Laevateinn

Time does not mature until very late. At low levels where single bosses are actually quite dangerous, it's useful to be able to knock one out with a quick 1-2 punch of Timestop + ST hold (you can use the ST slow + timestop to do the same thing, but the Mag 4 hold on that has extremely short duration). It sets up containment for Blind and also accepts Basilisk's gaze.

The long animation time and lack of damage make it much less useful at high levels where you are laying waste to team-sized spawns, but it's still a solid low-level pick.

If you compare a high-recharge mind controller to one with no recharge, obviously the mind controller will win out. Comparisons between powersets are only meaningful when both have builds of the same quality and players of the same ability behind them.

The controllers that get aoe immobilizes, with the exception of Ice, all have at least one 90s base recharge hard mez aoe. That's what's keeping them safe even without any defense.

Sure, go ahead and do that. I want to see what a powerful mind controller looks like. Even with more money than the average player will see in their career, I couldn't design one that gave performance close to the big three primaries.

That was in response to their claim that mind control's aoe damage ability "certainly isn't top tier, but it is middling" which is factually wrong. I want to see this so-called middling aoe damage for myself.

More broadly, people keep telling me about these mind controllers that supposedly have "good" damage (whether ST or aoe) relative to other primaries, without being able to explain where they are getting it from. I have a suspicion that a lot of these people simply haven't seen a high damage controller at work before, which is why I offered to show them one.

Contrary to what you claim, I place a strong emphasis on flexibility, versatility and optimizing to face what's actually in the game rather than a solo farm. As far as I'm concerned, the ideal character ought to perform well solo and teamed, on offense and defense, at high levels and low levels, against single hard targets or hordes of weak enemies (and hordes of strong enemies), with capable teams and poor ones, against as many enemy groups in the game as possible. I don't think any character can check all of those boxes but the more it can, the better it is. I issue the quoted challenge only because you claim that Mind has "middling" aoe damage without evidence to back it up.

I don't have a single "prime metric", unlike some controllers who emphasize the support role exclusively, nor do I neglect the effect of support and control. In my first post I listed as one of Mind's most glaring weakness to be the fact that it actually outputs less hard mez than Fire. I also noted that illusion shares the same low-damage weakness that Mind has, however I don't consider it sub-par, since illusion gives control advantages significant enough to counter the weakness. The problem with Mind is one of not enough control for the damage it does, or vice versa. For a control-heavy set, Earth comes a lot more closer to providing enough control for the amount of damage it applies.

None of the examples you cite are so significant as to compensate for Mind's weaknesses. Every powerset has specific enemy groups that are weak to it so I consider this nothing special (for a more balanced perspective, it's worth also looking at how many enemies have psi res/def). You are right that one of Mind's advantages is that it's a remarkably strong low-level set. In the low levels where over-aggro can actually be a problem and a single boss is a pretty tough enemy, being able to juggle bosses with Lev and getting an aggroless early sleep makes it one of the really strong performers pre-30 (which is where IO sets begin to dominate) and especially pre-20 (before most controllers can effectively slot their aoe mezzes). I just don't consider it much of an advantage to be strong in the early game and weak in the lategame, not when the first 20 levels quickly fly by and when late-blooming IO builds nevertheless manage to fare decently when exemplared down.


Nowhere in the quoted text did I "dismiss fun". What I did say is that fun is subjective, and what's fun for me may not be fun for another person. When people ask "should I play powerset X?" I don't consider long stories of what I subjectively consider fun to be a useful contribution. I think it's much more useful to point out how the powersets stand in relation to each other, because most people do try to find a balance between performance and concept/playstyle etc. In the end, whether or not the character will be fun enough to outweigh any mechanical disadvantages is for the individual player to decide.

There's certainly nothing odd with playing weak or sub-par powersets. However, I'd rather people chose to do so as an informed decision rather than on the basis of hyped-up, unrealistic scenarios, or people chest-thumping on behalf of their characters.

