build a fairly good ranged attack chain from psi dart, levitate and mental blast, adding in subdue if you want to later on, so it can also be skipped if that is your preference. On the other hand, when slotting for +recharge it's a nice place to stick a set of crushing impact.