IIRC the ATO for Doms doesn't enhance damage any, and Midnight Grasp is a major source of damage. Your better off slotting the ATO elsewhere and boosting MG's damage.
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I wouldn't be putting the entire set in Midnight Grasp, only the proc (which is a nearly perma 63% dmg buff at 3 stacks). That leaves plenty of room for enhancing MG's high base damage. The best place for the dom ATO proc is in an attack that is an integral part of your attack chain.
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Originally Posted by DoctorWhat
IIRC the ATO for Doms doesn't enhance damage any, and Midnight Grasp is a major source of damage. Your better off slotting the ATO elsewhere and boosting MG's damage.
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Have they fixed it? I heard someone slotted it in seismic smash and its not working properly. If you have an unslotter i would try it out first.
It does work in Seismic Smash. My Elec/Earth dom definitely gets the best use out of it there. Can't help with midnight grasp though. I assume it would work, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.
Yeah i dunno it seems to go into anything that has a stun or hold component. It doesnt work in powers with sleep components though(gg /elec).
Not sure about immob. i deleted my thorn dom so can't check.
The highest single-target chain for DM at not obscene recharge levels is
Smite-MG-Smite-SL
Without having the data on Dark Assault handy, I would imagine some variant there of with Life Drain or Gloom would be the best ST for Dark Assault.
Smite-MG-Smite-LD
Or Smite-MG-Smite-Gloom
Or Smite-MG-Gloom-LD (at lower recharge?)
Alright, just got my Dark/Dark to level 38 and here's the news:
Midnight Grasp DOES take the ATO set, which means you can put the proc there. I'm not certain of the math but the proc should have a very high chance, possibly 100%, of activating.
Now, the other consideration here is DPA. The top DPA attacks in Dark Assault are, from best to worst (ignoring the snipe):
1) Smite
2) Gloom
3) Midnight Grasp
4) Dark Blast
5) Life Drain
6) Engulfing Darkness
7) Nightfall
That's right, Life Drain actually has bad DPA, because it's based on the ranged version from Dark Blast, not Siphon Life from Dark Melee.
So, for the best ST DPS attack chain, focus on Midnight Grasp, Smite, and Gloom. That said, Life Drain is not that much worse than Dark Blast, has decent utility, and a longer animation, so for builds without insane recharge, Life Drain may still be a better gap-filler than Dark Blast.
1) Smite
2) Gloom
3) Midnight Grasp
4) Dark Blast
5) Life Drain
6) Engulfing Darkness
7) Nightfall
My attack chain is gloom/blast/nightfall and the occasional drain/darkness when appropriate, plus the free damage from the stun and aoe immob.
I guess its not the best, but it keeps me at range where my defense is greatest. I will let my pets duke out the melee.
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Hew in drag baby
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That is a completely valid playstyle. I would like to suggest, though, that you take Smite and Midnight Grasp and slot them anyway for those occasions where a hard target is locked down and entering melee range is perfectly safe. They're also nice for when something gets up in your face and you just need it dead NOW.
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Originally Posted by OneFrigidWitch
My attack chain is gloom/blast/nightfall and the occasional drain/darkness when appropriate, plus the free damage from the stun and aoe immob.
I guess its not the best, but it keeps me at range where my defense is greatest. I will let my pets duke out the melee. |
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Oh, I most certainly have grasp 6 slotted with makos. Only a fool would pass up 162pts damage at 50 unenhanced....
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Originally Posted by Blue_Fenix
That is a completely valid playstyle. I would like to suggest, though, that you take Smite and Midnight Grasp and slot them anyway for those occasions where a hard target is locked down and entering melee range is perfectly safe. They're also nice for when something gets up in your face and you just need it dead NOW.
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Hew in drag baby
If MIDS is to be believed it looks like recharge time on Dominator Smite is much longer than Scrapper Smite, making it difficult to create the Smite-MG-Smite-[Gloom] chain.
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You mean you aren't stacking tons of recharge to permadom without hasten and then throwing hasten on top for even MORE recharge????|
Originally Posted by Granite Agent
If MIDS is to be believed it looks like recharge time on Dominator Smite is much longer than Scrapper Smite, making it difficult to create the Smite-MG-Smite-[Gloom] chain.
