slythetic

Basically you have a chaos set. End issues aside, you have a lot of control but are going to have to spend a fair bit of your time learning how to leverage it.

Example:

A group of nasty council:

Situation One:

You can

Jump in thunderclap/dark pit and you have them all controlled.

Jump out, freezing rain, TT, nightfall. for some aoe and then pray you can aoe them before they kill you.

Probably not the best strategy but probably will work sometimes.

Situation Two:

You can

Jump in thunderclap/dark pit and you have them all controlled.

Jump out TT, nightfall. Jump out fr, tornado, lightning storm, flip on hurricane, clean up with aoes and single target as you can. This would work but it can be annoying and very messy.


Situation Three.

You can, use your aoe and hurricane to put mobs into a corner, use tornado, storm, etc to keep them in a corner, aoe them and be safe.


Problem, what happens when there's no good corner? Or you can't seem to get mobs there.


If the playstyle suits your personality then it can be effective and fun, if it's too chaotic for you, it's only going to get worse. Either way storm in general requires a fair amount of skillful play to get good at.

Good luck either way.

Not trying to threadjack but what happens if its in psedeuopet ala rain of fire? Would it have a chance to proc with every tick? Would it still buff the corruptor? What about dots from the fire attack?

Of more interest to me personally, something like full auto would it have a chance on every tick? What about ignite?

I suppose the short answer is play an ice/ff controller.

My point being, not all trollers will do good damage certainly not the level of a troller built for damage plant/fire kin/storm/rad/trick. For years dark/dark on a defender was very safe...but not amazingly fast, I don't think controllers will really break the mold in that regard.

Secondary aside creepers beat haunt aoe and I've heard umbral is broke, plant has a better immobilize, and you're also getting a fair amount of damage from confuse.

Not to anyone in particular but I wanted to thank all the people who led groups this weekend. Just from casual observation it seems a ton of people wanted groups but weren't willing to lead, myself included.

So a huge thanks to all the people in all the level ranges that invited me over the weekend and continually dealt with the hassle of putting together and keeping groups running.

You all made 2xp great!

My dominator actually started my squishy spree as it feels very rewarding to see it all come together.

Anyway, for whatever it's worth my personal philosophy is to play the stronger control sets on a dominator and damage on a controller. I also solo mostly and try for large spawns as soon as possible.

Leading into

Dark Control over Gravity as most of gravities damage is more useful on a controller in my eyes.

Psi/Dark - Good aoe, nice survivability. Psi probably has a better survivability tool in drain. Darks -to hit stacks well with dark. Psi is a much longer climb to aoe but probably comes out ahead in that regard.

My baby dark/dark is still learning how not to get flattened by large spawns compared to his elec/psi brother but the pairing is popular enough I'm sure you can get a dom vet to chime in on it.


Edit: Since you usually play melee thinking only in terms of that I might revise something I said. Gravity/Earth or Grav/Energy should feel very smashy and melee a lot. That way you have a melee'ing dom. I'd probably choose elec or earth control instead but I'm an elec/earth fan and haven't ever heard much good about grav.

I actually found my necro/dark to feel less effective as it leveled and everything and it's mother got an aoe. Keeping my zombies and even the grave knights alive in such a saturated environment was like herding cats, ie, it wasn't very fun. Keep in mind that I leveled in praetoria where most of the resistance have cone attacks and spent my 20's there as well where all the seers have psy shockwave.

Anyway, I was running on 0x6, end result, necro/dark was very fun and effective, especially if I was willing to corner pull. It could chew through mobs extremely well. However the things that make most mm annoyed - runners, pets splitting up, aoes, felt more annoying to me because of the melee nature of the set than they did on ranged sets. Of course it could just be that I suck at mm's and handling these types of things is easy for most mastermind masters.

Edit: I think I spent about 2 solid hours fighting and watching my pets health at 32 waiting for the big difference life drain would make in their survivability...I wasn't impressed. Problem is on my dark if my zombies die it was in a burst not to slow whittling away damage.

I assume he means, not actually damaging stuff. With conductive aura and choking cloud I hope he's standing in melee.

Another option op is to make a more damaging controller.

I'm sure my post about a splattroller is still up. That way you can get your control fix and still have fun killing things.

Generally

Fire
Plant

Maybe..

Grav? Probably single target stuff
Dark? Not sure how good the pets are
Illusion, single target stuff

With

Rad
Storm
Kin

Trick? Wonder if oil slick breaks pets

Dark?

