Epic Pools for Dark/Dark: Fire VS Dark VS Soul

I am going to keep this short and simple and try to keep from straining your eyes with a wall of text.

I am very adaptable when it comes to playstyle, Which of these epic pools would work best with dark/dark From an absolute mix/max standpoint, Also for the sake of arguement, Let's say soul drain is near perma, or at the very least, Usually has about 7-10 stacks on it. How would these compete with fire?

Well, not the dark app. Because it doesn't exist.
Fire is going to do more damage until you get up to 6+ stacks of soul drain, and then it's going to do more single target damage but a bit less aoe damage. If you use your cone immob as part of your single target damage chain to fill in gaps, the single target difference may disappear.
Shields are the same.
End powers are the same.
Pet vs. self rez. I prefer the pet, but patron pets are only a small boon.

Derp. Was thinking of my corruptor.

But yeah. Soul vs fire.

I don't know about your preferences but I get a lot more use out of a single target blast than an aoe blast on my dark/time. Obviously it's best to have both, of course. That pretty much made fire and ice the only real options for me, and fire blast's superiority to ice blast combined with the fact that it only take one prereq to get fire's aoe put it easily over the top. Fireball and dark oblit are decent aoes but they pale in comparison to my procced out distortion field and even shadow field whose only proc is the superior WotC for aoe damage. Fire blast, however, means I can actually contribute good single target damage when the situation calls for it, which is as often as every spawn depending on the mission.

You could always go with a patron pool (I'm taking soul on my dark/dark controller) and have yet another buffable damage dealing pet. Since most controllers build for high recharge you could easily make that pet perma...

That way you have 2 haunts, 1 wolf, 1 fluffy and 1 patron pet.

The aoe blast from the patron pool isnt bad and if you go with your ST hold and immob for damage you'll have a relatively ok attack chain with lots of damage dealing buffable pets to make up for any personal lack of dps... which also leaves you with more freedom to buff/debuff/heal.

it's like playing a bootleg MM.

I like the ice pool, but not for ice storm. It's on a 2min cooldown that kind of ruins its damage over time potential, in addition to being a psudopet and so not benefiting from containment and needing to keep enemies in the patch for 15s to do its thing.

Unfortunately pets are too stupid be to useful in many trial situations. On a MoDD you straight up can't use them for half of the trial or you may well cause failure. Even in less catastrophic circumstances pets don't know whether they're supposed to focus on Nightstar or Siege for example. There's also the issue of recharge - your pet sat in a pink patch and died? Well, you've lost that damage for a phase or two of MoM. In these cases, a single target blast is absolutely superior to any PPP pet and most of the time on trials I don't bother summoning my even-more-damaging umbra beast either.

I find time to blast on dark/time with perma chrono shift and I pretty much hit all of my buffs and debuffs as they come up, with the exception of time crawl which I find too marginal to bother with and temporal selection which doesn't really do a lot of heavy lifting in a trial environment. So yes, farsight is refreshed every 120 seconds, chrono shift every 90, heals as needed, distortion field every 20-ish and shadow field every 50-ish for damage, and haunt every 60 if it's safe to use pets. Dark/dark might be sliiiightly busier than dark/time but I'd say that after all that is done I still have more than fifty percent of my time free to blast, why not make it more effective blasting than would be just spamming my hold?

It really does come down to play style and personal preference. I play every character like it's a scrapper and to me that means trying to cobble together as good of a single target chain as I can while still fulfilling competing goals. Someone else could easily agree that they play like a scrapper and to them that means subcontracting some of the shooting out to a wayward Arachnos recruit while they focus on the more strategic tasks. To them I would say, "get your hands dirtier!" before saying, "if it works, do it."

I still like Lev Mastery.

Waterspout fits in perfectly with it's fear, -Def and tremendous single target dmg +the knock up is great as well.

Once it's slotted the Coralax fits perfectly with the other Dark/Dark pets. It's got a couple cones and then it runs into melee where Fluffy keeps it alive with everything else.

Slotted up, Bile Spray fits perfectly as well as it's cone isn't too different from the cones of FS and Living Shadows (not as wide and long, but still decent).

I don't really have a use for the Res armor, if Lev had a Def armor it would be the perfect set... But I think I *may* pick up Hibernate at 49 just because with 6 pets out being able to turtle up for a bit might be very useful if things start to go bad.

Arg

I went with /soul. It's thematically kind of / /dark and has one of my favorite patron pets. Really long range + psi damage. I seem to have a pretty solid single target chain just cycling my hold+1t immob, but realistically there are lots of other powers to be using as well... All in all, I'm pretty pleased with how this alt came out.