In conclusion, nowhere did I dismiss fun, and the fact that you keep twisting the meaning of my posts should stand as a warning to everyone to take your posts with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, most people can't divorce criticism of a powerset from criticism of their characters, which they're heavily emotionally invested in.

You're probably right in that Mind Dominators aren't all that hot either barring the edge case of the LRSF. I do tend to mention the Domintaor comparison because, if for whatever reason I absolutely had to play the powerset, I'd chose to do it on a Dominator - it has fewer issues compared to its peers.


Of course it can. Apart from fun (which is subjective and thus left out of balance discussions, which must focus on the objective), characters are built to complete content. How they accomplish that goal is immaterial because methods don't matter, results do. The faster characters can complete content, the less the risk they take while doing it, the more different types of content they can handle and the wider the range of situations under which they can do it, the better they are.

Since all powersets have their relative merits, one can always concoct some hypothetical situation which plays to the strengths of a particular powerset, and hype up its ability. Discerning players should ask themselves 1) how widely applicable the situation mentioned is, 2) how the character would fare in different situations, 3) whether other characters would fare just as well or better in the same situation, even if they employ different methods.

In my experience intermittently sleeping an AV offers no real mitigation if the rest of the team is hitting it.

These advantages are only relevant occasionally. They don't compensate for a fire controller producing more helplessly staggering about enemies than a mind controller does.

We can't compare control sets in a vaccum, but empathy is interesting in that it lets you see how the primary alone performs without any help from the secondary, and from there, infer how it might work with other powersets. When many people praise the performance of their Mind/Kin, Mind/Rad etc., it's really the secondary doing all the heavy lifting. Empathy eliminates that observer bias.

You claim that Mind can leverage other secondaries to greater effect without providing any compelling examples. A solo Mind/Kin would get to maximise FS at their leisure, but this would need to be weighed against the fact that it doesn't work as well in a team, and that modern characters can often be built to maximise FS, with or without aggroless controls. Mind's damage is so poor that it can't exploit the massive damage potential that other kins (Fire/, Plant/, etc.) bring to the table, which I consider a large disadvantage.


Mass Hypnosis doesn't set persistent containment and the need to reapply it constantly means mind controllers suffer an animation and endurance cost penalty. Mind has no aoe immobilize which, as I have mentioned above, not only sets persistent containment but also fires procs and DoT interfaces. It is really very difficult to overstate how much damage this does when the immobilize recharges once every 3 seconds plus change. The above two problems doom Mind control to the bottom of the barrel as regards damage. Some Mind controllers chose not to slot DoT interfaces in order to maintain the aggroless control advantage, which further hurts their damage.

It's worth noting that Illusion has the same problem of no persistent, low-recharge containment setter, but makes up for it by being able to control enemies that control primaries in general do not work against, while maintaining all of Mind's advantages (aggroless control, psi damage - there's even a nonpositional attack in there).

That said, I'll gladly change my opinion (and post here that I did) if someone shows me evidence. Get on your Mind controller and show me how fast you can kill things. I'll hop over to your server to take a look if you agree to come and see how fast my non-Mind controller can kill things. Send me a tell at @Laevateinn


The advantage is not unique, since Illusion also has it (and unlike Mind, Illusion is closer to being a truly aggroless control set, since you can beat on the PA-taunted enemies with impunity).

Between debuffs, self-buffs, and mitigation, modern builds have many ways to negate alpha strikes. In evaluating how much Mind's aggroless control ability is worth, it's worth looking at how other controllers fare without it. Since none of my controllers have any difficulty handling alpha strikes, even from enemies which their controls do not work against, I'm convinced the value is small/nonexistent. It would need to be weighed against the core disadvantage of not wielding enough control power for the amount of damage it does.

