ShoeTattoo

Click on the following link, sit down with a cup of tea, and read carefully through the best overall guide to khelds:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=117828

With your build info and some explanations of tactics, plus whether / how you use binds, you could probably get some suggestions pretty quickly.

You can make an ice/earth dom if you'd like a melee toon using arctic air and ice slick for mitigation. Earth assault was clearly meant to be a melee-focused assault set, right down to the screen shakes. Also, the slows in ice control mesh nicely with the knockdown in earth assault because things get up slower after you knock them down.

Set the earth assault powers to "crystal" and tint them light blue and/or white, if you'd like a cold-based character.

I've had good experiences with both ice patch and shiver, usually in different situations.

Ice patch is a very nice "keep away from me" power. I've found it particularly helpful against bosses because it tends to stop their forward progress when they want to close to melee range. It can be a little difficult to place well if your team is moving fairly quickly, or if battles are fairly fluid in where they begin and end. It is an excellent damage mitigation tool for tight quarters or when their are corners or chokepoints, though.

In contrast, I've found shiver particularly helpful on teams with a decent tank who is perhaps in a little over their head (ie: the tank can hold aggro OK, but the ability to withstand damage is a little lacking). Shiver can make a very big difference in those kinds of situations (ie: sometimes you see that on an ITF). Shiver also helps to keep battles from wandering far from their beginning point because mobs generally just ... can't move very far. Shiver also sets up mobs for rains (ice storm, rain of fire) or PbAOEs (fire sword circle, ...) or auras (ie: tank or scrapper auras) because mobs can't move far.

Mind/thorns has good synergy. Mind/* provides plenty of control, but with to-hit checks for everything other than telekinesis. */thorns has aim to help those controls hit their targets (and to boost damage). */thorns is also a good damage set (especially AOE), although with the caveat that the main damage type (lethal) is heavily resisted. Mind/* does good damage, for a primary, and it diversifies damage types from the lethal and toxic types found in */thorns. Diversification in damage types reduces the number of mob types that would be highly difficult to fight against.

This thread got me to thinking about an */ice blapper, and after doing a little research into the numbers I went ahead and made a psy/ice blapper.

He's very young, at present, with his blasts all colored white so they look all "snowy", and I like his potential. The tier one and two powers in psy, and the AOE, all do -recharge (30% each, IIRC), which will stack nicely with the -recharge in */ice. Telekinetic blast ups the DPA noticeably and has knockback, while Will Domination slightly ups the DPA and functions as another soft control. The slows in */ice also mesh nicely with the knockup in psy's AOE and the knockback in telekinetic blast.

In more general terms, and although they're virtually never talked about as such, */ice melee attacks are serviceable for blapping. They don't have DPA, DPE, or burst damage that is comparable to */electric or */energy. But, the */ice melee attacks recharge relatively quickly. With 95% recharge, you get recharge times of a little over 4 seconds for frozen fists and a little over 5 seconds for freezing touch and for ice sword. The recharge advantage of freezing touch over shocking grasp (10 seconds for freezing touch, to 15 seconds for shocking grasp) allows an appropriately slotted freezing touch to perma-hold bosses as of its second application, even if you have no other hold power. If you have a fast-activating, hard-hitting tier three in the primary, you can have an unbroken, repeatable attack chain with that one primary power and the three */ice melee attacks. Plus, the strong mitigation potential of */ice is not a bad thing to bring along to a team, or when soloing.

*/ice will never be a FOTM blapper set because of smaller orange numbers and because extreme high end IO builds will tend to favor */energy or */electric. But, sustained damage output will be quite reasonable for an */ice blapper, and mitigation will be noticeably better.

Did Starsman ever figure out how to add in an adjustment for voltaic sentinel?

If not, then the ST electric assault numbers are significantly under-stated, and not trustworthy.

I was tempted to skip tremor myself. But, when I look at earth assault, I see that I'd need to wait until level 35 to get another AOE (and that's a small radius toggle), and then lvl 38 to get a "true" AOE in fissure.

Tremor is sloowww, but leveling to 38 with no AOE seems somehow ... even slower.

