The Whelming Irony

Malentis, my luvable ice/energy dominator, is level 36. And blissfully happy. He can solo relentless missions at a passable clip – 9 to 20 mins, depending on the mission, and in fair safety vs minions (worse is when you miss holds against reds and end up getting shot to half hp, and then needing to go scrapper berserk to finish them off with a sliver of hp left) and in total safety vs bosses. *hugs domination*

It’s slow progress, maybe a bar of xp every two or three missions, but it’s rather fun soloing because you get to do everything. You do active defence with your holds – I’ve just managed to slot an additional recharge in block of ice to make it 3 recharges. It sounds totally weird especially since I have hasten, but I find it makes it much easier with the fast recharge so that I can hold 3 minions at a good clip. And this is with yellowed-out SOs.

(I decided not to take glacier as yet, I still feel it’s pretty durned risky, even with power boost to extend the duration. Heck, I was never impressed with the power even on ice controllers pre-ED, seemed to wear off too fast, which might make me one severely unhappy camper now. I might take it at the epic stage, if some epics aren’t attractive enough for me. And perhaps I might test it on the Test server should I ever manage to get myself onto a respec team in CoV. Ice, thankfully, has lots of other softer but more reliable controls (yay ice slick/AA) as well as a hard single-target one.)

You get to move Frosty around – don’t have recall friend, but slotting one recharge into his summons seems good enough for me - and get company from him as well. I’m actually thinking he’s more interesting when not controlled by you. An MM pet makes me bored after a while because it’s really an extension of you, and under your absolute control, so they don’t keep you company, they’re just…pseudopods of yourself. Frosty meanwhile has a certain unpredictability to him, he might just throw snowballs, or he might just turn bloodthirsty and start running up to everything and whacking them with his ice sword. And his greater ice sword (least I think it is, he does a headsplitter animation with an ice sword) is evil and hits for 120+ damage, just a little shy of my total focus.

And you get to do damage. This is something that I don’t usually do in teams because I drop back into the team role of crowd control and damage mitigation, the corrs and the brutes and the stalkers need something to do, after all, and they tend to be the explosive damagers. But that said, a /energy dom isn’t anything to sneeze at for single-target damage, total focus rocks, and the rest is just gravy to add domination. Frosty helps out too.

And all that hitting builds up domination, and you can fire it off at will when soloing because you’re in control. If it runs out when you hit a end boss, you can always backtrack and spambrawl a spare mob in the mish or a street mob outside. Dom meanwhile, I keep in teams for the really nasty combats or the last boss. S’not nice to make people wait while you build dom unless it’s really necessary for an AV battle that you wiped on or something.

So essentially, I get to do everything fulfilling in a solo setting. In a team setting, you have to deal with rather stupid people, who are focused on heals and more healz0rs. You have to put up with cruddily-played masterminds, which are really fragging annoying. My dom happens to be a pretty tall toon, so it’s damn hard to jump over the heads of a sea of fucking crazy robots moving in place but not moving off. And if I get more than one mm in a group, I start to get abyssal framerates – not sure if it’s ATI or what. I had to put up with 4 sucktastic mm’s in one PUG once and I had practically 2 spf – yes, seconds per frame, not the other way around. Fucking slideshow.

And it really bothers me to step into a slideshow because a dom is all about active defence. I cannot act and react fast enough if I am effectively “lagged” for 2 seconds. I hold one, I target another and before my second hold can get through, I’m tossed back by a sea of AoE damage that all happens to land on the fucking bots shooting wildly right in the rear where I am. I can’t run back and forth into vanguard and rearguard like a good dom if I have a bloody wall of bots in front of me, so I’m either sucking up massive aggro in front and praying really hard, or I’m dancing around like an idiot at the back trying to single-target shit I can’t even see.

(If I ever play an MM, I am so making sure I use the goto command. And have a separate goto for each bot. What’s wrong with making a gauntlet of bots to one or both sides? You can still shoot from range, but you don’t BLOCK everyfuckingbody from running. You can make your wall of bots later if we are really gonna die and need to run. I hate bot mms who don’t control bots properly. Melee-type mms aren’t so bad because they usually don’t mind intercepting aggro with their pets, it’s the bot mms who protest that oh, their function is not to suck up aggro, they just do support damage from ranged. That’s called a goddamn corruptor at best, and a useless leech at worst.

And the whelming irony of it all is that NOW the teams are starting to look for me. I get random tells and random invites, almost as bad as the tank’s glory days. And I usually get more xp alone. At best on a good team, I get equivalent xp (because of the xp share).