Muon_Neutrino

Before, a dom using a scale 1.0 melee attack, enhanced fully, would do scale 1.46 damage outside of dom, and scale 2.03 damage with dom activated. For a scale 1.0 ranged attack, that would be 1.27 outside of dom and 1.76 inside it.

Now, you do the same damage both outside and inside dom. A dom using a scale 1.0 melee attack fully enhanced now does scale 2.05 damage, and for a scale 1.0 ranged attack, you do 1.85. So, in each case, you are doing somewhat more damage all the time than you used to do in domination (assuming the power you're using wasn't changed).

Regarding ice sword circle specifically, the power used to do scale 1.55 damage, which translated to 1.16 given the dom's melee mod. The new ISC does scale 1.19 damage, which translates to 1.25 with the dom's new melee mod. After enhancement, those numbers are 2.26 and 2.44 respectively. So, even the new ISC does slightly more than the old did at base. However, it is true that the new ISC does less than the old one did while in dom - then, it did 3.12. So, ISC does more than it used to outside of dom, but less than it used to do *inside* dom. However, it did get a larger radius, so imo it's up to you what to make of it. I personally think it's still a good power, and my ice/ice certainly isn't dropping it.

[ QUOTE ]
I hear so many stories like this that I'm becoming more and more cynical at the notion that people are basically good.

Really... I just don't understand the amount of hate and vitrol that some people harbor. Sometimes it seems like a majority.


[/ QUOTE ]

I gave up the idea of people being basically good a long time ago....

In my book, 'people' as a whole are a bunch of ******s. Any individual person you meet may or may not be, but as a whole, people really do suck.

For non-stalkers, the stealth cap (at level 50) is only 571 feet, while base perception is 500 feet for all ATs (VEAT stealth and perception caps are somewhat different, and I can't seem to track down the exact numbers, but you shouldn't have to worry about them anyway). Heightened senses (and other similar powers) are 300 feet of perception, while cloaking device (and many other basic stealth powers) are 389 feet of stealth.

So, your base perception will allow you to see a blaster using just cloaking device at 500 - 389 = 111 feet, which is not very far - it's almost within range for some longer-ranged blasts (or boost range). If said blaster has cloaking device and a stealth IO (which I believe are also 389 feet of stealth edit: actually, it's 300 feet, but that's still enough to stealth cap him), he would be at the stealth cap and you wouldn't be able to see him at all with base perception. With just heightened senses, your perception is at 800 feet, letting you see that blaster who is simply cloaked at 411 feet, and even a stealth capped one will be visible out to 229 feet.

If you added a perception IO into buildup (which would give you an extra 100 feet of perception for 120 seconds after you use build up), you would be able to see basic stealthed characters out to 511 feet, and stealth capped ones out to 329 feet.

(There are no real changes to the above conclusions for lower levels than 50 - the non-stalker stealth cap slowly goes down, making a stealth capped character visible slightly farther away, but otherwise nothing major changes.)

Personally, for a villain I think that a single source of 300+ foot perception is adequate - especially for a stalker, who should have enough stealth to not be visible at 200 feet anyway. You can always stack the perception IO on top of that though, if you like.

I didn't try slotting range, no. It didn't occur to me that it would make any difference - I always found that mobs in the late game tended to have pretty long ranges on their powers anyway. Even if it had, though, I wouldn't have had the slots for it - I only had room to give it 4 slots total. It wouldn't have lasted long enough, been accurate enough, or recharged at any reasonable pace if I had had to devote 2 slots to range.

Concentration is the same as build up, yes, and just like build up, you should take it. On another note, I disagree with flares not being a 'must have'. It does the same damage as most other sets tier one attacks, for less endurance, and with a bit more than half the recharge. It's amazing for keeping up a decent flow of attacks at low levels, even aside from its ability to be fired through mez. I personally don't consider any of the blaster tier one or two blasts to be skippable after defiance 2.0, but flares is even less skippable in my book than most.

Given your primary, I might skip mind probe. It's nice single target damage, but with all three single target fire blasts, you ought to be able to maintain a decent flow of single target attacks without it, and they'll be better attacks, too, considering blasters have a higher ranged modifier than melee. In most cases, I wouldn't recommend skipping blaps, but mental only really has one, and paired with fire, you probably don't need it.

On the other hand, I would probably take TK thrust. Given you have no ability to stack mezzes, the only thing you have which will even delay a boss with one shot is TK thrust - and it's a great 'get outta my face' tool even for lesser foes. Fire doesn't bring any mitigation at all beyond 'kill every freakin #&*&#*&^ in the room', so taking mitigation tools in the secondary is a very good idea if they're any good.

