Carnifax_NA

Posts in the Mastermind forums seem to suggest it may be a knock-on from whatever they did to allow Beasts to benefit from their Run Speed buffs, which was clamped by Castle a couple of years back for this very reason.

And to think, I doubted his logic at the time

Hang on though, as Vimes_NA says because it is based off recharge it could be utterly mad in Shadow Field given its very long recharge.

Does anyone know if that formula works off base recharge or the recharge when the power is initially cast or what? It's so bloody vague.

This new proc formula for Market procs is bloody obtuse. How do they work in things like Creepers or Gases or pets? Is the recharge the recharge of the power or the recharge of the pets attacks in each case?

This is the better approach IMO. The AOE Immobs recharge quickly anyway, especially if you're going for Recharge set bonuses and have Hasten. The End will work better in terms of letting you spam it as much as possible.

Although I'd replace one of those damage procs with the Grav Anchor Chance for Hold. It's brilliant in any immob.

I'd agree with this. Slotting the whole set into Fearsome means the -ToHit isn't maxed out and you're also likely giving them a chance to fire back at you. HoD is probably a better option overall since there'll be no proc retaliation and a longer Stun is more useful than a longer Fear.

Go To doesn't override their other setting, ie aggressive / defensive / passive.

The only way I know to tell something to Go to and be sure it will is a bind for Go To Passive. I had a keybind to do this very thing (for Mr Pink, my very suicidal Bait Zombie who was also Spirit fodder).

You can bind it to a chord key & left click action (but be careful if you also use teleport, the wrong chord key and you're the one who ends up being the Bait ) and then another key bind to snap him back into Aggressive mode :

I used Z to set him and my two Knights to Aggressive and X to set my other two zombies & the lich to Attack Defensive.

Passive is the only thing that will get them to listen, it's by design. Keybinds based on names (I cheat and use , and . in the names to split them into groups) are very useful for keeping a tight rein on them.

I would like there to be some command which enabled / disabled ranged and melee attacks though in order to stop Thugs running in to pistol-whip people (or to better encourage Knights to use only their swords)

And we can't even FUS RO DAH it off a mountainside to get it to shut the hell up.

I don't think I should be allowed to have pets in games actually. Virtual PETA will be after me (once they've finished dealing with the Beast Mastery / Traps Masterminds of course...)

Ooooh? Really?

Must look at this for my Darkity Time controller later for her second cossie, to complement her tux & steampunk look in the first.

Myriad tricks is an excellent way to describe it. So many toys. For a few missions yesterday I was the only support on a team of a Tank, scrapper, stalker and a couple of brutes and it was just amazing how little I had to heal and how much control I was able to drop. At least 2 AOE tools per spawn, generally.

Then an Illusion/Emp joined in and it got silly with all the stacked Fearing. So much so that after a mission they actually said "I can't believe how little healing I have to do" with the tank saying "Yeah, I know", which I chose to take as an indirect compliment

Level 30 now as I'm timing it to hit 32 just after the Lassie fixes go live. So still at least 3 excellent powers to get (well two excellent one from Time and Lassie) before dipping into my APP (which I'm still contemplating. Primal is the obvious choice, especially if I could rejig to get Vengie into my build somehow but I went that route on my Plant/Empathy and I'm a bit bored of it so I might be more selfish this time around). I'm actually tempted to go for Earth. It's been ages since I used the Earth APP and it's one of my favourites.

Fulcrum is just awesome, there's nothing Dark has to offer to compare. It's Kinetics main trick and best power by a long shot (and remember Seismic is the heaviest hitting power available to controllers full stop).

Creepers are also one power which is made ridiculously awesome once the two main procs are in there, because they have a chance to proc with every attack the creepers makes (both the vines and the AOE bramble thingies which spawn around corpses).

So yeah, you're just not going to find much to compare to a suped up Plant/kin, especially against lots and lots of enemies, it's a bit of an outlier in terms of damage.

Dark gets you there with quite a few tools. And two of the points you mention above apply to dark as well, a dark can use the earth App too. Plus when you come to fighting at incarnate levels that -to hit and the pet which heals in your secondary are very useful, to both you and your team / league.

It's basically swings and roundabouts, especially on a large team. You are trading damage for more varied control and debuffs, and things like Tar Patch work well even if you have a kin or more darks on the team.

Plant is a bit of an AOE monster anyway, especially with procs in creepers and the immob. Add Kin to the mix and it's always going to be impressive.

Dark is an upper-mid level in terms of damage but a lot of it is single target (namely the pets) so it's not too surprising you're finding it lagging behind. It should be a fair bit sturdier than plant/kin though. especially comparing Kin to Dark.

I'm not so sure on this, in terms of your logic, but I agree with your point.

You see Hard controls *do* get better in two ways : The extra duration starts to be important again once you're fighting +4s or +5s as the base durations become pretty low on these guys. Secondly your Hard AOE Controls go from "Being up every 2nd or 3rd spawn" to being up whenever needed thanks to recharge buffs and enhancements getting maxxed out.

That said I do agree with your point, but for a different reason. At higher levels because AOE control for controllers has become much more prevalent it's more likely that adding more controllers or domis to a team isn't providing much extra, control-wise. Once a spawn is stunned or whatever then Holding or Fearing it is pretty irrelevant. In fact is some cases they can actually start falling over each other somewhat (someone Caging things on an Ice Patch, someone applying a DoT effect to a bunch of Terrified enemies, someone Flashfiring a bunch of confused enemies). The upside is those Controllers will at least be setting up and benefiting from Containment (ie doing more damage).

Whereas adding more damage is always good, and adding more buffs is usually good as well (although in terms of debuffs you can again hit a wall once you've debuffed them to the cap eg ToHit).

It's like adding a 3rd Tank to a team, most often the thing they'll be bringing to the team is damage, unless something unexpected happens like an ambush

This, pretty much. My Grav/TA gets a small bit of use from Ice Arrow followed by the hold on really nasty bosses who can do something horrible with that 3 second gap. But generally it sits there unused for the most part.

Lockdown is the one proc I am sticking in there, having 2 additional 15% chances to proc when the power is fired off is pretty nice for 2 boss spawns.

But the long, long recharge means damage procs are mostly a waste really, in terms of DPS. I'll probably do my usual frankenslotting for them (4 Acc/Hold/Recharge IOs) and then the Lockdown proc.

Haunt I'm planning to slot with the Cloud Senses proc, it should have a chance to go off with each of their attacks which is nice. If I can manage to max out their recharge and damage of course (I tend to frankenslot rather than slot for set bonuses since I mostly play my chars 1-50 and then move on to another).

Distortion Field I'll be proccing up though, maybe not 5 of them but as many as I can squeeze in once I have its recharge maxed out.

Not quite. Gases summons invisible pets which then cast holds. Field is more like a standard patch, a pseudo with an aura, so the once every 10 seconds applies.

I wouldn't go too mad proccing it out personally. But I'm Time controller, so the chance to hold field is more tempting due to the lower recharge.

This, pretty much word for word.

I like the idea. It does seem a bit debuff heavy and not great on control really , I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing mind, it's an interesting way to go : adding more erratic, chance-of controls rather than absolute ones (the T5 and the T8)

There's also probably too many power with -res in them. Given how powerful -res is in the game replacing them with something like -damage might be more balanced.

Indeed. Cephalopod Summoning is also high on my Want list.

*sigh* If only Lusca hadn't gotten that restraining notice.

I know.

I figured that those worms which has been returned to their can from earlier in the thread could do with another yard break