Muon_Neutrino

I must have missed something along the way here - what is this change that is causing 50s to earn more?

Ok, now I'm curious - how did you manage to cram in so many power slots that you're softcapped, have aid self, *and* still have room for confront? That's a build I'd like to see!

When I did this mission on my dom quite a while ago, I completed it just fine. None of the generators fell under attack before I got to them, and in fact the most annoying part was hunting for the reporter.

A few weeks back, me and my brother went through this mission again on our way to 50 with our duo, and it was like night and day. The first time through on his copy of the mish, we went looking for the generators and the mission failed just as we came in sight of where the first one had been. Booted out, we stood there blinking for a while before we set *my* copy of the mission and tried again. This time we took off at high speed immediately, and I got lucky to find a generator close to the entrace and take the aggro with force bubble before the nemesis took off the last 2 or so pixels of health. That was the only generator to survive.

Obviously the mission isn't working as intended, but for now if you want to try to complete it you've got to move *fast*. If you get lucky, maybe you can find a generator and distract the attackers before it dies.

Well, it's only anecdotal evidence, but there seems to be at least some shortage effects. My FF defender hit 50 during double XP, and the next day I placed a bunch of bids on low 30ish thunderstrikes to get his ranged defence up.

I noticed that there weren't really any existing stocks, so I placed bids (on a variety of level ranges) marginally above the 'last 5' to ensure I won and waited. I'm *still* waiting for some of them.

Exactly. Endurance recovery is not a fixed number of endurance points per second, but a percentage of your maximum endurance. At base, a character recovers their entire endurance bar in 60 seconds, for an endurance recovery rate of 1.667% end/s. Add in slotted stamina and that goes to something like 2.480% end/s. With a maximum endurance of 100, that 2.408% just translates to 2.408 points of end. With 105 max endurance, that 2.408% translates to about 2.604 points of end - for a boost of about 0.2 end per second.

That's one of the reasons max end boosts are so good - not only can you fight for longer before running dry, they also substantially increase your recovery rate.

Well, capella rises every night - at least from this latitude. (although somtimes it *is* during the day...) The only question is: will you be at the helm or not?

I believe it's been decided that the abilities he uses at the beginning are build up, conserve power, power boost, and the ammo change power - basically meaning that he's a pistols/EM blaster. We saw no sign of aim, and build up is always in the secondary.

Yeah, more or less. It's not that the end bonuses makes the perf shifter any less useful, but it just makes the numina's and miracle *more* useful. Notice that the best solution involves both of those uniques - it just adds perf shifters on top, because those procs are more valuable than the last 15%ish enhancement you could eke out in the third slot.

It's at least close, although there may be some possibilities if you want to look at level 50 IO endmods...

Stamina is 25% recovery, PP is 12.5% (I think). So, 3 slotting level 25-30 endmods for ~95% enhancement is an extra 23.75% recovery from stamina and an extra 11.875% recovery from PP.

If you instead slot two level 50 endmods (83.3% enhancement after ED), the additional recovery is 20.83% from stamina and 10.415% from PP, for a difference of 2.92% recovery from stamina and 1.46% from PP. That translates (with base 112 endurance) to 0.055 less end/s from stamina and 0.027 less end/s from PP.

That, however, frees up two slots. If we use one of them in PP for a performance shifter proc (remember, it's not unique), that's a net gain of 0.173 end/s from PP. If we put the other in health for a numina's unique, that's a net gain there of 0.132 end/s.

So, while I don't think there would be much difference with level 30 endmods, once you're able to slot level 50 endmods doing the following:

Health: miracle unique, numina's unique
Stamina: 2 level 50 endmods, perf shifter proc
PP: 2 level 50 endmods, perf shifter proc

would work out to about 0.305 end/s more recovery than the other setup (assuming about 112 max end and that I've done the math right). Of course, you're paying for a numina's and an extra performance shifter proc to get that, but if cost is no object, it would be superior.

Well, let's see.....

Miracle is 15% recovery, numina's is 10%. The performance shifter proc is a flat 0.2 end/s. At 100 max end and 1.6667% end/s base recovery, the miracle proc is 0.25 end/s, and the numina's is 0.167 end/s. At 112 max end, the miracle proc is 0.28 end/s, and the numina's is 0.187 end/s.

So, the miracle proc is always better than the performance shifter (at least in flat end/s recovered), and the numina's is always worse, whether you have +12 or so max end or not. The numbers shift slightly, but not enough to change the ordering. However, you *can* put the miracle unique into health's base slot, and if you do that, the most economical use of a single additional slot would be the performance shifter proc. Of course, the miracle unique is probably just a biiiit more expensive.

It's the latter - 100% mez reist cuts the duration in half. So, in your example, 90% sleep resist does indeed cut the effect to 1/1.9 of its original length, or about 52%. Which makes mez resistance from IOs somewhat underpowered in my opinion - the percentages are usually very small.

I personally wouldn't take it. The tiny radius doesn't help, but moreso the fact that for it to do any appreciable damage, you not only have to be in melee, you have to be in *sustained* melee, and with lots of enemies. Doms melee, yes, but rather like a blapper, I've found that I don't tend to *remain* in melee with any one foe for very long. I jump in long enough to beat down a foe, and then I'm off to the next. For my playstyle, anyway, I don't see mud pots doing very much.

