Solo Controller Question (In Regards to Power Pools)

I'm crazy and for some reason am thinking of making a solo controller. The solo controller guide is sadly listed as either issue 2 or 4, I forget, but it's waaaay behind. I guess my main question is this:

Are there any good power pool combat powers, or if there aren't any good ones are there any "ok" ones? Finally, which ones should I avoid when making my character and why?. Thanks.

Short answer - Flurry is the best.

You aren't crazy.
Well, it depends on your choice of Primary. Ice is worse, followed closely by Earth. Soloing either of them is going to be pretty slow.
I like Gravity as a solo set, but Mind, Fire and Plant are probably the best three.
Whatever set you pick, you'll be safe, but your End bar wilkl be your worse enemy much of the time, as your damage/endurance is pretty low.

As for pool powers...
Boxing and Kick are sub-par, and you won't need the Fighting pool on a solo Controller.
Air Superiority is pretty solid, and adds some extra control for a boss who gets too close.
I'd recommend Flurry though, because it has much better damage per endurance than other powers.
The main downside is the long animation, which doesn't matter if the targets held.

If you have the Sands of Mu 12 month vet power, this will do way more damage than any of your native attacks, and make soloing much better, especially with a source of +To hit or -Def. This is why I place Earth above Ice as a solo set, purely for the -Def. Rad as a secondary is a great solo-er, even more so becuase Rad Infection lets Sands of Mu hit.

I guess having Flurry and Sands of Mu might look a bit off if you use both..

Thanks for the tip, and I'm glad it's possible to do this

Opinions differ widely. The ones you definitely want to avoid are Ice, Electric and Earth -- you can solo them, but they are the lowest damage.

In the early game, Illusion, Mind and Gravity all have good single target damage powers. Illusion and Mind solo more easily because of Deceive/Confuse -- a no-aggro single target control power lets you confuse all the dangerous foes, so you can actually kill off foes with no danger to you whatsoever. Then Plant comes along with Seeds of Confusion at level 8 -- the best low level AoE control, with some AoE damage in Roots -- it is not fast, but you can often handle groups just as easily as individuals.

Fire is very slow to solo in the lower levels, but in high levels, it becomes the AoE damage king -- especially Fire/Kin, but Fire/Rad is pretty darn good, too. So is Fire/Storm. Other sets become easier to solo once you get your pet at 32 . . . except Mind gets a great AoE control power in Mass Confusion. (Soloing a Mind controller in upper levels becomes slow compared to other controllers.)

My personal favorite solo sets are Ill/Rad, Ill/Storm, Ill/TA and Grav/Storm. They aren't really that fast, but they can solo mostly in safety, and survival is more important to me than speed. My Fire/Rads follow close behind. Ill/Rad in particular works great solo, on small teams or on large teams -- it is an all-purpose character who can tank, blast, control and defend. (You might notice the link to my Ill/Rad guide in my sig . . . just sayin' . . . )

As for Power pools, the first pool attack I look at is Air Superiority. It does a little less damage than Flurry, but you don't get rooted for a long time, and you get that nice knockdown as another aspect of control -- plus you can knock down fliers. I think that if you do a survey of most experienced players, Air Sup will be more popular than Flurry.

Air Superiority is by far and away the better pool power in general.
For many solo Controllers though, Flurry pulls ahead of Air Superiority for the following reasons:

Your single target immobilise already causes -Fly at range (If you have one)

The knockdown from Air Superiority is cancelled by some of your most regularly used powers (ST Immobilise and/or hold). And a solo Controller won't need the extra control.

The long rooting time of Flurry is not dangerous if the enemy is held, which they probably are if they're fighting a solo Controller.

The damage per endurance of Flurry is far superior, by about 35%. It takes less end and does more damage (and you recover endurance during the long animation.)

On a solo Defender or Blaster looking for a bit more safety, Air Superiority is brilliant and Flurry can be a death sentence to use. But for a solo Controller, like I say, your end bar moves faster than the enemies, and Flurry works better mechanically to help this.

Whether the animation is your cup of tea is another matter, but numerically its the best pool attack to use.

I have done alot of controller soloing, including pre-containment and the best solo controller at the lower end is Mind Control. If the idea of having real pets is a concern, since Mind's idea of a pet is a confused Boss running wild, then you should consider Illusion.

My favorite soloing secondary is radiation, but just about anything will work with a controller.

And I have to agree with Dr.Mike on the pool attacks. Air Superiority is the best, Flurry is very functional, but if you have Sands of Mu, then go with AS instead.

Thanks again for the advice, I'm looking forward to making this character . Sadly I only have 6 - 7 mos. of play time so I don't have the cool sands of mu power lamely, I can make do with the power pool powers though

I always grab air sup on new controllers. Fly is a decent travel power (although I prefer to just use ninja run and grab more powers early) and air sup is a great attack that recharges fast. Slot your hold for damage early on. You shouldn't be fighting bosses anyway, so hold duration isn't as important since you don't need to stack holds and things should die at a good pace. Once I hit level 10 I tend to make 2 builds, one build is my grouping build, which is set up the same as my final planned build (where I skip powers like Air superiority), and the other is my solo build. That way you can slot out your hold for hold duration in your grouping build to help hold bosses and such, while being able to slot your solo build more towards dealing damage and less towards support. Especially with secondaries like rad, I've found that nice, since I never grab enervating field before level 20 on solo builds (just costs too much end), but in large groups it's a great toggle to have and well worth the endurance cost since it improves the damage of everybody.