Either way, high damage controllers are quite possible if you want to stick with.

For elec it really depends on how particular you are about breaking your sleep patch with dots, which might drive some away from dark/fire/thorns.

Popular pairs I know of

elec - mostly for theme or sapping, probably not the best choice but decent all around

energy - bit single target focused. But great at that.

Earth - cages don't prevent knockdown and you need to be in melee for elec anyway so they mesh very well outside of mud pots which you can skip. Quite a bit of extra control added.

Psi - sapping works well with drain pysche. Outside of killing robots I really like mine, it just felt a bit slow aoe wise till late in the build

Have fun

Depends on if recharge/damage run speed/survivability are your goals.

Eg

Drop

Brimstone
Combat Jumping
Recall friend or long range

Add Weave. Should put you very close to softcap to all. Any slot bonuses become gravy for ddr.

Or

Drop Brimstone
Recall friend

Add, Aid self, with all your knockdown you should be able to have time to use.


Or

Drop

Brimstone
Long Range
Recall
CJ
Conserver power

And try for both


Or, drop cj pick up maneuvers.

It's been a very long time since I've ran my stone/stone...I swore you couldn't run cj with rooted/granite, I'm not sure on that though.

With the recharge penalty I'm not sure how your endurance will look you might not need energy and could pick up something like soul for extreme survivability, problem is on different masteries you're going to have to put up with redraw.

So my plant/storm hit 50 last night. Yay, hoorah. I tend not to make uber expensive io builds on my toons post 50 and just will probably end up playing her off and on for fun.

So was looking for another fun troller to level up. Something I can solo with, has a fairly painless leveling curve and doesn't need a 3 billion influence build to be fun. I've probably spent about 500 mill on my plant so don't mind a little just not something that nearly requires a huge investment at 50 to enjoy.

Tried a fire/rad before but it sucked endurance like crazy, maybe I could manage that better now. Anyway, thanks for the help.

Also of some note since it's electric, you can jolting chain, then aoe, to reduce the damage you'll take as usually you get the aoe off before they get up and they fall right back asleep and given some patience you can drain them first, then aoe and the dots breaking sleep wouldn't hurt much.

Maybe I'm just a cynic or not uber enough but I think a bit of elaboration might be useful here.

What groups do you want included in should be able to solo 4x8 quickly?

Malta
Carnies
Council
Nemesis
Cot
DE
Rularu
Longbow
Arachnos

etc. That way you don't have people cherry picking cot/council and making broad statements. To me I doubt you'd find a build that is mostly indifferent to the enemy type.

GM's/AV's Forgive me I don't know as well, but I think the same is true.

Stone, lots of cc, disorient to stack with og.

Low damage as compared to? My elec/psi is 28 now.

Single target: Never really felt low...okay...sorta low, mostly because I'm not slotting psionic dart and was waiting for subdue. Also slot starved at the moment.

Aoe: Here my damage feels lows I'll be honest. Fire or the like probably would improve this as it gets its aoe earlier, though I'm not sure static field and combustion would play well together. But I know it will get better. And because I'm a masochist with patience I've been running at 0x6 for the last few levels. It's possible, just a bit slow, still, elec makes its very safe. All in all outside of robots I've never felt totally weak.

Just from a glance I'd say elec assault across the board is weaker.

I think electric melee is in a similar situation for aoe vs single...though I found elec's aoe to be pretty overrated on my brute....

But then I look at Titan Weapons and wonder how aoe vs single is balanced in that.

Hmm so I've been leveling a baby peacebringer. And it's been fun, aside from making me want to kill who ever invented void hunters, one attack 2/3 health! If it wasn't for seeing all the succesful khelds I'd have serious doubts you could jump into an 8 man spawn with 2-3 of those later...

Anywho rant aside, I'm having some trouble with form shift binds hoping I could get help with. Looking at the sticky I was using.

/bind End "powexec_toggleoff white dwarf$$powexec_toggleoff bright nova$$goto_tray 1$$powexec_name shining shield"

/bind Delete "powexec_toggleon bright nova$$goto_tray 9"

The problem I'm having. Occasionally it swaps trays but not forms. The first macro I figured out I need to hit the button twice, sometimes 3 if the first problem happens, most of the time once to shift once for shield. But if I hit it twice in a row really quickly it actually switches me out of nova, to human, back to nova.

I can work around but I thought maybe I had just bound wrong.

Thanks for any help

Many congrats. Don't forget to thank your support char. probably not dieing had a lot to do with farsight/chrono shift/temporal selection and risking dieing by coming close to heal you.

