What am I doing wrong?

I recently came back to the game, and have been playing as my SoA and a Brute. I decided I wanted to pick my Plant/Ice dom back up tonight though, and have been trying to solo tip missions.

However, I'm constantly dying with the difficulty turned slightly (+0 / x3) up. I run in stealthed and with Super speed like I did in the past. Pick a good target and fire seeds off to get the whole pack.

In the past, they would all start going to town on each other while I merrily melted them with various ice goodies. However I'm finding that they all shoot me and THEN turn on each other. So I'm soaking up a large alpha with my tiny HP pool, usually killing me (or getting close, in which case any random mob not hit by the confuse does me in).

Am I doing something wrong? Or was there a change where you no longer can use control to negate/reduce the alpha strike? Am I doomed to +0/x0 missions on my dom?

the reason baddies may be able to fire off attacks before the confuse takes effect is due to the animation time of the power

on my semi lowbie plant dom i usually take some aggro running straight up and hitting seeds even when i am a bit stealthed but a majority of the time i dont really have any problems

the only thing i might also see is that you are fighting mobs which see through stealth such as rikti drones are alerting the mob before your ready, or there might be bosses in the mob which wont be confused right away or there might be confuse resistant enemies such as nemesis

when i used to have my plant/ice dom, the ice assault felt kind of on the weak side to me so i rerolled to a plant/energy which im liking a lot more

edit: another thing i thought of was if you were running chilling embrace and running past baddies, that might cause them to aggro early too

Oh I totally forgot about Rikti drones... I am indeed having problems with those. I totally forgot they had higher than normal perception. Whoops! That must be what is doing me in. Thank goodness... I've always enjoyed Plant and would have been sad if I couldn't solo anymore.

One other thing is that Seeds has a 50' range which means that you are well within perception range at the time you cast it. It also notifies on miss so if you miss one mob it is notified, stealth breaks, and all of the mobs within perception range aggro immediately, que up an attack, and roll to hit. A split second later they are affected by the confuse, they turn toward each other while animating their powers but all the projectiles fly your way and damage you (since the hit rolls have all ready been made).

Unfortunately that is WAI. You can fix it by slotting up enough +range in Seeds to be able to cast it from 80ish feet (the bad news here is that is 3 level 50 range IOs) or you can slot Spore Burst with the Sandman set (increasing it's range to 81 feet) and open with that and then hit the sleeping spawn with seeds. Since seeds does no damage it won't wake the spawn so the confuse will apply and you can then safely wake the spawn with an AoE like frost breath or roots.

I try to use Seeds from behind a group when I'm concerned about return fire. Stealth suppresses the instant you begin to activate the power, while the confuse doesn't take effect until a second or two later. If you're behind the mobs you're less likely to be detected while activating Seeds. Another benefit is that sometimes mobs seem to take a second to turn around when they notice you, so with a little luck by the time they do the confuse will be in effect.

I noticed a large reduction in the damage I would take when I started doing that. It's not a 100% surefire way to eliminate return fire but it does help quite a bit.

I haven't had significant problems with slapping x4 groups with Seeds, so I can't necessarily say one way or the other how to fix a problem I'm not having.

Plant does have some alternative opening gambits available. Starting with Carrion Creepers, especially from out of LOS, is quite safe. So is letting the Fly Trap wander into aggro range and letting it take the alpha. It'll take some dings, but a Spirit Tree or Aid Other will take care of that. If worse comes to worst, there's always resummoning.

On my level 50 Plant/Elec/Ice, I will sometimes use Sleet from outside of LOS as an opener. This is particularly helpful against confuse-resistant Nemesis.