Well, it's kind of an interesting question. On the one hand, there's no doubt that Electric Assault can only enhance the draining effects of Elec Control, especially for harder, single targets. On the other hand, Electric Assault is one of the only Dom secondaries that I feel underperforms--barely any AoE damage at all, no useful tools like Power Boost, and a fairly crappy pet instead of a Tier 9 blast (Come on, devs. No one likes VS! Screw the cottage rule and give us a heavy damage, quick DoT lightning blast!).
And in the opposite corner is Energy Assault, one of the kings of ST damage. Take the best parts of Energy Melee and Energy Blast (combined with the GOD-LIKE Power Push) and you get one hell of a set. Unfortunately, even though the set itself performs well, the knockback will be a problem. Five of your nine attacks knock enemies back, and Elec Control HATES knockback. It makes it difficult for your chains to connect without switching targets. It catapults enemies out of range of your endurance drain toggle and your Static Field.
So, how do you leverage your powers to solve this problem? Simple. Electric Fence. Yes, you heard me. Even though Dominators rarely take their ST immobilize, it would be eminently worth it in this case. It slaps your enemy with a -100 Mag KB resistance, so you can blast away and never worry about knocking him around. You can even it for damage, if you like--it doesn't make a bad attack power. Or use it as a relatively cheap Purple Set holder.
Overall, my vote goes for Elec/Energy. Elec/ doesn't really need any help to be an effective soft controlling/draining set, and since there's such a simple solution to the one strike against /Energy, choose the better set. One final note: Power Boost can be used right before a fight to help with your Conductive Aura. Enemies' endurance will disappear so fast you'll wonder if it was ever there at all.
Also: welcome to the forums! We're nice people here.
Cool! Thanks.
Yeah about that...there's too much KB in Energy, you'll knock targets out of your PBAOEs, I think there's a reason why many pair Earth Assault with EC. With Earth you also get power boost and more damage with out the counter productive KB, which is win/win/win
I haven't found the knockback too annoying at all in NRG on my Elec/NRG.
The main reason is that it is all single target knockback. So when actually playing the set you tend to drop the sleep patch or Confuse, run into melee range to drain the group and then focus-fire on specific enemies until they are dead. Hold em, smack em with a melee or two and then send them bouncing to their deaths down a corridor (or do the godly Power Push and Total Focus combo, a brilliant safe way to deliver huge amounts of smackdown to a nasty boss). Then switch targets to your next victim. It doesn't really matter that your target is no longer being drained, they're held and generally flying through the air anyway. Meanwhile the *rest* of the spawn are sleeping/confused and being drained as you stand beside them (I throw out Fences, Whirling Hands and occasionally Jolting Chain at them to make sure I do enough damage to get some XP from them even if they start defeating each other).
Since your focus is single target it's also easily countered with the single target immob if you really want them to stay close to you but I've never felt the need for it
The only downside really is things like Scrappers on PuGs chasing after them occasionally but I've found you quickly pick up an understanding, both taking on separate targets and taking them down.
So, I have a concept for a dominator that would seem to fit with either the electric control/electric assault or electric/energy assault powersets. I was wondering how the play styles of the two secondaries differ. What are the pros and cons?