Dominating Blow

In the following wall of text I will address some problems of DB. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE DB and its interactions with rares and monsters in general. In of itself it's one of the most unique skills in the game imo. Its power is very high and it scales basically with the area you're using it in. Its power is also gated in the same way vaal skills are, a limited ressource system with a timer.

My references: I'm running a Dancing Dervish Dominating Blow Necro atm. The underlined text is the link to my guide about it. In the spoiler are my items and skilltree if you're interested:

There are some problems though.

First Problem

The maximum domination time you could get out of it is probably at most roughly 65 seconds. I have all the duration nodes in the tree including the ascendancy ones, a Conqueror's Efficiency jewel, a 20/20 Inc Duration Gem and an 8% inc skill duration corrupted Belt which leads to duration of 61.2 seconds on a minion. If I were to run with a Chober Chaber I would reach 64.2 seconds at most. This means a Boss which has huge time consuming animations might just survive the onslaught of the dominated Minions. I am aware that you can just choose not to run certain bosses/maps and that there are builds which can take on endgame content in a breeze but struggle at other things, that every build has its weaknesses... but heck, even Lightning Warp is viable...
I wonder if you could successsfully work Temp Chains into the build to prolong the domination which would result in less damage by the monsters though.

Second problem

If you aren't running The Scourge you face the second problem which is why DB is kinda weird. Either you just buff the damage you yourself deal and take the weakish 35% less damage minions as meatshields with you which last 20 seconds or a little more (20 seconds flat duration normally) because Skill Duration deals no damage (but why then not just run Heavy Strike or Infernal Blow), or you scale the Monsters/Minions damage and hope they provide enough damage to kill the monsters you are applying the Domination Debuff to which means you absolutely suck against stuff like Izaro or bosses you can't get monsters dominated around or take some with you. (I found a workaround kinda with other minions, only seems to work up to Merciless Izaro and normal Atziri though, haven't run shaper but this would suck). If you don't commit to either side and wanna go hybrid, you will hit a wall sometime.

Third problem

The horrendous mana cost is... well, horrendous. A decently buffed DB goes into the 90-100s of mana which most people who also run auras, can't sustain really. However, just supping it with less stuff is an option.

Possible Solution or at least Bandage

Currently, quality on it only provides increased Minion Damage. If the duration scaled by 0.1 seconds per level or quality gave 0.5% increased duration per % it would already be a decent buff to the skill. I know it might be problematic from a server standpoint handling/calculating so many things at once which I guess was also the reason CoC and other trigger things were nerfed because too many hits happened too fast. But it would mean some love towards this awesome skill.

If you are too lazy to read all of this, the paragraph right above this one is roughly what I wanna say.

I don't know if it has been posted before too many pages to read all and if it has I apologize. I read first couple pages and last couple but coulnd't get through all 30+. I have found if you Dominate the pocked miners they will break out the chaos sentinels and the chaos sentinels fight against you I am not sure if this intended or what but I found it odd that your minions would summon things to attack you

I was really excited to bring back dominating blow this league with the scourge. I'm leveling a gem to 20% on my other character and decided to go to dried lake to play. Breach monsters were not converted. They just died in place, not being resurrected to keep fighting. Is this intentional?

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EvilTony321 wrote:

I was really excited to bring back dominating blow this league with the scourge. I'm leveling a gem to 20% on my other character and decided to go to dried lake to play. Breach monsters were not converted. They just died in place, not being resurrected to keep fighting. Is this intentional?

RIP my max block/spell block + 900 life on block + crit immune DomBlow dreams. ;_;

Are you other guys who are using Dominating Blow getting reduced loot drops? I've just started using it and it seems to have almost removed all of the drops I would get. Rares often drop nothing at all, entire packs of enemies can die at my hands with absolutely nothing to show for it, not even a crappy white that my loot filter ignores. On rare occasions I manage to get a single item to drop from a random enemy upon kill with Dominating Blow, but it barely happens. What's the deal? Am I just getting absurdly unlucky?

Also, regarding breaches, I really hope that GGG fixes this. Breach enemies don't get raised (and oddly enough, they're the only enemies who seem to regularly drop items for me), but it seems like you could make them get raised and just disappear/die when the breach closes, like the rest of the breach monsters. The way this currently works makes it impossible for my character to effectively clear breaches, and I can imagine that I wouldn't be able to do breachlord domains either.

Could someone explain why I sometimes dominate crabs in first form? Though it always should just self-destruct spawning second form (which can be dominated), but no.
And also why when first dominated form dies it sometimes releases second form and sometimes doesn't?

I was playing around with a builder and made a dominating blow character. I doubt it's viable, just built what sounded right. Any suggestions to make it better? http://poeurl.com/bkLj


Also, is there any word on a buff/revamp on the skill? It seems really cool, just extremely hard to get working.

As various others have stated, this skill could use some love. It's mana cost needs more tweaking. It's 30% less minion damage mod doesn't make much sense.

Also, why harbinger's minions cant be dominated is beyond me. Just right in the nuts :(

I am yet again trying to run a DomBlow build. A few years ago the main problem of DomBlow was that scaling minions and getting damage for yourself was kinda hard. This has changed a bit to the better.

Story Bosses
With the addition of the Atlas and A5-10 we also got new Bossfights that have sometimes plenty of minions that you cannot dominate. Also the minions do not even leave corpses for Flesh Offering. Is there any reason why this happens? This seems like an unneccessary nerf for unconvential builds and minion based builds that forces you to also carry desecrate for your offerings.

I've just killed Kitava after countless deaths because i could not use my main skill on him. Switched to SRS first but they got all killed in the minion phase before. Last resort was switching to cyclone and speccing VP. It feels pretty shitty to not even be able to complete the campaign with a nonmeta skill.

Interactions
• Vaal Breach - sounds like good idea but does not work as far as i know as breach mobs cannot be dominated either like perandus mobs.
• Harbinger Mobs cannot be dominated
• Mob AI is stupid when you get a ton of minions - sometimes 10% of the mobs are attacking
• Boss HP Buff made the build feel pretty bad - the damage is not enough to kill bosses in a timely manner even in low tier maps. Combined with the shitty AI the skill just feels bad.

Concusion
Even though i love the skills theme i won't play it again. Feels like the build is only viable if you focus on your own stats and just use the minions as meatshield.