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(i'm totally being silly btw)
Incidentally scrapper smite recharge time is 6 seconds compared to dom's 8 seconds.
Jem - Ill/Rad Controller Lv 50+3 Nic - Mind/Psi Dominator Lv 50+3 Lady Liberation - Invuln/SS Tanker Lv 50+1 Invicitx - Demon/Pain Mastermind Lv 50+1 Celeste - Emp/Arch Defender Lv 50+1 Nightsilver - DB/WP Scrapper Lv 34 Dusk Howl - StJ/Regen Brute Lv 32 Kyriani - Time/Energy Defender Lv 41Psifire - FF/Psi Defender Lv 50
Star Lighter - LB/LA Peacebringer Lv 30
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Thanks. Yes in MIDS with reasonable perma-dommy recharge I was having trouble getting Smite to recharge under the anim time of MG (2.244sec).|
Originally Posted by Kyriani
Incidentally scrapper smite recharge time is 6 seconds compared to dom's 8 seconds. |
Who knows - maybe the best chain for Dark Assault is something different.
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I don't think you can get to a usable chain with just MG, Smite, and Gloom. Smite-MG-Smite-SL works for Dark Melee because Smite recharges faster for them, AND because SL is a much longer animation than Gloom.|
Originally Posted by Granite Agent
Thanks. Yes in MIDS with reasonable perma-dommy recharge I was having trouble getting Smite to recharge under the anim time of MG (2.244sec).
Who knows - maybe the best chain for Dark Assault is something different. |
I think you're going to have to weave in either Dark Blast or Life Drain as a filler attack.
Life Drain isn't a great filler for DPA, but it's nice to keep your hit points topped off. I was really hoping that they'd bump the recharge on it up to 10 seconds so that it would fall into the same damage/end/recharge numbers as Siphon Life (with the same animation!), only ranged.
That didn't happen, so you have Gloom, Smite, and Drain Life all at 8 second recharge. You'll probably want to use a control at some point as well since you're in melee range, so it's not like you can't find something to fill the gap, but it's not optimal for pure damage.
Sadly my plans for Dark/Dark/Soul were upended in part by a lack of slots (I'd want to slot up Dark Consumption, Dark Obliteration, and Soul Drain) and in majority by an unwillingness to swap alignment and run the arc during 2xp when I could join TFs instead. Alas, I was forced into taking Sleet instead, and will have to take Soul Mastery on a different build. 
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.
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I actually ran the numbers on this one, because it was making my head hurt trying to work out my build. Smite/MG/Smite/Gloom is actually close to the peak, even *with* small gaps. The actual peak chain, according to NoChain, is Smite/Gloom/MG, Smite/Gloom/Drain. Specifically, the 4-chain, even with gaps, is 139 DPS. The 6-chain is giving me 142 DPS.
But NoChain doesn't have any way to take non-damage procs into account, and I have the Superior ATO in MG. So the shorter chain, even with a slightly lower base DPS, is going to end up being better overall because I'm going to have more time with a full 3-stack of +Dmg.
That build has 85% global, plus Hasten and Agility. And the 4-chain still has small gaps in it. So I think that, overall, Dark Assault continues to scale with recharge until a bit past perma-Hasten. If you're building for high-recharge, with the ATO proc in MG, then the best chain is basically the DM chain, with Gloom instead of Siphon, and you just eat the gaps.
If you're not running permaHasten levels of Recharge, then you're going to fall back on the 6-chain, since it's gapless at much, much lower levels of +Rech. (In my build, I can turn off Hasten and Agility, and the 6-chain has a total cycle gap of less than a quarter second. And at that level, Dom isn't perma, and I can't imagine anyone that's enough of a tweaker to care about chains that isn't going to be building for permaDom, so just assume that the 6-chain is gapless on any high-end build.)
ETA: I just tweaked that build a bit, because in a post-converter world there's no reason not to have Hecatomb in Smite. The extra proc and the extra recharge tightened up the chain to the point where the 4-chain is flat out superior, even without factoring the ATO proc. Yeah, you can't get enough +Rech for Smite to recharge through Gloom, but those three attacks are so *massively* better than all of your other available filler that you'd rather suffer the gap than use a filler. As long as Smite is fast enough to recharge through MG, the gap after Gloom can't hurt you enough to make you want Drain or Blast.