A related question is there anyway...other than trial and error to learn what controls don't work on some types of mobs. I don't think this is a stacking issue...

My elec dominator is learning the hard way that nemesis don't seem to be confused and I'm pretty sure huntsman cheat because even after something like 4 holds it only ends up lasting a second or two.

Of some note, later in the game you will meet some baddies with annoyingly high psi resist...as my dominator is learning. With a partner it shouldn't be a problem but if you go mental prepare for the occasional moment when you're suddenly hitting for 1/3 of your normal damage with your secondary.

Elec/shield scrapper

Fire/Fire tank

Spine ... elec/dark/fire scrapper

TW/elec brute

claws... elec/fire brute

Maybe someone on beta could comment on staff fighting

Plant/storm controller
Fire/storm controller or rad or kin a splattroller

Hmm dominators

I don't know this as well so I'll simply mention as a possibility

I'm running elec/psi that has some potential

Probably

fire/fire

plant/thorns

or some variety of those

Fire/dark corrupter or ar/archery/dp/rad probably work to various extents

Mf'ing warshade

Hmm you could probably run a mastermind at x8 demons/thugs/bot, probably traps/dark/time.


Sorry if not the direction you wanted but it seemed you wanted something new that could melt large spawns safely and most of those should work. Wont guarantee they're all as fast but honestly taking a few minutes longer and having more fun sounds like a good trade to me.

As far as ea goes, even softcapped to fire, which is easy, you're still going to see a lot of fluctuation and the occasional faceplant goes. Not that this happens often to me but having an ss/fire brute as well I can confirm its both slower and requires more attention. And to verify that, I have a claws/ea scrapper. You should be able to itrial softcap fairly easily.

Just a thought, run invul and do s/l farms instead. Or io out a dark for all the psi damage and end drain. Or io out an elec armor for great resists end drain/psi/recharge reduction.

Wouldn't that only be useful if you came up with some horribly contrived situation?

I'm not a math guru so please take with grain of salt. But it seems to me that surviving Timmy the smashing/lethal pc with a very predictable dps cycle that has no debuffs is pretty easy for any armor.

Now imagine Timmy is great at recharge debuff. My fire/fire tank jumped in a spawn of council a few nights ago to end up with -500% recharge. He didn't do so well. Usually s/l mobs are easy for him though. I'm sure ice could have managed that just fine though. I'm betting dark armor would feel more like my fire tank and invul more like the ice tank in that scenario.

Also being balanced around a heal/lower resists/control means dark runs a greater risk of being burst down, but average dps seems to ignore this...I think.

Now just so you don't think I'm totally biased here, I'm pretty sure results for ssa 4 would be drastically different from the two and dark would look super.

Last point, keep in mind that primary and secondary mesh to different degress as well, ie in my mind shockwave provides a bigger boost for dark whereas if he was dark/invul, or staff/invul or the like it would look different.

Anyway, me....as a stupid math person, would hesitantly argue that there are too many variables in actual gameplay for such numbers to mean much.

Some of your stuff seems a little oddly slotted to me, but mine is a fair bit smaller.

A few examples:

Pyschic shockwave doesn't have damage slot

Boxing is slotted but it seems you skipped a lot of your single target attacks if you were just looking for mules it seems you could slot the +3 def in hoarfrost, drop boxing/tough and weave and toss a lotg in stealth to give you some more powers to play with.

Jolting chain is slotted for damage

Conductive Aura isn't slotted for draining

There doesn't seem to be much recharge in drain psyche.



Not sure if you the problem is what you're fighting, if it's killing you or its taking too long to kill. There's some things that just won't be very friendly to your main mitigation, ie nemesis, arach lieuts. But at your level I'd imagine you should be a machine of aoe destruction.

Edit: Since I'm not amazing and high level on my elec/psi to try to share his tentative build I thought I'd offer you a link where people are discussing various builds

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=255982

Let's see Dark is a resist set with a fair amount of exotic resist/effects resist, a powerful heal and some control.

Fire- Fulfills some of the resist, a powerful heal, and more damage

Elec - Has strong resists, some heals, and a lot of exotic resist/effects

Willpower - Has strong passive healing, some resist, some defense


Those are probably your closest to being like dark I'd imagine.

If my math is correct the pet unique, maneuvers, the protector's shields and all the other shields should softcap your pets.

Everything else sorta depends on on how many bonus powers you want to pick up and whether you want power boost to try to get closer to itrial cap.