For the reasons you mention, "soloing +4/x8" without qualification has no meaning, just like saying "soloing an AV" (there's a big difference between soloing Chimera, who's probably outdamaged by IDF bosses, and soloing the AV-class Avatar of Hamidon). I consider soloing the Lambda warehouse a better measure of baseline build ability, because IDF aren't built to disadvantage any particular AT, have a good spread of damage types and threats, and because the time limit in the warehouse means you need both good damage and survivability to make it through.

This has some nifty uses e.g. detoggling Mary's hurricane, but in general is not significant on AVs, which are mostly bags of HP that you have to attack over and over again. saying that Mind controllers "mez AVs in one hit" does make for a compelling soundbite, but is not a realistic description of the powerset's ability.


The advantage vanishes at high level, where controllers start getting APP blasts. Even Mind controllers will want to drop Lev for one of the good APP blasts because Lev is not particularly good DPA.


Theoretical advantages in extreme edge cases are not a significant factor. Very few enemies other than mitoes and AE critters have only positional defense, so this is of little use. Again, this is one of those soundbites that make the set sound better than it is.


A lack of AoE containment (and thus damage) affects much more than the ability to farm, since AoE damage is applicable throughout the game and on all ATs, not just in farming. Controller immobilizes recharge fast, accept plenty of damage procs, proc reactive interface, and mitigate damage by reducing the number of enemies that can melee the controller. They are a key part of any controller's arsenal.


This is false. Most of my experience with Mind is with Empathy, which gives the controller minor benefit and has no debuffs, so I have an extremely clear idea of why the powerset is deficient (unlike your Mind/Kin, where Kin makes up for some of the low damage). Ignoring the fact that performance cannot be considered in a vaccum (since you are forced to take a secondary anyway), Mind control is not especially powerful relative to other powersets.


This implies that people who do not pick Mind Control must be minmaxers (subtly drawing on the popular bias against minmaxing to sway the argument). It neglects the fact that many people do care for performance at the same time as concept and strive to find an acceptable balance between the two.

Here's a more objective description of Mind control from someone who's played over 100 levels of it. It has poor AoE damage and the AoE control ability is not significantly higher than that of most other powersets (you may be surprised to learn that Total Dom and Mass Confuse, combined, have less uptime than Flashfire alone). While it has a lot of AoE control powers on paper, Mass Hypnosis is really an aggro control tool and TK suffers from low target cap, high endurance cost and terrain dependency. What the set does have is a lot of single-target control options that are less relevant in the high-level game, where the focus is on taking out hordes of enemies at high speed with the occasional extra strong enemy thrown in.

Mind does have some unique advantages, like the best ST hold of all controller primaries, aforementioned Mag 3.5 mez and (like illusion) some aggroless controls. It has a variery of mez types so if one day, more enemies appear that are immune to specific mezzes, the set will regain some of its advantage. Overall the powerset is better on Dominators, mainly since they're not dependent on Containment for damage, but also because the higher magnitude and increased duration of controls let them bring to bear Mind control's tools on things that controller mezzes don't normally work on.

Because they do not mind the lower performance, are willing to take the performance hit in exchange for e.g. concept or playstyle, or are unaware of the significantly higher performance that can be achieved with better control sets.

You don't have enough inf to get?

Most secondary effects do very little to improve performance (except for -res and -tohit). Things like -def, minor slows, endurance drain and KB do not compare to the powerful and consistent advantage of higher damage. The developers have severely overvalued them when considering power balance.

Incidentally, the DoT in fire is actually quite minor, and not the main reason for the strength of the set. Fire is a top-tier sets because it has blaster-level rain of fire, a cone that does abnormally high damage (1.75 damage scale vs. 0.9-1.4 for most other blast sets), and a TAoE with one of the fastest animations in the game. To these advantages it adds no redraw and an exotic (non-S/L) damage type.

That said, lots of sub-par sets have been buffed recently, often in the face of highly vocal opposition, so there's still hope. I predict that within a year DP will get an animation time fix like TA, AR and Archery all did and maybe some other buffs on the side. And when it happens, all the people who insisted it was "just fine" will go about trying to pretend they never said anything of the sort.