Besides, permadom is attained by a small percentage of players who may appear more numerous than they are because they post in unusually high numbers on the forums. For most who play, permadom is either uninteresting or unaffordable.

There's no need for hesitation that I can see in the numbers. The ways in which earth assault is claimed as being "underpowered" are being presented in overly pessimistic terms.

Earlier today I plugged all the numbers for all the assault sets available in City of Data (Red Tomax) into a spreadsheet, and then did the same for earth assault by pulling numbers from the "secondary sets" screen for new characters. Earth assault compares very favorably for DPA and DPE for melee attacks against other assault sets, even after you add in regularly inserted buffs from aim or build up for the appropriate sets. It is advertized as "weaker" for ranged damage, and it is. But, the tier one (spears) has the highest DPE of all tier one dominator assault set powers, even though it lags several assault sets in its tier 1 DPA (it is not the worst tier one for DPA, though, as that prize goes to psi dart). Also, hurl boulder's casting time is quite close to that of a tier one and tier two blast combined (ie: power bolt and power blast). If you blend the DPA of tier one and tier two blasts in other assault sets, hurl boulder is roughly equivalent. And, hurl boulder has a substantially better DPE total than most blasts in other assault sets.

Some will point out that two successive blasts are superior to one hurl boulder because two blasts could be used on different targets. One blast could be used to remove that last sliver of life and another could be used on another target that has not yet dropped, instead of throwing one boulder in the same amount of casting time. Corpse blasting takes place less often with two quicker blasts than one long "hurl boulder" animation, as well. These are valid points, but they are a long way from being game-breaking. Others will point out that you get an endurance-efficient "two for one" with hurl boulder, and that you can parse out your damage in other ways (ie: with a quick recharging spears used to remove the last sliver of life), and use boulder effectively anyways to remove bigger chunks of life.

Also, hurl boulder will never be mistaken for blaze or bitter ice blast, which have far better DPA values (although their DPE totals are probably behind those of hurl boulder, and they both have shorter usable range). But, that's the price being paid for strong mitigation (especially when power boost is considered), strong melee (both DPE and DPA), and some very attractive DPE figures for the set as a whole.

With three points of "technical" or functional excellence in its favor and frequent screen shakes, earth assault is an effective and fun set to play.

Edit: I deleted the numbers previously given in this post, in light of Sarrate's feedback about how to incorporate Arcanatime. I'm making a post further down that re-states the numbers for earth assault, adjusted for Arcanatime. Undoubtedly, there are those who have numbers for other assault sets ready to go (I do not have those numbers), and those can be used to "benchmark" earth assault against other assault sets.

This. Nicely put, and this fits with my experiences.

If the OP wants the feeling of overwhelming power, of grinding everything beneath his or her heel, then it would be difficult to beat a how a brute with high fury feels. Make a super strength / willpower brute or a stone melee / willpower brute (screen shakes just feel all brutish), and read related guides to learn how to manage your endurance bar and slot your powers (related, but still separate skills). Then go forth and pound things with your fists until they drop. The learning curve is not all that steep before you can have the feeling for which you are searching.

You can also take the long, slow, difficult road and spend a big chunk of your time reading, farming, and playing markets to make several of these other builds function toward their peak performance level.

Have fun, whichever path you choose.

An under-the-radar combination that could work well would be rad / electric. Lightning field meshes nicely with irradiate. Stacked with the already healthy AOE potential of rad, that could be a nice fit. And, it would be nice to nuke, pop a blue, refill end, and then put a second hold on a boss that survived the nuke. Heavy-hitting electric blaps mesh nicely with relatively heavy hitting single target ranged attacks that recharge slowly.

I have a pistoleer at level 30 (pistols / traps). She's slower than my other characters (of course), but with style galore and she's plenty fun to play.

As for teams, my pistoleer has in her search field that she's petless, as well as in her character description, and she still sometimes gets invites for missions on teams (not just to fill). You get less invites when petless, but not zero. Just put it into your search comment that your MM is petless, so that those inviting you don't end up feeling tricked into having extended an invitation to a MM that they thought would bring pets to the team.

Incidentally, if you'd like a team-friendly build, you can have pets on your second build. If that doesn't fit your concept, by all means stay petless.