This is all very st-ish. In large groups of enemies, what are you going to do against groups bigger than 1 or 2 mobs? Just st everything to death? That is very slow and boring.
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Hew in drag baby
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Most attack chain discussions are ST-ish. I can't imagine anyone skipping Engulfing Darkness, but that doesn't really have a place in an attack chain discussion.
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Originally Posted by OneFrigidWitch
This is all very st-ish. In large groups of enemies, what are you going to do against groups bigger than 1 or 2 mobs? Just st everything to death? That is very slow and boring.
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Why not? I use ED extensively.
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Originally Posted by StormDevil
Most attack chain discussions are ST-ish. I can't imagine anyone skipping Engulfing Darkness, but that doesn't really have a place in an attack chain discussion.
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Hew in drag baby
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Against groups, it's almost impossible to have enough recharge for an AoE attack chain with no gaps as a Dominator. Dark Assault only has two damaging AoEs, so a lot is going to depend on picking up one or more from your Epic/Patron Pool.|
Originally Posted by OneFrigidWitch
This is all very st-ish. In large groups of enemies, what are you going to do against groups bigger than 1 or 2 mobs? Just st everything to death? That is very slow and boring.
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For example, I went for Fire Mastery on my Dark/Dark Dom. I use Fearsome Stare to open fights and let me close the distance, Heart of Darkness and/or Shadow Field for locking the group down, then Rain of Fire, Fire ball, and Engulfing Darkness (usually but not always in that order). By that point, most minions are dead and Lts are hurting, so I fire an individual hold or confuse at any bosses and start my single-target attacks against whatever's close and alive. Engulfing Darkness and Fireball get used again as they recharge if enough enemies are up to justify it.
A different Dominator with a different Epic pool might play very differently. Compared to single-target attack chains, there's much less one-size-fits-all number crunching that you can do with AoE.
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Truth. In an AoE situation, unless you're running a highly tweaked farmer build, your attack "chain" is called mashing buttons. Is there an AoE available? Hit it!|
Originally Posted by StormDevil
Most attack chain discussions are ST-ish. I can't imagine anyone skipping Engulfing Darkness, but that doesn't really have a place in an attack chain discussion.
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These sorts of formal discussions of "attack chains" are for people who are trying to optimize DPS for things like AV/GM fights, Pylon tests, and similar hard single targets. It doesn't take a lot of math to figure out that ED is better than Nightfall, and that Fireball kicks both their *****. So you just hit the best attack that's available whenever it's up, and you're going to have gaps where you're throwing a random punch at someone, or controlling a boss.
But for us extreme min-maxer types, who maybe want to try to solo an AV, or go time-test a Pylon, there's a bunch of mathy type stuff that goes in to figuring out the perfect order in which to hit a limited series of attacks, and the optimal slotting for those few attacks, to pour out maximum ST DPS. It's... of limited utility in the AoE-zerg that is the vast majority of content, but it's mathmatically delicious.
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Thank you for posting this. |
Originally Posted by LineNoise
I actually ran the numbers on this one, because it was making my head hurt trying to work out my build. Smite/MG/Smite/Gloom is actually close to the peak, even *with* small gaps. The actual peak chain, according to NoChain, is Smite/Gloom/MG, Smite/Gloom/Drain. Specifically, the 4-chain, even with gaps, is 139 DPS. The 6-chain is giving me 142 DPS.
