The Dominator "Surprise"?

I could be wrong, but I think the devs might have been alluding to the gravity revamp as well as the dark/darkityness.

And here's another from Synapse:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...7&postcount=59

He talked about 'goodies'.

So you had 'exciting' and 'goodies' being the two words used by the dev folks to reference what dominators were getting after they were skipped with the last round of proliferation and new power sets (Street, Time) released.

Now the discussion does dark control and dark assault fit those adjectives? Some people say no because they sets are cobbled from preexisting ones or because darkness powers are nothing new in game.

Also, some have pointed to the tier 9 pet in darkness control as the surprise, but now here we are unable to actually test that pet (it's not available in beta yet), but meanwhile MMs got apparently the same power in their new but not supposed to be announced set that slipped into beta. So that's not sitting well with a couple people.

I think it's going to come down to what the control set is like when we finally get to see it in beta. If the fx, animations and functinos are superior, then people will be happy. If they're just 'meh' then people will be disappointed.

I said this when Avatea first posted about the exciting news for doms coming, but you had to be patient. Those words painted the devs into a no-win corner. Somebody somewhere won't be excited and so their excuse for not releasing dark sets earlier won't go over well when everyone and their brother who had tons of powersets already got even more.

I said a while ago that the surprise would be that there isn't one. Though that's not entirely surprising either.

So far I've only been able to mess around with Dark Assault and as the devs themselves have said it's a cobbled together set from various powers already in the game. Exception is the buff that's like PBU, so that's cool. Everything else we've seen already.

So based on that, it's not the 'special', 'exciting' or 'goody' that was mentioned last summer and fall. Furthermore, it just goes to prove that Dark Assault could have been added a long time ago. And that's something that upset me when Blasters got Dark Manipulation with I21 and it was said they got it because it was 'low hanging fruit' so no challenge for the animation team. So I wanted to know at that time why doms didn't get Dark Assault. And a bunch of people told me to stop complaining because the devs said we'd get something exciting. So here we are with Dark Assault and I'm trying to figure out if that was what Avatea and Synapse were talking about. Doesn't seem like it to me.

I also wanted to know why Illusion wasn't being proliferated when every other AT was getting sets proliferated. Again I was told to be quiet because we were getting something exciting. So here we are with Dark Control and still no Illusion. Ok, is Dark Control the exciting goodie? I can't say because it's not on Beta yet. Instead, we see the Dark Control tier 9 'secret' appearing for another AT's accidentally leaked set. Kinda ruins the surprise for doms, eh?

Don't get me wrong. I'll take new sets any day. I just don't see why Illusion hasn't been proliferated. I don't understand what the hold up was for Dark Assault. I also don't agree that Dark Control required so much animation and art and new power design that it took longer to make than Time, Street, Titan, etc. Especially when dominators have the 2nd fewest powersets in the game ahead of MMs, who have a new powerset now, too.

The devs' explanation alluded to Dark being exciting enough that it would take extra time. I just haven't seen that yet. Maybe Dark Control will blow me away though. Maybe the Tier 9 pet was the hold up. Maybe because that held up dark control and they wanted to release both dark control and dark assault together, that explains the overall delay. Maybe. I don't know.

Well off to Beta server to play with the grav changes some more!

I wouldn't call Gravity "significantly altered."

They fixed Wormhole. Mostly.
That's about it.

Eh, significant for them and their rate. They altered 6 out of the 9 powers. Grav distortion, lift, propel, dimension shift, wormhole, and singularity all got tweaks. Some are significant, some not, but it's been awhile since they changed that much in any set at one time.

I will probably be rolling a Grav Dom thanks to these changes. Just haven't decided on a secondary or concept yet. I'm not sure I fully understand Propel yet either: does it actually increase the DPA of a set like Fiery Assault? Icey Assault? If so, that's fierce. If not... which ones would it increase?

The new Propel isn't great DPA, it just isn't abysmal anymore. As to which assault set would actually benefit from including it in attack chains, I don't know. Maybe Thorns? Maybe none.

Gravity/Earth could use it because of the lack of other decent ranged attacks.

Just at a glance, it appears that Propel is better DPA than a few of the ranged attacks in Psi, Earth, Electric, and Thorns even before Impact, but I could be wrong about that. I'm reasonably sure it's superior than at least one of the attacks in Energy. The tricky part is the extra damage from Impact and whether that pushes it high enough to replace something in Ice or Fire. Of course, I'm also just eyeballing the values and could be totally wrong. The new version certainly feels a LOT LOT faster than before though.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...72&postcount=1

The dark control animations look pretty sweet. I'm eager to test these out. If they look as good in game I'll have to give the art team huge props. Oh and the wolf looks pretty awesome... better than that pic on the main website.