Me? On teams, I let the brute do it, if there's one and nothing to hide behind. If neither are available, I pop a purple, hit ice slick, and then run away if I get too hammered. I tried using flash freeze for the few levels I had it, but even after it had slots in it, I just found it sub-par. Solo, taking a shot from half of the spawn is annoying. On a team, taking a shot from part of the spawn is actively dangerous. Honestly, I didn't find it very much better than ice slick in that regard. And, yeah, I've never really been satisfied with ice's alpha abilities - that's why I took flash freeze in the first place. It didn't work very well for me, though.

My ice dom has both shiver and AA - originally I took shiver for PvP, before there were dual builds, but I found occasional use for it in PvE as well. While I don't use it that often in PvE, I have noticed that it is usually a complementary, not redundant, ability.

Aside from the ranged cone/PBAoE nature, as a click shiver is 'sticky', while AA isn't - you have to *stay* in melee to get AA's benefit, while shiver continues to slow even if you move around after casting it. I've found shiver useful mostly in situations where I don't *want* to stay in melee - such as against tough melee foes, or to slow pursuit while I retreat. Also, against spread out enemies, I can shiver one clump and then jump into melee with the rest to slow the whole crowd. Shiver is definitely useful even if you already have AA - I don't think I would go so far as to say both are mandatory, but I would miss shiver if I were to drop it.

If you're expecting flash freeze to behave like mass hypnosis, you'll be disappointed. Mass hypnosis has a longer range than flash freeze, but that's unimportant next to the facts that mass hypnosis has half the recharge, doesn't cause aggro even if it misses, and doesn't have that annoying useless little plink of damage. There may be ways to leverage flash freeze to get it off without being shot up, but I sure didn't see them - and if they require slotting for range of all things, I don't think the enhancement tradeoff required is a reasonable expense. In contrast, you'll *never* take any shots while using mass hypnosis unless you walk right up to them first. YMMV, and I'd certainly try it out if you're interested, but do yourself a favor and do it on the test server so you don't have to waste a respec if you decide you don't like it.

[ QUOTE ]

Your system can't handle it? don't team period or adjust your graphic settings to make it bearable or here is an idea upgrade you memory or graphics card to something that isn't 5 or 6 years old.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thank you for spending the money I don't have for me. Obviously you know better than I do what to do with it. Try playing this game on a marginal system sometime and see what the rest of us have to deal with, even on low graphics settings.

Don't get rid of the immob/sleep holes. They are the only way that control sets have to do something *all* the time, not just part of it. Controllers need to be able to immob PToD EB's to get containment while soloing, and sleeps are mind's only contribution while the PToD are up. As it stands, these two mez types being holes are *good* - they give control sets something to do which isn't too overpowering but still useful.

Also, you seen how much some AVs run away? Eeesh. Gotta be able to immob em.

Personally, I would make use of whatever tech they did with blasters and the new defiance to make AVs who slowly become able to use fewer powers as mez is stacked. If you can break the PToD completely, they use no powers at all, like now. But if you can stack enough mag to get partway there, the av loses access to some of his powers. The breakpoint should probably be somewhere north of mag 10 - it should allow a well-slotted controller or dom to stack that much hold, but most other ATs would have a hard time (perhaps there could be a second breakpoint somewhere around mag 20 to 30 - designed for two toons to reach). The biggest problem with mezzes and AVs imo is the binary nature - either they're held, or they're not. The problem with alternating periods of vulnerability and invulnerability is that the uptime of the protection, not the strength of the mezzes, dictates the mitigation provided. There needs to be a system that allows for increasing levels of mitigation as the magnitude of hold stacked increases.

Alternatively, keep the vulnerability cycles, but instead of having the protection flicker back and forth between 0 and 50 in a binary fashion, have it scale up and down slowly. So, if you can only manage mag 6 of hold, the AV will only be held for 25 seconds, as now. But if you can stack mag 9, he'll be held for, say, 30s. If you've got 12, 35s, etc, etc, all the way up to being held the whole time at mag 50, as now.

Well, from illusion, the powers you might be able to skip are one or both of the two invisibilities and maybe flash. Everything else is very good, and the invis powers and even flash have their uses - they're just not as important.

From sonic, the powers I'd consider to be skippable are sonic cage and sonic repulsion. The three res powers are of course a cornerstone of the set, and you want both -res debuffs as well. Clarity is very nice if you ever team, and liquefy is a decent all-round debuff. Repulsion is imo near-useless solo (PA is invincible and phant should be plenty tough enough with your bubbles) and extremely situational at best on a team, not to mention the very high end cost. Sonic cage is actually useful in select situations, and if I had room for one more power in my build, it'd be that, but it's just situational enough that it's skippable in my book if you need the power slots.

