MinMin

Day 5 - Halloween is Nigh!!
For various unusual reasons, I get to play a bit during the afternoon and I end up on really early (7:30pm), which a hard deadline of 9pm as the servers go down for the Halloween publish.

The late afternoon play gets me to L12 where I pick up Propel. Yeah, yeah, Doms don't need Propel. However, I'm going to need something besides Stone Spears and Hurl Boulder to ooh and ah at, so Propel is it.It does slightly more damage than Hurl Boulder and together with the vet powers I have a nice (if excruciatingly slow) ranged attack chain. I find that I can hold one target, lift another and then annoy the hell out of a couple more with ranged knockback/down. On a small team, that behaviour could make up for not having actual AoE control of any sort, so I'm feeling a bit better about the prospects of this character. Stone Spears is already on the scrapheap with only occasional use to knock off slivers of health from mobs. (It's not even great for that. I suspect by L20 if you can see a sliver, Stone Spears won't be enough to remove it). With L12 I've also picked up DOs.

The good news is that's early enough in the evening to catch a couple of my VG mates playing their new Widows. They're at Level 4 so with the shiny new SSK feature I nip over to Mercy and help out with the early SoA missions and then do Kalinda's arc again. Capella works really well with the two Widows in exactly the mode I described above. By maintenance time we'd finished a fair few of the early missions and I was well into L13.

After thinking about it a bit while I'm watching an excellent documentary (the Stephen Fry/Mark Cawardine Last Chance to See following up from the Douglas Adams book), I log on again after maintanence. I'm wondering if I've been fair with Tremor, because I'm thinking a major lack of this build is AoE of any sort (damage or control). So to test this hypothesis I switch to my secondary build and this time I include Tremor. Capella Rising was lucky to survive the experience of a couple of missions with this power in the mix. I nearly deleted her outright. How on earth is a three and a half second PBAoE power that does the same damage as the already discarded Stone Spears seem even half way reasonable?! Even if it was being sold as a PBAoE knockdown power, by the time you've finished activating it, whatever you were trying to knockdown is playing catch with your kidneys!

Day 4 - The Day Off
A pupil-free day for the kids, plus catching up after working the previous two Saturdays, forces me to take the day off work. After getting the kids up and fed they want to have a quiet day. Suits me, the elder two have homework, and I have a Dominator project I want to have some fun with ...

So early on I do a little bit more soloing of Port Oakes missions (Angelo Vendetti's Vampyre arc to be specific) and after about 20 or 30 minutes of this I get snapped up by a small team (a couple of MMs, a corruptor and me). That suits me well as I want to guage the performance of the character in a team situation. In short, it worked reasonably well. The heavy buff on the team allows me to cut loose with the full target-switching aggro-magnet fun that is an early Dom's stock in trade.

This pushes me through to about L11. I pick up Hurl Boulder at L10, and this is another power which I love the look of. As promised earlier, I had to spend some time with the Tailor to fix up my costume and powers. I've got rid of the reddish-pink and gone with a three-toned approach. Base colour is a royal blue as before with bare shoulders and royal blue tights below with the "Lock" pattern in a sky blue. I rounded it out with thigh highs in royal blue and black using the "Vandal" pattern and matching it on the gloves. I modified the mask to the same royal blue as well. With the powers, I eliminated blue and went with the reddish-pink with a light purple backing for both powersets. Hurl Boulder looks brilliant with the Hasten glow around the fists as the boulder gets raised in the air. Ultimately, I'm hoping that looking cool will keep me playing this character well into the time where I expect it will become painful.

I was on about 5pm when I get a tell from my mate the pirate ninja looking for a team again. I say sure, but I have to go soon and make dinner but I have some time, so we form up again. By this stage I've actually got a level or two on him instead of the other way around. We get to chatting while working our way through the missions and I express my opinion at one point on this Dominator so far. "Racing to the bottom" was the phrase I used and he was quite surprised, as he'd already decided to roll an Earth Assault Dom based on the performance of our duo a couple of days ago. I laughed and pointed out to him how much damage was coming from Earth Assault and how much damage was coming from the Blackwand, Nemesis Staff and Sands of Mu. We both thought the Earth ranged powers look cool though, so that's something ...

Day 2 - Early Levels
After a very busy day involving work in the morning and then driving all over the city to get kids to various band performances (including an evening one with both my elder daughters here. Yes, I am a proud parent ), I eventually have everyone in bed and I get a chance to unwind. Time to put Capella through her paces.

By the time I get on it's quite late at about 10:30. That's actually about 11:30 for most of the rest of the Australian population, so I'm unsurprised to find things quiet. That's ok, I usually solo the first few levels anyway.

