Frosticus

Unless the ice pet has been fixed very recently then animate stone is tougher and does more damage. Jack should be doing heaps of damage, but once he pulls out his sword he no longer uses his blasts or freezing touch*

*I haven't checked this since about i14 so it might be fixed, but I kinda doubt it.

Other than that earth is generally a superior control set to ice, but ice isn't bad by any stretch.

Mind has no -kb powers, which pretty much every earth assault power has in spades so in that sense it would be a good pairing to allow earth to do its thing.

Plant has seeds which clumps enemies and if you haven't noticed mudpots is a very small aoe and fissure is much smaller than the troller version too so having enemies as tight as any melee toon would is pretty important to get much out of earth's later powers.

I believe it is a 10 sec duration vs even cons.

You also have to be on the ground to activate stone spears...

Def traps looks decent. Very solo viable set and very very easy to soft cap (35% with just FF gen, weave, 3% IO, and 1 slotted cj) and still retains a resistance based shield in the epic for a very tough Trapper. (comparatively, cheap soft capped *s/l corr trappers are stuck with a def epic).

Looking at the numbers it appears Fissure got crapped all over compared to the troller version.
Dom Vs Troller
10 vs 16 targets
10 vs 15 ft radius aoe
15.18 vs 12.6 end
16 vs 20 sec rech
61.81 vs 27.53 (55 contained) damage
33% mag 2 vs 50% mag 2 and 50% mag 1 stun
33% vs 50% chance of kd

I like the faster cycle time (though troller epic aoes are DOUBLE base rech of normal versions, so dom should be 10 sec), but everything else is worse than the troller version.

I'm a little confused why Fissure is doing MORE damge than tremor though. Tremor has a slower rech, higher end cost and is a melee attack vs a ranged attack. But tremor looks in line with the other pbaoes available to doms. So I'm worried that Fissure might get knocked down ever lower...

However, the radius reduction in Fissure has probably allowed it to be damage bumped a bit. Seems bassackwards do reduce the radius of fissure when last issue most of the pbaoes (they don't have any other aoe's) were increased... weird.

Aside from that Lava is really cool looking. Stone spears is a st control freak for a tier 1 power. The mallets kept nice high recharges (think NRG rather than Elec) so that is great. Hurl boulder should be a base 10 sec rech as the cast time is too long and has the same issue as impale. And finally I wish mudpots was more like blaster lightning field with a massive aoe rather than using the melee size aoe. Dom's often halt enemies outside of 8ft through immobs, stuns, or w/e whereas melee toons pull them in close with taunt auras.

The biggest boner is that none of the control aspects are being boosted by domination. Ya seismic is great at base mag 4, but I prefer a mag 6 total focus over it. I'm just not sure why NRG (full of stuns) is affected by domination, same for PSW, same for EVERY control power in the assault sets except impale (iirc) yet Earth Assault isn't. I hope it is a bug.

I was very excited for earth assault. I doubt I'm rolling one though unless kinks are worked out before it goes live.

meh I can triple stack FS for a bit on my plant/kin, it is a pretty minor change for those that only single stack the power too.

I'm thinking arctic air+contagious proc+world of confusion would be a rather confusing experience for enemies. All with no effort either.

While I was hopeful everyone would be getting an additional epic pool... I mean come on it wasn't likely to happen.

At one time there was:
brute elec melee - light st damage, good aoe, killer unique attack. Overall quick cycles
Stalker elec melee - moderate st damage (AS), best aoe, killer unique attack. Overall quick cycles
Corr/Def/Blaster elec blast - generally crappy st damage, ok aoe, massive utility, wicked unique attack in thunderous blast.
Blaster elec Manipulation - massive st damage (highest of all blaster secondaries), huge utility (powersink, hold, aoe stun), one of the best damage auras in the game (huge range on it), but generally crappy aoe.
Dominator elec Assault - massive st damage (highest of all dom secondaries), funky utility power with VS, but generally crappy aoe.

The elec melee sets were one form of elec. The elec blast sets were another form of elec. And the elec manipulation/assault was another form of elec. I can not agree at all that across the game elec was generally represented in any singular pattern, but rather:
one form for blasting
one form for melee
one for assaulting/manipulating
Other than it generally having a unique/funky tier 9 for everyone that gets it and the powers having the end drain/return function.

Some forms of elec were fast, aoe centric, others are utility centric, and others still are (or were) st focused.

Up until the revamp NO elec was fast and st oriented, so new elec assault is like no other form of elec present in the game. Maybe that is a good thing. I'd be on board with that if it was presented in that way originally, but it wasn't.

If people like new elec good for them, I'm happy for them. It's done and even though I care enough to not leave it alone I probably should as it accomplishes nothing.

New Nrg is great, it follows much of the design of Old Elec, so what's not to like? I just don't see how new elec AND new nrg can both be good, but when their roles were reversed under old doms both were bad and required changing. Seems peculiar.