Solo, I would advise taking fly as your travel power just so that you can pick up air superiority. This one attack will make your soloing career *far* smoother - illusion lacks the ST immob many controllers use to fill in their ST damage, so air sup is a godsend. Aside from that, I would focus on leveraging deceive - learn what foes are the most dangerous or have the most annoying abilities, and turn them on their friends. Bonus points if you can convince an enemy to buff you or debuff the rest of his spawn - tsoo sorcerers, for example, make hilarious converts. Also, when soloing you can place disruption field on your phantom army, thus giving you a way to use this power even though you don't have a melee pet.

On teams, your focus will be much more on support than damage. Place your disruption field on the most aggressive meleer, bubble up everyone, be ready to free squishies from mez, use PA and spectral terror to take alphas and control spawns, and use your single target controls to neutralize the most annoying individual enemies. Your attacks will take a back seat here.

I have one catgirl character, mostly as a joke. I just couldn't pass up such an awesome name.

There are some catgirl characters whose players really do fit the stereotype of giggly little girls, or creepy cosplayers, but there are also some players who have one just because they think the whole idea is funny, like myself and yuri.

The proc provides -20% resistance on your target, and has a 20% chance to go off each time the power it's slotted in is used (for clicks, anyway, which are all a PB can slot it in). The proc's effect used to be bugged to have an infinite duration, but that has been fixed and the debuff now lasts 10 seconds.

The effect does not stack with itself, at least not from the same user. It has been said that it may be able to stack from both the player and a pet, or two different players, but I'm not sure about that. However, it still may be useful to slot the proc into multiple attacks, simply to increase the chances of the debuff being in effect continuously. In all cases, it's usually the best to slot it first into the attack you use most often, simply to give it the most chances to go off. After that, slotting it in additional powers can better your odds of keeping the debuff up all the time. It is likely overkill to slot it everywhere, though.

That holds for single target powers. For AoEs, it's a bit more complicated. The proc will roll separately for each enemy, so roughly one in 5 will be hit. However, it's not very easy in the thick of battle to tell which ones it hit, so unless you or your teammates are following up with more aoes, the debuff may be wasted. In other words, to best leverage the achilles heel proc in aoes, you need more aoes. Peacebringers do have a good deal of usable AoEs, but a lot of them come with annoying knockback that makes them difficult to chain up. However, if slotted in the AoEs that *don't* do knockback (nova cone, human cone, dwarf stomp), you could provide a small bonus for your teammates.

Whatever attacks you slot them in, don't do it at the expense of getting actual enhancement percentages. It doesn't do you much good to have the proc if the power you slotted it in misses a lot, does less damage than it should, or recharges too slowly due to skimping on actual enhancements. That said, if you can get it in and still keep decent enhancement levels, I'd certainly go for it in an attack or two. It is useful, especially for beating on one tough target like a boss.

I don't think of it as losing... I think of it as giving those people who keep following me around a chance to actually shoot something for a bit before I explode everything as I stand back up. Of course, that's from the perspective of a fire armor *scrapper*, and we all know how psycho *they* are.

More seriously, defeats happen. We all would love to pretend that our characters never get the worse end of a fight, but that's just not the case. And especially for fire aura tanks, I think it's useful to be able to get back up while simultaneously incapacitating the majority of the baddies who put you down. Fire tanks have less mitigation than most tanker primaries, and lack a god mode to hit when things look bad. Given that tankers are generally expected to absorb damage and control aggro for the team, I think it's a good idea to have a tool in your box to allow you to resume tanking if your mitigation fails you. While I'm not intending to badmouth fire here, it does have more need for such a tool than some other sets. It's not mandatory for sure, and there are other abilities you can also take to help you tank better, but it can be useful.

Plus, on a completely different note, it's *fun*! "Oh, you put me down? Well here, take this!" *KABOOM!* Seriously, explosions are just cool. I don't have any special love for most self-rezzes, but rise of the phoenix is one I always try to make room for.

I personally took leviathan for concept reasons (I pretend they're just more of her abilities), but it works pretty well, too.

Hibernate is really quite nice - it gives you one of the things you normally lack as a dom: solid personal protection when things go bad. Now, you can only hibernate for 30s and if you're still surrounded by a huge crowd when it drops, you're still in trouble, but at least you give your powers a chance to recharge and you come out at full health. Personal force field is probably a better panic button since you can still run away, but hibernate is still quite good. Also a good response when a custom EB pops build up or aim and starts to punch through your purples like butter....