In my experience Mind Control on a Controller has 2 major downsides.

The first is AoE Containment. It shares this problem with Illusion, but Illusion literally has an army to make up the damage difference.

The second is fighting elite bosses and AVs. I found it very, very frustrating, because establishing Containment is so difficult. However, now that we can go Villain, I believe there is at least a temporary job power that can help alleviate this.

The lack of a pet never bothered me one way or another. I can't really say Plant or Ice's pets are that great (although if we call Carrion Creepers a "pet" perhaps so). I always valued the Earth pet for its survivability more than its damage. Fire and Electric get pretty significant damage from the pets. Illusion is basically a Mastermind with a couple of control powers. Gravity's pet is good but the set is not comparable to Mind in a million years.

Now the thing about Mind Control is I've found it a bit of a roller coaster in terms of performance. It starts out way ahead of the other sets in performance. Then at around level 15 its slightly behind (climbing the lift hill?), and holds that position for a long time while you make your way to level 26 for Terrify. Even then, I find it still requires you to get all the way to level 33, with Mass Confusion slotted, for it to really take off... then at 41-47 other Controllers start getting Contained AoEs, and may surpass you in damage.

However, if you keep going to 50, and start building for massive recharge, you edge more and more on other sets, who aren't really benefitting as much from dropping recharge on things that recharge semi-quickly anyway. If you take the Primal APP (IMO the best for most Mind Controllers) eventually you can use Power Boost to obtain ~50 seconds of Containment from Total Domination every 60 seconds or so. At that point, you are not only ridiculously survivable, but doing damage at least on par to average sets. To wit, my Mind/Cold Controller was doing Carnie radio missions on +0x8. I did die from time to time, but the fact that he could do it at all, combined with his excellent ability to provide mitigation on teams, impressed me.

In terms of teaming, I have lvl 50 Earth/Storm, Ice/Therm, Ice/Rad, a FF/Ice Defender, but the Mind/Cold is who I'd reach for everytime a team seemed hopeless and someone needed to go get their "best toon," because he could almost always carry the group past impossible odds with a combo of stealth, Power Boost, and sneaky sleeps and confuses.

We should add that this game is changing over time. With the introduction of "tip" missions, which tend to reward you for actually completing the objective each day instead of farming the mission for XP, Mind Control is a shoo-in set because it's amazing at being able to stealth objectives. At various times I have even walked kidnap victims to exits with a bare minimum of fighting by just sleeping or confusing each enemy group as I stroll passed.

All of this said, I did recently try rerolling my Mind/Cold troller as a Mind/Ice Dominator. The change resulted in him gaining even better lockdown, earlier access to power boost, but has made him contribute less to AV and monster fights where I am on a team. He is currently level 34, but showing lots of promise.

Personally, I evaluate characters with standard builds leveling up, and maybe some lower cost IOs late in the build. There are so many changes you can make with a full IO build maximizing this attribute or that attribute, that I don't think it is very helpful to folks looking for advice to take that final expensive build into account.

Ultimately, it is a matter of personal choice. On my Mind Controllers, I slot Dom, Mez and Lev for damage and enough recharge to get a pretty steady attack chain. Terrify is slotted for damage rather than control. I use Confuse a lot, and Mass Confusion when appropriate. I don't think that Terrify and Mass Confusion make up for the damage of most pets.

As for Tip Missions, my Ill/Rad is my first choice . . . with Superior Invis, Deceive and PA drawing the attention of foes, it makes it very, very easy to stealth missions.

I am a big fan of Flurry myself, although I also love Boxing. Air Sup is my least favorite on a controller.

Here is a handy chart for reference, damage is level 50 unenhanced.
DPA = Damage per Animation Time
DPE = Damage per Endurance
Arcanatime = the animation time accounting for stuff explained here.
Damage = Damage per click of the power.

Attack   DPA    DPE   Arcanatime   Damage
Boxing   19.33    5.25     1.20         23.2
  Kick   13.11    5.20     1.96         25.7
J-Kick   18.77    5.60     1.63         30.6
AirSup   18.77    4.71     1.63         30.6
Flurry   10.94    6.41     3.20         35.0

Well I think if we're going to break it down far enough, the argument ultimately becomes "why solo a Controller at all when you could just go Dominator and 9 times out of 10 have an easier time?" I think we're talking less about what is best than what is functional.

Since there's a lot of talk about mind control, I'll begin there. First stop, containment: solo you can leverage Mass Hypnosis for containment much easier than on teams. Establish a rhythm with it, mixing your buff/debuffs and single target attacks between MH and you will have containment almost everytime you need it. To me, this has never been an issue and certainly doesn't approach the trouble Illusion has establishing containment.

The most difficult thing about solo'ing a mind controller is going to be AV's and PToD EB's. Other controllers can rely on their pets to soak some of the attacks or at least have the option of keeping them at range with immobilizes. With mind, you're going to be the sole target and AV's/EB's are going to close to melee and melee hard. You can shut them down with a sleep, but... well, you can't attack them unless you're ready to be attacked again.

Really, part of the question of what to controller solo comes down to what you intend to solo. If you want to mow through radio after radio at x8, plant and fire do a fine job. If you decide you want to solo AV's and GM's then Illusion is the go-to set. There are cetainly niches among controller primaries, it's a matter of which you want to explore.