I start in the tutorial and spend a few minutes setting up the UI as I prefer it with all the powers in their right places and global channels on the right tabs. I'm about half way through the tutorial when I realise just how cool the Stone Spears animation is. This is a good sign because I'm easily amused by costumes and powers that I like. I'm not particularly imaginative or easily bored (still playing after 5 years!), so that's a good thing. I've gone with Lift and Stone Spears to start with, and I quickly pick up Gravity Distortion after I leave the tutorial. Some quick Kalinda missions (including the mandatory-drop Eliminate the Infected) and I'm level 5 and off to Port Oakes for my jet pack.

At this point I've selected Stone Mallet for my Level 4 power. Hate the look, love the power. Pretty much the reverse of Stone Spears really. At this point the performance of the character is ok, but I do kind of feel more like a Gravity/Vet Power Dom than any particular reliance on my secondary. I'm dropping in the odd Earth Assault power to look pretty while the vet powers are doing all the work. That's kind of frustrating, but it's a common feeling for low level Doms, so I'm not rushing to judgement here.

I get to Port Oakes and I go see Drea the Hook (boo!) to get my newspaper. After getting it and grabbing a mission I get a tell from a cheery fellow looking to start a team and promising "super fun times". It's after 11pm and I've had a busy day, but how do you say no to that? He's a level or so ahead of me, but that's ok as he's looking to do the paper/mayhem grind as well. I get into the mission and he's dressed up in cool blue and white pirate gear and he's a Ninja Mastermind. Pirate ninjas? Gotta love it when someone runs with a cliche and really makes it their own. I did make the suggestion that he pick up the mekman non-combat pet and go for the robot ninja pirate trifecta.

As promised the duo with this guy is indeed "super fun times" and we get through a few missions, levels and a mayhem before I have to plead exhaustion. Fun evening, a couple of levels and a new global friend (who I'll probably not see much due to near-complete inversion of our timezones). At this point I'm L7 and I've picked up Hurdle for my L6 power. I'm still vacillating as to whether this guy is going to be a speeder or not, so I wasn't sure about Hasten at L6.


Day 3 - ZZZzzzz
A relatively lazy Sunday with a few errands to run. I get on a few times during the day, but never for long. A couple of extra missions and I've soloed Capella Rising to L8 and here I bit the bullet and pick up Hasten. A very small amount of soloing follows in the evening, but I'm tired and I head to bed quite early.

Day 1 - The Dreaded Dominator
The wife and kids want to watch some awful television show so I have some time to play relatively early (about 8pm). However, it's the last day of Friday maintenance (yay!) and the servers are going to go down in just under an hour. After a brief think about what I want to do for that hour I decide that it's finally time to bite the bullet. It's time to start something I've been dreading: my Gravity Control/Earth Assault Dominator. An hour will give me a hard deadline so that I don't get lost in costume creator hell.

** Aside: There's an interesting book called The Paradox of Choice by a psychologist named Barry Schwartz. He explores the theory that "infinite" choice can bring genuine suffering, particularly to certain personality types. My reaction to spending time with the costume creator tells me I'm most likely one of those people he's talking about. There's a part of me that just sits behind the rest of me screaming "JUST CHOOSE SOMETHING! ANYTHING!" When that gets loud enough I tend to have a new character. And I tend to be visiting the Tailor for tweaks sometime before L10.

So, "dreading", huh? That probably deserves an explanation.

I've been a critic of Gravity Control for a very long time, but other than some early abortive attempts, most of my criticism comes from on-paper comparison with the other sets. I feel that to own my opinion of the set it's probably worthwhile to actually take it to a decent level. Similarly, on paper Earth Assault doesn't look great either. Tremor is painfully slow and does awful damage besides, the ranged attacks are slow and Mud Pots and Fissure have reduced their radii so far as to make them questionable. About they only good thing I can see is that the melee powers look to be terrific. So I have an opinion to form here as well.

I end up with a female magic-origin character with a primarily blue costume with reddish-pink features (what the hell was I thinking?!) and using basically the same colours but flipped for the powers with the crystal theme for Earth Assault. Following on a recent theme on character naming I name her Capella Rising. One of my VG mates is on in the last few minutes before maintenance so I get him to invite the character.

I agree with you completely, and Seldom as well.

I think where we differ is that my personal preference is consistency of performance as opposed to excelling situationally. I can nearly always use extra damage or +regen/-regen debuff, whereas I tend to have to look hard for a situation where I want to increase the duration of my holds by 60% or so where I can't just use Domination instead.

