I get the idea of maxed vents and hardened shields, where when the shield goes down the ship is regenerating shield HP. There are 3 factors that I think make this a poor decision:
1) The base 1.0 shield means the Dominator gets less value out of this strategy than other ships. It is getting the least shield HP per flux regenerated.
2) The Dominator has highly efficient weapons, IE it gets the most value from its flux by shooting the enemy. Shooting a kinetic into the enemy shield is far better than saving your own flux. If the enemy drops shields, then the other weapons start doing real damage and the torpedoes can fire.
3) If the Dominator doesn't have a target directly ahead, or if an ally flies in front, or there is debris, or a weapon gets knocked out (this ship is very resistant to that, but not immune), the flux is wasted because it only has 3 light ballistics on turrets. The AI will not act like we want it to and lower its shields in that situation to regenerate HP, it will keep them up and the extra dissipation will do nothing.
3b) Corollary: if the ship has soft flux built up (for example from firing weapons over dissipation) then in all of the above scenarios the ship's dissipation is still doing something even when the shield is up: recovering for the next burst.
I'm not saying a Dominator should be no vents, max caps. But I think that the weapon load, without PD, should be about 20-30% more than dissipation for a conservative, endurance focused build. Even if going for max dissipation + hardened shields, it still never wants to be in the situation where the soft flux bar is empty and the shields are up.
Right I didn't mean to say you were implying no vents at all. It just felt like you were suggesting max caps, few vents. Like a 15 vents, 35 caps split.
I tried for a few hours setting up quick battles to test our assertions a little. The video I made from that process below isn't meant to imply anything besides that I feel like we're both largely correct in all of our points besides any mentions of the other design being lesser in any big way, but I agree that stabilized shield may not be worth the op and that investing so much into flux dissipation probably isn’t worth the sacrifice it happens elsewhere. It’s just not a major improvement I think. They both do their job and to what seems like about the same effectiveness. I think there's value both between maximizing dissipation at the cost of some other things versus... not doing that. Part of why I feel neither build is all that different is that both Dominator and Hellbore are largely best used as a DP-efficient wall, it's partly why I love using Devastators so much on them, though I wouldn't recommend that kind of build to someone asking for a generic "i want a dominator!" build, devastators go best vs. fearless enemies.
All that said, going so greedy for flux dissipation that you use flux distributor is probably not the play. Stuff like s-mod ARU is undoubtedly more powerful for the Dominator and it's op inefficient to use it without s-mod.
Also, it's a nice way to show off how nice omnishield, and shield power in general, is for the Dominator for anyone doubting it. Overall, Dominator doesn't exactly feel amazing, I feel like I'd rather have 2 onslaughts for this fleet, but it does its job. I didn't do the best job outfitting the rest of the fleet, but I feel like that helped make the dominators need to carry a bit harder than they otherwise would. That's why I used autopilot as well.
Note, I would have put Ordnance Expertise Elite on all those Dominator officers, but decided not to for the sake of testing to not skew the differences too much. I tried to keep the spirit of your suggestions strong but include an officer in the mix. Removed flux distributor S-mod which is basically removing 14 vents, then added more weapons and also removed stabilized shield.
The Dominator that went to 63% hull in the Hellbore video unfortunately took that damage while soloing a Fulgent and an Apex. I feel like I controlled my fleet much better in the Hephag video, so I feel like that mostly evens out the hp/durability between the two videos. This is most obvious when you look at how long I allowed all of my medusas to be stuck chasing the Radiant doing not much of anything valuable. Whoops.
