How I Improved My Ice Dom

So I finally figured out a way to make an ice dom awesomesauce. I recently respec'd and incarnated my ice/earth dom and here's what I did:

(This guy's an end hog and extremely toggle heavy, but you can make it work with proper IO sets and incarnate choices.)

Go for mega-stacking confuse.

From Ice Control you take Arctic Air of course. I six-slotted with frankenslots for a combo of confusion and damage procs. Cacophony dmg proc + end/confuse, Malaise dmg proc + end/confuse, Impeded Swift dmg proc + Coercive Persuasion contagious confusion. This allows AA to do its standard confuse duty, saves on end costs, gives you 3 dmg procs that provides 'hot feet lite', and spreads confusion quickly in a wide AoE.

From Earth Assault you take Power Boost of course. This will lengthen the confusion time on targets affected by AA. Also, take Mud Pots. Yes, I know the radius is small. But take it anyway. You'll see why in a minute.

I swapped primal forces mastery for psionic mastery and picked up World of Confusion. Yes, I know the radius is small. Yes, I know the confusion chance is only 20%. But take it anyway. You'll see why in a minute.

From those three powersets you should easily be able to achieve permadom status. I have my guy at 90% without any purple sets, so you can do it too. This will give you the recharge to spam attacks, boost your other control mags (doesn't work on AA's confuse to my knowledge), and refill your end bar (which is critical because I gave up Conserve Power when I respec'd).

Okay here's where incarnate abilities come in. Take Vigor and go up the right tree. That'll give acc, end redux and heal boosting that all have usefulness (the end redux is mandatory fyi). It also will boost your confuse duration 33%, which helps AA and WoC

From Interface, take the Cognitive set and head up the left hand tree. At tier 4 you have a 20% confuse proc on all dmg attacks + psi dmg proc DoT to all attacks. This makes it so any of your attacks... oh say from mud pots and WoC... proc confusion every 5th hit. It'll stack up to 5x. Combined with your AA and WoC hits, you're confusing targets potentially 7x stacked.

I took Void Judgement cuz I live in melee with this guy. Barrier destiny for the def/res boost in melee. Lore doesn't matter much but I haven't given much thought (I went vanguard, but don't like their ranged nature).

Okay, last but not least is your Hybrid slot. A lot of folks poo-poo this tree, but I can't say enough about it for this build. Control. If you head up the left hand tree, you can get the +1 mag boost to all mezzes and a chance to dmg to all mezzed targets. Well now you're firing critical level confuses from AA and WoC hits. And you're proc'ing dmg because everything is 'mezzed' that stands within your AA cloud, or gets close enough for WoC.

At the end of the day, just standing in the middle of x8 mobs is all the control you'll ever need. You're procing dmg and mezzes all over the place. Hitting with your AoEs like fissure, psi nado, mud pots, WoC, and tremor just spreads the madness. Contagious confusion wreaks havoc even more. You'll one-shot confuse bosses. And even better the mag boost from hybrid lets you one-shot hold mez resistant foes like kheld dwarfs. I seismic smashed one while domination was up (when isn't it?) that was running past me in a DA arc and he stopped dead, held. Those guys usually take a couple, three holds to stop. It was glorious.

Anyway, it's a really fun build. Of course, to me, it just highlights how weak ice control is that it requires massive incarnation to make it work to the level other control sets have in their 30s, but hey, what else is there to do with the end game stuff?

Oh, btw, can't the devs move the dmg from the sleep to ice slick?

Oh, I didn't forget. I was screaming at the time that that qualifies as breaking the cottage rule, so there was no reason dimension shift couldn't be changed as well.

Anyway, the idea was that energy armor wasn't losing anything, but the ability was moved from A to B and A had X added to it to make it better. So can't the dmg from Flashfreeze (why does a sleep do dmg???) be moved to Ice Slick? Would make sense that the falling would do smashing dmg wouldn't it? Maybe put a DoT version. Then slick could take dmg sets.

This would improve both powers without much effort (IMO). Ice slick would have more utility just like every other patch power in the game, plus the sets you could put in it would give it some nice dmg potential.

I'd further like to see flash freeze receive the static field treatment. Make it a sphere of cryogenic freezing. Anything that enters is slowed and has a sleep proc hit it. I wouldn't mind the aggro then as it'd make sense.

You do that and ice control goes from bottom of the barrel to mid-level.

If Synapse feels really frisky, he could beef up Shiver while he's at it. There have been two suggestions I've seen on the forums that would make it quite nice. One was to add a -range debuff a la hurricane and taunt. The other was to add a shatter mechanic. Any target hit with shiver would then be susceptible to bonus 'shatter' damage from a followup hit with BoI or Chilblain.

Toss that in with the above and now you have a top tier set with useful powers from 1-32 that you'd have a hard time deciding to take/skip.

Yeah, as it stands Ice needs something. Whether or not it breaks the cottage "rule" or not (they've done it a few times now, why not for Ice).

Just about any change would be a marked improvement, considering how the set currently performs.

@Oathbound & @Oathbound Too

I use 2 main patterns for Ice Control on Dominators, depending on whether Destiny Barrier or Glacier is up:

(Arctic Air is running)
>> Super Speed in with Glacier OR Barrier at a distance and then run in
>> Frostbite (slotted for immob duration)
>> Fireball
>> Rain of Fire
>> Blaze
>> Ice Slick
(the -KB is about to wear off, so enemies start falling)
>> Fireball
>> etc

That basically keeps everything cemented in place while I DPS them down.

Sometimes I cast Ice Slick around a corner if I'm slightly worried.

I agree that the Fear in Arctic Air is often counter productive. It helps you survive a little but probably creates more problems than it solves. Frostbite helps with this a lot.

Hopefully I'm not figmenting too much in my hope that an Immobilize -KB adder or remover IO might be on the table for the future.

IMO at the very least Arctic Air should be modified to use a mezz duration table that does not penalize Dominators. The duration is based on the Fear table for some reason. This power should almost probably use the Ranged_Ones table so that the duration of a confusion pulse does not degrade.

Given the way Bonfire works now damage in Ice Slick is not out of the question. I just don't want to see a few modest tweaks that only help out a few non-key powers. Plant, Fire, and Illusion are really good because they pack most of their potential into just a few powers, not because every individual power is must have.


PS just speaking of my own taste, I personally hate World of Confusion. IMO if you're going to go Psi APP, the main reason is the Psi Defense in Indom Will, and mezz protection outside of Domination. The -Recharge in Psi Tornado is nice to have too because it stacks with AA and gets you out of having to use something like Shiver. Anyway, I've personally gotten a lot Confusion-use out of Fireball/Rain of Fire because they cast quickly/pulse and trigger the Cognitive incarnate proc. Rise of the Phoenix is pretty nice too and basically takes a lot of the guesswork out of it all, especially in the incarnate trials.

I have built my Ice/Dark/Psi dom under the same premise as DarkCurrent (vigor/cognitive/barrier/control) and it is indeed a ton of fun (I get more mileage off Vigor due to the heal portion). Didn't heavy proc AA but I can understand why he did so.

Just because some playstyles work however doesn't mean the set is 100% fine

@Miladys_Knight: Vigor Radial Paragon also provides sleep and fear duration in addition to confuse/acc/end/heal, making it a good fit for your playstyle as well.

Ice Control has almost zero ranged control in my opinion, that being the biggest issue. Any foe that attacks from range while you're in melee with AA and on top of slick has a free pass to whoop you good.