I could perhaps see mud pots working on an ice/, to stack on top of AA, but even then I'm not sure how well it'd work given that AA tends to make mobs wander away from you. I suppose it might also work on a plant/, since seeds encourages mobs to clump and makes meleeing much less dangerous. But really, I would most likely skip it on any set - I don't really see it doing enough in any case to justify the power pick, slots, end cost, and effort. But that's ok with me, every power set needs a skippable power or two anyway.

I'm glad to see that you're having fun - you've got the same reaction I do to the stone melee attacks, it's just so much *fun* to SMASH the heck out of everything.

The /earth dom I plan to make eventually will also be a grav/, so I'm finding your reports quite interesting. In most cases, I would usually suggest taking the ST immob for use on EBs and skipping the AoE version, but with the extreme melee focus of /earth and possibly wanting to prevent scatter from WH, I'm not as sure. If you have room, I might actually suggest taking both (you ought to have room, if you're skipping propel, dimension shift, and mud pots), though you obviously don't need both immediately.

Less than a year after I started playing (sometime spring '08, I think), the devs changed something in the guts of the login process, and suddenly I couldn't log in anymore - it would just hang after I entered my PW, and eventually the connection would time out. So, I went to the college's IT people to see what was going on, and eventually we figured out why the network wasn't liking the new login system and fixed it.

At one point, I was in the guy's office and we were talking about the problem, and he went into the logs to see what IP address my login command was attempting to reach - and we noted that I was the only one who had ever tried to connect to that address, in the 2 or 3 years that the college had been using that system.

My college isn't very large, only 2000-3000 students, but that's still 2-3000 people of prime video game playing age. I had never run into anyone who played, but that's hardly the same as finding out for *sure* that I was the only one on the entire campus. It felt pretty weird.

(In the meantime, there are so many WoW players that they have a dedicated slice of bandwidth reserved in the college's bandwidth allocation scheme just so that they don't bog down the entire network. )

Yeah, I don't think I've ever slotted more than a dozen or so SOs across all of my characters, ever. I came into the game in issue 10, and it just never made any sense to me to slot SOs when even generic IOs are so much better - let alone frankenslotting cheap set IOs, which I find is almost like a small minigame itself (how much enhancement can I get for 50k, etc).

I mean, the first time I heard about frankenslotting, I read up on it and said - I can 6 slot this attack with SOs, and get 95% damage and 33% acc/end/rech, or I can 5 slot it with extremely cheap set IOs and get 95% damage, 60% acc, and 35% end/rech? Oh, I wonder which should I do?

Heh, yeah, the prices are nothin much right now. I thought I was set when I dropped one on an ITF - I figured, even a confuse purple has to sell for *something*, right? Heh, 5 mil, whee. I laugh at those who whine about purple prices.

Eh, I'm not so sure. At this point, I personally think energy is good enough that what he said could actually be literally true - it *is* no longer such a bad secondary that you'll be sorry you rolled it. (Of course that's not what he *meant*, but piffle. I'm being pedantic here. )

More seriously, though, it is pretty decent nowadays. It is certainly still horrible at AoE, but its ST is not bad at all - and it *is* probably best at *ranged* ST damage (at least, at non-permadom recharge levels), if that's a niche you're looking for. And, as much as many have derided it, it *still* provides the best mitigation out of the secondaries, with the *possible* exception of earth, with all its knockdown. And I've never understood why so many have problems with powerboost - if nothing else, it works wonders on the AoE holds, and it's also extremely good for boosting stuns and whatnot.

(And I have to nitpick on the stuns point - if we ignore lolwhirling hands as we should, there are only 2 powers with stuns - and total focus's stun is far from random or tiny duration.)

Since issue 12, huh? There have certainly been some chances since then. (Of course, there were more changes than just what I'm listing. I'm just listing the changes that affected doms.)

In issue 12, of course, doms got earth control and electricity assault. After that, there weren't any real changes until issue 13 came out.

In issue 13, villain patron pools were changed to no longer be locked. You can take any patron pool on your villain, no matter which actual patron you chose, and you can change your patron pool with a respec. This issue also gave us the option for multiple builds, and added a 5th power to each of our patron pools. It also brought a complete revamp of PvP (which most seem to have disliked - I wouldn't really know as I don't PvP).

Somewhere in here, all melee powers had their range buffed from 5 to 7 feet (if they weren't already better). A fairly minor change, but it's surprising just how noticeable a difference it made, IMO.

Issue 14 brought the Mission Architect, which is a feature that could take up an entire post in its own right. Suffice to say, it's a way for players to write their own story arcs and play the story arcs of others. As you might expect, most of what people have written is either horribly bad or a farm, but there are a lot of real gems in there too, if you can find them.