I agree that fire should have probably been left alone for the most part. It definitely strays from the expected format that fire has followed in every iteration presented be in melee, ranged, or somewhere in between. I feel like fire was largely changed for the sake of change and wonder why Icy, which people cited as "lacking" received nothing, but Fire, which was generally accepted as the best assault set across an entire career of leveling needed some very major rebalancing. And worse yet icy was critisized for requiring massive recharge and lvl 38 before it felt decent, and yet Fire was changed to be even more recharge intensive...

I just hope that come i16 purple sets tank in price, and it starts raining lotg's because almost every dom I've looked at making post changes requires MORE recharge than before to get to a point that I'd be satisfied with the play experience. If earth turns out to be a high performing set then I'll drop major inf for one more dom because if it has the numbers consistent with the rest of the game I'm going to want about 100% global rech on top of hasten and heavy slotting.

But for the other sets I'm just not willing to do that, they generally lack the aoe output to be worth the expenditure or have great st damage, but aren't good enough toons to be competent hard target solo'ers so why bother if you feel it is necessary to drop 2 billion into them now, but could get tremendously more toon out of other AT's for that price.

Sorry got rambling at the end, but just wanted to get everything out so I don't need to respond to this thread again.

Take care dom community. I'm bailing on you until earth shows up heh.

I have no problem with high end costs when they are justified, of which several of the end costs on doms are debatable. I have zero issues with something that is released as a certain value that everyone gets used to. I have issues when a bait and switch is performed and you either take a set that was exceedingly fast, light on end and easy to build chains and then make is a leviathan. Or you take a previously high recharge high damage model and turn it into clawls. I don't give a crap if the new version can 2 shot hamidon, it isn't what I signed on for when I rolled the set.

It is not fit for the purpose intended. For me. because I intended it to be exactly what it was within a reasonable range of variance. Doubling the recharge of say fireblast is not a reasonable change imo and is unjustified and more than likely unnecessary. I don't care if 8 sec fireblast hits as hard as energy xfer. I really don't.

I expect /earth to be quite high end cost and fully intend for a perma dom build to help fuel it and either soul of mu to further offset the costs (in addition to stam, miracle, num, perf proc, and recovery IO's). With the control secondary effects that should be present in earth:
mag 2 immob in mudpot
50% chance of mag 2-3 stun in fissure
mag 3-4 hold in seismic
It would seem silly to build for anything other than perma dom as all of those will double in mag and get hefty duration. And it looks like it should be fairly easy to perma dom as well.

If the goal is to move doms away from the necessity of perma dom then earth assault is running counter to that intention due to:
high end costs
long recharges (ie all the mallets, tremor...probably fissure)
and massive boostable control.

Hey we want you to rely less on domination, but here take this set that is going to perform about 600 times better with perma dom, but no pressure to go for it

Well the way I see it, Fissure should be a 10 second recharge because all the troller epic aoe's are set to double the base recharge of the prim/secondary versions of the powers they are pulled from.

ie fireball 16 sec, but 32 in epic form
frostbreath 16 sec, but 32 in epic from
icestorm 60 sec, but 120 sec in epic
energy torrent 12 sec, but you guessed it 24 sec in epic

the only current exception is psy nado which is 20 sec for all AT's including troller epic. I'd bug that personally.

If fissure isn't less than a 20 sec recharge then I'll be bugging it asap. And it should not have any lessening of base DS either. It should also cost less than 13 end too. Really fissure should probably be then new "old" psw (10 sec rech, ~10 end), but probably only do about ~50 base damage rather than the 70 that psw did and does.

But we'll probably just get the "actual" troller version with 20 sec rech and 13 end. Which is still a good power, just mean the one the trollers are using is better than it should be... or doms is worse based on how the other aoe's have transferred to the epics.

I for one look forward to seeing purples falling from the sky and seeing the price of salvage plummet.

These dynamic sliders should fully solidify City of X as City of Farmers. Story? who needs story? with being able to set for x team members and customize the types of enemies we face it is a full-fledged Hack and Slash... and you never need story in a hack and slash.

hmm City of Dual Boxing Instanced Farmers...nah doesn't quite have a catchy sound to it hehe.

OP you should play a fire/kin, I hear they are pretty hot.

And it's not like most of them use speedboost so no biggy if you skip it right?

As for fire/storm, you could easily skip snowstorm, I did on mine and never missed it. It is a defensively geared power on an offensively oriented build. However skipping freezing rain is putting a lot of gimp into your build.

I think it will be static discharge myself. Though shocking bolt would fit with the way tanker apps are designed, but alas this is for brutes so static discharge.

/ea still has conserve power as far as we know, so CP won't be getting shifted to the ppp's unless EA's conserve power is also getting changed.