Waterspout is extremely cool looking and is also nice damage against single tough targets. Not especially useful in crowds since they reduced its knockback capability, but give it one target to grind on and it'll do a lot of damage. It's also autohit and carries a defense debuff - perfect for those annoying high-defense foes that an ice/ice doesn't otherwise have good tools to break.

Shark skin is an armor - generic smashing/lethal res, and a nicely thematic splash of cold. Relatively nice blue aura, fits well thematically if that's important to you.

I don't have any experience with bile spray or the pet, as I didn't take either.

Looking at the other epics, the things that jump out at me are the endurance recovery tools in soul and mu, power surge and soul drain, and personal force field. We all know ice/ice can be an end hog, and both mu and soul can help alleviate that (mu better, but still). Power surge looks like a great tool for soloing EBs - 2 minutes of high resistance and end recovery should make that annoying task much easier. Soul drain is *great* for a dom who lives in melee and doesn't have another damage boosting power, and it'll be even better once domination isn't eating up 75% of your potential damage cap. Personal force field, combined with the aid self that you already have, is basically a reset button for a fight. Don't like how this is going? Pop PFF, heal up, run away if necessary, start again.

It probably depends on what you think your biggest issues are. For soloing EBs, mu, mace, and leviathan offer useful tools. For end problems, mu and soul. For damage, soul is best for crowds and leviathan offers some single target damage. What do you need most?

Speaking from an ice/ice who tried it - don't take the sleep. It's really junk. The duration isn't great and it'll be broken if you sneeze at them. But the kicker is how its tiny amount of damage interacts with the sleep effect. To avoid the sleep being broken by the power's own damage, it delays the sleep effect by 0.25 of a second. Since the mobs are alerted as soon as the damage hits, that 0.25 of a second will often be enough time for them to que up a ranged attack. Meaning that I found that I usually took at least a half alpha from any group I cast it on. So, it can't really be used for alpha mitigation, and it doesn't really work for in-fight mitigation either. If you're looking for a control to back up ice slick, on an ice/ice I'd grab glacier. With power boost it actually has a decent duration considering it's a *hold* instead of a sleep.

Yep..... I can still get on test with the XP partition and an external hard drive, but it's a very suboptimal solution - not to mention that my backpack doesn't have room to lug the hard drive home every weekend! I just want to be able to do it from the mac side....

Oh well, at least they know what the problem is now and are working on fixing it. It's a lot better than not even knowing what's wrong, and getting more and more frustrated trying everything the tech support people come up with and having none of it work!

Well, twas a fun night. I'm sorry I couldn't provide more of a threat, but 1v.... however many heroes you had in your blob was not exactly the most encouraging odds. So I ran around attacking the pillboxes you already took instead. ^.^ Still was fun to see the zone hopping. I finally bit the bullet and started buying IOs to make my second build a PvP oriented one, so maybe next time I can be a bit more of a credible threat (and once the dom buffs go through, you'd better watch out!). Good times, all in all.

More seriously, I really want to play with the new energy, but I can't decide what to pair it with. I *want* to pair it with illusion, but that option doesn't exist yet. I may just sit on it until illusion is finally proliferated in issue 17 or whenever.

Weren't we supposed to get more than just one round of proliferation? Seems like it's been quite a while since we heard anything about it.

tl;dr version: slots placed after 30 still count, so yes, there is a reason to level past 30.

Long version: Unlike for powers, the game can't tell when you placed a slot, so it can't deny access to only some of them based on what level you placed them at. Also, *you* don't have any way of telling which slot was placed at which level, so you wouldn't be able to know which slots to put enhancements in and which not to (say you have 6 slots in an attack, 2 of which you placed at 31. You can't tell which is which just by looking at them). So, the game just lets you keep the slots placed above level 30, even though you are exemped down. However, you don't keep the *powers* you placed above 30, and I don't know for sure if you keep set bonuses from sets slotted in powers you lose access to. But you definitely get set bonuses from the rest of your sets, as long as the enhancements aren't more than 3 levels above the level you're exemped to (so level 33 or less in the case of siren's).

Also, might as well level to 50 eventually just in case you want to play in RV at some point - perhaps when SC is empty, or whatever. Also, being level 50 lets you slot purples if you can afford them, which are both massively powerful and unique in that their set bonuses work while exemped even though they're level 50.

As a data point, I lie on *both* sides of the 'not particularly interested in a graphics update' crowd. My computer sucks, and I already have to play on either the lowest or second lowest settings depending on situation - and you can just forget about zombie/rikti zone events or (god forbid) a mothership or hami raid. So, one reason that a graphics update would be meaningless to me is that I literally wouldn't be able to see it.

