Dominator Fest

About 9+ people showed up for the Dominator Meet on Test, with a couple more trickling in later, while others had to leave early.

I must say, the one thing I've concluded from meeting these guys...Dominator players are like cats. :P We evidently like something unique, we're pretty stubborn and set in our ways, we're pretty aggressive (clawing and scratching and all that), and we may hang together but pretty much still fly solo. :)

Our PvE foray, well, let's just say 515A would have had a field day mocking us. *cackles* We may have all the cc in the world, but it's not 100% damage mitigation, which means something or someone was taking hits.

We went for a heroic Longbow mission in Warburg (no one to get pwned on the Test Warburg, alas) and managed single spawns pretty well. The problem arose with overaggro - and pets and creepers and so on can create a lot of aggy. The firing back of Longbow Wardens could get pretty ugly to a team with no inherent mez resist or buff/debuff/heals. We total party wiped a few times. :P Much to everyone's amusement. Pace was pretty aggressive, if we took it slower and wormholed stuff, etc, no problems - t'was when everyone started running around and starting fights that things could get a lil chaotic.

Then we tried a Snaptooth mission on Relentless. Equal hilarity. TPK on the Snaptooth ambushes repeated times. We reset the mission each time cos we wanted to see if we could devise a strategy for holding off +2 and +3 ambush waves, while taking down Snappy. Very hard because no one could agree on what to do. We'd agree on one strat, and then when actually executing it, people would look at the situation and start running off to do their own cc thing, sucking up too much aggro, wiping and so on. :P And some strats pretty much resulted in wiping if one faithfully followed it anyhow.

Eventually, we somehow pulled it off by a bunch of independent dominators going after Snappy, while some bravely suicidal dominators trapped the ambush around a corner. Now I'm a coward, so I don't do the bravely suicidal stuff.

Unfortunately, I happen to be a loyal supportive coward, so when Liliaceae threw her creepers around the ambush, I waited out several ticks, and then threw down ice slick when I figured creepers was just about wearing off. Doubly unfortunately, she managed to suck up too much aggro and then died. Leaving me the proud aggro owner of about 30+ Redcaps and Arachnos (I kid you not, there was two ambushes' worth in there) bouncing up and down on my ice slick.

Hahahaha. Coward turns hero in order to preserve one's own skin. Chomp down two huge defence inspirations, one resist, silently screaming in panic. Shiver the whole lot of them, arctic air running madly, pray really hard some other dominators are with me and mentally will the ice slick button to recharge faster.

Long story short, we held 'em off long enough for the fire doms to do evil things to Snaptooth and win the mission. Then we got totally overrun by the ambush again. :P

After that, a bunch had to go, so we decided to go for piccies. Again, the cat tendencies came out. We just couldn't figure out where to go. :P We agreed, "Ok, the pyramid." And then five minutes later, all of us were on different spots on goodness-knows-which pyramid. I gave up, and just teamchatted, "following Lili", and stuck with her... Some minutes later, everyone had meandered and congregated around the steadily aggregating group. Against the side of a pyramid - not the world's most scenic location, but heck, we were all together somewhere. I didn't dare suggest moving somewhere else. :P T'was like herding cats.

Lili had to quit after that and then there were six.

We went for some arena team pvp after that. And I must say, we had a blast doing that.

There's nothing like being evenly matched, squishy and mez-unresistant enough for our damage to matter, and so on.

Now granted, we weren't really evenly matched. We had a 33 dominator amongst our group of 40s, and every team he was on, lost. :P I tell you, levels matter. :( Not sure if the arena auto-exemps levels, we tried, but dunno.

Our third and last pvp bout, he wasn't on my team, and that was a blast. :P I actually managed to fire off domination in that bout. Quite thrilling. Scored the most kills too.

Certainly garnered a LOT of respect for all the dominator primaries I've seen though. They were mentioning that ice slows were really evil. I felt the full blast of fire damage, with imps and all, and that was evil too. Plant confuse drove me nuts, and I -know- I froze a few teammates :P

And the grav/energy who came along was really good at what he did. Wormhole is sweet. And he won my heart when I was frozen by two opponents and he came along, and for some reason no one attacked, then he fired off his bind saying "They have been phased for your protection." Ah kewl. :P And yea, my hold wore off, and we got them. Dual Total Focus is mean. :P

I must try a plant and a grav some time. The only non-represented was a mind dom, so alas, I cannot ooze about how kewl it is. I will just have to try it some other time. :)