Issue 15 brought the biggest changes for us doms - this issue included the long-awaited Dominator Archetype Revamp. Basically, the biggest change was to domination. This power no longer boosts damage - instead, the archetype's base damage modifiers were increased so that you now do the damage you used to do in domination, *all the time*. Aside from that, a whole host of individual assault powers were changed, in general to make them harder-hitting but longer recharge. Energy assault got a large buff and is now one of the better assault sets. Psi shockwave got the nerf everyone had been waiting for since CoV first came out, but the rest of the psi assault set got enough of a buff that it's not '37 levels of suck' anymore. Some of the assault sets are slightly more endurance intensive than they were before (notably psi assault, because psi shockwave was so broken before), but in general the change was hailed as a very nice buff by nearly the entire community. Castle described the changes as 'giving the dominator AT two primary roles - damage and control' (paraphrased) - meaning, basically, that even though our damage sets are our secondaries, they should be as effective as if they were a primary set.

Issue 16 brought us a feature that has been requested since the start of the game - Power Customization. So far, you can alter the colors of all primary and secondary powers, along with occasionally picking between multiple animations or graphical themes. They have said that they want to expand this to pool and epic powers, but that hasn't come around yet. Issue 16 also brought us 'Super Sidekicking' - basically, every player on the team is sidekicked/exemplared to the team leader (or mission holder if inside a mission) at all times. To go along with this, while exemplared players can still earn XP, and retain access to powers up to 5 levels above the level they are exemplared to. Gone are the days of playing 'mentor tetris' to ensure that all the lowbies on the team could be sidekicked. (As a nice side effect, you shouldn't ever be bothered with 'bridge' requests anymore.) Issue 16 also had another round of powerset proliferation - this time, doms got Earth Assault, a not uber-powerful but fun and smashy assault set. Lastly, issue 16 also revamped the difficulty system - now, you can choose what level you want your missions to be (from -1 to +6, I believe) and how large of a team you want them to spawn for (1 to 8), along with choosing whether to fight bosses or AVs solo, all independently of each other. So, now, those psychotic scrappers can set themselves to +6/8/yes/yes and go slaughter stuff to their homicidal little hearts' content. It was an awesome issue.

Nowadays, all I'm waiting for is for doms to get illusion control.

[Edit:] Seeing as you have an /energy dom listed in your sig, you're probably going to want to respec him/her. Specifically, power push is now a beastly attack - it does more damage than power blast used to do, and still has the high accuracy and guaranteed knockback - all with the same quick animation and no increase to end cost or recharge time. Power blast now does even more damage than that (push used to be scale 0.4, blast 1.32 - now, push is 1.64, blast 1.96). Power burst went from scale 2.12 damage to scale 2.6, bone smasher went from scale 1.64 to 1.96, and total focus went from scale 3.56 to 3.88, as well. Layered on top of the changes to the ATs base damage modifiers, these changes literally double (or more) the damage of several powers (power push does about 6 times the damage it used to!). Most of these changes were accompanied by somewhat longer recharge timers, but you have enough individual attacks that making a coherent attack chain shouldn't be a problem.[/edit]

For 'cheap' typed defense, here are the sets I usually go for:

Melee sets - smashing haymaker, 4 slots gets you 1.88% smashing/lethal defense. It's only half the bonus that 4 kinetic combat gives you, but this set is extremely cheap, where some kinetic combat pieces go for tens of millions of inf. The set only has one component with accuracy, though, so you'll probably have to 6 slot the attack to get enough accuracy. When I have the slots to do this, I tend to slot the 4 smashing haymakers and then an acc/dam and acc/end/rech from another set (say, focused smite) to fill out the numbers - that's with approximately level 30 IOs.

For mind over body, grab 4 reactive armor for 1.25% defense to energy/negative/smashing/lethal. Res/end, res/rech, res/end/rech, res will grant you enhancement numbers about the same as your current slotting. If you can scrape up the extra slot, doing the same for tough would also help (4 reactive and the steadfast 3%). Also, and this is a bit of a stretch, you could slot high pain tolerance with two level 50 heal IOs and 4 reactive armor if you like.

For melee AoE, 3 cleaving blow gives 1.25% energy/negative defense, and are pretty cheap. (3 eradication gives 3.13% energy/negative def, but is likely to be more expensive). In your case, though, since you already have 5 sirocco's in two of them and 6 multistrike in the third, I might just leave those there. Each of those sets provides a bit of typed defense too, and the accuracy and regen bonuses on sirocco's are also nice.

Aside from that, there aren't too many options open to you. There aren't any good typed def bonuses in defense sets, and you don't have access to a lot of the more exotic set types that might bring other defense bonuses.

As an aside, are you not planning on exemping with this build at all? I can't really think of any other reason to leave indomitable will and heightened senses until so late in the build. At the very least, I would move health and stick indomitable will in its spot (indom 18, health 22, buildup 26, perhaps?), so that you can have it when exemplared down to any level 15 or 20 content.

The biggie is that they give defense debuff resistance. With all 3 toggles and passives slotted for the max defense, you are at 96.5% defense debuff resistance. Without dodge and lucky, you are only at 75.1%. The 95% defense debuff resistance is one of the reasons SR works so well at the softcap - not only are you softcapped, you're effectively immune to cascading defense failure. At only 75%? Not so much.