Dominators Are Beasts

Earth/Fire (or Earth/ anything, really) also has the advantage that with all the -def in Earth/ you can skimp a bit on slotting for accuracy, which is nice at the lower levels because Doms are really slot hungry then.

ok so i went with an earth/fire and an earth/eng dom. I took the fire dom to lvl 11 and the eng dom to 15. I enjoy playing the eng dom more than the fire dom so far due to the ranged attacks and bone smasher. are there any advantages to the fire dom over the end dom? so far I dont see any but Im just getting started.

/Energy is a very good secondary early on, thanks to getting 4 very nice attacks by level 10. /Fire, by comparison, starts a bit slower, since one of your early powers is an AoE (and it doesn't get the hax that is power push). They're pretty similar overall at these levels, though.

Later on is when they diverge significantly in overall focus. /Fire will have much more overall AoE potential - combustion is much better than whirling hands, and /energy has no equivalent of fire breath at all. Fire also has an endurance recovery tool in consume, and embrace of fire is a massive buff to your overall damage. It will massively out-damage energy assault in AoE (*especially* once you get the /fire epic and pick up fireball and rain of fire, since fiery embrace works on these as well), and will probably do so in ST as well (though not as much, and depending on your overall recharge levels).

/Energy, on the other hand, has more of a single target focus than /fire. Nothing it has can match blaze, but it's still got a good bit of ST damage, and the higher number of attacks makes it easier to get a complete chain at lower levels of recharge. Instead of fiery embrace it has power boost, which is sorta like buildup for mez durations. Between the KBs, stuns, and power boost, it brings much, much more mitigation to the table than /fire does, but at the sacrifice of having much worse AoE and no better ST damage.

Both are very good secondaries these days, but I would probably go /fire if you're going to pair it with earth/. The much better AoE of the */fire/fire combo meshes quite well with earth/'s superb AoE control, and you don't need to worry about knocking things out of your control patches with your attacks. Earth also doesn't need the extra mitigation that /energy provides, and since it uses so many pseudopet controls it doesn't get very much out of power boost. Both combos will definitely work well, of course, but I just think that earth/fire has more overall synergy than earth/energy.

thank you for taking the time to write such an informative explanation as to why fire is better over all.

thanks

Energy also gets Power Push, which is both total hax, and really useful for positioners.

Fire offers only damage. Don't get me wrong, that's the choice I'd make and suffer the consequences. But every set has its own stuff to offer.

Heroes, Villains ♦ Reviews ♦ Retrospect

NRG gets an earlier single target ranged chain thanks to Power Push (PP is a brilliant, brilliant attack now: good damage, quick animation time and ridiculously high base accuracy), up until you get Embrace of Fire NRG will do better single target damage.

The other drawback of fire is the lack of control and the DOTness of the PBAOE and Incinerate. NRG does up-front, chunks of damage rather than DoT which can be more useful.

Fire gets better damage overall and Breath of Fire is great on a Domi (especially when you get EF). Fire becomes beastly later on and speeds ahead of all the other secondaries in terms of raw damage. Especially now that Domis can get the Fire APP in the 40s and boost the AOEs with Embrace of Fire.

By the way the belief that Pseudopets don't benefit from Power Boost is incorrect. I've tested with Electrics chained confused, they do get Power Boosted all the way down the pseudopet chain. Earthquake won't get it's knockdown boosted but should get it ToHit debuff increased while PB is active.

Gasses should also get the holds boosted for 15 seconds, but since they are short duration, reapplied holds it isn't that great a boost.

So Earth doesn't benefit hugely from Power Boost, but its down to the mechanics the Pseudopets use (short durarion, reapplied mezzes / debuffs) rather than the fact it uses Pseudopets at all. Stalagmites gets a full boost to it though since it's a direct, relatively long lasting single mez rather than a short duration reapplied one.

The "worst" set for Power Boost is probably Ice control since Ice Patch only does knockdown, Arctic Air does short, reapplied confuses and -recharge isn't Boostable at all.

sorry I guess I should have chosen my words a little more carefully.

Im currently going with both types. I have the eng dom up to lvl 20 already. I enjoy playing it more but im going to work on the fire dom as well. Thanks for all the advice.

Fire is a late bloomer. For your damage to really kick up, wait for Embrace of Fire.

Discussion on APP's here:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=248605

at this point, all of the assault sets are decent, just with different strengths and drawbacks, now if only they would consider revising Gravity Control a bit

All Grav really needs is to get Wormhole much earlier (by level 12 or so). I would also like to see Grav be the one set that gets its pet early (say by level 22), because really, after Singy, Grav is one of the best control sets around. With Singy working for you, you spend way more time attacking than with any other control set. Currently the journey to Singy is a trying one. Very trying.

WARNING: I bold names.

Did something in Dominators change recently? or did people just recently figure out how to best abuse their power?

I think the alphas benefit Doms more than some other classes. Most people can get permadom without investing much inf.