But as well, I just don't really care - the game already looks good enough to me. Even playing on the low settings that I do now doesn't take away from my enjoyment of the game. I've seen what the game looks like on higher settings a couple of times (I am officially jealous of my brother's new computer, by the way... ), and it's certainly pretty, but in the long run, it's still the same game - just in prettier packaging. Would I *mind* having better graphics? Of course not. But do I really care either way? No.

On the other hand, power customization is something that definitely *would* increase my enjoyment of the game, especially if it includes animation swapping. For me, overall graphical detail of the game world doesn't really affect the feeling of immersion very much, but the specific actions of my character certainly do. I would feel much more comfortable about the buzzsaw killing machine that is my claws stalker, for example, if I could swap out the clunky eviscerate animation for something more fluid and in keeping with (imo) the feel of the rest of the set. Similarly, my MA/SR would really love to swap out a few of her kicks for punches - the current set just doesn't feel right for a character whose backstory is essentially that of a self-trained fighter. My electric/energy blaster would love to have blue energy attacks to go with her electric blasts, etc, etc.

Yeah, some of the CoV music is pretty nice. It's just too bad that all of the tracks are so short. The CoH music kinda sucks, though. Although, my preferences are backwards for the menu music - I don't mind the default 'hero' menu music, but can't stand the 'villain' music - too loud and intrusive. Whenever I'm rolling up a villain alt, I always have to turn down the speakers.

... Oh, and OP - I clicked on this topic solely because of your name. B wings for ever (torpedoes away)!

You are correct in that salt crystals is pretty bad. It's got a worse duration and recharge than mass hypnosis, as well as causing aggro and being PBAoE. I don't think you'd be able to sleep the phalanx with it. And I'm not really a fan of snipes, either.

If you're looking at the first tier patron powers, the only one that really jumps out at me is water spout. All the rest are armors, a couple of whatever attacks, and two end recovery powers that you already don't really need. Water spout is pretty decent for taking on harder targets, though. It's autohit and actually does a lot of damage if it stays on one target over its entire duration - such as if you're fighting an eb. As well, it can take the achillies' heel proc, although you may already have one of those in earthquake. Given that they can only go off once every 10 seconds, though, couldn't hurt to have two possible sources. However, this might be somewhat of an ill fit with your concept - a misty looking tornado doesn't really seem to fit with fire powers (although it does look pretty cool - way better than storm's tornado).

If you don't want waterspout, I'd probably just grab consume. While you may not need it that often at the moment, it could come in handy sometimes. Also, with the upcoming dominator changes that are currently on test, you might need the endurance recovery after all - /fire is one of the sets that had some of its attacks buffed in damage, which means that they also cost more endurance. Some /fire dominators are reporting that the more powerful attacks are leading to them using up endurance faster than before. All that is to say, consume might be useful once issue 15 hits to fully leverage the more damaging attacks.

Well, ideally I'd be rolling up an illusion/energy, but power proliferation seems to have gotten lost in the mail somewhere along the way here, so...

But seriously, the great ranged chain of energy combined with PA and phant's decoy? Probably the easiest EB soloing dom, or it would be, anyway. Might actually be able to get through a ptod eb fight without purples for once.

Electric blaster: I keep accidentally wrecking electronics. It's getting hard to come up with excuses as to why stuff always breaks around me, and there was this one time with a pacemaker.... well, let's just say it's a good thing I can precisely time my power jolts.

Regen stalker: You know what's annoying about having regeneration powers? Tattoos. Your body rejects 'em. Cleans the ink right out, gone overnight. How are you supposed to look properly villainous if you can't get a scary looking facial tattoo?

Plant dominator: For the last time, NO I CANNOT HELP YOU WITH YOUR GARDEN! Seriously, I control giant carnivorous fly traps and cause vines to grow to massive sizes and crush people. Do you want your garden to look like that? No? Well then stop asking my why your flowers didn't bloom!

Super reflexes scrapper: The thing about having such tricked out senses is, I've <dodges small bug> .. oops, sorry about that. Anyway, it's become so automatic that I find myself dodging well, everything <dodges speck of dust> - agh, there I go again. It really makes it hard to do work, or well, much of anything without getting distracted... <dodges small wad of paper> ...hey, cut it out! Trying to work here!

Ice dominator: Worst thing about having ice powers? Condensation. I had to resort to getting a battery-powered heating system for my glasses to stop them from fogging up, and you can just forget about keeping your costume dry. On the other hand, it's great for keeping beer cold at parties - plus, freezing the pool solid is always a great joke. Bonus points if you can do it with people still inside!