Battle Axe and Gravity Control
By
Arcanaville,
Posted on: 2012-04-06 03:04 in Archetypes and Powers General Discussion
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Which you are going to, most of the time. The important thing is that once you do, you will tend to hit more often. We tend to ignore accuracy slotting and tohit buffs except in extreme conditions most of the time because most of the time we have enough to hit the tohit ceiling where it no longer matters how much more we have. But at lower levels when slotting is poor, there's a substantial difference between hitting 80% of the time and 90% of the time, say. That's 12.5% more damage. At low levels, that's a significant improvement both in DPS and almost as important DPE.|
Originally Posted by vernichterhelge
for the defense debuff you have to hit your target
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And because it stacks, in effect you tend to get casade effects on the targets: your hit rate keeps going up until you hit the 95% ceiling or it dies.
Once you hit SOs, that advantage mostly vanishes. But it exists, and is noticable, at earlier levels. The -def in the swords is lower than the -def in radiation blast, and they are also quite noticeable at early levels.
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Dark Control really did seem to swipe the rug out from under Mind Control. Relative to Dark, Mind has range, Mass Confusion, and the sleep. Everything else is pretty much not that great, and you take some serious losses to get what you have. There is no reason, in the modern CoX that Mass Confusion needs the Recharge that it has, even if it means cutting the duration of the power.
I have three versions of the same character (The Cold Reader from the sig below): Mind/Cold troller, Mind/Ice Dom, Dark/Cold Controller. The final of the three is definitely the best of them so far, in terms of performance before IOs. I'm fairly sure he's going to destroy the other 2 builds once I IO him.
My old tactic for using my Mind/Cold character was to use Power Boost to try to use Total Domination for Containment. That only really worked after massive IO efforts to get Total Dom down to around 60 seconds. But as the incarnate stuff progressed the set backs against the character just became too great. At one time, Terrify was a somewhat fair replacement for an immobilize, but then came incarnate procs. And then came Dark Control with a much better fear AND the immobilize AND the pets AND the aggro-free single target confuse AND the significant debuff. The writing was really on the wall for me... luckily both concepts work for my particular character.
The one thing I will give Mind Control over the control primaries is it can use Mass Confuse discretely as an opener, then elect to spring the rest of its attacks when it wants. But Mind is so screwed in terms of damage relative to other Controller sets, and for seemingly no reason, that it just became more and more evident that I would be happier playing something else.
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Thankfully rad gets an acc bonus as well in most powers, as well as -def. Though I wouldn't mind x-ray being changed to match the 6second blast sets, a bit more damage would help, the only other change would be to speed up the beach ball.
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Originally Posted by vernichterhelge
for the defense debuff you have to hit your target
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Dirges
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Not just mind control. Except for the indestructibility of the phantom army, it seems to be a superior set to Illusion as well in many ways.
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Originally Posted by Oedipus_Tex
Dark Control really did seem to swipe the rug out from under Mind Control.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Not just mind control. Except for the indestructibility of the phantom army, it seems to be a superior set to Illusion as well in many ways.
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That's a pretty big except
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A big if, but not an all powerful if. Its interesting in certain corner cases, but the flip side to indestructibility is that they can't be buffed. In situations where you have the buff/debuff to keep them alive, the fact that the dark pets are buffable, particularly damage buffable, can make up for their lack of indestructibility. That's why you often see Illusion paired with strong debuffing sets: its the only way to increase the damage of the phantom army.|
Originally Posted by Lucky666
That's a pretty big except
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Mind Control's two ifs are mass confusion and sleeps, and those are fairly big ifs also. Dark's overall power probably exceeds Mind, but where Mind excels it *really* excels.
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The problem is, where Mind falters it *really* falters. I was ok with it for a couple of years, but post-incarnate content its faults are too big to ignore. In particular, Terrify being the main damage source means the opening move you're often pushed into in fast moving fights causes enemies to shoot you, with no -ToHit penalty.. though the power, which is clearly cloned from the same power now making an appearance in Dark, taunts you with -ToHit slot options that actually do nothing. Fighting elite boss is a lesson in absolute frustration, as you do half the damage of something that can immobilize the boss and you have no pet to either hide behind, help deliver damage, or take a few blows. Even that was somewhat acceptable--you could Hypnotize most bosses. But then extra damage came in the form of DoTs for every incarnate, and now your "choice" was to do less damage than everyone else or do less damage than everyone else.
It's worth noting though that Mass Hypnosis is a power in the Defender and Corruptor Psi APP. I've actually found it more useful there despite it having a longer recharge and working on fewer enemies. Corruptors in particular have damage mods to take advantage of it. I guess Dominators do too, but there are just so many better hard mezzes you could be throwing around at Mag 6 than a power that makes enemies shoot at you like Terrify or one that takes 4 times as long as Seeds of Confusion or Synaptic Overload to recharge.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Not just mind control. Except for the indestructibility of the phantom army, it seems to be a superior set to Illusion as well in many ways.
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Did you notice that when Dark first entered beta, its immobilize also did the same double-damage as Roots--in mainly negative damage?
I think I earned some permanent scars from the flaming I got for pointing out how overpowered that was, but to the developer's credit, they did bring this power in line with other immobilizes (which are still pretty crazy).
I have a grav/time troller in the 40s and he's just plain awesome. They did a GREAT work with impact mechanics and the dmg scales pretty well. I'd say st dmg-wise it's the highest for a controller set between you and singy it applies A LOT. Right now it's a hell of a hold machine: 2 ST holds, 1 aoe hold, 1 aoe with hold proc and singy spamming st hold...it plays almost like a dom, everything is held and I just apply impact dmg which is really big for a controller. I didn't take dim shift as is too much situational for me. All in all, this toon really shines in almost every situation, can't wait to incarnate him.
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I'm not terribly familiar with Broad Sword, but I believe Battle Axe and War Mace are generally regarded as clones of one another since the War Mace reboot. |
Originally Posted by stevie_james
I've heard that Battle Axe and Broad Sword are basically clones from a couple players now.
However, Broad Sword is one of my favorite power sets and Battle Axe is on the other end of the spectrum. I'm starting to wonder why that is now. |
There are some subtle differences from power to power, but they're by and large the same sets. The notable exception is Swoop vs Clobber (Clobber is significantly more powerful than the Axe alternative).
War Mace is actually a pretty good set. If the performance of Swoop was brought up to speed with Clobber, i think Battle Axe would be held in a lot higher regard.
If the cast times of neutrino bolt, x-ray beam, and cosmic burst were reduced to 0.83s, 1.0s, and 1.67s then I think radiation's single target damage would be just about where it ought to be.
Now, the Blaster's version is much better. A typical 4s and 8s with much higher base damage. I wish Corr's version could be like that.
What's left is to normalize all Assassin Strikes and improve Stalker's old sets (Claw, MA and EM)! You don't need to bring back the missing PbAoE attack. You just need to make the existing ones better! For example, make Slice a WIDER and LONGER cone.