Rediscovering My Mind/Psi Dominator

The Sleeping Girl: once Mind/Psi/Soul, now Mind/Psi/Psi.

With all the melees I've been playing lately, I got the itch to play a Dominator again. With no leveling slot currently open on my roster, I took The Sleeping Girl (formerly The Sleeping; I like the new name better) out of retirement. The experience was an interesting but frustrating one.

Funny thing about Doms is they are a skill-dependent Archetype. If you're out of practice with Doms in general or even a particular build, you'll faceplant when you try to pick it back up at first. A lot. You must constantly assess the situation for fights, and decide the best approach for each. Total situational awareness is the difference between victory and defeat. Things get better as you  take your lumps and get those Dominating skills sharpened back up. Once mastered, it's the most intense, rewarding play style available in the game.

The Sleeping Girl was Mind/Psi/Soul. Once I sharpened my skills back up, I tried to up the difficulty, but I couldn't crack +0x3 (no set bonuses yet). It became apparent the Soul Mastery APP, taken for story reasons, was holding me back. Luckily, the announcement of Dark Control/Dark Assault Doms gave me a way to advance The Sleeping Girl's story and make her better all at once.

To make a long origin story short, The Sleeping Girl was the result of a young girl named Sally Worth being taken over by an evil netherworld entity. It put her into an apparently-permanent coma during which it would have full control of her. The Soul Mastery APP was a manifestation of this entity along with Sally Worth's inherent but latent Psionic powers providing the primary and secondary. Sally would never have had her latent abilities activated but for Mr. Panda's (Sally's name for the nether-worldly entity) magical influence. This was thought to be the end of the story, and the end of Sally Worth.

But then the impossible happened: Sally Worth started to wake up. Respeced into Psi Mastery, Sally has started to supplant Mr. Panda with her own power. Before long, she'll be doing the Tip Missions to go Rogue, then full Hero. But not before Mr. Panda has the last laugh!

The way Sally finally escapes is by using her Psionic power to cordon off Mr. Panda into his own corner of her mind, and then eject the encapsulated creature out into the world. This results (at first unknown to her) in her arch nemesis being born: the Dark/Dark/Soul Dominator (name not yet decided).

I had thought I was done with this character a long time ago, but part of the beauty of MMOs, and City of Heroes Freedom in particular, is they are ever-evolving things and that can mean new life for characters once thought permanently retired. The now permanently retired Daemodand, I'm looking at you...