But I can understand where you might want to do that, particularly if you're actually filling an actual "control niche" in a team, instead of being just another member of whatever PUG is currently running. Due to timezone issues, I find the latter is far more common, and I tend to have to build towards greater self-sufficiency.

I don't think anyone said that. My reference to eating an alpha was in reference to throwing down Ice Slick without a convenient corner around. Ice Slick breaks Sleep.

DarkCurrent's reference to it was that you can't stack it because it does a small amount of damage, breaking the earlier Sleep effect.

Muon_Neutrino is giving you good advice.

Here's some other tips on dealing with an PToD EB:

• Obviously purple insps are the key. You'll also need some greens for the odd lucky shot and some combination of blues, reds and (depending on the EB) break frees. Personally, I rarely stock reds, and if I'm particularly hunting an EB I'll go with a stock of about half purples, quarter blues and quarter greens.
  
• Use your immobs to keep the EB at range. They still hit lke a mack truck, but most of them don't have a one-hit kill power at range. Combined with a good supply of purples you can survive for some time this way. You can dart in for heavy hitting melee when the PToD go down and the EB can be held.
  
• Pets make excellent speed bumps. If you're fighting an EB that you can't immob easily (Mynx is a good example) or the EB breaks free of your immob, then you can summon a Fly Trap or a PPP pet in front of it. That typically allows you enough time to take whatever remedial action you need (popping insps, waiting for a power to recharge, etc).

As a Plant/Fire you also have the advantage of having a very heavy hitting secondary and a pet that you really don't mind sacrificing. Even Carrion Creepers can work well against EBs. Sharing aggro is good.

Is Telekinetic Thrust now a key power?
It's a lot of fun. I'm not sure that I'd describe it as "key". Personally, I'd put it where you have Fire Cages and leave that power until much later in your build.

- Assault or Maneuvers?
- Vengeance or Ball Lightning?
Depends. How many LotG +recharge IOs do you have access to?

The reason why you see the Leadership pool on so many Fire/Psi Doms is that both Maneuvers and Vengeance can be slotted with that IO. Along with Hover you have 3 spots to slot this.

- Any slotting changes?

• I like Acc, Hold, Hold, Rech, Rech for Char.
• Hasten should be slotted Rech, Rech, Rech!! not Rech, Rech, Rech?
• If you took SS instead of Fly you'd have a spot for another power. SS isn't as bad as people think - rememeber there is unlimited Jet Pack powers now.

I think it's hilarious that you posted it like that to help readability, but the non-bolded red font on the slate-blue background pretty much makes my eyes bleed ...

Regarding the Stamina vs Drain Psyche issue: Drain Psyche is only a feasible replacement for Stamina once it has plenty of slots and recharges quickly (ie., some reasonable level of global recharge). I recommend taking Stamina initially and respeccing into a Stamina-less build at some later point.

Some tips on that build:

• Flashfire is your only decent AoE control power. It deserves 6 slots. I recommend 2 Acc, 2 Duration, 2 Recharge.
• Hot Feet pretty much becomes "always on". As it's an endurance hog, you really need 3 EndReduc in there.
• Fire Cages is a horrible, horrible AoE damage source. Slot it with accuracy, endurance reduction and immob duration. Slotting it with recharge just encourages bad behaviour You do see this slotted with Positron's Blast in some builds; that's for the cheap +recharge set bonus, not because the damage is worth enhancing.
• If you take my adivce above about Stamina, you won't need end reduc in your attacks. Slot for acc, dam and rech. Typically Acc, Dam, Dam, Dam, Rech is reasonable slotting.
• Slot Drain Psyche with as much recharge as you can. I personally like 5 x Doctored Wounds + 1 recharge IO, even at early levels as the set is quite cheap.
• Fire Imps is best slotted with 1 Acc, 3 Dam. You don't need recharge.
• It's a shame you took Hot Feet so early. It's hard to run consistently without a decent endurance recovery power. By taking it this early, you need to put off Psychic Scream until after Stamina/DP.

Hope that helps!

That is good news Ghost_Falcon. I hope it works out.

I'm paid up until the end of February. I've removed my credit card from automatic billing.

It's plainly obvious that we now have 3 maintenance periods per week and we can't plan around when they will be.

I can't justify paying for a game I can't access as often as not.

What? By using their AoE Stun power and then laying down their AoE Knockdown? Cool! Now which Ice Control power does AoE Stun ... wait a sec.

Yes, I know what you really meant, but corners aren't always as convenient as you would like and an AoE Sleep won't eliminate an alpha.