But NoChain doesn't have any way to take non-damage procs into account, and I have the Superior ATO in MG. So the shorter chain, even with a slightly lower base DPS, is going to end up being better overall because I'm going to have more time with a full 3-stack of +Dmg. That build has 85% global, plus Hasten and Agility. And the 4-chain still has small gaps in it. So I think that, overall, Dark Assault continues to scale with recharge until a bit past perma-Hasten. If you're building for high-recharge, with the ATO proc in MG, then the best chain is basically the DM chain, with Gloom instead of Siphon, and you just eat the gaps. If you're not running permaHasten levels of Recharge, then you're going to fall back on the 6-chain, since it's gapless at much, much lower levels of +Rech. (In my build, I can turn off Hasten and Agility, and the 6-chain has a total cycle gap of less than a quarter second. And at that level, Dom isn't perma, and I can't imagine anyone that's enough of a tweaker to care about chains that isn't going to be building for permaDom, so just assume that the 6-chain is gapless on any high-end build.) ETA: I just tweaked that build a bit, because in a post-converter world there's no reason not to have Hecatomb in Smite. The extra proc and the extra recharge tightened up the chain to the point where the 4-chain is flat out superior, even without factoring the ATO proc. Yeah, you can't get enough +Rech for Smite to recharge through Gloom, but those three attacks are so *massively* better than all of your other available filler that you'd rather suffer the gap than use a filler. As long as Smite is fast enough to recharge through MG, the gap after Gloom can't hurt you enough to make you want Drain or Blast. |
Practically speaking, I really am loving the dark assault, this chain even with my current sub-decent recharge gives me a great flow for throwing in my controls.
Mains - Freedom: Croatoa - 50 Fire/Psi Dom, Grandville - 50 SS/Elec Brute, Dark-Astoria - 50 Dark/Fire Scrapper, Pearline - 50 Spines/Regen Scrapper, Caffeine Girl - 50 Earth/Kin Troller
How does NoChain work? I remember a post about it, but it never got integrated into MIDS, and at least back then you had to manually enter the various different stats for attacks.
Does it account for purple dmg procs vs normal damage procs?
But it doesn't account for -RES procs?
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It's still manual input. The damage procs are taken care of in Mids, by setting it up to use "damage*%chance" for variable effects, which I think is the default. So you get an average damage per activation that includes the procs. There's no way, in Mids or in NoChain, to account for non-damage procs like the Dom ATO or -Res procs. If you really want accurate simulations on those, then head back to Excel and do it the hard way.|
Originally Posted by Granite Agent
How does NoChain work? I remember a post about it, but it never got integrated into MIDS, and at least back then you had to manually enter the various different stats for attacks.
Does it account for purple dmg procs vs normal damage procs? But it doesn't account for -RES procs? |
To be perfectly honest, I don't really trust simulation of -Res procs, and I kinda want to see Pylon test if someone wants to sell me an attack chain that relies heavily on -Res. Although Arcanaville had a really nice formula for them at some point that I would have to go digging for. (I really need to make that Pwiki page where I collect all the scraps of mathy goodness for advanced building.)
In terms of Dark Assault, it doesn't really matter. The only -Res proc you can get is the Fury of the Gladiator in Engulfing Darkness. And there's no way it's going to be good enough. I've been spending a lot of time on my Plant/Dark lately, and I've pretty much proved the 4-chain for ST use. In general play it's a lot more chaotic, but the general rule is "throw enough control that you're not going to die", followed by "throw MG whenever it's up", followed by "is an AOE recharged? Hit it!"
In my particular case, that tends to look like Seeds of Confusion, MG, Fireball, Engulfing, Smite/MG/Smite, Engulfing, and I'm about ready for the next spawn. If I actually hit something that can live through a Smite/MG/Smite, then I drop down to the simple 4-chain. Smite/MG/Smite, and either Gloom or Life Drain, depending on whether I need the heal. Smite/MG/Smite/LD is actually a respectable chain for ST DPS. It clearly lags behind Gloom, but not by *that* much, and it ends up being a lot more sustainable in real-world situations where squishy dom is getting slapped by AoE all the time.
First off, I am curious if Midnight Grasp can take the Dominator ATOs, since if it can slotting the proc there would be very beneficial. TBH if it can't slot the proc in MG I may end up entirely scrapping my idea of making a dark assault dom all together and go psi assault instead since it can slot it in Subdue (I think).
Second, has anyone worked out what the best attack chain for Dark Assault would be? I'm thinking Gloom>Smite>MG>Gloom>Smite>Siphon Life>Repeat, however I am unsure if that is the best available and the specific amount of recharge that each power would require. I'm not super awesome with maths in this regard.